Steven Pinker

Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion
by Paul Bloom

Hambrick and Christopher Chabris, “Yes, IQ Really Matters,” Slate, April 14, 2014, http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/04/what_do_sat_and_iq_tests_measure_gen eral_intelligence_predicts_school_and.html. 233 professional moral philosophers Eric Schwitzgebel and Joshua Rust, “The Moral Behavior of Ethics Professors: Relationships Among Self-Reported Behavior, Expressed Normative Attitude, and Directly Observed Behavior,” Philosophical Psychology 27 (2014): 293–327. 234 Walter Mischel investigated For a review, see Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control (Boston: Little, Brown, 2014). studies of exceptional altruists Abigail A. Marsh et al., “Neural and Cognitive Characteristics of Extraordinary Altruists,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111 (2014): 15036–41. Steven Pinker has argued Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Penguin Books, 2011). 235 Smith discusses the qualities Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Lawrence, KS: Digireads.com, 2010), 130. studies run by Geoffrey Cohen Geoffrey L. Cohen, “Party Over Policy: The Dominating Impact of Group Influence on Political Beliefs,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85 (2003): 808–22. 236 Other studies have found Philip M.

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It’s reassuring to have these scholars on my side. Others have done the work of outlining empathy’s limits and of carefully distinguishing empathy from other capacities, such as compassion and a sense of justice. I’m thinking here of Jean Decety, David DeSteno, Joshua Greene, Martin Hoffman, Larissa MacFarquhar, Martha Nussbaum, and Steven Pinker. I am particularly impressed by the research of Tania Singer, a cognitive neuroscientist, and Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk—two scholars working together to explore the distinction between empathy and compassion. I’ve been influenced as well by a novelist, Leslie Jamison, and a literary scholar, Elaine Scarry, both of whom have fascinating things to say about empathy and its limits.

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When you think like this—when you choose to broaden your ambit of concern and empathize with the plight of others, whether they are close friends or distant strangers—it becomes harder not to act, harder not to help.” I like this quote because it provides a nice illustration of how empathy can be a force for good. Empathy makes us care more about other people, more likely to try to improve their lives. A few years ago, Steven Pinker began a discussion of empathy with a list: Here is a sample of titles and subtitles that have appeared in just the past two years: The Age of Empathy, Why Empathy Matters, The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, The Science of Empathy, The Empathy Gap, Why Empathy Is Essential (and Endangered), Empathy in the Global World, and How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy. . . .

50 Psychology Classics
by Tom Butler-Bowdon
Published 14 Oct 2007

It is an intellectual tour de force, and may well shatter some of your cherished opinions or shift them to firmer scientific ground. It is easy to see why Pinker is in the top echelon of popular science writers today—his work combines scientific gravitas with a highly enjoyable style. Steven Pinker Born in 1954 in Montreal, Canada, Steven Pinker has degrees from McGill University and Harvard, where he obtained his PhD in experimental psychology. He is best known for his research into language and cognition. Other books include The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Visual Cognition (1985), Lexical and Conceptual Semantics (1992), and Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language (1999).

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Laing The Divided Self: A Study of Sanity and Madness (1960) 34 Abraham Maslow The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (1971) 35 Stanley Milgram Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974) 36 Anne Moir & David Jessel Brainsex: The Real Difference Between Men and Women (1989) 37 Ivan Pavlov Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex (1927) 38 Fritz Perls Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality (1951) 39 Jean Piaget The Language and Thought of the Child (1923) 40 Steven Pinker The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002) 41 V. S. Ramachandran Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (1998) 42 Carl Rogers On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy (1961) 43 Oliver Sacks The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales (1970) 44 Barry Schwartz The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (2004) 45 Martin Seligman Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfilment (2002) 46 Gail Sheehy Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life (1976) 47 B.

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We can pick up one of their titles today and still be entranced. Despite the difficulty of some of the concepts, people have a deep hunger for knowledge on how the mind works, human motivation, and behavior, and in the last 15 years there has been something of a new golden age in popular psychology writing, with authors such as Daniel Goleman, Steven Pinker, Martin Seligman, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi fulfilling that need. Below is a brief introduction to the titles covered in 50 Psychology Classics. The books are divided into seven categories that, although unconventional, may help you to choose titles according to the themes that interest you most.

Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future
by Johan Norberg
Published 31 Aug 2016

We often think of the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which have killed around 650,000 people, but we rarely talk about the conflicts in those countries between 1979 and 1989, which killed more than two million people. War and violence used to be the natural state of humanity. The cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, on whose exhaustive research on the history of violence I draw heavily in this chapter, writes that the dramatic reduction in violence ‘may be the most important thing that has ever happened in human history’.2 A tour through our cultural heritage, our myths, proverbs and even our language reveal how much of an everyday occurrence brutal violence was.

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Torture and mutilation have been regularly applied in all great civilizations, from the Assyrians, Persians and Chinese to the African kingdoms and the Native American tribes, but the medieval Christian culture was more creative than most, and some of that era’s best minds were occupied with coming up with ways of inflicting as much pain as possible on people before they confessed or died. As Steven Pinker summarizes it: Torture was meted out by national and local governments throughout the Continent, and it was codified in laws that prescribed blinding, branding, amputation of hands, ears, noses and tongues, and other forms of mutilation as punishments for minor crimes. Executions were orgies of sadism, climaxing with ordeals of prolonged killing such as burning at the stake, breaking on the wheel, pulling apart by horses, impalement through the rectum, disembowelment by winding a man’s intestines around a spool, and even hanging, which was a slow racking and strangulation rather than a quick breaking of the neck.5 We know that torture is practised today as well, especially in dictatorships, but even in some advanced democracies like the United States.

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But human sacrifice was also abolished in all cultures, often at first replaced by animal sacrifice. It could be that knowledge of history and other cultures provides evidence to counter such beliefs. It could be that greater wealth, along with longer and more predictable lives, erodes fatalism and generally leads people to value the lives of others more. According to Steven Pinker’s sources, the average annual rate of violent death for non-state societies – and this includes everything from hunter-gatherer tribes to gold rush societies in California – is 524 per 100,000. If we add all the deaths from wars, genocide, purges and man-made famines in the twentieth century, we still don’t get a rate higher than 60 per 100,000 annually.6 The first step in the pacification process was associated with the early agricultural civilizations.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century
by Rodrigo Aguilera
Published 10 Mar 2020

Spelke A Debate”, 16 May 2005, https://www.edge.org/event/the-science-of-gender-and-science-pinker-vs-spelke-a-debate 18 “Steven Pinker at Davos: excessive political correctness feeds radical ideas”, Big Think, 31 Jan. 2018, https://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/steven-pinker-excessive-political-correctness-feeds-dangerous-ideas 19 Pinker, S., “Featured Reader”, Arts and Letters Daily, 26 Dec. 2014, https://www.aldaily.com/featured-reader/steven-pinker-2014-12-26/ 20 Szalai, J., “Steven Pinker Wants You to Know Humanity Is Doing Fine. Just Don’t Ask About Individual Humans”, New York Times, 28 Feb. 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/books/review-enlightenment-now-steven-pinker.html 21 Pinker, S.

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Scientists’ Role in the Eugenics Movement (1907-1939): A Contemporary Biologist’s Perspective”, Zebrafish, 5(4), Dec. 2008, https://doi.org/10.1089/zeb.2008.0576 53 Snyder, T., Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (Vintage Books, 2011), pg. 160 54 Pinker, S., Enlightenment Now, ch. 22. 55 Pinker, S., Enlightenment Now, pg. 408. 56 Gray J., “Steven Pinker is Wrong About Violence and War”, Guardian, 13 Mar. 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-steven-pinker-wrong-violence-war-declining 57 Burke, M., Hsiang, S.M., and Miguel, E., “Global Non-linear Effect of Temperature on Economic Production”, Nature, 527, 12 Nov. 2015, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature15725. An interactive website can be found at https://web.stanford.edu/~mburke/climate/map.php 58 Mecklin, J.

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It’s That, but Way Way Weirder”, Vox, 18 Apr. 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/4/18/11434098/alt-right-explained 36 Issac, M., “Mark Zuckerberg’s Great American Road Trip”, New York Times, 25 May 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/25/technology/zuckerberg-harvard-commencement-road-trip.html 37 “Steven Pinker on Genetically Re-engineering Human Nature”, The Nexus Institute, 2016, http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/steven-pinker-genetically-reengineering-human-nature/ 38 Norberg, J., Progress, pg. 124 39 Ridley, M., The Rational Optimist, pg. 346 40 Pinker, S., Enlightenment Now, Ch 22 41 Plous, S., “The Nuclear Arms Race: Prisoner’s Dilemma or Perceptual Dilemma?”

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
by Steven Pinker
Published 1 Jan 1994

See Alphabet Wynn, K., 58–60, 468 X-bar theory, 99–105, 124, 127–129, 239, 289, 432, glossary Xhosa, 168 Yamanashi, M., 168, PS14 Yiddish, 56, 170, 253, 263, 378 Yourcenar, M., 135 Yngve, V, 457 Zurif, E., 321 P.S. Insights, Interviews & More… About the author Meet Steven Pinker About the book On Writing The Language Instinct Frequently Asked Questions The Language Instinct Today Read on Author’s Picks: Suggested Reading Have You Read? More by Steven Pinker Notes to P.S. Material References to P.S. Material About the author Meet Steven Pinker © 2005 by Rebecca Goldstein THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT is dedicated to my parents, “who gave me language”; the ambiguity between nature and nurture was, of course, intentional.

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Last-minute addition: another excellent book on the science of reading. Have You Read? More by Steven Pinker WORDS AND RULES: THE INGREDIENTS OF LANGUAGE How does language work, and how do we learn to speak? Why do languages change over time, and why do they have so many quirks and irregularities? In this original and totally entertaining book, written in the same engaging style that illuminated his bestselling classics, The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker explores the profound mysteries of language. By picking a deceptively simple phenomenon—regular and irregular verbs—Pinker connects an astonishing array of topics in the sciences and the humanities: the history of languages; the theories of Noam Chomsky and his critics; the attempts to create language using computer simulations of neural networks; what there is to learn from children’s grammatical “mistakes”; the latest techniques in identifying genes and imaging the brain; and major ideas in the history of Western philosophy.

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—London Review of Books OTHER BOOKS BY STEVEN PINKER The Stuff of Thought: Language and Human Nature The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language How the Mind Works Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure Language Learnability and Language Development Credits Cover painting by Donna Coveney Copyright This book was originally published in 1994 by William Morrow and Company. P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers. THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT. Copyright © 1994 by Steven Pinker. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist
by Michael Shermer
Published 8 Apr 2020

ISBN 978-1-108-48978-2 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. This book is dedicated to my friends Christopher Hitchens and Steven Pinker, peerless champions of liberty who have always given the devil his due … for our own safety’s sake. Contents Acknowledgments IntroductionWho Is the Devil and What Is He Due? Part IThe Advocatus Diaboli: Reflections on Free Thought and Free Speech1Giving the Devil His Due: Why Freedom of Inquiry and Speech in Science and Politics Is Inviolable 2Banning Evil: In the Shadow of the Christchurch Massacre, Myths about Evil and Hate Speech Are Misleading 3Free Speech Even If It Hurts: Defending Holocaust Denier David Irving 4Free to Inquire: The Evolution–Creationism Controversy as a Test Case in Equal Time and Free Speech 5Ben Stein’s Blunder: Why Intelligent Design Advocates Are Not Free Speech Martyrs 6What Went Wrong?

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When I argue that free speech is inviolable and sacrosanct, I mean this in the broadest sense, even while acknowledging that some restrictions are both legally and morally necessary, such as leaking the nuclear codes to an enemy nation, libeling someone in a way that damages their reputation and income, extorting others to give up money or freedom, and fraudulently stealing from others what isn’t rightfully yours through persuasion. But as the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker explained, these exceptions must be strictly delineated and individually justified; they are not an excuse to treat speech as one fungible good among many. Despots in so-called “democratic republics” routinely jail their opponents on charges of treason, libel, and inciting lawlessness. Britain’s lax libel laws have been used to silence critics of political figures, business oligarchs, Holocaust deniers, and medical quacks.

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He coined the meme in a 1919 Supreme Court case that upheld the conviction of a man who distributed leaflets encouraging men to resist the draft during World War I, a clear expression of opinion in a democracy. And if you object to these arguments – if you want to expose a flaw in my logic or a lapse in my accuracy – it’s the right of free speech that allows you to do so.13 It is for these reasons – and many others – that this book is dedicated to my friends Christopher Hitchens and Steven Pinker, peerless champions of liberty who have always given the devil his due … for our own safety’s sake. Part I The Advocatus Diaboli: Reflections on Free Thought and Free Speech Chapter 1 Giving the Devil His Due Why Freedom of Inquiry and Speech in Science and Politics Is Inviolable Preamble This article was originally published in the November/December 2018 issue of the Journal of Criminal Justice as a “Special Issue on the Study of Ethnicity and Race in Criminology and Criminal Justice,” addressing a target article by the psychologist James Flynn on “Academic Freedom and Race,” dealing with the always-controversial topic of racial group differences in IQ scores.

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 14 Jun 2017

Also, I love playing with babies, mostly staring at each other and smiling. Drooling is also involved, and sometimes it’s the baby. “If it’s already common knowledge, it’s probably too late to make a major contribution. If you’re the only one excited, you may be deluding yourself.” Steven Pinker TW: @sapinker FB: /Stevenpinkerpage stevenpinker.com STEVEN PINKER is a Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as The New York Times and The Atlantic, and is the author of ten books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and most recently, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.

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Money Mustache David Lynch Nick Szabo Jon Call Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: Feb. 3–Feb. 24, 2017) Dara Torres Dan Gable Caroline Paul Darren Aronofsky Evan Williams Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: March 10–March 24, 2017) Bram Cohen Chris Anderson Neil Gaiman Michael Gervais Temple Grandin Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: March 31–April 21, 2017) Kelly Slater Katrín Tanja Davíðsdóttir Mathew Fraser Adam Fisher Aisha Tyler Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: April 28–May 12, 2017) Laura R. Walker Terry Laughlin Marc Benioff Marie Forleo Drew Houston Scott Belsky Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: May 19–June 2, 2017) Tim McGraw Muneeb Ali How to Say No: Neal Stephenson Craig Newmark Steven Pinker Gretchen Rubin Whitney Cummings Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: June 9–June 16, 2017) Rick Rubin Ryan Shea Ben Silbermann Vlad Zamfir Zooko Wilcox Stephanie McMahon Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: June 23–July 7, 2017) Peter Attia Steve Aoki Jim Loehr Daniel Negreanu Jocko Willink Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: July 14–July 27, 2017) Robert Rodriguez Kristen Ulmer Yuval Noah Harari Some Closing Thoughts Breathe Recommended Resources The Top 25 Episodes of The Tim Ferriss Show Extended Conversations Mentor Index Question Index Subject Index Acknowledgments Sample Chapter from TOOLS OF TITANS Buy the Book About the Author Connect with HMH Footnotes Copyright © 2017 by Timothy Ferriss All rights reserved.

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“Most gifted” is lower risk, an easier search query (easier to recall), and implies benefits for a broader spectrum of people, which the idiosyncratic “favorite” does not. For the curious and impatient among you, here are a few books (of many) that came up a lot: Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charlie Munger If you’d like to see all of the recommended books in one place, including a list of the top 20 most recommended from this book and Tools of Titans, you can find all the goodies at tim.blog/booklist 2. What purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your life in the last six months (or in recent memory)?

The Right Side of History
by Ben Shapiro
Published 11 Feb 2019

Allum Bokhari, “Lawsuit: Google Instructed Managers That ‘Individual Achievement’ and ‘Objectivity’ Were Examples of ‘White Dominant Culture,’” Breitbart.com, April 18, 2018, http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/04/18/lawsuit-google-instructed-managers-that-individual-achievement-and-objectivity-were-examples-of-white-dominant-culture/. 30. Joshua Loftus, “Steven Pinker’s Radical Centrism and the ‘Alt-right,’” Medium.com, January 11, 2018, https://medium.com/@joftius/steven-pinkers-radical-centrism-and-the-alt-right-b261fde5a24f. 31. Twitter, January 9, 2018, https://twitter.com/jbouie/status/950794932066947072?lang=en. 32. Eric Turkheimer, Kathryn Paige Harden, and Richard E. Nisbett, “Charles Murray Is Once Again Peddling Junk Science about Race and IQ,” Vox.com, May 18, 2017, https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/5/18/15655638/charles-murray-race-iq-sam-harris-science-free-speech. 33.

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According to economics professors at Stanford and Brown, political polarization is taking place more for “demographic groups least likely to use the internet and social media.”19 Polarization seems to cross demographic boundaries, without reference to level of technological use.20 Finally, there’s the most basic argument of all: for whatever reason, human nature has kicked back in. We’re naturally tribal, naturally possessive, naturally angry. For a while, we suppressed those instincts; we called that the “Enlightenment.” Jonah Goldberg, in his masterful Suicide of the West, calls that overthrow of human instinct “The Miracle.”21 Steven Pinker, author of Enlightenment Now, makes a similar case: he says that the Enlightenment changed everything—that it brought about science and humanism, reason and progress. Enlightenment thinking substituted rationality for irrationality, and the effect was the creation of the modern world.22 Goldberg, arguing that Enlightenment ideals are unnatural, says that our current dissolution looks like a reversion to our tribal, reactionary nature.

