Quotes from Steven Pinker

I think moralistic science is bad for morals and bad for science.

emerge from the rough-and-tumble of argument, such as that you have to provide reasons for your beliefs, you're allowed to point out flaws in the beliefs of others, and you're not allowed to forcibly shut people up who disagree with you. Add in the rule that you should allow the world to show you whether your beliefs are true or false, and we can call the rules science. With the right rules, a community of less than fully rational thinkers can cultivate rational thoughts.31

Not just beside the point but taboo. A communal outrage inspires what the psychologist Roy Baumeister calls a victim narrative: a moralized allegory in which a harmful act is sanctified, the damage consecrated as irreparable and unforgivable.29 The goal of the narrative is not accuracy but solidarity. Picking nits about what actually happened is seen as not just irrelevant but sacrilegious or treasonous.30

his book On Nuclear Terrorism, Levi laid out all the things that would have to go right for a terrorist nuclear attack to succeed, noting, "Murphy's Law of Nuclear Terrorism: What can go wrong might go wrong."278 Mueller counts twenty obstacles on the path and notes that even if a terrorist group had a fifty-fifty chance of clearing every one, the aggregate odds of its success would be one in a million.

Without a substrate of thoughts to underlie our words, we do not truly speak but only babble, blabber, blather, chatter, gibber, jabber, natter, patter, prattle, rattle, yammer, or yadda, yadda—an onomatopoeic lexicon for empty speech that makes plain the expectation that the sounds coming out of our mouths are ordinarily about something.

The transparency and intelligibility of a country with a free market economy can reassure its neighbors that it is not going on a war footing, which can defuse a Hobbesian trap and cramp a leader's freedom to engage in risky bluffing and brinkmanship.

As the columnist Franklin Pierce Adams pointed out, "Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.

Yet it would be mad to suppose that Sally is not better off, and positively depraved to conclude that one may as well not try to improve Seema's life because it might improve her neighbors' lives even more and leave her no happier.

Our understanding of life has only been enriched by the discovery that living flesh is composed of molecular clockwork rather than quivering protoplasm, or that birds soar by exploiting the laws of physics rather than defying them. In the same way, our understanding of ourselves and our cultures can only be enriched by the discovery that our minds are composed of intricate neural circuits for thinking, feeling, and learning rather than blank slates, amorphous blobs, or inscrutable ghosts.

a bit of wisdom from the linguist Ann Farmer: "It isn't about being right. It's about getting it right.

Cause now we live in an amazing world, and it's wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots.

A definition that is more or less faithful to the way the word is used is "the ability to use knowledge to attain goals.

the difficulty of a sentence depends not just on its word count but on its geometry. Good writers often use very long sentences, and they garnish them with words that are, strictly speaking, needless. But they get away with it by arranging the words so that a reader can absorb them a phrase at a time, each phrase conveying a chunk of conceptual structure.

Horses have an even number of legs. Behind they have two legs, and in front they have fore-legs. This makes six legs, which is certainly an odd number of legs for a horse. But the only number that is both even and odd is infinity. Therefore, horses have an infinite number of legs.

The beliefs, moreover, must be held in service of a goal. No one gets rationality credit for merely thinking true thoughts, like calculating the digits of ?

judaísmo, el cristianismo, el hinduismo, el zoroastrismo, el budismo, el confucianismo, el islamismo, el bahaísmo

Even the humdrum rationality of seeing rather than hallucinating is in the service of the ever-present goal built into our visual systems of knowing our surroundings.

Handwashing, midwifery, mosquito control, and especially the protection of drinking water by public sewerage and chlorinated tap water would come to save billions of lives.

Better still, improvements build on one another. A richer world can better afford to protect the environment, police its gangs, strengthen its social safety nets, and teach and heal its citizens. A better-educated and connected world cares more about the environment, indulges fewer autocrats, and starts fewer wars.

The press is an availability machine. It serves up anecdotes which feed our impression of what's common in a way that is guaranteed to mislead. Since news is what happens, not what doesn't happen, the denominator in the fraction corresponding to the true probability of an event—all the opportunities for the event to occur, including those in which it doesn't—is invisible, leaving us in the dark about how prevalent something really is.

Another major change we have lived through is an intolerance of displays of force in everyday life. In earlier decades a man's willingness to use his fists in response to an insult was the sign of respectability.52 Today it is the sign of a boor, a symptom of impulse control disorder, a ticket to anger management therapy.

All five of the major personality dimensions are heritable, with perhaps 40 to 50 percent of the variation in a typical population tied to differences in their genes.

With this definition the case for rationality seems all too obvious: do you want things or don't you? If you do, rationality is what allows you to get them.

Sympathy, recall, tends to be expressed in communal relationships, the kind that are also accompanied by guilt and forgiveness. Anything that creates a communal relationship, then, should also create sympathy.