Quotes from Steven Pinker

Given these payoffs, endorsing a belief that hasn't passed muster with scientific and fact checking isn't so irrational after all, at least not by the criterion of the immediate affects on the believer. The affects on the society and planet are another matter.

Since populist movements have achieved an influence beyond their numbers, fixing electoral irregularities such as gerrymandering and forms of disproportionate representation which overweight rural areas (such as the US Electoral College) would help. So would journalistic coverage that tied candidates' reputations to their record of accuracy and coherence rather than to trivial gaffes and scandals. Part of the problem, over the long term

Deep explanations of the universe, the planet, life, the brain? Unless they use magic, we don't want to believe them!

A dollar tomorrow really is worth less than a dollar today (even if we assume there is no inflation), and interest is the price we put on the difference.

A snapshot of these forces pushing in the same direction may be found in an advertisement for tractors in a 1921 issue of the magazine Successful Farming entitled "Keep the Boy in School": The

Gloria Steinem: "There are really not many jobs that actually require a penis or a vagina, and all the other occupations should be open to everyone.

Among the surprises in the statistics are that some things that sound exciting, like instant independence, natural resources, revolutionary Marxism (when it is effective), and electoral democracy (when it is not) can increase deaths from violence, and some things that sound boring, like effective law enforcement, openness to the world economy, UN peacekeepers, and Plumpy'nut, can decrease them.

Solzhenitsyn recounted a party conference in Moscow that ended with a tribute to Stalin. Everyone stood and clapped wildly for three minutes, then four, then five . . . and then no one dared to be the first to stop. After eleven minutes of increasingly stinging palms, a factory director on the platform finally sat down, followed by the rest of the grateful assembly. He was arrested that evening and sent to the gulag for ten years.278

how low it has sunk—to 10 percent. In two hundred years the rate of extreme poverty in the world has tanked from 90 percent to 10, with almost half that decline occurring in the last thirty-five years.

It makes no sense to scrimp all your life so that you can have one hell of a ninetieth birthday bash.

You might have to spread-eagle while a guard slides a wand up your crotch, you may have an elbow in your ribs and a seatback in your chin, but long-distance lovers get to see each other, and if your mother gets sick you can be there the next day.

In all foraging societies, presumably including our ancestors, hunting is overwhelmingly a male activity. Women are cumbered with children which makes hunting inconvenient and men are bigger and more adapted to killing because of they're evolutionary history of killing each other.

It makes little sense to make tens of millions of poor Americans pay more for clothing to save tens of thousands of jobs in the apparel industry.

Bertrand Russell wrote, "Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day." For intellectuals today, many of those convictions are about psychology and social relations. I will refer to those convictions as the Blank Slate: the idea that the human mind has no inherent structure and can be inscribed at will by society or ourselves.

That's right: when it comes to correct English, there's no one in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum.

A white lie is told for the benefit of the hearer. A blue lie is told for the benefit of an in-group... While some of the conspiracy theorists may be genuinely misinformed, most express these beliefs for the purpose of performance rather than truth; they are trying to antagonize liberals and to display solidarity with their blood brothers. The anthropologist John Tooby adds that preposterous beliefs are more effective signals of coalitional loyalty than reasonable ones.

Among Whorf's "kaleidoscopic flux of impressions

Speech is a river of breath, bent into hisses and hums by the soft flesh of the mouth and throat.

In that regard we are different from our ancestors of a few centuries ago, who approved, carried out, and even savored the infliction of unspeakable agony on other living beings. What were these people feeling? And why don't we feel it today?

We live in a world not just with a smaller proportion of extremely poor people but with a smaller number of them, and with 6.6 billion people who are not extremely poor.

Even the emotional comfort of a belief in an afterlife can go both ways. Would life lose its purpose if we ceased to exist when our brains die? On the contrary, nothing invests life with more meaning than the realization that every moment of sentience is a precious gift.

Watch a movie now or pass a course later; buy a bauble now or pay the rent later; enjoy five minutes of fellatio now or an unblemished record in the history books later.

Players with hands tied behind them competed to kill a cat nailed to a post by battering it to death with their heads, at the risk of cheeks ripped open or eyes scratched out by the frantic animal's claws....

If people are mentally agile enough to interpret events in many ways, what's to prevent a child from interpreting the meaning of to nail as "to obscure a surface by nailing things to it," or to coil as "to cause a long object to have a filament coiled around it"?