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If the new science had called into question the possibility of universal human truths, advocates of scientism were willing to overlook that, too. Instead, these neo-Enlightenment thinkers returned to the premises of the Enlightenment in the name of science: the same Enlightenment that had brought about scientific progress, they argued, had ushered in an age of universal morality as well. Take, for example, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now is a powerful ode to Enlightenment values. Where Wilson discards Kant as antiscientific, Pinker embraces Kant’s call to “understand.” He also endorses in glowing terms the power of reason: “The Enlightenment principle that we can apply reason and sympathy to enhance human flourishing may seem obvious, trite, old-fashioned. . . .

Talk on the Wild Side
by Lane Greene
Published 15 Dec 2018

While experienced Lojbanists write without too much trouble, they seem to struggle in speech. What’s going on? One possibility is that Lojban does not fit the template of the kind of languages humans are supposed to learn. This is the “language instinct” hypothesis, whose most famous proponents are Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker. They claim that all human languages share underlying features that the brain is primed to learn. This could be one reason why children speak so fluently by age five despite little instruction, and while highly intelligent adults seem to struggle mightily with Lojban: the brain doesn’t want inflexible predicates and arguments.

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Their stories, like Genie’s, come out as a mess of content words that give a clear gist but which do not form grammatical sentences. They are nonetheless comprehensible; Broca’s aphasia affects only language production. Indeed, sufferers often show frustration that they can’t express what is obviously clear in their minds. People can even solve complex intellectual problems without words. Steven Pinker, in The Language Instinct, lists a host of scientists from Michael Faraday (electromagnetism) to James Watson and Francis Crick (the helical structure of DNA) whose breakthroughs were visual, not verbal. Pinker concludes with a quotation from Einstein, who described the thought experiments that led to some of his breakthroughs: “this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought – before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others.”9 Of course, people do think in language sometimes.

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* Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage betrays its publisher’s mission: collecting citations of English in order to make ordinary dictionaries. And Bryan Garner’s Modern English Usage betrays its author’s main vocation, that of a lawyer. The final language tamer we turn to is perhaps the most surprising – although he shouldn’t be. Steven Pinker is an arch-descriptivist: an academic language scientist and psychologist who has spent decades criticising half-baked old shibboleths of writers like Gwynne. Pinker, in his book The Language Instinct, objected to the sticklers’ appropriation of a beloved Yiddish word in calling themselves “language mavens”, saying “kibbitzers and nudniks is more like it!”

Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist
by Richard Dawkins
Published 15 Mar 2017

Theoretically there is no limit to the depth of embedding of relative and prepositional clauses within one another, although keeping track of deep, multiple embedding makes demands on the brain’s computational machinery. Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct is a beautifully written, evolutionarily slanted introduction to such matters. *31 The seminal book on evolutionary psychology, with chapters by many of its leading practitioners, is the volume edited by J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides and J. Tooby, The Adapted Mind. Not long after this lecture was given, Steven Pinker’s masterly How the Mind Works appeared. Evolutionary psychology, for reasons I don’t understand, arouses incandescent hostility in quarters where I wouldn’t expect it.

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Where do our twenty-first-century values come from, as opposed to the relatively nasty ones of earlier centuries? What has changed, such that in the 1920s ‘votes for women’ was a daringly radical proposal, leading to riots in the streets, whereas now to forbid women the vote is regarded as an obvious outrage? Looking back to earlier centuries, Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature and Michael Shermer’s The Moral Arc document inexorable improvements in our values. Improvements by whose standards? By the standards of modern times, of course – a line of reasoning which, although circular, is not viciously so. Think of the slave trade, think of killing as a spectator sport in the Roman Colosseum; of bear-baiting, burning at the stake, treatment of prisoners including prisoners of war before the Geneva Convention.

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I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms’ (‘Evolution as fact and theory’, in Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes). *4 Professors of ‘Women’s Studies’ are occasionally given to lauding ‘women’s ways of knowing’ as if these were different from, even superior to, logical or scientific ways of knowing. As Steven Pinker rightly said, such talk is an insult to women. *5 Quoted in Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, p. 234. See also Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition, for a chilling collection and justifiably savage indictment of similar drivel including ‘Cultural Constructivism’, ‘Afrocentric Science’, ‘Feminist Algebra’ and ‘Science Studies’, not forgetting Sandra Harding’s ‘stirring assertion that Newton’s Principia Mathematica Philosophae Naturalis is a “rape manual” ’

The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World
by Linsey McGoey
Published 14 Sep 2019

As Guardian economics editor Larry Elliot observes, there has rarely been any admission from ‘the IMF or World Bank that the policies they advocated during the heyday of the so-called Washington Consensus – austerity, privatisation and financial liberalisation – have contributed to weak and unequal growth, with all the political discontent that this has caused.’17 The lack of institutional soul-searching at these organizations post 2008 is a sort of strategic ignorance, and in recent years, academics have published accounts of ‘institutional ignorance’ at the IMF.18 Goldin and Elliot’s criticism is controversial not due to the outlandishness of their statements (their criticisms of the IMF are quite mild), but because of a problem that, for want of any better framing I’ve seen, I label the Bannon–Pinker conundrum – after two figures who have amassed widespread public followings for different reasons: Steven Pinker and Breitbart mastermind Stephen Bannon. THE BANNON–PINKER CONUNDRUM Bannon is at the forefront of propagandist efforts to demonize what he calls a ‘globalist’ conspiracy to undermine the interests of western nation states and what he sees as a superior Judeo-Christian world outlook. His anti-foreigner views are deservedly condemned by centrist political thinkers including Steven Pinker, who has criticized Bannon’s ideas. But the Pinker–Bannon conundrum is this: although Pinker disavows racism, he also tends to imply that any criticism of globalization, no matter how reasonable or evidence-based, is ‘anti-progress’ as he puts it.

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Also, the lives of Carnegie and Rockefeller are relevant for another reason: they help to explore why Adam Smith’s call to be ‘suspicious’ towards the self-serving activities of business merchants is neglected in mainstream economic theory today. Today is a good time to re-examine Smith’s attitude to profiteering among business merchants. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, in his recent bestseller Enlightenment Now, also turns to the late 18th century, but I argue that he gets Adam Smith wrong, and also that his historical omissions are pregnant with meaning. What Pinker doesn’t say about Smith helps me to examine where the myth of America and Britain’s laissez-faire origins have come from, and why those myths still thrive today.

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But there’s also another problem surrounding the treatment of Smith’s work today. His book, The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, is widely viewed today as the most important modern economic text ever written. Smith is seen as the patron saint of the belief that economic self-interest will lead naturally to positive economic growth for all members of a community. Steven Pinker and others call this the ‘positive-sum’ or ‘shared prosperity’ thesis and they attribute it to Smith. The reality is different. It is true that Smith believed the pursuit of economic self-interest could be a force for moral and economic good by fuelling economic growth. But only when self-interest is restrained by just laws and prudent government regulation.

The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 25 Jun 2024

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 78 For a couple of the most influential recent analyses of why most global trends are going in the right direction, see Max Roser, “Most of Us Are Wrong About How the World Has Changed (Especially Those Who Are Pessimistic About the Future),” Our World in Data, July 27, 2018, https://ourworldindata.org/wrong-about-the-world; “Why Are We Working on Our World in Data?,” Our World in Data, July 20, 2017, https://ourworldindata.org/motivation; Steven Pinker, “Is the World Getting Better or Worse? A Look at the Numbers,” TED video, April 2018, https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_is_the_world_getting_better_or_worse_a_look_at_the_numbers. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 79 For Erik Brynjolfsson’s views in more detail, see Erik Brynjolfsson, “The Key to Growth? Race with the Machines,” TED, February 2013, https://www.ted.com/talks/erik_brynjolfsson_the_key_to_growth_race_with_the_machines; Erik Brynjolfsson et al., Mind vs Machine: Implications for Productivity, Wages and Employment from AI,” The Artificial Intelligence Channel, YouTube video, November 20, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

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uri=/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/datasets/appendixtableshomicideinenglandandwales/current/homicideyemarch22appendixtables.xlsx; European Commission, Investing in Europe’s Future: Fifth Report on Economic, Social and Territorial Cohesion (Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2010), https://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/sources/docoffic/official/reports/cohesion5/pdf/5cr_part1_en.pdf; Global Study on Homicide, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2019, https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/gsh/Booklet1.pdf; Global Study on Homicide, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2011, http://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/statistics/Homicide/Globa_study_on_homicide_2011_web.pdf; Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Penguin, 2011). BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 161 For an in-depth talk by Pinker expanding on this view, see “Steven Pinker: Better Angels of Our Nature,” Talks at Google, YouTube video, November 1, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gGf7fXM3jQ. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 162 I made most of these predictions in my 1990 book The Age of Intelligent Machines.

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I’ve reviewed the extensive positive impact of technological change on human well-being in The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999)[7] and The Singularity Is Near (2005)[8] and in scores of lectures and articles since. In their 2012 book Abundance,[9] Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler fleshed out how we are headed toward an era of abundance in resources that used to be characterized by scarcity. And in his 2018 book Enlightenment Now,[10] Steven Pinker described the continual progress being made in a variety of areas of social impact. My emphasis in this chapter is specifically on the exponential nature of this progress, how the law of accelerating returns is the fundamental driver of many individual trends we see, and how the result will be a dramatic improvement of most aspects of life in the very near future—not just in the digital realm.

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
by Bill McKibben
Published 15 Apr 2019

Recent years have seen the publication of a dozen high-profile books and a hundred TED talks devoted to the idea that everything in the world is steadily improving. They share not only a format (endless series of graphs showing centuries of decreasing infant mortality or rising income) but also a tone of perplexed exasperation that any thinking person could perceive the present moment as dark. As Steven Pinker, the author of the sanguine Enlightenment Now, explained, “None of us are as happy as we ought to be, given how amazing our world has become.” People, he added, just “seem to bitch, moan, whine, carp and kvetch.”1 I’m grateful for those books because, among other things, they remind us precisely how much we have to lose if our civilizations do indeed falter.

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Even compared to the twentieth century, violence is now far less likely to kill us—of the more than 55 million people who died around the world in 2012, war killed just 120,000 of them.2 Eighty-five percent of adults can read now, a staggering increase inside two generations.3 Women, with more education and at least a modicum of equality, have gone from having more than five kids apiece on average in 1970 to having fewer than two and a half today, probably the most rapid and remarkable demographic change the planet has ever witnessed. In the year 1500, humans managed to produce goods and services worth $250 billion in today’s dollars—five hundred years later, that number is $60 trillion, a 240-fold increase.4 The chorus of affirmation swells, from Steven Pinker insisting we’re in an age of unprecedented enlightenment to Donald Trump tweeting, “There is an incredible spirit of optimism sweeping the country right now—we’re bringing back the JOBS!” We’re quite accustomed to this idea of progress, so accustomed that some can’t imagine anything else: the former chief economist of the World Bank, Kaushik Basu, recently predicted that, in fifty years, global GDP will be growing 20 percent a year, meaning that income and consumption will be doubling every four years or so.5 There are, each day, more ideas hatched, more songs sung, more pictures taken, more goals scored, more schoolbooks read, more money invested

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Economists calculated that it would take twenty-six years for the island’s economy to get back to where it had been the day before the storm hit40—if, of course, another hurricane didn’t strike in the meantime. Or look at people living so close to the margin that small changes make a huge difference. I noted earlier that we’ve seen a steady decline in extreme poverty and hunger. “Our problem is not too few calories but too many,” Steven Pinker wrote smugly.41 But late in 2017, a UN agency announced that after a decade of decline, the number of chronically malnourished human beings had started growing again, by 38 million, to a total of 815 million, “largely due to the proliferation of violent conflicts and climate-related shocks.”42 In June 2018, researchers said the same sad thing about child labor: after years of decrease, it, too, was on the rise, with 152 million kids at work, “driven by an increase in conflicts and climate induced disasters.”43 Those “conflicts,” too, are ever more closely linked to the damage we’ve done to the climate.

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Published 20 Feb 2018

It made my bull***t detector so sensitive that listening to well-marketed nonsense (by verbalistic people, especially academics) had the same effect as being put in a room with instances of randomly occurring piercing and jarring sounds, the type that kill animals. I am never bothered by normal people; it is the bull***tter in the “intellectual” profession who bothers me. Seeing the psychologist Steven Pinker making pronouncements about things intellectual has a similar effect to encountering a drive-in Burger King while hiking in the middle of a national park. It is under such an oversensitive bull***t detector that I have been writing this book. THE BOOK REVIEWERS And since we are talking about books, I close this introductory section with that one thing I’ve learned from my time in that business.

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The mean-field approach is when one uses the average interaction between, say, two people, and generalizes to the group—it is only possible if there are no asymmetries. For instance, Yaneer Bar-Yam has applied the failure of mean-field to evolutionary theory of the selfish-gene narrative trumpeted by such aggressive journalistic minds as Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, with more mastery of English than probability theory. He shows that local properties fail and the so-called mathematics used to prove the selfish gene are woefully naive and misplaced. There has been a storm around work by Martin Nowack and his colleagues (which include the biologist E. O. Wilson) about the terminal flaws in the selfish gene theory.fn2 The question is: could it be that much of what we have read about the advances in behavioral sciences is nonsense?

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The IYI has been wrong, historically, about Stalinism, Maoism, GMOs, Iraq, Libya, Syria, lobotomies, urban planning, low carbohydrate diets, gym machines, behaviorism, trans-fats, Freudianism, portfolio theory, linear regression, HFCS (High-Fructose Corn Syrup), Gaussianism, Salafism, dynamic stochastic equilibrium modeling, housing projects, marathon running, selfish genes, election-forecasting models, Bernie Madoff (pre-blowup), and p-values. But he is still convinced that his current position is right.fn1 NEVER GOTTEN DRUNK WITH RUSSIANS The IYI joins a club to get travel privileges; if he is a social scientist, he uses statistics without knowing how they are derived (like Steven Pinker and psycholophasters in general); when in the United Kingdom, he goes to literary festivals and eats cucumber sandwiches, taking small bites at a time; he drinks red wine with steak (never white); he used to believe that dietary fat was harmful and has now completely reversed himself (information in both cases is derived from the same source); he takes statins because his doctor told him to do so; he fails to understand ergodicity, and, when explained to him, he forgets about it soon after; he doesn’t use Yiddish words even when talking business; he studies grammar before speaking a language; he has a cousin who worked with someone who knows the Queen; he has never read Frédéric Dard, Libanius Antiochus, Michael Oakeshott, John Gray, Ammianus Marcellinus, Ibn Battuta, Saadia Gaon, or Joseph de Maistre; he has never gotten drunk with Russians; he never drinks to the point where he starts breaking glasses (or, preferably, chairs); he doesn’t even know the difference between Hecate and Hecuba (which in Brooklynese is “can’t tell sh**t from shinola”); he doesn’t know that there is no difference between “pseudointellectual” and “intellectual” in the absence of skin in the game; he has mentioned quantum mechanics at least twice in the past five years in conversations that had nothing to do with physics.

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI
by John Brockman
Published 19 Feb 2019

I very much hope that a new generation of leaders who understand the AI Control Problem and AI as the ultimate environmental risk can rise above the usual tribal, zero-sum games and steer humanity past these dangerous waters we are in—thereby opening our way to the stars that have been waiting for us for billions of years. Here’s to our next hundred thousand years! And don’t hesitate to speak the truth, even if your voice trembles. Chapter 10 TECH PROPHECY AND THE UNDERAPPRECIATED CAUSAL POWER OF IDEAS STEVEN PINKER Steven Pinker, a Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He is the author of eleven books, including The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and, most recently, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

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Max Tegmark: Let’s Aspire to More Than Making Ourselves Obsolete We should analyze what could go wrong with AI to ensure that it goes right. CHAPTER 9. Jaan Tallinn: Dissident Messages Continued progress in AI can precipitate a change of cosmic proportions—a runaway process that will likely kill everyone. CHAPTER 10. Steven Pinker: Tech Prophecy and the Underappreciated Causal Power of Ideas There is no law of complex systems that says that intelligent agents must turn into ruthless megalomaniacs. CHAPTER 11. David Deutsch: Beyond Reward and Punishment Misconceptions about human thinking and human origins are causing corresponding misconceptions about AGI and how it might be created.

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In the end, twenty-five people wrote essays, all individuals concerned about what is happening today in the age of AI. Possible Minds is not my book, rather it is our book: Seth Lloyd, Judea Pearl, Stuart Russell, George Dyson, Daniel C. Dennett, Rodney Brooks, Frank Wilczek, Max Tegmark, Jaan Tallinn, Steven Pinker, David Deutsch, Tom Griffiths, Anca Dragan, Chris Anderson, David Kaiser, Neil Gershenfeld, W. Daniel Hillis, Venki Ramakrishnan, Alex “Sandy” Pentland, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Alison Gopnik, Peter Galison, George M. Church, Caroline A. Jones, and Stephen Wolfram. I see the Possible Minds Project as an ongoing dynamical emergent system, a presentation of the ideas of a community of sophisticated thinkers who are bringing their experience and erudition to bear in challenging the prevailing digital AI narrative as they communicate their thoughts to one another.

