Quotes from Steven Pinker

certain facts are objectively true just because people act as if they are true. [...] a social fact depends entirely on the willingness of people to treat it as a fact.

Mass incarceration, even if it does lower violence, introduces problems of its own. Once the most violent individuals have been locked up, imprisoning more of them rapidly reaches a point of diminishing returns, because each additional prisoner become less and less dangerous, and pulling them off the streets makes a smaller and smaller dent in the violence rate.

Though editors have told me that readers hate math and will never put up with numbers spoiling their stories and pictures, their own media belie this condescension. People avidly consume data in the weather, business, and sports pages, so why not the news?

Tversky and Kahneman note that no one would buy probabilistic insurance, with premiums at a fraction of the cost but coverage only on certain days of the week, though they happily incur the same overall risk by insuring themselves against some hazards, like fires, but not others, like hurricanes.27 They buy insurance for peace of mind—to give themselves one less thing to worry about.

the mind is a metaphor-monger

Contrary to popular belief, the Eskimos do not have more words for snow than do speakers of English. They do not have four hundred words for snow, as it has been claimed in print, or two hundred, or one hundred, or forty-eight, or even nine. One dictionary puts the figure at two.

Language is re-created every generation as it passes through the minds of the humans who speak it.

Also, since people tend to get less violent as they get older, keeping men in prison beyond a certain point does little to reduce crime.

The schooling, together with health and wealth, are literally making us smarter—by thirty IQ points, or two standard deviations above our ancestors.

But the supposedly mind-broadening anecdotes owe their appeal to a patronizing willingness to treat other cultures' psychologies as weird and exotic compared to our own.

At the time of the report, the entire Arab world exported fewer manufactured goods than the Philippines, had poorer Internet connectivity than sub-Saharan Africa, registered 2 percent as many patents per year as South Korea, and translated about a fifth as many books into Arabic as Greece translates into Greek.

People seek revenge by an accounting that exaggerates their innocence and their adversary's malice; when two sides seek perfect justice, they condemn themselves and their heirs to strife.

Moving from philosophy to psychology, we discover a big problem with the claim that most of our thinking is metaphorical: people effortlessly transcend the metaphors implicit in their language.

In the United States in 1901, an hour's wages could buy around three quarts of milk; a century later, the same wages would buy sixteen quarts. The amount of every other foodstuff that can be bought with an hour of labor has multiplied as well: from a pound of butter to five pounds, a dozen eggs to twelve dozen, two pounds of pork chops to five pounds, and nine pounds of flour to forty-nine pounds.20

And countries that combine free markets with more taxation, social spending, and regulation than the United States (such as Canada, New Zealand, and Western Europe) turn out to be not grim dystopias but rather pleasant places to live, and they trounce the United States in every measure of human flourishing, including crime, life expectancy, infant mortality, education, and happiness.

In this way the theory of human nature coming out of the cognitive revolution has more in common with the Judeo-Christian theory of human nature, and with the psychoanalytic theory proposed by Sigmund Freud...

people esteem others according to how much time or money they forfeit in their altruistic acts rather than by how much good they accomplish.

In 1909 Carl Bosch perfected a process invented by Fritz Haber which used methane and steam to pull nitrogen out of the air and turn it into fertilizer on an industrial scale, replacing the massive quantities of bird poop that had previously been needed to return nitrogen to depleted soils. Those two chemists top the list of the 20th-century scientists who saved the greatest number of lives in history, with 2.7 billion.

Because the cultures of politics and journalism are largely innocent of the scientific mindset, questions with massive consequences for life and death are answered by methods that we know lead to error, such as anecdotes, headlines, rhetoric, and what engineers call HiPPO (highest-paid person's opinion).

Half of the world's homicides are committed in just twenty-three countries containing about a tenth of humanity, and

people could not analyse their metaphors if they didn't command an underlying medium of thought that is more abstract than the metaphors themselves.

At his trial, Guiteau repeatedly said, "The doctors killed him; I just shot him." The jury was unpersuaded, and in 1882 Guiteau was hanged—another man whose fate hinged on the semantics of a verb.

In the United States in 1901, an hour's wages could buy around three quarts of milk; a century later, the same wages would buy sixteen quarts.

En las pequeñas empresas -o, como se las suele llamar, las *empresas familiares* o *empresas de papá y mamá*- el nepotismo es muy habitual, por lo que puede entrar en conflicto con los principios de igualdad de oportunidad y granjearse el rencor de la comunidad en que se encuentra.