Quotes from Steven Pinker

The inability to set aside something that you know but that someone else does not know is such a pervasive affliction of the human mind that psychologists keep discovering related versions of it and giving it new names.

sesgo de la disponibilidad»

As Thomas Macaulay reflected in 1830, "We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all before us, and with just as much apparent reason. . . . On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?"4

Poverty, too, needs no explanation. In a world governed by entropy and evolution, it is the default state of humankind.

PHILOSOPHY TODAY GETS no respect.

changes that take place on the time scale of journalism will always show ups and downs.

According to the National Safety Council, the horse-associated fatality rate was ten times the car-associated rate of modern times [in 1974, which is more than double the per capita rate today—SP].45

People are qualitatively the same but may differ quantitatively. The quantitative differences are small in biological terms, and they are found to a far greater extent among the individual members of an ethnic group or race than between ethnic groups or races. These are reassuring findings. Any racist ideology that holds that the members of an ethnic group are all alike, or that one ethnic group differs fundamentally from another, is based on false assumptions about our biology.

descuido de la probabilidad».

Though we cannot logically prove anything about the physical world, we are entitled to have confidence in certain beliefs about it. The application of reason and observation to discover tentative generalizations about the world is what we call science.

What's good for humanity is not always good for social science, and it may be impossible to unsnarl the bundle of correlations among all the ways that life has improved and trace the causal arrows with certainty.

and many people misremember the mid-20th century as a golden age of family togetherness.

If the system is wired so that it triggers actions that typically reduce the difference between the current state and the goal state, it can be said to pursue goals (and when the world is sufficiently predictable, it will attain them).

A quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, is in fact the morally enlightened one, because it treats every human life as having equal value rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic

according to the transition probabilities of English. Remember Chomsky's sentence Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. He contrived it not only to show that nonsense can be grammatical but also to show that improbable word sequences can be grammatical. In English texts the probability that the word colorless is followed by the word green is surely zero. So is the probability that green is followed by ideas, ideas by sleep, and sleep by furiously.

People see violence as moral, not immoral: across the world and throughout history, more people have been murdered to mete out justice than to satisfy greed.28

Happy those who with a glowing faith in one embrace clasped death and victory.

For one thing, empathy can subvert human well-being when it runs afoul of a more fundamental principle, fairness. Batson found that when people empathized with Sheri, a ten-year-old girl with a serious illness, they also opted for her to jump a queue for medical treatment ahead of other children who had waited longer or needed it more. Empathy would have consigned these children to death and suffering because they were nameless and faceless.

Active, shmactive!

The first countries that made the Great Escape from universal poverty in the 19th century, and the countries that have grown the fastest ever since, are the countries that educated their children most intensely.5

Here is how one technology executive explains why he rejects job applications filled with errors of grammar and punctuation: "If it takes someone more than 20 years to notice how to properly use it's, then that's not a learning curve I'm comfortable with.

Plane crashes, in contrast, get lavish coverage, but they kill only about 250 people a year worldwide, making planes about a thousand times safer per passenger mile than cars.

La violencia se considera moral, no inmoral: por todo el mundo y a lo largo de toda la historia, se ha asesinado a más personas para imponer la justicia que para satisfacer la codicia.

Vengeance is no disease: it is necessary for cooperation, preventing a nice guy from being exploited.