T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone That Dominates and Divides Us
by Carole Hooven
Published 12 Jul 2021

“The police gave me a subtle nod of approval”: Fairless, Mad Blood Stirring, 1. “From an early age, small boys were taught to think much of their own honor”: Quoted in R. E. Nisbett, Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996; Abingdon, UK: Taylor and Francis, 2018), 2. As Steven Pinker has documented in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Penguin, 2012), ch. 3, 104. CHAPTER 8 “Tell Mrs. Coolidge”: James R. Wilson, Robert E. Kuehn, and Frank A. Beach, “Modification in the Sexual Behavior of Male Rats Produced by Changing the Stimulus Female,” Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology 56, no. 3 (1963): 636.

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The government doesn’t pump pacifying chemicals into the water supply. The explanation presumably lies in the Singaporean culture, which is one of law-abidingness, strict discipline in families, and lack of poverty, plus harsh criminal penalties, among other factors. Rates of violent crime don’t vary just from country to country, they also vary over time. As Steven Pinker has documented in The Better Angels of Our Nature, the homicide rate in Europe fell astonishingly steeply from the thirteenth century on, from as much as 100 per 100,000 people per year, to the present rate of about 1 per 100,000. The explanation for the reduction in violence is not in changes in our genes but in centuries of large cultural and social changes, including the monopolization of violence by the state.

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But we can also put roadblocks in the way. #MeToo is a movement that has made real progress, and hopefully that will continue. As I have emphasized throughout this book, to bring about changes in male behavior it is not necessary to depress testosterone. Changes in attitudes and culture can do that all by themselves. As Steven Pinker reports in his book Enlightenment Now, in the United States the “rates of rape and violence against wives and girlfriends have been sinking for decades and are now at a quarter or less of their peaks in the past.” Declining male T levels are not the explanation. Even though, as far as we can tell, men’s heightened desire for sex has not changed, what has changed (in some places) is the sense of entitlement of some powerful men.

You Are What You Read
by Jodie Jackson
Published 3 Apr 2019

Notes 1 Harbison, F., quoted in Teheranian, M., Communications policy for national development, Routledge, London, 2016. 2 Schramm, W., Mass media and national development, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1973. 3 The Total Audience Report: Q1 2016, Nielsen.com, available at: http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/reports/2016/the-total-audience-report-q1-2016.html 4 Johnson, C., The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption, O’Reilly Media, London, 2015. 5 Ibid., p. 31. 6 Ibid., p. 35. 7 Merrill, J., The Elite Press, Pitman, New York, 1968, p. 20. 8 Mitchell, A., Stocking, G. and Matsa, K., ‘Long-Form Reading Shows Signs of Life in Our Mobile News World’, Pew Research Center for Journalism & Media, 5 May 2016. 9 Shearer, E. and Gottfried, J., News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2017, Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project, 2018, available at: http://www.journalism.org/2017/09/07/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2017/ 10 Pariser, E., Beware online ‘filter bubbles’, Ted.com, 2018, available at: https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles 11 Vinderslev, A., BuzzFeed: The top 10 examples of BuzzFeed doing native advertising, Native Advertising Institute, 2018, assssssvailable at: https://nativeadvertisinginstitute.com/blog/10-examples-buzzfeed-native-advertising/ RESOURCES News organisations: ‘BBC World Hacks’ BRIGHT Magazine The Correspondent Delayed Gratification INKLINE Monocle News Deeply The Optimist Daily Positive News Solutions Journalism Network Sparknews ‘The Upside’ (by the Guardian) The Week ‘What’s Working’ (by the Huffington Post) YES! Media Books: The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity by Steven Pinker Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now by Alan Rusbridger Broadcasting Happiness: The Science of Igniting and Sustaining Positive Change by Michelle Gielan Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress by Steven Pinker Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – And Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling, with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund A Force for Good: How the American News Media Have Propelled Positive Change by Rodger Streitmatter The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption by Clay A.

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I also owe thanks to the pioneering news organisations that value and practise solutions journalism. It is by learning from them and their audience that I have been able to craft a collective experience of my own. I would like to personally thank Danielle Batist, Michelle Gielan, Sean Dagen-Wood, Steven Pinker, David Bornstein and Ulrik Haagerup. It has been through your support, encouragement and example that I have found my voice in the conversation for a more constructive media. Thank you to everyone who has pledged for this book. When I set out to write it, I wanted to bring people together in the quest for a more constructive, healthy and balanced media diet.

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Cronin Massimo Curatella Richard D’Souza Neal Davies Joshua Davis Libby Davy Evan De Barra Maddie De Bois Jean Philip De Tender Jenny Demetriou Joanne Douglas Jonathan Dransfield Charlie Drayson Paul Driver Fiona Durkin Fiona Edgerley Henry Edwards Ruairi Edwards Ruhi Habib Edwards-Behi Terence Egalton Deborah Eleazar Will Ellner Thomas Emmet James Erskine Amélie Escudier Sue Finch Molly Flatt Darren Forrester Yasmin Forrester David Foster Aaron Fullerton Ariana Gabr Eva Gabr Nadia Gabr Tariq Gabr Hilary Gallo Philippa Garety Daisy Geddes Marion Gibbs Daniele Gibney Barrie Glibbery Fiona Gollan Katie Goodall Shukuri Graham Sarah Gray Miriam Great Giselle Green Paul Greengrass Gemma Greenwood Dave Gunn Rin Hamburgh Diana Hamilton Bunny Hankers Christine Hawe David Head Jack Hellewell Jenny Hitchens Matt Hitchens Amy Hobbs Linda Horsfield Simon Howard Val Hudson Ailsa Hughes Helle Ibsen Jonathan Irons Beata Ivarsson Alison Jackson Charlie Jackson Christopher Jackson Daniel Jackson Jemma Jackson Jonny Jackson Leila Jackson Josie Jacobs Caroline Jaine Dawn Jones Nicholas Jones Laura Keating Nick Keegs Nina Kelly Ella Kennedy Ebbie Khadem Mohsin Khan Dan Kieran Heidi King Hilary King Jenny King Mike King Charlotte Kirkham Janet Kirkham Andy Kitching Nick Koutsoudis Christi Kraft Anna Kunnenkeril Pierre L’Allier Elisa Lapenna Mauri Liebendörfer London School of Ecomonics LSE Jonathan Long Kyser Lough David Lush Elizabeth Lyons Lucy Lyons Séamus Mac An Airchinnigh Cassie Madge Paul Main Silvio Malvolti Karen McIntyre Ailsa McNab Juliet Menager Louisa Mercer Jane Mew Lottie Mew Dave Minchin Joseph Mishon Veronique Mistiaen Jeremy Mitchell John Mitchinson Christopher Moger Joanna Moncreiffe Sally Musgrave Jawwad Mustafa Carlo Navato Juliet Newth Gary Nicol Luke Niggemann Gabriela Nóra Johan Norberg Anthony Norton Anne-Sophie Novel Denis O’Keeffe Kate O’Connor Jenny Oakley CJ Obi James Ovenden Raquel Paiva Kirstin Papworth-Smyth Josh Parrack Sabrina Passos Pete & Irene Catherine and Karl Phillips Steven Pinker The team at piqd www.piqd.com Justin Pollard Ana Prudente Kathryn Puch Prudence Quicke Janakan Ratnarajan Valentina Recla Kate Reinecke Lucie Resteau Emily Reynolds James Richardson Sean Richardson Chloe Rigby Glynis Robertson JE Robins Lucy Robinson Stuart Robinson Justine Rose Tom Rose Ola Rosling Helen Rule Yann Say Cyndy Schlaepfer-Youker Stephanie Scott Megan Sheer Peter Silva-Jankowski Hasina Silvester Patricia Silvester Nicola Slawson Kirsty Sleep Bubs Smith Dr Mike Smith Jason Smith Nigel Smith Tim Smith Pippa Sophia Kirsten Sparre Caroline Sproule William Squire Kirsty Stanley Björn Staschen JP Stead Cathy Stewart Heather Stewart Daniel Strombom Jane Taylor Victor Temple Peter ten Wolde Grahame Terry Joe Thompson Graham Tomlinson Milly Toovey Kristen Truempy Truuli Property Sophie Turner Vicky Unwin Bart van der Vliet Chared Verschuur Lynda Vowles Connie Waddell Anna Wallace Howard Walters Yelena Walters James Warner Margaret Warren Frances Watson Amy White Jan Wifstrand Antonia Williams Helen Williams Jan Williams Seán Wood Carolanne Wright Jessie Zhu First published in 2019 Unbound 6th Floor Mutual House, 70 Conduit Street, London W1S 2GF www.unbound.com All rights reserved © Jodie Jackson, 2019 The right of Jodie Jackson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 7 Sep 2022

How Growing Rent-Seeking Is at the Heart of America’s Economic Troubles,” Journal of Public and International Affairs , https:// jpia .princeton .edu /news /something -nothing -how -growing -rent -seeking -heart -americas -economic -troubles.   74   “some kinds of social change” : Jennifer Szalai, “Steven Pinker Wants You to Know Humanity Is Doing Fine. Just Don’t Ask About Individual Humans,” New York Times , February 28, 2018, https:// www .nytimes .com /2018 /02 /28 /books /review -enlightenment -now -steven -pinker .html.   74   The Dawn of Everything : David Graeber and David Wendgrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021).   74   problem with Pinker’s oft-quoted statistics : Jeremy Lent, “Steven Pinker’s Ideas Are Fatally Flawed. These Eight Graphs Show Why,” openDemocracy , May 21, 2018, https:// www .opendemocracy .net /en /transformation /steven -pinker -s -ideas -are -fatally -flawed -these -eight -graphs -show -why /.   75   “As we have seen” : Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Penguin, 2018), 109.   75   “What we want … fast as you can” : “Dr.

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These Eight Graphs Show Why,” openDemocracy , May 21, 2018, https:// www .opendemocracy .net /en /transformation /steven -pinker -s -ideas -are -fatally -flawed -these -eight -graphs -show -why /.   75   “As we have seen” : Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Penguin, 2018), 109.   75   “What we want … fast as you can” : “Dr. Jordan Peterson Makes the Case for Capitalism,” YouTube video, July 5, 2020, 10:05, https:// www .youtube .com /watch ?v =uWeDnN0O _xA.   76   Extrinsic rewards … intrinsic rewards : Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993); Kenneth Thomas, “The Four Intrinsic Rewards That Drive Employee Engagement,” Ivey Business Journal , December 4, 2017, https:// iveybusinessjournal .com /publication /the -four -intrinsic -rewards -that -drive -employee -engagement /.   76   “vile despoilers” : Pinker, Enlightenment Now .   76   Bezos has a yacht : Allison Morrow, “Jeff Bezos’ Superyacht Is So Big It Needs Its Own Yacht,” CNN , May 10, 2021, https:// www .cnn .com /2021 /05 /10 /business /jeff -bezos -yacht /index .html.   77   “there is a growing loss” : Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti , sec. 13, https:// www .vatican .va /content /francesco /en /encyclicals /documents /papa -francesco _20201003 _enciclica -fratelli -tutti .html.   78   Nietzsche’s sister : Sue Prideaux, “Far Right, Misogynist, Humourless?

Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World
by Paul Collier
Published 30 Sep 2013

Within economics my key influences have been the writings of George Akerlof through his innovative ideas on identity, and Frédéric Docquier for his rigorous investigation of the migration process, and especially discussion with Tony Venables both on economic geography and as a sparring partner for the model that is the analytic workhorse of this book. In social psychology I have drawn on discussions with Nick Rawlings and the works of Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, Daniel Kahneman, and Paul Zak. In philosophy I have learned from discussions with Simon Saunders and Chris Hookway and from the writings of Michael Sandel. The book is an attempt to answer this question: what migration policies are appropriate? Even to pose this question requires a degree of courage: if ever there was a hornet’s nest it is migration.

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In a violent society the rule of law keeps getting overridden: households and firms must divert effort into safety, and in the limit they seek safety through choosing to remain poor so they are less of a target.5 The capacity to cooperate is fundamental to prosperity: many goods and services are “public goods” that are most efficiently supplied collectively. So the social foundations of peace and cooperation matter for growth and are not direct corollaries of formal institutions. Steven Pinker has convincingly suggested that norms concerning violence have evolved quite radically in distinct steps over many centuries.6 An early step is the passage from anarchy to centralized power: a passage that Somalia has yet to make. Another is the passage from power to authority: a step that many regimes have yet to manage.

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Noncooperation can be reinforced by its own moral code of honor: the vendetta, in which wrongs are repaid with wrongs. Vendettas are a normal aspect of clan-based societies. Historically, clans have been the most common basis for social organization, and in many poor countries they continue to be so.4 As Steven Pinker shows, vendettas are reinforced because wrongs are systematically exaggerated by victims and minimized by perpetrators, so that the retaliation regarded as justified by victims of the initial wrong creates a fresh wrong in the eyes of the new victims.5 Vendettas only end once the entire moral code of honor is abandoned.

Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think
by Alan Grafen; Mark Ridley
Published 1 Jan 2006

Marek Kohn, Visiting Fellow at the School of Life Sciences, University of Sussex, author of A Reason for Everything, As We Know It: Coming to Terms with an Evolved Mind, The Race Gallery, and other books. Randolph M. Nesse, Professor of Psychiatry and Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan, author of Why We Get Sick and other books. Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology, Harvard University, author of The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, and other books. Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials trilogy, Ruby in the Smoke, and other books. Andrew F. Read, Professor of Natural History, Edinburgh University.

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Thus the knowledge-laden structures are big, in the multiverse, while many of the objects, such as galaxies, that have large-scale structure in any one universe, have little or none in the multiverse. It is only the ‘neo-Darwinist’ version of evolution theory that has turned out to illuminate other fields in this way. That is smoking-gun evidence of a good explanation. Deep commonalities between life and mind Steven Pinker US television talk-show host Jay Leno, interviewing a passerby: How do you think Mount Rushmore was formed? Passerby: Erosion? Leno: Well, how do you think the rain knew to not only pick four presidents—but four of our greatest presidents? How did the rain know to put the beard on Lincoln and not on Jefferson?

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We need to be, and are, superb intuitive psychologists. Poor psychologists would rarely have got to be parents of further inept judges of character, emotion, intention. Many of the typical problems of human life are demanding in similar ways, yet we respond effortlessly and successfully to most of those challenges. Steven Pinker and his allies suggest that we can do this because we have evolved a collection of special purpose cognitive machines, each of which is innately equipped to solve demanding but repeated and predictable problems of human life; he develops this view in his How The Mind Works.2 As Pinker reads the human story, we are good intuitive psychologists because we have built into our minds a human psychology program—a system designed to read the thoughts and intentions of others—on which we rely as we navigate our way through the storms of our social world.

Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will
by Geoff Colvin
Published 3 Aug 2015

Regarding Skype, see “Skype Update Translates English and Spanish in Real Time,” Christian Science Monitor, 15 December 2014. Economists Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane . . . Levy and Murnane, The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market (Princeton University Press, 2004). Steven Pinker observed in 2007 . . . Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language As a Window Into Human Nature (Penguin Books, 2007). Yet iRobot soon thereafter . . . For product descriptions, see www.irobot.com. And yet, in 2014, when I asked Dominic Barton . . . Personal interview, 24 September 2014. Judges make parole decisions . . .

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Kung San were as bloodcurdlingly violent as any culture you’ve ever heard of. Years of research by psychologists, anthropologists, neuroscientists, and others has pretty well sunk the blank-slate view. The full scope of the argument is beyond our needs here (it is elucidated brilliantly in the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature), but it’s worth our while to examine a list of “human universals” compiled by the anthropologist Donald E. Brown and published in 1991. These are, Brown said, “features of culture, society, language, behavior, and psyche for which there are no known exceptions.”

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Murnane, in an excellent 2004 book called The New Division of Labor, explain how driving a vehicle involves such a mass of sensory inputs and requires such complex split-second judgments that it would be extremely difficult for a computer ever to handle the job; yet Google introduced its autonomous car six years later. Steven Pinker observed in 2007 that “assessing the layout of the world and guiding a body through it are staggeringly complex engineering tasks, as we see by the absence of dishwashers that can empty themselves or vacuum cleaners that can climb stairs.” Yet iRobot soon thereafter was making vacuum cleaners and floor scrubbers that find their way around the house without harming furniture, pets, or children, and was also making other robots that climb stairs; it could obviously make machines that do both if it believed demand was sufficient.

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence
by John Brockman
Published 5 Oct 2015

DEDICATION To Marvin Minsky CONTENTS DEDICATION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS PREFACE: THE 2015 EDGE QUESTION MURRAY SHANAHAN Consciousness in Human-Level AI STEVEN PINKER Thinking Does Not Imply Subjugating MARTIN REES Organic Intelligence Has No Long-Term Future STEVE OMOHUNDRO A Turning Point in Artificial Intelligence DIMITAR D. SASSELOV AI Is I FRANK TIPLER If You Can’t Beat ’em, Join ’em MARIO LIVIO Intelligent Machines on Earth and Beyond ANTONY GARRETT LISI I, for One, Welcome Our Machine Overlords JOHN MARKOFF Our Masters, Slaves, or Partners? PAUL DAVIES Designed Intelligence KEVIN P.

