Quotes from Steven Pinker

In the study of humans, there are major spheres of human experience—beauty, motherhood, kinship, morality, cooperation, sexuality, violence—in which evolutionary psychology provides the only coherent theory.

In The Blank Slate I argued that two extreme visions of human nature—a Tragic vision that is resigned to its flaws, and a Utopian vision that denies it exists—define the great divide between right-wing and left-wing political ideologies.154

El Dios de la Biblia hebrea, siempre misericordioso, dijo a la primera mujer: -Tantas haré tus fatigas cuantos sean tus embarazos: con dolor parirás los hijos-. Hasta hace poco tiempo, en torno a 1% de las madres morían en el parto; para una mujer estadounidense, estar embarazada hace un siglo era casi tan peligroso como tener cáncer de mama en la actualidad.

hipatitis n. Terminal coolness.

That bias is built in because of the asymmetry of time: there is a nonzero probability at any moment that we will be felled by an unpreventable accident like a lightning strike or landslide, making the advantage of any costly longevity gene moot.

In the United States, the share of income going to the richest one percent grew from 8 percent in 1980 to 18 percent in 2015, while the share going to the richest tenth of one percent grew from 2 percent to 8 percent.

No sooner did Obamacare pass than the Republican Party made it a sacred cause to repeal it, but each of their assaults on it after gaining control of the presidency in 2017 was beaten back by angry citizens at town-hall meetings and legislators afraid of their ire.

Meat tastes good, and eating it makes people happy.

it's time to retire the morality play in which modern humans are a vile race of despoilers and plunderers who will hasten the apocalypse unless they undo the Industrial Revolution, renounce technology, and return to an ascetic harmony with nature.

They write as if the consumption of elite art is the ultimate moral good.

Studies that assess education at Time 1 and wealth at Time 2, holding all else constant, suggest that investing in education really does make countries richer. At least it does if the education is secular and rationalistic.

In a noisy world in which misunderstanding and error are possible, Tit for Tat is bested by an even more forgiving strategy called Generous Tit for Tat. Every once in a while Generous Tit for Tat will randomly grant forgiveness to a defector and resume cooperating. The act of unconditional forgiveness can flick a duo that has been trapped in a cycle of mutual defection back onto the path of cooperation.

A state is conceived as a location in a space of possible states, and change is equated with moving from one location to another in that state-space.

So not just vengeance, but also forgiveness and contrition, are necessary for social organisms

The average would have been longer still were it not for the calamity of AIDS, which caused the terrible trough in the 1990s before antiretroviral drugs started to bring it under control.

Stanley Goldfarb died and his relatives and the congregation gathered for an evening of prayers and mourning. When the time came for the mourners to come up and eulogize him, no one stirred. After several minutes, the rabbi was getting anxious. "Someone must have something nice to say about him," he implored. More silence. Finally a voice piped up from the back of the room: "His brother was worse.

We wanted flying cars; instead we got 140 characters.

the Blank Slate had, and has, a dark side. The vacuum that it posited in human nature was eagerly filled by totalitarian regimes, and it did nothing to prevent their genocides. It perverts education, childrearing, and the arts into forms of social engineering. It torments mothers who work outside the home and parents whose children did not turn out as they would have liked. It threatens to outlaw biomedical research that could alleviate human suffering.

Though our ignorance is vast (and always will be), our knowledge is astonishing, and growing daily.

loss aversion, the sunk-cost fallacy, and throwing good money after bad, is patently irrational, but it is surprisingly pervasive in human decision-making.

Dopeler effect n. The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

But this book is about semantics, and I would not make a claim on your attention if I did not think that the relation of language to our inner and outer worlds was a matter of intellectual fascination and real-world importance.

A third dubious belief about violence is that lower-class people engage in it because they are financially needy (for example, stealing food to feed their children) or because they are expressing rage against society. The violence of a lower-class man may indeed express rage, but it is aimed not at society but at the asshole who scraped his car and dissed him in front of a crowd.

A humanistic morality rests on the universal bedrock of reason and human interests: it's an inescapable feature of the human condition that we're all better off if we help each other and refrain from hurting each other.