Quotes from Steven Pinker

But subtler accommodations instigated by breakaway denominations, reform movements, ecumenical councils, and other liberalizing forces have allowed other religions to be swept along by the humanistic tide. It is when fundamentalist forces stand athwart those currents and impose tribal, authoritarian, and puritanical constraints that religion becomes a force for violence.

empathy is not a reflex that makes us sympathetic to everyone we lay eyes upon. It can be switched on and off, or thrown into reverse, by our construal of the relationship we have with a person. Its head is turned by cuteness, good looks, kinship, friendship, similarity, and communal solidarity.

Conceptual metaphors point to an obvious way in which people could learn to reason about knew, abstract concepts. They would notice, or have pointed out to them, a parallel between a physical realm they already understand and a conceptual realm that they don't yet understand. […] They would be the mechanism that the mind uses to understand otherwise inaccessible concepts.

To repeat: equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.

Richard Feynman once wrote, "If you ever hear yourself saying, 'I think I understand this,' that means you don't." Though

aggregate statistics like GDP per capita and its derivatives such as factor productivity . . . were designed for a steel-and-wheat economy, not one in which information and data are the most dynamic sector. Many of the new goods and services are expensive to design, but once they work, they can be copied at very low or zero costs. That means they tend to contribute little to measured output even if their impact on consumer welfare is very large.

In the mid-19th century it took twenty-five men a full day to harvest and thresh a ton of grain; today one person operating a combine harvester can do it in six minutes.17

But proving that incarceration deters people (as opposed to incapacitating them) is easier said than done, because the statistics at any time are inherently stacked against it.

If God does have good reasons for his commandments, why don't we appeal to those reasons directly and skip the middleman?

With a constant probability of ending every year, a war is most likely to end after its first year, slightly less likely to end within two years, a bit less likely to stretch on to three, and so on.

language often allows us to express that aspect as a noun, whether or not it is a physical object. For example, when we say I have three reasons for leaving, we are counting reasons as if they were objects (though of course we do not literally think that a reason can sit on a table or be kicked across a room).

The writer Warwick Cairns calculated that if you wanted your child to be kidnapped and held overnight by a stranger, you'd have to leave the child outside and unattended for 750,000 years.

Combinatorics allow a finite set of simple ideas to give rise to an Infinite set of complex ones.

These fields include genetics, which explains the replicators that make natural selection possible, and game theory, which illuminates the fates of goal-seeking agents in a world that contains other goal-seeking agents.2

And so they opened the door to the idea that in the name of future peace, any and all means might be justified—including even exterminatory war."108 Kant himself despised this turn, noting that such a war "would allow perpetual peace only upon the graveyard of the whole human race." And the American framers, equally aware of the crooked timber of humanity, were positively phobic about the prospect of imperial or messianic leaders.

For every job lost to automation, a new one will materialize that we cannot anticipate: he unemployed forklift operators will retrain as tattoo removal technicians and video game costume designers and social media content moderators and pet psychiatrists.

The impression that the Muslim world indulges kinds of violence that the West has outgrown is not a symptom of Islamophobia or Orientalism but is borne out by the numbers.

The urban planner Donald Sean has argued that an 'urban blight' metaphor led planners to treat crowded neighbourhoods as if they were diseased plants, which had to be extirpated to prevent the spread of rot. The result was the disastrous urban renewal projects the 1960s.

that children or adults possess any general aversion to inequality." People are content with economic inequality as long as they feel that the country is meritocratic, and they get angry when they feel it isn't.

The mind cannot be a blank slate, because blank slates don't do anything.

Nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptic orbit.

Culture is an autonomous entity that carries out a desire to perpetuate itself by setting up expectations and assigning roles, which can vary arbitrarily from society to society.

Given the costs of information, the perfect can be the enemy of the good.

To take just two examples, more than twice as many children are hit by cars driven by parents taking their children to school as by other kinds of traffic, so when more parents drive their children to school to prevent them from getting killed by kidnappers, more children get killed.