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Only when more sophisticated AI is a familiar part of our lives will our language games adjust to such alien beings. But of course by that time it may be too late to change our minds about whether they should be brought into the world. For better or worse, they’ll already be here. THINKING DOES NOT IMPLY SUBJUGATING STEVEN PINKER Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology, Harvard University; author, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the Twenty-First Century Thomas Hobbes’s pithy equation of reasoning as “nothing but reckoning” is one of the great ideas in human history. The notion that rationality can be accomplished by the physical process of calculation was vindicated in the twentieth century by Alan Turing’s thesis that simple machines can implement any computable function, and by models from D.

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We don’t yet know how to program human-level intelligence and creativity into these computers, but in twenty years desktop computers will have the power of today’s supercomputers, and the hackers of twenty years hence will solve the AI programming problem long before any carbon-based space colonies are established on the moon or Mars. The AIs, not humans, will colonize these places instead, or perhaps take them apart. No human, no carbon-based human, will ever traverse interstellar space. There’s no reason to fear the AIs and human uploads. Steven Pinker has established that as technological civilization advances, the level of violence decreases.2 This decrease is clearly due to the fact that scientific and technological advance depend on free, nonviolent interchange of ideas between individual scientists and engineers. Violence between humans is a remnant of our tribal past and the resulting static society.

The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve
by Steve Stewart-Williams
Published 12 Sep 2018

And thanks to everyone else who’s helped out in one way or another, either with the book itself or with my thinking on these topics, including Pat Barclay, Chloe Bradley, Andrew Clark, Jerry Coyne, Oliver Curry, Greg Dingle, Céline Durassier, Martie Haselton, Adam Hooper, Stephanie Huitson, Toko Kiyonari, Danny Krupp, Claire Lehmann, Andrew Loughnan, James McKellar, Stewart McWilliam, Randy Nesse, Nikki Owen, Adam Perrott, Steven Pinker, John Podd, David Schmitt, Delia Shanly, Christina Hoff Sommers, Phil Tucker, Alison Walker, Abigail Walkington, Lee White, Barbara Williams, and Brian Williams. Last but not least, thanks to John Anderson for the plant genitals joke (see the Alien’s Report). 1 The Alien’s Challenge This book is about the strangest animal in the world – the animal that’s reading these words and the animal that wrote them: the human animal.

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The critics have failed to distinguish the ultimate from the proximate, the evolutionary mode of explanation from the psychological. The generalized form of this error is the idea that, according to evolutionary psychologists, people have an innate motivation to pass on their genes, and that we’re all constantly scheming about how we might achieve this. As the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker points out, though, “If that’s how the mind worked, men would line up outside sperm banks and women would pay to have their eggs harvested and given away to infertile couples.”30 Rather than having a very general motivation to propagate our genes, humans have a portfolio of more specific motivations – motivations to eat and drink, to run away from predators, to have sex and care for our young.

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By the way, as you might already have noticed, the spillover hypothesis doesn’t just explain our fondness for cute animal videos. It also hints at an explanation for a much older and more pervasive phenomenon: our habit of keeping pets. There’s another way to cash out the by-product hypothesis – one that may prove useful in solving the alien’s dilemmas. This is Steven Pinker’s strawberry cheesecake hypothesis.74 Cheesecake is one of the world’s most popular desserts. Unless we’re watching our weight, most of us would choose it over fruit. This is curious, though, because we evolved to eat fruit but we didn’t evolve to eat cheesecake. The explanation, of course, is that, like much of our food today, cheesecake is a supernormal stimulus: an artificial concoction that presses our evolved buttons more strongly than any natural substance, and that therefore packs more of a punch.

Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room
by David Weinberger
Published 14 Jul 2011

See also Linda Martin Alcoff, “Foucault’s Philosophy of Science: Structures of Truth/Structures of Power,” in Gary Gutting, ed., Continental Philosophy of Science (Wiley-Blackwell, 2005), pp. 211–223, http://www.alcoff.com/content/foucphi.html. 49 See Juan Carlos Castilla-Rubio and Simon Willis, “Planetary Skin: A Global Platform for a New Era of Collaboration,” March 2009, http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac79/docs/pov/Planetary_Skin_POV_vFINAL_spw_jc_2.pdf. 50 Interview with Juan Carlos Castilla-Rubio, March 17, 2010. 51 Interview with Timo Hannay, February 12, 2010. 52 Interview with John Wilbanks, December 14, 2009. 53 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton University Press, 2009). 54 Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. xvii. 55 “Climate of Fear,” Nature 464, no. 141 (March 11, 2010), DOI:10.1038/ 464141a, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v464/n7286/full/464141a.html. 56 See Mary Elizabeth Williams, “Jenny McCarthy’s Autism Fight Grows More Misguided,” Salon, January 6, 2011, http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/01/06/jenny_mccarthy_autism_debate. 57 Steven Pinker, “Mind over Mass Media,” New York Times, June 10, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/opinion/11Pinker.html. For a rebuttal, see Nicholas Carr’s blog post, “Steven Pinker and the Internet,” June 12, 2010, http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/06/steven_pinker_a.php. 58 David Quammen, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution (W. W. Norton, 2007), p. 84. 59 Ibid., p. 76. 60 Ibid., p. 141. 61 Ibid., p. 137. 62 Ibid., p. 162. 63 Ibid., p. 172. 64 Jean-Claude Bradley, “Dangerous Data: Lessons from My Cheminfo Retrieval Class,” January 2, 2010, http://usefulchem.blogspot.com/2010/01/dangerous-data-lessons-from-my-cheminfo.html. 65 “Eggs Good for You This Week,” The Onion, April 28, 1999, http://www.theonion.com/articles/eggs-good-for-you-this-week,4144/.

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Hyperlinked science If electronic media were hazardous to intelligence, the quality of science would be plummeting. Yet discoveries are multiplying like fruit flies, and progress is dizzying. Other activities in the life of the mind, like philosophy, history and cultural criticism, are likewise flourishing.57 So wrote cognitive scientist Steven Pinker in an op-ed in the New York Times in the summer of 2010. It would be difficult to find scientists who would disagree with this assessment overall, although every scientist would likely point to some pain point: lack of funding, government ineptitude, media sensationalism.... Still and all, this is a great age for science.

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It is the network itself—the seamless connection of scientists, data, methodologies, hypotheses, theories, facts, speculations, instruments, readings, ambitions, controversies, schools of thought, textbooks, faculties, collaborations, and disagreements that used to struggle to print a relative handful of articles in a relative handful of journals. So, Steven Pinker is right: Science is doing better than ever thanks to the Net. There is more information than ever. More of it is available than ever. Computers can discover patterns that humans would never have noticed. Commons are forming from clouds of Linked Data. Collaborative tools allow scientists to work together across all boundaries.

The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success
by Kevin Dutton
Published 15 Oct 2012

May 5, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7380400.stm. For a more academic slant on things, see Susan Batchelor, “Girls, Gangs, and Violence: Assessing the Evidence,” Probation Journal 56, no. 4 (2009): 399–414, doi:10.1177/0264550509346501. 2 Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has recently flagged this … See Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011). 3 Trawling through the court records of a number of European countries.. See Manuel Eisner, “Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime,” Crime and Justice 30 (2003): 83–142. 4 Similar patterns have elsewhere been documented … Michael Shermer, “The Decline of Violence,” Scientific American, October 7, 2011, www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?

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In China, following an incident in which a two-year-old baby was left stranded in the middle of a marketplace and run over, not once but twice, as passersby went casually about their business, an appalled electorate has petitioned the government to pass a “Good Samaritan” law to prevent such a thing from ever happening again. On the other hand, however, bad things have always happened in society. And no doubt always will. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has recently flagged this in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature. In fact, he goes one step further. Far from being on the increase, Pinker argues, violence is actually in decline. The reason that vicious slayings and other horrific crimes make the front pages of our papers isn’t because they’re commonplace.

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The subject of neurolaw came up in the context of a wider discussion about the field of cultural neuroscience: the study of how societal values, practices, and beliefs shape, and are shaped by, genomic, neural, and psychological processes across multiple timescales and cultures. If society was becoming increasingly psychopathic, I wondered, was there a gene already at work out there churning out more psychopaths? Or was it a case, as Steven Pinker had elucidated in his “culture of dignity” argument, of customs and mores becoming ever more socialized until they end up second nature? Hare suggests that it’s probably a little of both: that psychopaths, right now, are on a bit of a roll, and that the more of a roll they get on, the more normative their behavior becomes.

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control
by Stuart Russell
Published 7 Oct 2019

Robert Atkinson, director of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (the very same foundation that gives out the Luddite Award), made a similar argument in a 2015 debate.20 While there are valid questions about precisely how risks should be described when talking to the media, the overall message is clear: “Don’t mention the risks; it would be bad for funding.” Of course, if no one were aware of the risks, there would be no funding for research on risk mitigation and no reason for anyone to work on it. The renowned cognitive scientist Steven Pinker gives a more optimistic version of Atkinson’s argument. In his view, the “culture of safety in advanced societies” will ensure that all serious risks from AI will be eliminated; therefore, it is inappropriate and counterproductive to call attention to those risks.21 Even if we disregard the fact that our advanced culture of safety has led to Chernobyl, Fukushima, and runaway global warming, Pinker’s argument entirely misses the point.

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Thus, for example, Yann LeCun, a pioneer of deep learning and director of AI research at Facebook, often cites this idea when downplaying the risk from AI:28 There is no reason for AIs to have self-preservation instincts, jealousy, etc. . . . AIs will not have these destructive “emotions” unless we build these emotions into them. I don’t see why we would want to do that. In a similar vein, Steven Pinker provides a gender-based analysis:29 AI dystopias project a parochial alpha-male psychology onto the concept of intelligence. They assume that superhumanly intelligent robots would develop goals like deposing their masters or taking over the world. . . . It’s telling that many of our techno-prophets don’t entertain the possibility that artificial intelligence will naturally develop along female lines: fully capable of solving problems, but with no desire to annihilate innocents or dominate the civilization.

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It follows that those problems reflect things of value to humans that were omitted from the goals set for it by humans. The optimal plan being carried out by the machine may well cause problems for humans, and the machine may well be aware of this. But, by definition, the machine will not recognize those problems as problematic. They are none of its concern. Steven Pinker seems to agree with Bostrom’s orthogonality thesis, writing that “intelligence is the ability to deploy novel means to attain a goal; the goals are extraneous to the intelligence itself.”32 On the other hand, he finds it inconceivable that “the AI would be so brilliant that it could figure out how to transmute elements and rewire brains, yet so imbecilic that it would wreak havoc based on elementary blunders of misunderstanding.”33 He continues, “The ability to choose an action that best satisfies conflicting goals is not an add-on that engineers might forget to install and test; it is intelligence.

A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth
by Chris Smaje
Published 14 Aug 2020

It’s hard to imagine a realistic scenario in which the world can add around $40 trillion of new economic output in the 2040s alone while decarbonising by using low-EROI energy sources that require greater investment in unproductive intermediate stocks, and deal simultaneously with a raft of other crises related to soil, water and biodiversity loss. But here I’m going to focus on a second form of crisis – the human inequalities within and between countries that seem both an ethical outrage and a political tinderbox. On this point, progress-literature (see ‘Introduction’, page 5) attempts to soothe us with a different view. Steven Pinker, for example, asserts that ‘industrial capitalism launched the Great Escape from universal poverty in the 19th century and is rescuing the rest of humankind in a Great Convergence in the 21st’.127 I’m reluctant to enter the statistical labyrinth through which such claims are defended or refuted because, unlike Pinker, I think summary statistics and grand historical claims make for uncomfortable bedfellows, but I’d like to take a cautious step inside, just to suggest that other views are possible.

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For roughly 99% of the world’s history, 99% of humanity was poor, hungry, dirty, afraid, stupid, sick and ugly,’ while Anthony Warner makes the bold and conveniently untestable assertion that ‘every society that has ever existed would eagerly swap their lives with someone living in the developed world today’. Other writers I mentioned earlier – Steven Pinker and the authors of the Ecomodernist Manifesto among them – also weigh in on the theme that when all is said and counted, the evidence proves conclusively that modern lives are just better than premodern ones.143 You’d have thought a confident culture that was truly modern in the sense described by Therborn could let the dead lie, rather than indulging in shrill pronouncements of its superiority over them.

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It’s not that there’s nothing worth celebrating or defending in the traditions of modernity, but doing so requires a nuanced and creative response to changing times that acknowledges modernity’s downsides. The heavy-handed nostalgia for a perfected vision of past modern achievements as the lodestar of human progress offered by figures like Steven Pinker is stuck in the past. It’s time to move forwards to a small farm future. CHAPTER TWO Wicked Problems: Of Progress and Other Utopias As I charted the ten crises in Chapter 1, I intentionally sequenced them from physical and technological issues – our human numbers, the climate, energy availability, soils, water and so on – to deeper cultural, political and economic forces driving them.

The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
by Sam Harris
Published 5 Oct 2010

In addition to my dissertation committee at UCLA, several outside scholars and scientists reviewed early drafts of this book. Paul Churchland, Daniel Dennett, Owen Flanagan, and Steven Pinker read the text, in whole or in part, and offered extremely helpful notes. A few sections contain cannibalized versions of essays that were first read by a larger circle of scientists and writers: including Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Owen Flanagan, Anthony Grayling, Christopher Hitchens, and Steven Pinker. I am pleased to notice that with friends like these, it has become increasingly difficult to say something stupid. (Still, one does what one can.)

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—Ian McEwan, author of Atonement and winner of the Man Booker Prize for Amsterdam “A lively, provocative, and timely new look at one of the deepest problems in the world of ideas. Harris makes a powerful case for a morality that is based on human flourishing and thoroughly enmeshed with science and rationality. It is a tremendously appealing vision, and one that no thinking person can afford to ignore.” —Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and author of How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate “Beautifully written as they were (the elegance of his prose is a distilled blend of honesty and clarity) there was little in Sam Harris’s previous books that couldn’t have been written by any of his fellow ‘horsemen’ of the ‘new atheism.’

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Evolution could never have foreseen the wisdom or necessity of creating stable democracies, mitigating climate change, saving other species from extinction, containing the spread of nuclear weapons, or of doing much else that is now crucial to our happiness in this century. As the psychologist Steven Pinker has observed,21 if conforming to the dictates of evolution were the foundation of subjective well-being, most men would discover no higher calling in life than to make daily contributions to their local sperm bank. After all, from the perspective of a man’s genes, there could be nothing more fulfilling than spawning thousands of children without incurring any associated costs or responsibilities.

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next
by Andrew McAfee
Published 30 Sep 2019

Let’s look more closely at how this pattern of mistakes and corrections unfolded. People as Property It has been acceptable in many societies throughout history for people to own other people, especially if they come from a different ethnic group, religion, or tribe. The cognitive scientist Steven Pinker writes that sentiment toward slavery began to change in the late 1700s with the rise of humanism, or the belief that “the universal capacity of a person to suffer and flourish… call[s] on our moral concern.” As Pinker writes in his book Enlightenment Now, “The Enlightenment is sometimes called the Humanitarian Revolution, because it led to the abolition of barbaric practices [such as slavery] that had been commonplace across civilizations for millennia.”

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The fuel of interest in eliminating costs was added to the fire of the computer revolution, and the world began to dematerialize. The economic historian Joel Mokyr argues that the Industrial Era was made possible by the values of the Enlightenment. This intellectual movement began in the second half of the eighteenth century with many societies in the West embracing what Steven Pinker characterizes as four values: reason, science, humanism, and progress. According to Mokyr, the Enlightenment created a “culture of growth” that let both capitalism and technological progress flourish. I see an interesting inversion taking place now. If the Enlightenment led to the Industrial Era, then the Second Machine Age has led to a Second Enlightenment—a more literal one.

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Governments abuse their own people less and have become more effective at halting abuses. You Have Our Sympathies The last of the four horsemen of the optimist is public awareness: awareness both that we should take better care of each other and of our planet, and of good ways to do so. In Enlightenment Now Steven Pinker uses the image of an expanding “circle of sympathy” to convey that the first kind of public awareness is increasing. He makes an optimistic argument: “Given that we are equipped with the capacity to sympathize with others, nothing can prevent the circle of sympathy from expanding from the family and tribe to embrace all of humankind, particularly as reason goads us into realizing that there can be nothing uniquely deserving about ourselves or any of the groups to which we belong.

