Steven Pinker Quotes - Page 7

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• We often feel that a clever aphorism captures a truth that would require pages to defend in any other way.

  Steven Pinker

  Clever, Pages, Way

  Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.549, W. W. Norton & Company

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• A...reason we are so-so scientists is that our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.

  Steven Pinker

  Brain, Sometimes, Truth Is

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• Personality and socialization aren't the same thing.

  Steven Pinker

  Personality, Socialization

  "A biological understanding of human nature". Edge Interview, www.edge.org. September 18, 2017.

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• Education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is
  innately bad at. Children don't have to go to school to learn how to walk,
  talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends,
  even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or
  remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written
  language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and
  skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to
  have evolved.

  Steven Pinker

  Children, Reading, School

  "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature". Book by Steven Pinker, 2002.

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• Students do everything on laptops these days, so I definitely think electronic books are a trend that's going to expand.

  Steven Pinker

  Book, Thinking, Trends

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• As women are empowered, violence can come down, for a number of reasons. By all measures, men are the more violent gender.

  Steven Pinker

  Men, Numbers, Violence

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• But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don't depend on information coming in from the senses.

  Steven Pinker

  Gmos, Perception, Brain

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• I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor.

  Steven Pinker

  Art, Believe, Thinking

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• People consider the harms they inflict to be justified and forgettable, and the harms they suffer to be unprovoked and grievous.

  Steven Pinker

  People, Suffering, Religion

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• Everyone's pedigree merges into everyone else's pedigree. So if you go back far enough, everyone is related.

  Steven Pinker

  Enough, Pedigree, Related

  "Surprising Family Trees!". abcnews.go.com. October 18, 2007.

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• Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual.

  Steven Pinker

  Thoughtful, Style, Oral Tradition

  "Oaf of Office" by Steven Pinker, www.nytimes.com. January 21, 2009.

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• Genetically influenced behavior is not necessarily good and not necessarily unchangeable. Explanations of bad behavior that appeal to genes do not absolve a person any more than do explanations that appeal to upbringing.

  Steven Pinker

  Evolution, Behavior, Genes

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• People today sometimes get uncomfortable with empirical claims that seem to clash with their political assumptions, often because they haven't given much thought to the connections.

  Steven Pinker

  People, Political, Connections

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• As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children. It was published in a major journal.

  Steven Pinker

  Children, Long, Dots

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• An eye for beauty locks onto faces that show signs of health and fertility - just as one would predict if it had evolved to help the beholder find the fittest mate.

  Steven Pinker

  Eye, Locks, Fertility

  Steven Pinker (2003). “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, p.85, Penguin

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• America had, for one thing, lived in anarchy for - until much more recently than Europe. We had the Wild West, where the cliche of the cowboy movies was the nearest sheriff is 90 miles away, and so you had to pack a gun and defend yourself.

  Steven Pinker

  Gun, Cowboy, Europe

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

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• the mind is a neural computer

  Steven Pinker

  Mind, Computer

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• People have long assumed that violence is necessary for political change. Rulers never cede power voluntarily, the argument goes, so progressives have no choice but to contemplate the use of force to bring about a better world, mindful of the trade-off between a small amount of violence now and acceptance of an unjust status quo indefinitely.

  Steven Pinker

  Acceptance, Long, People

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• Broadly speaking, the Southern and Western desert and mountain states will vote for the candidate who endorses an aggressive military, a role for religion in public life, laissez-faire economic policies, private ownership of guns and relaxed conditions for using them, less regulation and taxation, and a valorization of the traditional family.

  Steven Pinker

  Military, Gun, Southern

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• Genes are a play within a play, not the interior monologue of the players.

  Steven Pinker

  Player, Genes, Monologues

  Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.44, W. W. Norton & Company

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• As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty.

  Steven Pinker

  Philosophy, Believe, Exercise

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• Aggression, like every other part of human behavior we take for granted, is a challenging engineering problem!

  Steven Pinker

  Engineering, Challenges, Problem

  Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.17, W. W. Norton & Company

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• I think that communism was a major force for violence for more than 100 years, because it was built into its ideology - that progress comes through class struggle, often violent.

  Steven Pinker

  Struggle, Thinking, Years

  "The Violent Dangers of Ideology". The Economist Interview, www.economist.com. November 03, 2011.

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• I try to jog in every city I visit, and I particularly enjoy harbour-front paths that let me ogle big ships, railroad bridges and the ruins of factories and warehouses.

  Steven Pinker

  Bridges, Cities, Trying

  "My week" by Steven Pinker, www.theguardian.com. October 14, 2007.

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• Jews are known for many things, but strength, swiftness, and agility are not among them. There is one trait, as controversial as it is familiar, for which Jews are above all known, and that is shrewdness in business.

  Steven Pinker

  Swiftness, Agility, Shrewdness

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