Quotes from Steven Pinker

I will present a different understanding of the world, grounded in fact and inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment: reason, science, humanism, and progress.

Thinking can not trade in metaphors directly. It must trade in a more basic currency that captures the abstract concepts shared by the metaphor and its topic […] while sloughing off the irrelevant bits.

Sensing the necessity to be wise and honest in order to succeed, he flees vice, or at least his demeanor exhibits decency and seriousness so as not to arouse any adverse judgment on the part of present and future acquaintances

Human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.

inequality is generally a better predictor of violence than unemployment.

Normative models also serve as benchmarks against which we can assess how human schlemiels do reason, the subject matter of psychology and the other behavioral sciences.

I also get a perverse pleasure from correcting students who refer to an important piece of data or write that this data is important. (Data is the plural of datum, I tell them, so one ought to say, The datum is important; The data are important.) Yet

Until they do, these older and less-educated people (mainly white men)

Roots are for trees; people have feet

Chinese, in contrast, lacks a subjunctive and any other simple grammatical construction that directly expresses a counterfactual.

Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.

Lakoff is right to insist that conceptual metaphors are not just literary garnishes but aides to reason – they are 'metaphors we live by.' And metaphors can power sophisticated inferences, not just obvious ones…

El ideal del progreso tampoco debería confundirse con el movimiento del siglo XX para rediseñar la sociedad al antojo de los tecnócratas y los planificadores, que el politólogo James Scott denomina «alto modernismo autoritario».

Only such black-and-white thinking could lead people to convert the idea that some aspects of behavior are innate into the idea that all aspects of behavior are innate, or convert the proposal that genetic traits influence human affairs into the idea that they determine human affairs.

Thanks to the Green Revolution, the world needs less than a third of the land it used to need to produce a given amount of food.23 Another way of stating the bounty is that between 1961 and 2009 the amount of land used to grow food increased by 12 percent, but the amount of food that was grown increased by 300 percent.24 In addition to beating back hunger, the ability to grow more food from less land has been, on the whole, good for the planet.

El nepotismo es una inclinación humana universal, y un azote universal de las grandes organizaciones. Tiene fama de socavar los países que dirigen dinastías hereditarias y de paralizar gobiernos y empresas del Tercer Mundo.

When a criminal justice system works properly, it's not because rational actors know that Big Brother is watching them 24/7 and will swoop down and impose a cost that will cancel any ill-gotten gain. No democracy has the resources or the will to turn society into that kind of Skinner box.

One of the most commonly cited human irrationalities is the sunk-cost fallacy, in which people continue to invest in a losing venture because of what they have invested so far rather than in anticipation of what they will gain going forward.

In her article "The Feminist Side of Sweatshops," Chelsea Follett (the managing editor of HumanProgress) recounts that factory work in the 19th century offered women an escape from the traditional gender roles of farm and village life, and so was held by some men at the time "sufficient to damn to infamy the most worthy and virtuous girl.

Historical data are scarce, not least because suicide, also called "self-murder," used to be a crime in many countries, including England until 1961.

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Good writing starts strong. Not with a cliché ("Since the dawn of time"), not with a banality ("Recently, scholars have been increasingly concerned with the question of . . ."), but with a contentful observation that provokes curiosity.

When you scale by population size, only one of the 20th century's atrocities even makes the top ten. The worst atrocity of all time was the An Lushan Revolt and Civil War, an eight-year rebellion during China's Tang Dynasty that, according to censuses, resulted in the loss of two-thirds of the empire's population, a sixth of the world's population at the time.13

They laid that foundation in what we now call humanism, which privileges the well-being of individual men, women, and children over the glory of the tribe, race, nation, or religion.

We should not be surprised that what people take away from science education is a syncretic mishmash, where gravity and electromagnetism coexist with psi, qi, karma, and crystal healing.