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds
by Daniel C. Dennett
Published 7 Feb 2017

Alternatively, we could consider words, and memes more generally, to be the result of variable, temporally extended processes of reproduction (as if father’s contribution was not made “at conception” but at some later time, after mother had already given birth), an imaginable variation on our normal mode of sexual reproduction. So there are several ways we could consider cultural evolution to be Lamarckian without thereby erecting a barrier against the imperialistic forays of dread Darwinism into the sacred precincts of culture. Steven Pinker—no friend of memes—has candidly acknowledged: “To say that cultural evolution is Lamarckian is to confess that one has no idea how it works.” He goes on, however, to say quite a bit about how he thinks it works: The striking features of cultural products, namely their ingenuity, beauty, and truth (analogous to organisms’ complex adaptive design), come from the mental computations that “direct”—that is, invent—the “mutations,” and that “acquire”—that is, understand—the “characteristics.” (1997, p. 209) This perfectly expresses the traditional view that it is comprehension, by inventors, by intelligent designers, that accounts for the improvements—the “ingenuity, beauty, and truth”—we observe in cultural items.

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Niche construction is not just an effect of the selective pressures of natural selection; it is also an important, even destabilizing, cause of new selective pressures, a crane of considerable lifting power in Design Space. There is no doubt that our species has engaged heavily in niche construction. Steven Pinker (2003, 2010) calls our world the “cognitive niche,” stressing that it is a product of human comprehension. Boyd, Richerson, and Henrich (2011) disagree with Pinker, proposing that it would better be called the “cultural niche,” a platform of competences on which comprehension can grow. As we will see, the R&D that has constructed the niche we inhabit today is a changing blend of both Darwinian, bottom-up processes and top-down intelligent design.

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This fluidity of information transmission in human culture, and its use in combatting, discrediting, discarding, but also revising, improving, adapting and spreading, new memes pushes Darwinian meme evolution into the background. Have I just admitted that memetics cannot be a valuable theoretical tool in modeling today’s (and tomorrow’s) cultural evolution? Consider again the claim by Steven Pinker, quoted in chapter 11: The striking features of cultural products, namely their ingenuity, beauty, and truth (analogous to organisms’ complex adaptive design), come from the mental computations that “direct”—that is, invent—the “mutations,” and that “acquire”—that is, understand—the “characteristics.” (1997, p. 209) This is close to the truth about some cultural products, but, as we have seen, by insisting that invention and understanding are the sole phenomena at work, Pinker restricts our attention to cultural treasures only, and exaggerates the role of intelligent design in creating these.

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters
by Steven Pinker
Published 14 Oct 2021

ALSO BY STEVEN PINKER Language Learnability and Language Development Learnability and Cognition The Language Instinct How the Mind Works Words and Rules The Blank Slate The Stuff of Thought The Better Angels of Our Nature Language, Cognition, and Human Nature: Selected Articles The Sense of Style Enlightenment Now EDITED BY STEVEN PINKER Visual Cognition Connections and Symbols (with Jacques Mehler) Lexical and Conceptual Semantics (with Beth Levin) The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004 VIKING An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC penguinrandomhouse.com Copyright © 2021 by Steven Pinker Penguin supports copyright.

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ALSO BY STEVEN PINKER Language Learnability and Language Development Learnability and Cognition The Language Instinct How the Mind Works Words and Rules The Blank Slate The Stuff of Thought The Better Angels of Our Nature Language, Cognition, and Human Nature: Selected Articles The Sense of Style Enlightenment Now EDITED BY STEVEN PINKER Visual Cognition Connections and Symbols (with Jacques Mehler) Lexical and Conceptual Semantics (with Beth Levin) The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004 VIKING An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC penguinrandomhouse.com Copyright © 2021 by Steven Pinker Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following: Excerpt on this page from The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson.

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Copyright © 2018 by Emily Wilson. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Charts rendered by Ilavenil Subbiah library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Names: Pinker, Steven, 1954– author. Title: Rationality : what it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters / Steven Pinker. Description: 1st Edition. | New York : Viking, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021003592 (print) | LCCN 2021003593 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525561996 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525562009 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593489352 (international edition) Subjects: LCSH: Critical thinking. | Practical reason. | Choice (Psychology) Classification: LCC BF441 .P56 2021 (print) | LCC BF441 (ebook) | DDC 153.4/2—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003592 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003593 Cover design: Pete Garceau Designed by Meighan Cavanaugh, adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen pid_prh_5.8.0_c0_r0 To Roslyn Wiesenfeld Pinker What is a man, If his chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed?

You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity
by Robert Lane Greene
Published 8 Mar 2011

But though once upon a time everyone in linguistics seemed to be responding to the dominant “classical” Chomskyan paradigm, today the minimalist program has put the titan himself into a smaller, more controversial camp, against, for example, his fellow “innatist” (a believer that some elements of grammar are wired in the brain), Steven Pinker. All this should dispel the notion that descriptivists don’t believe in rules. But they see their role as discovering, not pronouncing, them. Some (like Pullum) use real-world evidence. Others (like Chomsky) construct artificial examples to illustrate their points. But what neither does is sit in a chair saying “This is how it is, by Jove, and anyone who doesn’t know this rule is a fool.”

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Boroditsky points out that groups living near the Kuuk Thaayorre, in nearly identical conditions but without this feature in their languages, also lack the ability to stay constantly oriented. Boroditsky’s work puts her in a camp of neo-Whorfians. She strongly believes that different languages train the mind in different ways. Boroditsky rejects the notion—prominently expounded by Noam Chomsky, Steven Pinker, and others—that human language is fundamentally a single phenomenon, with interesting surface variations but much deeper universals. But the neo-Whorfians argue that language steers—it does not govern—what we perceive and think. Some languages, such as Chinese, have no word for “brother,” only “older brother” and “younger brother.”

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Patel in London will think of himself primarily as an Indian, a British citizen, a Hindu, a Gujarati-speaker, an ex-colonist from Kenya, a member of a specific caste or kin-group, or in some other capacity depends on whether he faces an immigration officer, a Pakistani, a Sikh or Moslem, a Bengali-speaker, and so on. There is no single platonic essence of Patel. He is all these and more at the same time. —ERIC HOBSBAWM Steven Pinker, in his book The Stuff of Thought, has a fascinating chapter about metaphors. “The Metaphor Metaphor” is about cognition itself: some people think that to think is to think in metaphors or that metaphorical thinking is a metaphor for thought. It is a powerful idea. He begins with the famous first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence and finds it rife with metaphors: to “dissolve … the bands which have connected them with another” is a metaphor: alliances are bonds.

The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice
by Fredrik Deboer
Published 3 Aug 2020

Human behavioral traits, such as IQ, are profoundly shaped by genetic parentage, and this genetic influence plays a larger role in determining human outcomes than the family and home environment. I began reading more deeply in the field and found that the influence of genetics on behavioral traits had been replicated again and again, not just in IQ but in personality traits like persistence, optimism, even political orientation. Books like Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate and Judith Rich Harris’s brilliant The Nurture Assumption laid out the importance of biological parentage, and in doing so articulated why so many people resist these conclusions. The relationship between genes and behavioral traits is neither perfect nor fixed; environment does matter, to a varying degree, and there are interventions that can ameliorate some of the impact of genes.

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In keeping with his empiricist assumptions, Locke believed that all moral rules and laws should be reasoned out rather than be accepted as handed down from the ancients. To make this communal reasoning possible, it was necessary to believe that everyone who would be governed according to these rules was equally capable of contributing. As Steven Pinker notes, Locke didn’t use the term “blank slate,” but rather referred to humans with the similar metaphor of “white paper, void of all characters.” And, as Pinker writes, “Locke’s notion of a blank slate also undermined a hereditary royalty and aristocracy”6—an important facet of his philosophy in a world where many societies were still ruled by kings.

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Not If Parenting Matters, But How It Matters While biological parentage plays an outsize role in a child’s outcomes, the portion of influence left for parenting style, family dynamics, and home effects is often quite small. The notion that parents can control very little of the behavioral traits in their children—that parenting doesn’t have much to do with personality—is consistently one of the most controversial elements of modern behavioral genetics. In an interview with The Guardian, Steven Pinker explained the continuing importance of parenting succinctly: The first reaction of everyone to such evidence was, [Pinker] says, remarkable. “So you are saying it doesn’t matter how I treat my children?” “Of course, it matters. Because parents have an enormous influence on the child’s happiness and wellbeing.

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking
by John Brockman
Published 14 Feb 2012

Paul Kedrosky Shifting Baseline Syndrome We don’t have enough data to know what is normal, so we convince ourselves that this is normal. Martin Seligman PERMA The elements of well-being must be exclusive, measurable independently of one another, and—ideally—exhaustive. Steven Pinker Positive-Sum Games In a positive-sum game, a rational, self-interested actor may benefit the other actor with the same choice that benefits himself or herself. Roger Highfield The Snuggle for Existence Competition does not tell the whole story of biology. Dylan Evans The Law of Comparative Advantage At a time of growing protectionism, it is more important than ever to reassert the value of free trade.

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We think of the New York intellectuals who wrote for little magazines like Partisan Review in the 1950s. The most influential thinkers in our own era live at the nexus of the cognitive sciences, evolutionary psychology, and information technology. This constellation of thinkers, influenced by people like Daniel Kahneman, Noam Chomsky, E. O. Wilson, Steven Pinker, Steve Jobs, and Sergey Brin, do a great deal to set the intellectual temper of the times. They ask the fundamental questions and shape debates outside of their own disciplines and across the public sphere. Many of the leaders of this network are in this book. They are lucky enough to be at the head of fast-advancing fields.

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As the late James Lee Byars, my friend and sometime collaborator, used to say: “I can answer the question, but am I bright enough to ask it?” I’m looking for questions that inspire answers we can’t possibly predict. My goal is to provoke people into thinking thoughts they normally might not have. This year’s question, suggested by Steven Pinker and seconded by Daniel Kahneman, takes off from a notion of James Flynn, intelligence researcher and emeritus professor of political studies at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, who defined shorthand abstractions (SHAs) as concepts drawn from science that have become part of the language and make people smarter by providing widely applicable templates.

The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics
by Tim Harford
Published 2 Feb 2021

“Smoking and Tobacco Use, Fast Facts,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, page last reviewed May 21, 2020, https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast_facts/. There are 1,300 deaths a day from smoking-related diseases, about 40,000 a month; almost 3,000 people were killed in the attacks of September 11, 2001. 16. “Steven Pinker on the Case for Optimism,” interview by Chris Anderson, TED2018 conference, https://www.ted.com/talks/the_ted_interview_steven_pinker_on_why_our_pessimism_about_the_world_is_wrong/transcript?language=en. 17. Steven Pinker mentions in the endnotes of Enlightenment Now (New York: Viking, 2018) that this correspondence took place in 1982. 18. Quoted in Denis Campbell, “Stroke Association Warns of Alarming Rise in Number of Victims,” Guardian, May 12, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/may/12/stroke-association-warns-of-alarming-rise-in-number-of-victims; see also More or Less, May 17, 2015, with the analysis of this claim: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05tpz78. 19.

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Arguably this temptation lay at the root of the last financial crisis: the sophistication of mathematical risk models obscured the question of how, exactly, risks were being measured, and whether those measurements were something you’d really want to bet your global banking system on. Working on More or Less, I found the problem everywhere. After working with a particular definition for years, the experts we talked to could easily forget that the ordinary listener might have something very different in mind when they heard the term. What the psychologist Steven Pinker calls the “curse of knowledge” is a constant obstacle to clear communication: once you know a subject fairly well, it is enormously difficult to put yourself in the position of someone who doesn’t know it. My colleagues and I weren’t immune. When we started researching some statistical confusion, we’d habitually start by pinning down the definitions—but as we quickly took them for granted, we always had to remind ourselves to explain them to our listeners, too

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Ten times as many US residents died from smoking-related diseases as from terrorism in September 2001, the month that saw the most deadly terrorist attack in the country’s history.15 Even a weekly magazine could honestly have noted at the end of that terrible week that cigarettes had killed more people than al-Qaeda. The newspapers ignored the deaths from cigarettes because they had a bias toward the shocking. It’s possible, of course, for shocking news to be positive. But the psychologist Steven Pinker has argued that good news tends to unfold slowly, while bad news is often more sudden.16 That sounds right—it is, after all, quicker to knock something down than to build it. Following a thought experiment the great psychologist Amos Tversky once shared with a young Pinker,17 imagine the best possible thing that could happen to you today.

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity
by Martin J. Rees
Published 14 Oct 2018

Whether or not you agree with all the points he makes, you must take them very seriously indeed.” —ROGER PENROSE, author of Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe “An engaging analysis of the most important issues facing the world, sprinkled with insight and suffused with wisdom and humanity.” —STEVEN PINKER, author of Enlightenment Now “Are we heading for a utopian or dystopian future? Martin Rees believes it’s down to us. But the one thing we must not do is put the brakes on technology. Science, applied wisely, offers humanity a bright future, but we must act now. In this visionary book, and despite his many fears, Rees adopts a refreshing and cautiously optimistic tone.”

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Indeed, biohacking is burgeoning even as a hobby and competitive game. Back in 2003 I was worried about these hazards and rated the chance of bio error or bio terror leading to a million deaths as 50 percent by 2020. I was surprised at how many of my colleagues thought a catastrophe was even more likely than I did. More recently, however, psychologist/author Steven Pinker took me up on that bet, with a two-hundred-dollar stake. This is a bet that I fervently hope to lose, but I was not surprised that the author of The Better Angels of Our Nature6 should take an optimistic line. Pinker’s fascinating book is infused with optimism. He quotes statistics pointing to a gratifying downward trend in violence and conflict—a decline that has been obscured by the fact that global news networks report disasters that would have been unreported in earlier times.

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Noyce, Seth Lederman, and David H. Evans, ‘Construction of an Infectious Horsepox Virus Vaccine from Chemically Synthesized DNA Fragments’, PLOS One (January 19, 2018): https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0188453.   5.  Chris D. Thomas, Inheritors of the Earth (London: Allen Lane, 2017).   6.  Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Penguin Books, 2011).   7.  Freeman Dyson, Dreams of Earth and Sky (New York: Penguin Random House, 2015).   8.  An overview of these developments is given in Murray Shanahan, The Technological Singularity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015); and Margaret Boden, AI: Its Nature and Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil
by Kenneth Cukier , Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Francis de Véricourt
Published 10 May 2021

Pinker’s “cognitive niche”: The term is not Pinker’s per se, though he’s most closely associated with it. As he points out, the idea and phrase come from the anthropologists John Tooby and Irven DeVore. See: “Listen to Psycholinguist Steven Pinker Speak About ‘Cognitive Niche’ in Early Modern Human Evolution,” transcript, Britannica, May 29, 2015, https://www.britannica.com/video/193409/Psycholinguist-Steven-Pinker-humans-evolution-niche. Metaphorical abstraction: The specific example and quote come from: Steven Pinker, “The Cognitive Niche: Coevolution of Intelligence, Sociality, and Language,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, supplement 2 (May 2010): 8993–99, https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2010/05/04/0914630107.full.pdf.

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But our ability to abstract enabled humans to develop grammatical language, which in turn gave us the ability to coordinate with one another beyond immediate kinship and across space and time. Groundbreaking research in recent years sheds powerful light on the factors behind the success of frames. The work of two professors in particular underscores the role they play. One is Steven Pinker, the Harvard neuroscientist and polymath whose ideas are as distinctive as his flowing silver hair. The other is Michael Tomasello, a Floridian who teaches at Duke University (and whose own gray hair, for the record, is neat and trim). In Pinker’s view, the most important factors include our ability to use cognitive skills for abstract thinking, the development of grammatical language, and humanity’s social tendencies that let us share ideas.

Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension
by Samuel Arbesman
Published 18 Jul 2016

“suddenly become opaque and bewildering”: Homer-Dixon, The Ingenuity Gap, 186. 100 billion sentences: Actually, to avoid duplicate sentences, it’s really 10,000 nouns × 1,000 verbs × 9,999 nouns. It would still take more than 30,000 years to go through these sentences. from the linguist Steven Pinker: Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (New York: William Morrow, 1994; repr. HarperPerennial, 1995), 205. “This is the cheese”: Quoted in Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Penguin, 1999), 95. Consider Kant Generator: Program via Mark Pilgrim, Dive into Python: Python from Novice to Pro, updated 2004.

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It’s silly to say that language allows for an arbitrarily large number of embedded clauses: that may be technically feasible according to the rules of grammar, but our brains simply can’t parse that much recursion. As much as we would like our languages to be infinite and variegated, we can’t handle sentences with a recursion depth of much more than two or three. Here are some sentences from the linguist Steven Pinker that not only are hard to understand, they don’t even look syntactically correct: The dog the stick the fire burned beat bit the cat. The rapidity that the motion that the wing that the hummingbird has has has is remarkable. Each of these has only a small amount of nesting. For example, the first sentence means that the dog—the one that was beaten by a burnt stick—bit the cat.

Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide
by Joshua S. Goldstein
Published 15 Sep 2011

Then again, besieging armies often did not allow surrender on terms, since they “stood to lose all they might gain by loot from a storm attack.” All in all, medieval warfare was not a model of civilized chivalry compared with today’s barbarous warfare—quite the opposite. ANCIENT WARFARE Catch the time machine back to the ancient empires. They lived by war. In fact, for most of human history, writes Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, “unexceptional features of life” included human sacrifice, slavery, conquest, genocide, assassination, rape as a spoil of war, and “homicide as the major form of conflict resolution.” Pinker concludes that “violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on earth.”

