Quotes from Steven Pinker

Yet the single best predictor of emancipative values is the World Bank's Knowledge Index

So you're saying that we can all sit back and relax, that violence will just take care of itself. Illogical, Captain. If you see that a pile of laundry has gone down, it does not mean the clothes washed themselves; it means someone washed the clothes. If a type of violence has gone down, then some change in the social, cultural, or material milieu has caused it to go down. If

it's easier to deter people from crime if the lawful alternative is more appealing.

Rule Seventeen. Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!

No one thinks of Thursday as Thor's Day anymore, or of breakfast as breaking a fast. Modern English has thousands of former phrases and complex words that have congealed into what people now perceive as simple words, such as business (busyness), Christmas (Christ's Mass), and spinster (one who spins).

Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?

Knowledge of science, he argued, was a moral imperative, because it could alleviate suffering on a global scale by curing disease, feeding the hungry, saving the lives of infants and mothers, and allowing women to control their fertility.

For reasons we have seen, market economies can generate wealth prodigiously while totalitarian planned economies impose scarcity, stagnation, and often famine.

the theory of the hedonic treadmill

Certainly the taste for cruelty clashes with the values of a cooperative society: it must be harder to work with your neighbors if you think they might enjoy seeing you disemboweled.

Of the seventy million people who died in major 20th-century famines, 80 percent were victims of Communist regimes

Many intellectuals and critics express a disdain for science as anything but a fix for mundane problems. They write as if the consumption of elite art is the ultimate moral good. Their methodology for seeking the truth consists not in framing hypotheses and citing evidence but in issuing pronouncements that draw on their breadth of erudition

They left. Among the many dumb rules of paragraphing foisted on students in composition courses is the one that says that a paragraph may not consist of a single sentence. Wilkerson ends a richly descriptive introductory chapter with a paragraph composed of exactly two syllables. The abrupt ending and the expanse of blankness at the bottom of the page mirror the finality of the decision to move and the uncertainty of the life that lay ahead. Good writing finishes strong.

As wages rise, or when governments pay parents to send their children to school, child labor plummets, which suggests that poor parents send their children to work out of desperation rather than greed.54

The only way [people] can end up equal is if they are treated unequally.

Natural selection consists of competition among genes to be represented in the next generation, and the organisms we see today are descendants of those that edged out their rivals in contests for mates, food, and dominance.

The danger, sometimes called the Value Alignment Problem, is that we might give an AI a goal and then helplessly stand by as it relentlessly and literal-mindedly implemented its interpretation of that goal, the rest of our interests be damned.

Trump was the beneficiary of a belief—near universal in American journalism—that "serious news" can essentially be defined as "what's going wrong." . . . For decades, journalism's steady focus on problems and seemingly incurable pathologies was preparing the soil that allowed Trump's seeds of discontent and despair to take root. . . .

To encounter erotica designed to appeal to the other sex is to gaze into the psychological abyss that separates the sexes. Ã¢â'¬Â¦ The contrasts between romance novels and porn videos are so numerous and profound that they can make one marvel that men and women ever get together at all, much less stay together and successfully rear children."64

One of the dangers of "self-determination" is that there is really no such thing as a "nation" in the sense of an ethnocultural group that coincides with a patch of real estate. Unlike features of a landscape like trees and mountains, people have feet.

In the richest country two centuries ago (the Netherlands), life expectancy was just forty, and in no country was it above forty-five. Today, life expectancy in the poorest country in the world (the Central African Republic) is fifty-four, and in no country is it below forty-five.

The authors of recent histories of mass killing are adamant that the idea of an unprecedented "century of genocide" (the 20th) is a myth. On their first page Chalk and Jonassohn write, "Genocide has been practiced in all regions of the world and during all periods in history," and add that their eleven case studies of pre-20th-century genocides "are not intended to be either exhaustive or representative.

Though obesity surely is a public health problem, by the standards of history it's a good problem to have.

Men fantasize about copulating with bodies; women fantasize about making love to people.