Quotes from Steven Pinker

In fact, these reference works, with their careful attention to history, literature, and actual usage, are the most adamant debunkers of grammatical nonsense. (This is less true of style sheets drawn up by newspapers and professional societies, and of manuals written by amateurs such as critics and journalists, which tend to mindlessly reproduce the folklore of previous guides.)

In many Islamic countries, attitudes toward women and minorities are improving (chapter 15)—slowly, but more detectably among women, the young, and the educated.105 The emancipative forces that liberalized the West, such as connectivity, education, mobility, and women's advancement, are not bypassing the Islamic world, and the moving sidewalk of generational replacement can outpace the walkers shambling along it.106

Si algo tenían en común los pensadores ilustrados era su insistencia en que apliquemos enérgicamente el estándar de la razón a la comprensión de nuestro mundo y no recurramos a generadores de engaño como la fe, el dogma, la revelación, la autoridad, el carisma, el misticismo, la adivinación, las visiones, las corazonadas o el análisis hermenéutico de los textos sagrados.

The top five countries that still execute people in significant numbers form an unlikely club: China and Iran (more than a thousand apiece annually), Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. As in other areas of human flourishing (such as crime, war, health, longevity, accidents, and education), the United States is a laggard among wealthy democracies.

the dozens of Eskimo words for snow.

The observation that conflict is part of the human condition, banal though it is, contradicts fashionable beliefs.

Happy people live in the present; those with meaningful lives have a narrative about their past and a plan for the future.

The explanations may help us understand the parts of the brain that made a behavior tempting, but they say nothing about the other parts of the brain (primarily in the prefrontal cortex) that could have inhibited the behavior by anticipating how the community would respond to it. [...] Why should we discard our lever on the system for inhibition just because we are coming to understand the system for temptation?

When we gaze at the world, we do not fathom the many layers of apparatus that underlie our unified visual experience, until neurological disease dissects them for us.

The authors of Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, having surveyed the uses of the two forms over six hundred years, conclude, "The traditional rules about shall and will do not appear to have described real usage of these words precisely at any time, although there is no question that they do describe the usage of some people some of the time and that they are more applicable in England than elsewhere.

What is enlightenment? In a 1784 essay with that question as its title, Immanuel Kant answered that it consists of "humankind's emergence from its self-incurred immaturity," its "lazy and cowardly" submission to the "dogmas and formulas" of religious or political authority.

Religions have provided comfort, community, and moral guidance to countless people, and some biologists argue that a sophisticated deism, toward which many religions are evolving, can be made compatible with an evolutionary understanding of the mind and human nature.

No sooner did people step into the light than they were advised that darkness wasn't so bad after all, that they should stop daring to understand so much, that dogmas and formulas deserved another chance, and that human nature's destiny was not progress but decline.

One [dogma] is that violence is caused by a deficit of morality and justice. On the contrary, violence is often caused by a surfeit of morality and justice, at least as they are conceived in the minds of the perpetrators.

marketroid n. Member of a company's marketing department.

No learning rule can be entirely devoid of theoretical content nor can the tabula ever be completely rasa." 13

But probabilities are not about the world; they're about our ignorance of the world.

El populismo autoritario puede verse como la resistencia de ciertos elementos de la naturaleza humana -tribalismo, autoritarismo, demonización, pensamiento de suma cero- en contra de las instituciones ilustradas que fueron diseñadas para sortearlos.

The second decade of the 21st century has seen the rise of political movements that depict their countries as being pulled into a hellish dystopia by malign factions that can be resisted only by a strong leader who wrenches the country backward to make it "great again.

Manuel Eisner has calculated that between 600 and 1800 CE, about one in eight European monarchs was murdered in office, mostly by noblemen, and that a third of the killers took over the throne.

New information reduces our ignorance and changes the probability. If that sounds mystical or paradoxical, think about the probability that a coin I just flipped landed heads. For you, it's .5. For me, it's 1 (I peeked). Same event, different knowledge, different probability.

The peak age of poisoning deaths in 2011 was around fifty, up from the low forties in 2003, the late thirties in 1993, the early thirties in 1983, and the early twenties in 1973.57 Do the subtractions and you find that in every decade it's the members of the generation born between 1953 and 1963 who are drugging themselves to death.

No one can fail to recognize the influence of the doctrine of the Noble Savage in contemporary consciousness. We see it in the current respect for all things natural (natural foods, natural medicines, natural childbirth) and the distrust of the man-made, the unfashionability of authoritarian styles of childrearing and education, and the understanding of social problems as repairable defects in our institutions rather than as tragedies inherent to the human condition.

As Francis Crick liked to say, "Any theory that can account for all the facts is wrong, because some of the facts are wrong.