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But then in his conclusion Luard declares that wars in these places are more costly now than in the past. He “assumes that the modern events he knows about are larger and more frightening than past events of which he is not aware.” Chapter 2 described these actual trends; the point here is the importance of chronological bias. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker adds that we miss long-term declines in violence because “the decline of violent behavior has been parallelled by a decline in attitudes that tolerate or glorify violence.... From a contemporary vantage point, we see [today’s atrocities, mild by historical standards] as signs of how low our behavior can sink, not of how high our standards have risen.”

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And thus “peace organizations obey the same imperative: if they report that the world is getting more peaceful, they make their mission seem less necessary, and donations to them will slack off.” As journalist Gregg Easterbrook puts it, “Most contemporary fund-raising turns on high-decibel assertions that everything’s going to hell. It is not. . . .” Steven Pinker adds, “No one ever attracted followers and donations by announcing that things keep getting better.” In addition, people have trouble thinking realistically about war trends because war is so traumatic and horrible. Psychological trauma interferes with the ability to measure and compare information accurately.

Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made
by Vaclav Smil
Published 2 Mar 2021

Governing. 2018. Car Ownership in U.S. Cities Data and Map. http://www.governing.com/gov-data/car-ownership-numbers-of-vehicles-by-city-map.html Grant, R.G. 2017. Flight: The Complete History of Aviation. London: DK. Gray, J. 2015. Steven Pinker is wrong about violence and war. The Guardian, March 13, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-steven-pinker-wrong-violence-war-declining GRUMP (The Global Rural-Urban Mapping Project). 2019. The Global Rural-Urban Mapping Project. New York: Columbia University. http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/collection/grump-v1 Guo, J. et al. 2010.

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Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Williams, M. et al. 2009. Environmental impact of the 73ka Toba super eruption in South Asia. Palaeogeography Palaeoclimatology Palaeoecology 284:295–314. Willick, J. 2018. False dawn. RealClear Books August 3, 2018. https://www.realclearbooks.com/2018/08/03/false_dawn_steven_pinker_against_steven_pinker_16130.html Winegarden, C.R. and J.E. Murray. 2004. Effects of early health-insurance programs on European mortality and fertility trends. Social Science and Medicine 580:1825–1836. Wintle, M. 2000. An Economic and Social History of the Netherlands 1800–1920: Demographic, Economic and Social Transition.

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The first, a relatively restrained version of these views, is one of an ever-better world, of promises that the coming generations will see many repeats of our recent accomplishments, replete with monotonously improving health, rising life expectancies, higher incomes, ever greater surfeits of food and energy, even more affordable mobility, and an even easier access to information—and all of that would be taking place with ever lower impact on the environment. This is the message of the two much acclaimed publications by Hans Rosling and Steven Pinker (Rosling et al. 2018; Pinker 2018). The authors have followed the same basic precept that I did in this book and in other writings since the year 2000 (most notably in Smil 2005, 2006, 2010a, 2013b, 2014, 2017a, and 2020). All of us have assessed many remarkable historic achievements and appraised the current state of modern civilization by focusing on facts and numbers, past and present.

The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically
by Peter Singer
Published 1 Jan 2015

Better education may have played some part, but scores have risen most on those questions that test the ability to reason abstractly rather than on the sections that test vocabulary and math. Flynn later proposed that the spread throughout the population of scientific modes of reasoning about problems could contribute to an improvement in reasoning.15 Steven Pinker believes that the improvement in our reasoning abilities may have begun when the development of the printing press spread ideas and information to a much larger proportion of the population. He argues that better reasoning had a positive moral impact too. We became better able to take an impartial stance and detach ourselves from our personal and parochial perspectives.

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Flynn, “Massive IQ Gains in 14 Nations: What IQ Tests Really Measure,” Psychological Bulletin 101 (1987): 171–91. 14. U. Neisser, “Rising Scores on Intelligence Tests,” American Scientist 85 (1997): 440–47. 15. James Flynn, What Is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 16. Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (New York: Penguin, 2011). Chapter 9. Altruism and Happiness 1. http://blog.givewell.org/2013/08/20/excited-altruism/. 2. http://www.givingwhatwecan.org/about-us/history/profile-of-founder (2/20/14). 3. Richard Ball and Kateryna Chernova, “Absolute Income, Relative Income, and Happiness,” Social Indicators Research 88 (2008): 497–529.

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I owe this reference and other points in this paragraph to Michael Selgelid, “Governance of Dual-Use Research: An Ethical Dilemma,” Bulletin of the World Health Organization 87 (2009): 720–23. 15. Luke Muehlhauser, Facing the Intelligence Explosion, chap. 13, available at: intelligenceexplosion.com/2012/intelligence-explosion. 16. Nick Bostrom makes such a proposal at http://www.existential-risk.org/faq.html#10. Afterword 1. Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (New York: Viking, 2011). 2. For estimates of the death toll in the Syrian civil war, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Syrian_Civil_War. At the time of writing the highest of these estimates is 171,509 for a period of a little over three years, which gives a daily average of 144 deaths.

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World
by Steven Johnson
Published 15 Nov 2016

Because music has such a long history in human society, some scientists believe that an appetite for song is part of the genetic heritage of Homo sapiens, that our brains evolved an interest in musical sounds the way it evolved color perception or the ability to recognize faces. The question of whether music is a cultural invention or an evolutionary adaptation has been a contentious one in the last decade or so, a debate initially triggered by Steven Pinker’s best-selling manifesto of evolutionary psychology, How the Mind Works. Pinker is famous for seeing the mind as a kind of toolbox with a set of specific attributes shaped by the evolutionary pressures of our ancestral environments. But music he considers to be a cultural hack, designed to trigger circuits in the brain that evolved for more pressing tasks.

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And I’m also very grateful to Helen Yentus and Ben Denzer for what may well be my favorite jacket design of all of my books. A number of people were gracious enough to read the book (or sections of it) in draft form. I’m deeply indebted to the comments, corrections, and encouraging words from Alex Ross, Ken Goldberg, Stewart Brand, Steven Pinker, Mike Gazzaniga, Filipe Castro, Jane Root, Fred Hepburn, Chris Anderson, Juliet Blake, Angela Cheng, and Jay Haynes. As always, my wife, Alexa Robinson, read every word—but only improved every other word—with her wisdom and line-editing mojo. Thanks to Franco Moretti for introducing me to the kleptomaniacs of Paris more than two decades ago.

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Fifty Years Ago, the Mall Was Born. America Would Never Be the Same,” The New Yorker 15 (2004). “Southdale was not a suburban alternative”: Ibid. “The service done by the Fort Worth”: Quoted in Hardwick, 181. “giant shopping machine”: Quoted in Hardwick, 211. Chapter 2. Music “We enjoy strawberry cheesecake”: Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1999), 535. “The presence of music”: Nicholas J. Conard, Maria Malina, and Susanne C. Münzel, “New Flutes Document the Earliest Musical Tradition in Southwestern Germany,” Nature 460:7256 (2009), 739. Others take the sexual conquests: A fine overview of the arguments for the evolutionary roots of music can be found in Daniel J.

Humankind: A Hopeful History
by Rutger Bregman
Published 1 Jun 2020

In 1968, the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon came along with a study on the Yanomami people of Venezuela and Brazil that really shook things up. Title? The Fierce People. It described a society ‘in a chronic state of war’. Worse still, it revealed that men who were killers also had more wives and children – makes sense then that violence is in our blood. But the argument wasn’t truly settled until 2011, with the publication of Steven Pinker’s monumental book The Better Angels of Our Nature. It’s the magnum opus of a psychologist who was already ranked among the world’s most influential intellectuals: a massive doorstop of a book with 802 pages in extra-small font and packed with graphs and tables. Perfect for knocking your enemies out cold.

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Fortunately, Pinker reassures his readers, we’ve been ennobled by the ‘artifices of civilization’.11 The invention of farming, writing and the state have served to rein in our aggressive instincts, applying a thick coat of civilisation over our nasty, brutish nature. Under the weight of all the statistics trotted out in this hefty tome, the case seemed closed. For years, I thought Steven Pinker was right, and Rousseau cracked. After all, the results were in and numbers don’t lie. Then I found out about Colonel Marshall. 3 It’s 22 November 1943. Night has fallen on an island in the Pacific, and the Battle of Makin has just begun. The offensive is unfolding as planned when something strange happens.12 Samuel Marshall, colonel and historian, is there to see it.

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True, it might not rate as high as sex, but it certainly wouldn’t inspire a deep aversion. If, on the other hand, Rousseau was right, then nomadic foragers should have been largely peaceable. In that case, we must have evolved our intrinsic antipathy towards bloodshed over the tens of thousands of years that Homo puppy went about populating the earth. Could Steven Pinker, the psychologist of the weighty tome, be mistaken? Could his seductive statistics about the high human toll of prehistoric wars – that I eagerly cited in earlier books and articles – be wrong? I decided to go back to square one. This time, I steered clear of publications intended for a popular readership and delved deeper into the academic literature.

The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities
by John J. Mearsheimer
Published 24 Sep 2018

The Enlightenment was characterized by a burgeoning confidence in the human ability to make sense of the world, to grasp its regularities and fundamental principles, to predict its future, and to manipulate its powers for the benefit of mankind.”27 The most prominent progressive liberals over the past fifty years include Ronald Dworkin, Francis Fukuyama, Steven Pinker, and John Rawls. Fukuyama’s famous 1989 article “The End of History?,” which argued that with the fall of communism the question of the ideal form of government had largely been answered in favor of liberal democracy, is an outstanding example of this genre. Rawls, of course, was one of the most influential political philosophers of modern times, while Dworkin was a giant among legal philosophers.

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In that setting, it makes good sense for people to be well armed and to shoot first and ask questions later if someone comes toward them in menacing ways. The growing reach of the various political entities that have populated the planet since the beginning of human history seems to explain in good part why violence around the world has steadily declined over time. As Steven Pinker notes, “The reduction of homicide by government control is so obvious to anthropologists that they seldom document it with numbers.”28 Finally, the story Thomas Hobbes tells in Leviathan is largely consistent with structural realism. Individuals in the state of nature, which is an anarchic system, cannot know each other’s intentions, and they all have the capability to kill each other.

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Jack Knight, Institutions and Social Conflict (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 53. Harold D. Lasswell, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (New York: Whittlesey House, 1936). 54. I discuss the limits of rules under anarchy in John J. Mearsheimer, “The False Promise of International Institutions,” International Security 19, no. 3 (Winter 1994/95): 5–49. 55. Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011), chaps. 2–3. 56. The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War, ed. Robert B. Strassler (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), p. 352. 57. Joseph M. Parent, Uniting States: Voluntary Union in World Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Sebastian Rosato, Europe United: Power Politics and the Making of the European Community (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Ashley J.

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
by Steven Pinker
Published 1 Jan 2002

There is nothing else like it, and it is going to have an impact that extends well beyond the scientific academy.” —Paul Bloom, Trends in Cognitive Sciences “Steven Pinker has written an extremely good book—clear, well argued, fair, learned, tough, witty, humane, stimulating. I only hope that people study it carefully before rising up ideologically against him. If they do, they will see that the idea of an innately flawed but wonderfully rich human nature is a force for good, not evil.” —Colin McGinn, The Washington Post “Steven Pinker is a man of encyclopedic knowledge and an incisive style of argument. His argument in The Blank Slate is that intellectual life in the West, and much of our social and political policy, was increasingly dominated through the twentieth century by a view of human nature that is fundamentally flawed; that this domination has been backed by something that amounts to academic terrorism (he does not put it quite so strongly): and that we would benefit substantially from a more realistic view.

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PENGUIN BOOKS THE BLANK SLATE Steven Pinker is Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. His research on visual cognition and the psychology of language has earned prizes from the National Academy of Sciences and the American Psychological Association. Pinker has also received many awards for his teaching at MIT and for his books How the Mind Works (which was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) and The Language Instinct. He is an elected fellow of several scientific societies, associate editor of Cognition, and a member of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary.

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Pinker is a star, and the world of science is lucky to have him.” —Richard Dawkins, The Times Literary Supplement “The Blank Slate is not dismal at all, but unexpectedly bracing. It feels a bit like being burgled. You’re shocked, your things are gone, but you can’t help thinking about how you’re going to replace them. What Steven Pinker has done is break into our common human home and steal our illusions.” —John Morrish, The Independent “As a brightly lighted path between what we would like to believe and what we need to know, [The Blank Slate] is required reading. Pinker presents an unanswerable case for accepting that man can be, as he is, both wired and free.”

The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters
by Rose George
Published 13 Oct 2008

When church influence weakened, the products of the body—which Puritan influence has successfully turned into a foul, shameful thing—stepped in instead to give us our worst words. There must be something wrong with it, after all, when all we do is get rid of it as fast as possible. Meanwhile, a plentiful supply of euphemisms can serve as linguistic stand-ins. The cognitive scientist Steven Pinker lists a dozen categories of euphemism, including taboo (shit), medical (stool, bowel movement) and formal (feces, excrement, excreta, defecation, ordure). The category that’s missing is “conversational.” There is no neutral word for what humans produce at least once a day, usually unfailingly.

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A place where all sorts of human needs and habits intersect: fear, disgust, conversation, grooming, sex. It’s an ambiguous space that is not quite in the public eye, though the public uses it. A place of refuge and sociability, of necessity and criminality. How we are allowed to behave in a public necessity even influences everyday speech. Steven Pinker, in his explanation of taboo words, quotes a spectrum of excreta-related swearing. Shit is less acceptable than piss, which is less acceptable than fart. And so on through to snot and spit, “which is not taboo at all. That’s the same order as the acceptability of eliminating these substances from the body in public.”

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Borody, “Flora Power: Fecal Bacteria Cure Chronic C. difficile Diarrhea,” American Journal of Gastroenterology 11 (August 1995): 3028–29. You don’t ever see or smell a thing Megan Levy, “Grandma Saved by Daughter’s Poo,” Daily Telegraph, November 29, 2007. Once people got talking about bathrooms “Examining the Unmentionables,” Time, May 20, 1966. A dozen categories of euphemism Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (London: Allen Lane, 2007), p. 351. Without talking frankly about shit WSSCC, Listening (Geneva: WSSCC, 2004), p. 44. [Humanity’s] wiser course Freud quotes from the last scene of Faust, where the “more perfected angels” lament “Uns bleibt ein Erdenrest/zu tragen peinlich/und wär’ er von Asbest/er ist nicht reinlich” (We still have a trace of the Earth, which is distressing to bear; and though it were of asbestos, it is not cleanly).

Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, From Atoms to Economies
by Cesar Hidalgo
Published 1 Jun 2015

NOTES INTRODUCTION: FROM ATOMS TO PEOPLE TO ECONOMIES 1. In this context, the word atom is used to refer mainly to discrete particles, which could be either atoms or molecules. 2. Two great books describing the interaction between evolution and behavior are Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), and Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin, 2003). 3. Information theory also has a quantum version, known as quantum information theory. The existence of quantum information theory, however, does not invalidate the claim that classical information is a concept that works at a range of scales that is unusual for other theories. 4.

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The point here is that the need for social learning slows down knowledge accumulation because it is hard for individuals to find the social learning opportunities they require to acquire each specific chunk of knowledge. 10. A great book eloquently describing the role of genes on human behavior is Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin, 2003). 11. During the last couple of decades the political scientists and biologists working in the field of genopolitics have amassed an impressive amount of evidence connecting political preferences and genetics. These studies have hinged largely on exploiting data on identical and nonidentical twins, which they have matched with voter records and political party affiliations.

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Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 19. M. Pagel, “Human Language as a Culturally Transmitted Replicator,” Nature Reviews Genetics 10, no. 6 (2009): 405–415. 20. Ronen Shahar, Bruno Goncalves, Kevin Hu, Alessandro Vespignani, Steven Pinker, and César A. Hidalgo, “Links That Speak: The Global Language Network and Its Association to Global Fame,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, (10.1073/pnas.1410931111(2014)). 21. G. F. Davis, Managed by the Markets: How Finance Re-shaped America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 22.

A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream
by Yuval Levin
Published 21 Jan 2020

Economic pressures are clearly part of the story, but they do not explain the whole. 5. According to the US Justice Department’s Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics, the nationwide violent-crime rate in 2017 was the lowest since 1970. 6. Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Viking, 2018); Steven Pinker, “The Enlightenment Is Working,” Wall Street Journal, February 10, 2018. 7. This view has long been identified with the communitarian Left (the work of Harvard’s Michael Sandel offers some examples), but it has also expressed itself in recent years on the Right in a series of sharp critiques of the liberal tradition as a foundation for American life.

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But even those declines don’t come close to explaining the source of people’s anxiety (and as noted above, they actually seem to be symptoms as much as causes of a crisis of isolation and despair).5 In fact, some observers have argued that the frustration and anxiety that seem to overwhelm us are rooted in imaginary grievances and are themselves the problem. Harvard’s Steven Pinker takes the complaints that roil our social life to be just irritable gestures of self-indulgent ingratitude. In a recent book, he reviews mountains of data on wealth, health, safety, and choice and concludes that populist outrage on all sides of our politics is detached from reality. And it is dangerous too, he says.

