Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker
Steven Arthur "Steve" Pinkeris a Canadian-born American cognitive scientist, psychologist, linguist, and popular science author. He is Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth18 September 1954
CountryCanada
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One of them is a simple logical point that no matter how important learning and culture and socialization are, they don't happen by magic.
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During the past century the doctrine of the blank slate has set the agenda for much of the social sciences and humanities, ... ... Psychology has sought to explain all thought, feeling, and behavior with a few simple mechanisms of learning.
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When people talk, they lay lines on each other, do a lot of role playing, sidestep, shilly-shally and engage in all manner of vagueness and innuendo. We do this and expect others to do it, yet at the same time we profess to long for the plain truth, for people to say what they mean, simple as that. Such hypocrisy is a human universal.
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As technology accumulates and people in more parts of the planet become interdependent, the hatred between them tends to decrease, for the simple reason that you can't kill someone and trade with him too.
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The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero.
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It got ugly. People used this as an occasion to vent a large number of grievances.
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The 9/11 strikes left an indelible impact on our minds, but in relative terms, the scale of casualties actually wasn't all that high.
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Though as a psychologist I like to think that nothing human is foreign to me, I admit to having been repeatedly flabbergasted by the insouciance, and sometimes relish, with which our ancestors carried out and witnessed unspeakable cruelties.
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Today there are movements in the arts to reintroduce beauty and narrative and melody and other basic human pleasures. And they are considered radical extremists!
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To make changes you have to make some enemies, but you also have to be careful not too make too many enemies. He made far too many enemies.
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A hostility to modernity is shared by ideologies that have nothing else in common - a nostalgia for moral clarity, small-town intimacy, family values, primitive communism, ecological sustainability, communitarian solidarity, or harmonies with the rhythms of nature.
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We know about every massacre that has taken place close to the present, but the ones in the distant past are like trees falling in the forest with no one to hear them.
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I think it may not be a coincidence that the rise of printing and book publication and literacy and the phenomenon of best sellers all preceded the humanitarian reforms of the Enlightenment.
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Roads, better harnesses for horses, time-keeping devices, financial instruments like a currency that was recognized everywhere in the kingdom, enforceable contracts - all of this made commerce more appealing than plunder.