Steven Pinker Quotes - Page 6

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• The rules of friendship are tacit, unconscious; they are not rational. In business, though, you have to think rationally.

  Steven Pinker

  Thinking, Rational, Unconscious

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• By denying people's sense of visual beauty in painting and sculpture , melody in music , meter and rhyme in poetry , plot and narrative and character in fiction , the elite arts wrote off the vast majority of their audience . They purposely excluded people who approach art in part for pleasure and edification in favour of social one-upmanship and an ever-narrowing, in-crowd elite.

  Steven Pinker

  Art, Character, People

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• An enormous amount of scientific language is metaphorical. We talk about a genetic code, where code originally meant a cipher; we talk about the solar system model of the atom as though the atom were like a sun and moon and planets.

  Steven Pinker

  Moon, Atoms, Ciphers

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• No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you're still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be.

  Steven Pinker

  Atrocities, Matter, Stills

  "Is Human Violence On The Wane?". Science Friday with Ira Flatow, www.npr.org. October 7, 2011.

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• There's guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western culture.

  Steven Pinker

  Intellectual, Guilt, Western Culture

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• Fiction is empathy technology.

  Steven Pinker

  Technology, Empathy, Fiction

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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.

  Steven Pinker

  Technology, Simple, People

  Steven Pinker (2003). “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, p.232, Penguin

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• A word is an arbitrary label - that's the foundation of linguistics. But many people think otherwise. They believe in word magic: that uttering a spell, incantation, curse, or prayer can change the world. Don't snicker: Would you ever say, 'Nothing has gone wrong yet' without looking for wood to knock?

  Steven Pinker

  Prayer, Believe, Thinking

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• Conventions are unstated agreements within a community to abide by a single way of doing things - not because there is any inherent advantage to the choice, but because there is an advantage to everyone making the same choice.

  Steven Pinker

  Agreement, Choices, Community

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• A decent government with an effective, but not gratuitously violent, police force and a fair court system are essential. This deters and incapacitates psychopaths, bullies and hotheads - and if it earns the confidence of the people, they don't have to become violent in self-defence.

  Steven Pinker

  Government, Self, People

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• Maybe philosophical problems are hard not because they are divine or irreducible or meaningless or workaday science, but because the mind of Homo sapiens lacks the cognitive equipment to solve them. We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness ot to answer any question we are capable of asking.

  Steven Pinker

  Philosophical, Angel, Mind

  "How the Mind Works". Book by Steven Pinker, 1997.

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• The last 100 years of research into the human brain...sees the brain as an organ that works by physical principles just like the other organs in the body...our emotions and higher callings, such as religion, as well as our grubby low-level physical systems like stereo vision and motor control, are products of a machine.

  Steven Pinker

  Fear, Years, Brain

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• We instinctively fear snakes, but we appear not to be afraid of fast cars, which are a real danger now. This suggests our emotions were shaped by our evolutionary environment not the one we grew up in.

  Steven Pinker

  Real, Snakes, Car

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• If people are innately saddled with certain sins and flaws, like selfishness, prejudice, sort-sightedness, and self-deception, then political reform would seem to be a waste of time.

  Steven Pinker

  Self, People, Political

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• The moral, then, is that familiar categories of behavior - marriage customs, food taboos, folk superstitions, and so on - certainly do vary across cultures and have to be learned, but the deeper mechanisms of mental computation that generate them may be universal and innate.

  Steven Pinker

  Culture, May, Superstitions

  Steven Pinker (2003). “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, p.66, Penguin

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• For example, parents who talk a lot to their children have kids with better language skills, parents who spank have children who grow up to be violent, parents who are neither too authoritarian or too lenient have children who are well-adjusted, and so on.

  Steven Pinker

  Children, Growing Up, Kids

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• Space and force pervade language. Many cognitive scientists (including me) have concluded from their research on language that a handful of concepts about places, paths, motions, agency, and causation underlie the literal or figurative meanings of tens of thousands of words and constructions, not only in English but in every other language that has been studied.

  Steven Pinker

  Agency, Space, Research

  Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.355, W. W. Norton & Company

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• As long as your ideology identifies the main source of the world's ills as a definable group, it opens the world up to genocide.

  Steven Pinker

  Long, Groups, World

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• The elegant study... is consistent with the themes of modern cognitive neuroscience . Every aspect of thought and emotion is rooted in brain structure and function, including many psychological disorders and, presumably, genius. The study confirms that the brain is a modular system comprising multiple intelligences, mostly nonverbal.

  Steven Pinker

  Psychological Disorders, Brain, Genius

  "On Einstein's brain". The New York Times, June 24, 1999.

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• Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we're exposed to an infectious world.

  Steven Pinker

  World, Language, Human Nature

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• The strongest argument against totalitarianism may be a recognition of a universal human nature; that all humans have innate desires for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The doctrine of the blank slate... is a totalitarian's dream.

  Steven Pinker

  Dream, Pursuit Of Happiness, Desire

  "Steven Pinker: the optimistic voice of science" by Andrew Anthony, www.theguardian.com. September 17, 2011.

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• I do look for openings where I can overturn popular misconceptions, but unlike Christopher Hitchens, I am neither a contrarian nor a lone heretic. I like to have a significant number of academics watching my back.

  Steven Pinker

  Numbers, Looks, Significant

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• Something about the topic of consciousness makes people, like the White Queen in Through The Looking Glass, believe six impossible things before breakfast.

  Steven Pinker

  Queens, Believe, Impossible Things

  Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.133, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Evolution is an indispensable component of any satisfying explanation of our psychology.

  Steven Pinker

  Psychology, Evolution, Indispensable

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• If crime is going down, you shouldn't be increasing resources for crime prevention. Or you should be taking note of what has worked and concentrate the crime-prevention methods on policies that have a track record of success.

  Steven Pinker

  Track, Records, Prevention

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