Spite: The Upside of Your Dark Side
by Simon McCarthy-Jones
Published 12 Apr 2021

If we were indeed prepared to lash out to spite logic, the laws of nature, and inevitability itself, this would make us tragic beasts. Yet, as we will see, such apparently nonsensical behavior can also have benefits. We are at least gloriously tragic. The solutions to the formidable global problems we face, argues another Harvard psychologist, Steven Pinker, lie in reason.2 This is consistent with the Enlightenment principle that we must use reason to understand our world and overcome our follies. After dismissing faith, authority, and gut feelings as “generators of delusions,” Pinker argues that the use of reason when making decisions is “non-negotiable.”

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Existential spite would lead humans to be defined not only by their rationality but also by their willingness to oppose it.33 Existential spite, paying a cost to retain a feeling of freedom in the face of the dictates of reason, would appear to have only downsides. When it comes to the laws of nature, the house always wins. Existential spite could only end in calamity. Or would it? There are two objections to this assertion. First, it can be rational to refuse reason. Steven Pinker’s masterful ode to reason, Enlightenment Now, claims reason as the only solution to humanity’s problems. I don’t doubt that he is right, in the long run. But reason has a dark side. It is the only acceptable form of domination left in our society. The better-reasoned argument wins through what the philosopher Jürgen Habermas calls “unforced force” (zwanglose Zwang).34 Yet unforced force is still force.

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Mance, “Britain Has Had Enough of Experts, Says Gove,” Financial Times, June 3, 2016, www.ft.com/content/3be49734-29cb-11e6-83e4-abc22d5d108c. 36. J. Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 26, 102. 37. See, for example, Steven Pinker’s lecture on Bayesian reasoning, Spring 2019–2020: https://harvard.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=921ab5c6-3f83-450d-b23f-ab3b0140eeae. 38. Berlin, “Four Concepts of Liberty.” 39. B. Wootton, In a World I Never Made: Autobiographical Reflections (London: Allen and Unwin, 1967), 279. 40.

Unweaving the Rainbow
by Richard Dawkins
Published 7 Aug 2011

Newton's law that objects stay in motion unless positively stopped is counter-intuitive. So is Galileo's discovery that, when there is no air resistance, light objects fall at the same rate as heavy objects. So is the fact that solid matter, even a hard diamond, consists almost entirely of empty space. Steven Pinker gives an illuminating discussion of the evolutionary origins of our physical intuitions in How the Mind Works (1998). More profoundly difficult Eire the conclusions of quantum theory, overwhelmingly supported by experimental evidence to a stupefyingly convincing number of decimal places, yet so alien to the evolved human mind that even professional physicists don't understand them in their intuitive thoughts.

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Well, I'd be surprised if it quite came to that, and not only because the double helix model is now very unlikely to be disproved. But in science, as in any other field, there really are dangers of becoming intoxicated by symbolism, by meaningless resemblances, and led farther and farther from the truth, rather than towards it. Steven Pinker reports that he is troubled by correspondents who have discovered that everything in the universe comes in threes: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; protons, neutrons and electrons; masculine, feminine and neuter; Huey, Dewey, and Louie; and so on, for page after page. How the Mind Works (1998) Slightly more seriously, Sir Peter Medawar, the distinguished British zoologist and polymath whom I quoted before, invents a great new universal principle of complementarity (not Bohr's) according to which there is an essential inner similarity in the relationships that hold between antigen and antibody, male and female, electropositive and electronegative, thesis and antithesis, and so on.

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But 'typically' is not the same thing as 'universally', and the scientific truths that men and women eventually discover (albeit there may be statistical differences in the kinds of research that they are drawn to) will be accepted equally by reasonable people of both sexes, once they have been clearly established by members of either sex. And no, reason and logic are not masculine instruments of oppression. To suggest that they are is an insult to women, as Steven Pinker has said: Among the claims of 'difference feminists' are that women do not engage in abstract linear reasoning, that they do not treat ideas with skepticism or evaluate them through rigorous debate, that they do not argue from general moral principles, and other insults. How the Mind Works (1998) The most ridiculous example of feminist bad science may be Sandra Harding's description of Newton's Principia as a 'rape manual'.

An Optimist's Tour of the Future
by Mark Stevenson
Published 4 Dec 2010

Sure Deep Blue can occasionally beat grandmasters (and no doubt elephants) at chess, but it’ll never be able to find shade or express its political views on Vladimir Putin. So, does Deep Blue think? Well, sort of. A bit. But we still haven’t got anything like Star Wars’ C-3PO, the multipurpose smart machine that we consider a real personality. Or as Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, wrote: The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. The mental abilities of a four-year-old that we take for granted – recognising a face, lifting a pencil, walking across a room, answering a question – in fact solve some of the hardest engineering problems ever conceived.

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But the figures speak for themselves and they speak volumes. It’s an astonishing and underreported fact that violence is declining and has been for centuries. This goes against popular sentiment that the past was somehow safer and simpler – a time without nuclear weapons or helicopter gunships, with no violent movies or 18-rated computer games. Steven Pinker sums up this misconception when he describes it as ‘the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions.’ In the last thirty-five years, anthropologists like Carol Ember and Lawrence Keeley have been scouring the archaeological record and studying tribal cultures with results that seriously question the idea that the trappings of civilisation corrupt us toward violence.

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Recent research by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Washington and Harvard Medical School suggests that in some cases war deaths may be three times more than WHO estimates. All that said, the long view is that the underlying trend in violent deaths is steeply downward. Even if we double, triple or quadruple the recorded rates of slaughter for the last century we’re still killing far fewer people per capita than our ancestors. As Steven Pinker says, ‘We must have been doing something right. And it would be nice to know what, exactly, it is.’ My hunch is that one of the things we’re getting right is becoming increasingly connected, and being so we find it harder to kill each other. It’s a popular view and one that seems to make instinctive sense.

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody
by Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay
Published 14 Jul 2020

While some on the far right might want to halt progress or even consider it to have gone too far already, and some on the far left consider progress a myth and insist that life in liberal democracies is still as oppressive as it ever has been (thanks, Foucault), liberalism both appreciates progress and is optimistic that it will continue. Within the liberal spectrum, which encompasses people on both the political right and left, everyone agrees that liberalism implies progress, though the speed and means of that progress are up for debate. For cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, it is vital that we appreciate how much progress we have made in liberal democracies—and that we owe that progress to Enlightenment humanism—if we wish it to continue: A liberal democracy is a precious achievement. Until the messiah comes, it will always have problems, but it’s better to solve those problems than to start a conflagration and hope that something better arises from the ashes and bones.

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“Many psychological traits relevant to the public sphere, such as general intelligence, are the same on average for men and women…. [G]eneralizations about a sex will always be untrue of many individuals. And notions like ‘proper role’ and ‘natural place’ are scientifically meaningless and give no grounds for restricting freedom.” Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (London: Penguin, 2002), 340. 12.E. O. Wilson, “From Sociobiology to Sociology,” in Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader, ed. Brian, Joseph Carroll, and Jonathan Gottschall, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 98. 13.Some trans scholars and activists have recently begun to call upon science, as neuroscience has increasingly provided evidence that trans people’s experience of their gender as different from their sex is biologically based.

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Harding was perhaps most influential for developing the idea of “strong objectivity” in standpoint theory and is perhaps most famous for referring to Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica as a “rape manual” in her 1986 book, The Science Question in Feminism, which she later claimed to have regretted writing. Sandra G. Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). 53.Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress (Penguin Books, 2019). 54.Armin Falk and Johannes Hermle, “Relationship of Gender Differences in Preferences to Economic Development and Gender Equality,” Science 362, no. 6412 (2018): eaas9899. 7 Disability and Fat Studies 1.This strange notation is relatively common in disciplines that use postmodern methods and means.

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth
by Jonathan Rauch
Published 21 Jun 2021

The insular community served as an incubator of extreme, irrational views.”50 As with online outrage, so also with canceling: the ostensible target, whether a person like Rushdie or Tuvel or a piece of work like The Satanic Verses or Tuvel’s article, is not the campaign’s real subject at all, but rather a convenient object for a show of group solidarity. If Rushdie had not come along, some other target might have served just as well. In the summer of 2020, almost 600 “members of the linguistic community,” as they called themselves, sent a letter to the Linguistic Society of America demanding that Steven Pinker, a prominent Harvard linguist, be removed from “both our list of distinguished academic fellows and our list of media experts.” They could not cite any examples of professional misconduct or assert plausibly that Pinker was not distinguished or expert. Instead, they had combed through Pinker’s writings and Twitter feed and come up with a handful of complaints which were trivial if not absurd (Pinker had used the phrase “urban crime,” had cited a Black scholar on the decline of overt racism, had described a public shooter as “mild-mannered,” and so on).

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The indictment’s arbitrariness—one might comfortably say silliness—was part of its point: “No one engaged in public life could be confident of avoiding speech that might be deemed problematic by the standards used in the Pinker letter,” wrote Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.51 Pinker was a tenured professor with a national following, too big to take down—but that, too, was part of the point. In an important respect, the ostensible target—Steven Pinker—was not the campaign’s real target, or at least not its main target. The real target was the onlooking audience of much less powerful people who understood that they might be next, and that if Pinker could be targeted, certainly they could be. “This letter wasn’t really about Pinker at all,” wrote a graduate student named Shaun Cammack.

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Quoted in Teresa M. Bejan, Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration (Harvard University Press, 2017), p. 110. Hat tip to Jacob Mchangama, whose podcast history of free speech (“Clear and Present Danger”) is invaluable. 2. I exaggerate, but not all that much. See, for example, Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (Viking, 2018). 3. See Samuel Fleischacker, Being Me Being You: Adam Smith and Empathy (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Fleischacker argues that Smith’s notion of empathy is distinctive in having a cognitive as well as emotional component: we can “enter in imagination into the circumstances of others … thereby gain[ing] insight into what it is like to occupy their perspective.” 4.

How Emotions Are Made: The New Science of the Mind and Brain
by Lisa Feldman Barrett
Published 6 Mar 2017

It helps define you as human. Without rationality, you are merely an emotional beast. This view of emotions has been around for millennia in various forms. Plato believed a version of it. So did Hippocrates, Aristotle, the Buddha, René Descartes, Sigmund Freud, and Charles Darwin. Today, prominent thinkers such as Steven Pinker, Paul Ekman, and the Dalai Lama also offer up descriptions of emotions rooted in the classical view. The classical view is found in virtually every introductory college textbook on psychology, and in most magazine and newspaper articles that discuss emotion. Preschools throughout America hang posters displaying the smiles, frowns, and pouts that are supposed to be the universal language of the face for recognizing emotions.

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A dog is never a cat. Likewise, all varieties of the classical view consider emotions like sadness and fear to have distinct essences. The neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, for example, writes that an emotion’s essence is a circuit in the subcortical regions of your brain. The evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker writes that emotions are like mental organs, analogous to body organs for specialized functions, and that an emotion’s essence is a set of genes. The evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides and the psychologist Paul Ekman assume that each emotion has an innate, unobservable essence, which they refer to as a metaphorical “program.”

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Others have made this point before me, but it’s time to take it seriously. We don’t know every detail about how the mind and brain work, but we know enough to say definitively that neither biological determinism nor cultural determinism is correct. The boundary of the skin is artificial and porous. As Steven Pinker so nicely writes, “It is now simply misguided to ask whether humans are flexible or programmed, whether behavior is universal or varies across cultures, whether acts are learned or innate.” The devil is in the details, and the details give us the theory of constructed emotion.34 … Now that the final nails are being driven into the classical view’s coffin in this era of neuroscience, I would like to believe that this time, we’ll actually push aside essentialism and begin to understand the mind and brain without ideology.

Raw Data Is an Oxymoron
by Lisa Gitelman
Published 25 Jan 2013

When referring to individual bits or varieties of data and contrasting them among one another, it may be sensible to favor the plural as in “these data are not all equally reliable”; whereas, when referring to data as one mass, it may be better to use the singular as in “this data is reliable.” According to Steven Pinker, in English today, the latter usage has become usual.9 The fact that a standard English dictionary defines a “datum” as a “piece of information,” a fragment of another linguistically complex mass noun, further strengthens this intuition.10 As Pinker argues, however much priggish pleasure professors may take in pointing out that the term data in Latin is plural, foreign plurals may be deployed in English as singulars.

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On the usage of “data” in contemporary English, see American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 3rd ed. 37 38 Daniel Rosenberg Technical literature on the subject includes the following: Chaim Zins, “Conceptual Approaches for Defining Data, Information, and Knowledge,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58, no. 4 (2007): 479–493; Carter A. Daniel and Charles C. Smith, “An Argument for Data as a Collective Singular,” Business Communication Quarterly 45, no. 3 (September 1982): 31–33;Walter E. Meyers, College Composition and Communication 23, no. 2 (May 1972): 155–169. 9. Steven Pinker, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 178. 10. Oxford Dictionaries Online, “Datum,” http://oxforddictionaries.com (accessed February 10, 2012). See also Geoffrey Nunberg, “Farewell to the Information Age,” in The Future of the Book, ed. Geoffrey Nunberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 103–138. 11.

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In this vast literature, see, for example, Nicholson Baker, The Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (New York: Vintage, 2002); Robert Darnton, The Case for Books (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009). 16. Jean-Baptiste Michel, Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva Presser Aiden, Adrian Veres, Matthew K. Gray, The Google Books Team, Joseph P. Pickett, Dale Hoiberg, Dan Clancy, Peter Norvig, Jon Orwant, Steven Pinker, Martin A. Nowak, and Erez Lieberman Aiden, “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books,” Science 331 (2011), published online ahead of print: December 16, 2010; Erez Lieberman, Jean-Baptiste Michel, Joe Jackson, Tina Tang, and Martin Nowak, “Quantifying the Evolutionary Dynamics of Language,” Nature 449 (2007).

The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention
by Simon Baron-Cohen
Published 14 Aug 2020

Autistic people, even if not formally diagnosed, often hide in the shadows, avoiding the limelight, and systemize to such an extreme that they are more likely to invent something, though they may not even put their name to their invention. They just systemize for the pure pleasure of systemizing. Systemizing is wired into our brains by evolution, and it is wired into the brains of autistic people to such a high degree that they can’t help but do it all day long. Psychologist Steven Pinker writes in The Language Instinct about how language is an instinct for humans just as much as web-spinning is an instinct for spiders: “Web-spinning was not invented by some unsung spider genius and does not depend on having had the right education or on having an aptitude for architecture or the construction trades.

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Eldrid-Cohen (2016), “Historical figures who may have been on the autism spectrum,” The Art of Autism, October 20, the-art-of-autism.com/historical-figures-who-may-have-been-on-the-autism-spectrum/; and “Was Nikola Tesla autistic?,” AppliedBehaviorAnalysisEdu.org, www.applied behavioranalysisedu.org/was-nikola-tesla-autistic/. Note that although the latter website is related to applied behavioral analysis, this is not relevant to Tesla’s biography. 20. See P. Galanes (2018), “The mind meld of Bill Gates and Steven Pinker,” New York Times, January 27; and S. Levy (2019), “Inside Bill’s Brain calls BS on Malcolm Gladwell’s outliers theory,” Wired, September 20. 21. The sigma character is taken from Wikipedia, “The common Six Sigma symbol,” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Sigma#/media/File:Six_sigma-2.svg; see also D.

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Peretz et al. (2002), “Congenital amusia: A disorder of fine grained pitch perception,” Neuron 33, 185–191; J. Ayotte et al. (2002), “Congenital amusia,” Brain 125, 238–251; and M. Thaut et al. (2014), “Human brain basis of musical rhythm perception: Common and distinct neural substrates for meter, tempo, and pattern,” Brain Sciences 4, 428–452. 10. I have to briefly deal with the claim by linguist Steven Pinker that music is “auditory cheesecake.” See S. Pinker (1994), The language instinct: How the mind creates language (New York: William Morrow). What he means is that our love of music is simply a by-product of something more basic, such as hearing or spoken language, both of which were adaptive. When something is a by-product of evolution, it is called an “exaptation” rather than an adaptation.

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence
by George Zarkadakis
Published 7 Mar 2016

The first piece of evidence to support the notion that language begot our highly evolved consciousness is genetic. In the late 1990s, a team of British scientists17 isolated a gene that is crucially involved in the development of speech and language. Dubbed ‘FOXP2’, it also became known as the ‘language gene’. Steven Pinker, the renowned MIT psychologist, has called the finding the smoking gun for the relationship between genes and language.18 The gene exists in other mammals too, including chimpanzees, but seems to have undergone a significant mutation in humans around 200,000 years ago, a period that roughly coincides with the advent of H. sapiens sapiens.

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The discovery of FOXP2 provides some validation of the language theory proposed by Noam Chomsky, about the connection between genes and language. Chomsky observed that children are born with an innate knowledge about language and grammatical structure, which had to be biologically determined. According to his language theory, we are hardwired for language, a notion shared and supported by Steven Pinker and other neurolinguists. We saw how human brains became increasingly larger as our biological lineage made its epic journey though time; from 750 to 1250 cc for earliest H. erectus to 1200 to1750 cc for Neanderthals. Brain size reached a plateau between 1.8 million and 500,000 years ago, and rapidly increased as archaic H. sapiens appeared.

