Quotes from Steven Pinker

The Blank Slate is today's Great Chain of Being: a doctrine that is widely embraced as a rationale for meaning and morality and that is under assault from the sciences of the day. As in the century following Galilee, our moral sensibilities will adjust to the biological facts, not only because facts are facts but because the moral credentials of the Blank Slate are just as spurious.

Los regímenes revolucionarios, desde la Alemania nazi y la China maoísta hasta la Venezuela contemporánea, muestran que la gente tiene muchísimo que perder cuando los autoritarios carismáticos que responden a una -crisis- pisotean las normas y las instituciones democráticas y gobiernan sus países mediante la fuerza de sus personalidades.

The fact-checking site PolitiFact judged that an astonishing 69 percent of the public statements by Trump they checked were "Mostly False

Norberg, drawing on Braudel, offers vignettes of this era of misery, when the definition of poverty was simple: "if you could afford to buy bread to survive another day, you were not poor.

This isn't the first time we've been warned of certain ruin. The experts have predicted civilization-ending aerial gas attacks, global thermonuclear war, a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, a Chinese razing of half of humanity, nuclear powers by the dozen, a revanchist Germany, a rising sun in Japan, cities overrun by teenage superpredators, a world war fought over diminishing oil, nuclear war between India and Pakistan, and weekly 9/11-scale attacks.

The brain may be a physical system made of ordinary matter, but that matter is organized in such a way as to give rise to a sentient organism with a capacity to feel pleasure and pain. And that in turn sets the stage for the emergence of morality.

A verb, then, is not just a word that refers to an action or state but the chassis of the sentence. It is a framework with receptacles for the other parts-the subject, the object, and various oblique objects and subordinate clauses-to be bolted onto.

If my starting offer is "I get to rob, beat, enslave, and kill you and your kind, but you don't get to rob, beat, enslave, or kill me or my kind," I can't expect you to agree to the deal or third parties to ratify it, because there's no good reason that I should get privileges just because I'm me and you're not.

If the pie we were dividing in 1700 was baked in a standard nine-inch pan, then the one we have today would be more than ten feet in diameter.

Thoreau was a victim of the Optimism Gap (the "I'm OK, They're Not" illusion), which for happiness is more like a canyon. People in every country underestimate the proportion of their compatriots who say they are happy, by an average of 42 percentage points.19

Nuclear power presses a number of psychological buttons—fear of poisoning, ease of imagining catastrophes, distrust of the unfamiliar and the man-made—and the dread has been amplified by the traditional Green movement and its dubiously "progressive" supporters.

Los líderes -autoritarios- emplean los formidables recursos del Estado para hostigar a la oposición, crear falsos partidos opositores, utilizar los medios de comunicación controlados por el Estado para propagar relatos favorables, manipular las reglas electorales, inclinar los registros de votantes y manipular las propias elecciones.

Many hours of law-school argumentation have been spent on what to do with a man who stabs a corpse thinking it is his sleeping enemy, or whether it makes sense to charge a shooter with attempted murder if the nearest hospital is five minutes away and his victim survives, but to charge him with murder if the nearest hospital is fifteen minutes away and the victim succumbs.

In any case, e lengeege weth e smell nember ef vewels cen remeen quete expresseve, so we cannot conclude that a hominid with a restricted vowel space had little language.

Sex has high stakes, including exploitation, disease, illegitimacy, incest, jealousy, spousal abuse, cuckoldry, desertion, feuding, child abuse, and rape. These hazards have been around for a long time and have left their mark on our customs and our emotions.

Language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works. Instead, it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains.

Most disputes about "correct" usage are questions of custom and authority rather than grammatical logic (see "The Language Mavens" in my book The Language Instinct), and in these disputes in particular, both parties have grammatical logic on their side. Their

Outwitting and second-guessing an organism of approximately equal mental abilities with non-overlapping interests, at best, and malevolent intentions, at worst, makes formidable and ever-escalating demands on cognition. And a cognitive arms race clearly could propel a linguistic one.

The alternative, then, to the religious theory of the source of values is that evolution endowed us with a moral sense, and we have expanded its circle of application over the course of history through reason (grasping the logical interchangeability of our interests and others'), knowledge (learning of the advantages of cooperation over the long term), and sympathy (having experiences that allow us to feel other people's pain).

The psychologist Walter Mischel captured the conflict in an agonizing choice he gave four-year-olds in a famous 1972 experiment: one marshmallow now or two marshmallows in fifteen minutes.15 Life is a never-ending gantlet of marshmallow tests, dilemmas that force us to choose between a sooner small reward and a later large reward.

Violence is a problem not of too little self-esteem but of too much, particularly when it is unearned.

Anyone who is equipped to hunt, harvest crops, chop firewood, or prepare salad has the means to damage a lot of human flesh.

Either way, I suspect that it's less effective to aim at the Gini index as a deeply buried root cause of many social ills than to zero in on solutions to each problem: investment in research and infrastructure to escape economic stagnation, regulation of the finance sector to reduce instability, broader access to education and job training to facilitate economic mobility, electoral transparency and finance reform to eliminate illicit influence, and so on.

When predictions of apocalyptic resource shortages repeatedly fail to come true, one has to conclude either that humanity has miraculously escaped from certain death again and again like a Hollywood action hero or that there is a flaw in the thinking that predicts apocalyptic resource shortages. The flaw has been pointed out many times.