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He writes: ‘… it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence test or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility’.30 Although computational methods can reproduce high-level reasoning – as demonstrated in the case of expert systems – research in robotics has shown that sensorimotor skills remain a huge challenge. Coding cognition has proved to be an easy problem. The really hard problem in AI is coding sensing and action. According to cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, this is the most significant discovery about AI.31 It suggests that in the second machine age, while lawyers and doctors may struggle on social benefits, gardeners and janitors will remain in business and thrive. But why is this so? Many AI researchers, including former MIT professor and current robotics entrepreneur Rodney Brooks, point out that human sensorimotor skills are not related to cognition but are the product of millions of years of evolution.32 Despite the success achieved in AI by approaching the problem of intelligence from a different angle (the ‘aeroplane’ way), one would really need to reverse-engineer evolution in order to reproduce the full capabilities of a human brain including self-awareness and high-levels of consciousness.

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning
by Jeremy Lent
Published 22 May 2017

See also Richard G. Klein, “Archeology and the Evolution of Human Behavior,” Evolutionary Anthropology 9, no. 1 (2000): 17–36, which argues that this sudden change must have been caused by a genetic mutation that permitted symbolic thought. 16. Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994), 4–5. 17. Ibid., 44–73. 18. Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom, “Natural Language and Natural Selection,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13, no. 4 (1990): 707–84. 19. Daniel Margoliash and Howard C. Nusbaum, “Language: The Perspective from Organismal Biology,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13, no. 12 (2009): 505–10; Morten H.

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After all, if there is a language instinct, it must be embedded so deeply in the human psyche that we would have been talking to each other at least a few hundred thousand years ago. So let's see what light this other debate sheds on the problem. A Language Instinct? The Language Instinct is a popular book written by renowned cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. Pinker's title says it all, and he makes no bones about his position in the language debate. “Language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works,” he writes. “Instead, it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains.”

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In time, attacking Sapir-Whorf became a favorite path to academic tenure, until the entire theory became completely discredited.9 In place of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis arose what is known as the nativist view, which argues that the grammar of language is innate to humankind. As discussed earlier, the theory of universal grammar, proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1950s and popularized more recently by Steven Pinker, posits that humans have a “language instinct” with grammatical rules coded into our DNA. This theory has dominated the field of linguistics for decades. “There is no scientific evidence,” writes Pinker, “that languages dramatically shape their speakers’ ways of thinking.” Pinker and other adherents to this theory, however, are increasingly having to turn a blind eye—not just to the Guugu Yimithirr but to the accumulating evidence of a number of studies showing the actual effects of language on people's patterns of thought.10 Frustration…or Stenahoria?

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are
by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
Published 8 May 2017

DEDICATION To Mom and Dad CONTENTS Cover Title Page Dedication Foreword by Steven Pinker Introduction: The Outlines of a Revolution PART I: DATA, BIG AND SMALL 1. Your Faulty Gut PART II: THE POWERS OF BIG DATA 2. Was Freud Right? 3. Data Reimagined Bodies as Data Words as Data Pictures as Data 4. Digital Truth Serum The Truth About Sex The Truth About Hate and Prejudice The Truth About the Internet The Truth About Child Abuse and Abortion The Truth About Your Facebook Friends The Truth About Your Customers Can We Handle the Truth? 5. Zooming In What’s Really Going On in Our Counties, Cities, and Towns?

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No experiment using reaction time or pupil dilation or functional neuroimaging could ever have turned up that fact. Everybody will enjoy Everybody Lies. With unflagging curiosity and an endearing wit, Stephens-Davidowitz points to a new path for social science in the twenty-first century. With this endlessly fascinating window into human obsessions, who needs a cerebroscope? —Steven Pinker, 2017 INTRODUCTION THE OUTLINES OF A REVOLUTION Surely he would lose, they said. In the 2016 Republican primaries, polling experts concluded that Donald Trump didn’t stand a chance. After all, Trump had insulted a variety of minority groups. The polls and their interpreters told us few Americans approved of such outrages.

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He is responsible for a huge amount of what is good about the Times columns that have my name on them. Other players on the team for these columns include Bill Marsh, whose graphics continue to blow me away, Kevin McCarthy, and Gita Daneshjoo. This book includes passages from these columns, reprinted with permission. Steven Pinker, who kindly agreed to write the foreword, has long been a hero of mine. He has set the bar for a modern book on social science—an engaging exploration of the fundamentals of human nature, making sense of the best research from a range of disciplines. That bar is one I will be struggling to reach my entire life.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World
by Fareed Zakaria
Published 5 Oct 2020

Goodman et al., “Potential Indirect Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Use of Emergency Departments for Acute Life-Threatening Conditions—United States, January–May 2020,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, MMWR Morb Mortal Weekly Report 69 (2020):795–800; and Will Feuer, “Doctors Worry the Coronavirus Is Keeping Patients Away from US Hospitals as ER Visits Drop: ‘Heart Attacks Don’t Stop,’ ” CNBC, April 14, 2020. 80 swine flu could kill 65,000 in Britain . . . some 450 Britons died: Jonathan Ford, “The Battle at the Heart of British Science over Coronavirus,” Financial Times, April 15, 2020; David D. Kirkpatrick, Matt Apuzzo, and Selam Gebrekidan, “Europe Said It Was Pandemic-Ready. Pride Was Its Downfall,’ New York Times, July 20, 2020. 81 overblown panic may have contributed: Ibid. 81 an April 2020 interview: Steven Pinker, “Alan Alda & Steven Pinker: Secrets of Great Communication,” 92nd Street Y, April 23, 2020. 81 a science lesson: Jhag Balla, “This Viral Angela Merkel Clip Explains the Risks of Loosening Social Distancing Too Fast,” Vox, April 17, 2020; and Katrin Bennhold, “Relying on Science and Politics, Merkel Offers a Cautious Virus Re-entry Plan,” New York Times, April 15, 2020. 82 “universal masking”: Lili Pike, “Why 15 US States Suddenly Made Masks Mandatory,” Vox, May 29, 2020. 82 fundamentally disingenuous: For one account of how these missteps could have been avoided, see: Zeynep Tufekci, “Why Telling People They Don’t Need Masks Backfired,” New York Times, March 15, 2020. 82 US surgeon general admitted: On CBS Face the Nation.

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Most Americans think of science by its endpoints—a discovery or breakthrough or invention. They look at dazzling pictures of galaxies and read of miracle drugs. But science is really all about the process of learning and discovering, with many failures and disappointments. The Harvard scholar Steven Pinker warned in an April 2020 interview that scientists’ “earned authority” may be breaking down, so that much of the public may “think that those people in the white coats are just another priesthood.” Pinker called on advocates of science to start “lifting the hood and showing how it works,” through a process of “open debate and attempts at falsification.”

It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear
by Gregg Easterbrook
Published 20 Feb 2018

There is strong desire for a clear explanation of why nearly all forms of crime have moderated: especially, for a narrative tied to single causes. But it may be that no one can fully explain the remarkable decline of crime—a frustrating conclusion unless the theories of the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, to be addressed at the close of this chapter, ultimately will provide the explanation. Why war is in decline seems, by contrast, straightforward. JOSHUA GOLDSTEIN, A RESEARCHER AT the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has spent years swimming upstream against conventional wisdom by documenting the decline of combat: there has been no direct great-power combat since the Korean War armistice of 1953, and no proxy great-power combat since the Soviet Union folded in 1991.

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Some awful reversal of fortune may be in our future; worse, one of the nuclear powers may make The Big Mistake. For now, we live in a world where all forms of violence are in at least mild decline—some in sharp decline—compared to population rise. And that leads to the theories of Michael Tomasello and Steven Pinker. * * * TOMASELLO STUDIES SOCIAL COGNITION AT Duke University and at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig. His research finds that although human beings are perceived as insensible to the needs of their fellows, men and women have incentives to behave altruistically: this not only makes for an improved society; it also increases the individual’s chance of getting ahead.

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The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which tracks this issue: See the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Military Expenditure Database maintained at www.sipri.org/databases/milex. Not long before her 1989 death, the eminent historian Barbara Tuchman wrote: Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978). Juan Manuel Santos, president of Colombia, said that year: Steven Pinker, “Colombia’s Milestone in World Peace,” New York Times, August 26, 2016. The Yale University historian Timothy Snyder has noted: Timothy Snyder, Black Earth (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2015). The Polish writer Stanislaw Lem introduced the concept: Stanislaw Lem, Fiasco (New York: Harcourt, 1987).

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
by Steven Pinker
Published 13 Feb 2018

ALSO BY STEVEN PINKER Language Learnability and Language Development Learnability and Cognition The Language Instinct How the Mind Works Words and Rules The Blank Slate The Stuff of Thought The Better Angels of Our Nature Language, Cognition, and Human Nature: Selected Articles The Sense of Style EDITED BY STEVEN PINKER Visual Cognition Connections and Symbols (with Jacques Mehler) Lexical and Conceptual Semantics (with Beth Levin) The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004 VIKING An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 375 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 penguin.com Copyright © 2018 by Steven Pinker Penguin supports copyright.

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ALSO BY STEVEN PINKER Language Learnability and Language Development Learnability and Cognition The Language Instinct How the Mind Works Words and Rules The Blank Slate The Stuff of Thought The Better Angels of Our Nature Language, Cognition, and Human Nature: Selected Articles The Sense of Style EDITED BY STEVEN PINKER Visual Cognition Connections and Symbols (with Jacques Mehler) Lexical and Conceptual Semantics (with Beth Levin) The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004 VIKING An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 375 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 penguin.com Copyright © 2018 by Steven Pinker Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. Charts rendered by Ilavenil Subbiah ISBN 9780525427575 (hardcover) ISBN 9780698177888 (ebook) ISBN 9780525559023 (international edition) Version_1 TO Harry Pinker (1928–2015) optimist Solomon Lopez (2017– ) and the 22nd century Those who are governed by reason desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of humankind.

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Charts rendered by Ilavenil Subbiah ISBN 9780525427575 (hardcover) ISBN 9780698177888 (ebook) ISBN 9780525559023 (international edition) Version_1 TO Harry Pinker (1928–2015) optimist Solomon Lopez (2017– ) and the 22nd century Those who are governed by reason desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of humankind. —Baruch Spinoza Everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge. —David Deutsch CONTENTS ALSO BY STEVEN PINKER TITLE PAGE COPYRIGHT DEDICATION EPIGRAPH LIST OF FIGURES PREFACE PART I: ENLIGHTENMENT CHAPTER 1. DARE TO UNDERSTAND! CHAPTER 2. ENTRO, EVO, INFO CHAPTER 3. COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENTS PART II: PROGRESS CHAPTER 4. PROGRESSOPHOBIA CHAPTER 5. LIFE CHAPTER 6.

The Kingdom of Speech
by Tom Wolfe
Published 30 Aug 2016

Germany’s biggest and most influential magazine, Der Spiegel, said the Pirahã, a “small hunting and gathering tribe, with a population of only 310 to 350, has become the center of a raging debate between linguists, anthropologists and cognitive researchers. Even Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Steven Pinker of Harvard University, two of the most influential theorists on the subject, are still arguing over what it means for the study of human language that the Pirahã don’t use subordinate clauses.”134 The British newspaper the Independent zeroed in on recursion. “The Pirahã language has none of [recursion’s] features; every sentence stands alone and refers to a single event.

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But in 2009, after Everett’s book was published, he went all out in a paper entitled “Universal Grammar Is Dead” for the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences and confronted Chomsky head-on: “The idea of a biologically evolved, universal grammar with linguistic content is a myth.”152 “Myth” became the new word. Vyvyan Evans of Wales’s Bangor University expanded it into a book, The Language Myth, in 2014. He came right out and rejected Chomsky’s and Steven Pinker’s idea of an innate, natural-born “language instinct.” In a blurb, Michael Fortescue of the University of Copenhagen added, “Evans’ rebuttal of Chomsky’s Universal Grammar from the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics provides an excellent antidote to popular textbooks where it is assumed that the Chomskyan approach to linguistic theory…has somehow been vindicated once and for all.”153 Thanks to Everett, linguists were beginning to breathe life into the words of the anti-Chomskyans of the twentieth century who had been written off as cranks or contrarians, such as Larry Trask, a linguist at England’s University of Sussex.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
by Jonathan Haidt
Published 13 Mar 2012

If evolution gave men and women different sets of desires and skills, for example, that would be an obstacle to achieving gender equality in many professions. If nativism could be used to justify existing power structures, then nativism must be wrong. (Again, this is a logical error, but this is the way righteous minds work.) The cognitive scientist Steven Pinker was a graduate student at Harvard in the 1970s. In his 2002 book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Pinker describes the ways scientists betrayed the values of science to maintain loyalty to the progressive movement. Scientists became “moral exhibitionists” in the lecture hall as they demonized fellow scientists and urged their students to evaluate ideas not for their truth but for their consistency with progressive ideals such as racial and gender equality.14 Nowhere was the betrayal of science more evident than in the attacks on Edward O.

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I date the rebirth to 1992 because that is when an influential volume appeared with the provocative title The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. The book was edited by Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby. Other leading figures in the field included David Buss, Doug Kenrick, and Steven Pinker. Morality (particularly cooperation and cheating) has been an important area of research in evolutionary psychology since the beginning. 25. I call this model “Jeffersonian” because it allows the “head” and the “heart” to reach independent and conflicting moral judgments, as happened in his letter to Cosway.

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I’m oversimplifying here; species of bees, ants, wasps, and termites vary in the degree to which they have achieved the status of superorganisms. Self-interest is rarely reduced to absolute zero, particularly in bees and wasps, which retain the ability to breed under some circumstances. See Hölldobler and Wilson 2009. 15. I thank Steven Pinker for pointing this out to me, in a critique of an early version of this chapter. Pinker noted that war in pre-state societies is nothing like our modern image of men marching off to die for a cause. There’s a lot of posturing, a lot of Glauconian behavior going on as warriors strive to burnish their reputations.

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives
by Danny Dorling and Kirsten McClure
Published 18 May 2020

King, Farmers of Forty Centuries: Organic Farming in China, Korea, and Japan (1911; repr., Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004). 14. Bill Gates, “My New Favorite Book of All Time,” Gates Notes Blog, 26 January 2018, https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Enlightenment-Now. 15. Jeremy Lent, “Steven Pinker’s Ideas about Progress Are Fatally Flawed. These Eight Graphs Show Why,” Patterns of Meaning, 17 May 2018, https://patternsofmeaning.com/2018/05/17/steven-pinkers-ideas-about-progress-are-fatally-flawed-these-eight-graphs-show-why/. 16. “Meaning of feitorias (Portuguese),” Wiktionary, accessed 3 July 2019, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/feitoria#Portuguese. 17. Danny Dorling, Injustice: Why Social Inequality Still Persists, rev. ed.

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12 In the northern plains of China, over one hundred generations are thought to have lived much the same life, stable and sustainable, at a high population density, and that kind of society is only possible when the elites are controlled. Out-of-control elites lead to war.13 There are always a few people who seemingly can’t help sucking up to elites and who suggest that all will be well if we just allow a few people “who know what is best for us” to be in control. In 2018 Steven Pinker wrote a book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, in which he suggested that the human race has never had it so good as it does today. Bill Gates promptly declared it his “new favorite book of all time.”14 It is not hard to see how Pinker’s story is wrong.

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Department of Health Education and Welfare, 1968) table 19 (p. 138), table 80 (p. 876), http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsus/vsrates1940_60.pdf. 16. Max Roser and Mohamed Nagdy, “Nuclear Weapons,” Our World in Data, accessed 4 September 2019, https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-weapons/#note-3. Figure 5-22 is based on Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (London: Penguin, 2011). 17. Statistics New Zealand, “Sure to Rise: Tracking Bread Prices in the CPI,” Stats NZ On-line, 2011, http://www.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/economic_indicators/prices_indexes/tracking-bread-prices-in-the-cpi.aspx. 18.

Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All
by Michael Shellenberger
Published 28 Jun 2020

Urbanization, industrialization, and energy consumption have been overwhelmingly positive for human beings as a whole. From preindustrial times to today, life expectancy extended from thirty to seventy-three years.34 Infant mortality declined from 43 to 4 percent.35 Before 1800, notes Harvard University’s Steven Pinker, most people were desperately poor. “The average income was equivalent to that in the poorest countries in Africa today (about $500 a year in international dollars),” he writes, “and almost 95 percent of the world lived in what counts today as ‘extreme poverty’ (less than $1.90 a day).” The Industrial Revolution constituted what Pinker calls the “Great Escape” from poverty.36 The Great Escape continues today.

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It was little more than two rollers and a hand crank, but it spared my grandmother’s hands the hard labor of pulling, squeezing, and twisting clothes. Later came the electric-powered washing machines and dryers that fully liberated women from having to wash, wring, and hang out to dry the family’s clothes.41 Scholars including Harvard’s Benjamin Friedman and Steven Pinker find that rising prosperity is strongly correlated with rising freedom among, reduced violence against, and greater tolerance for, women, racial and religious minorities, and gays and lesbians. Such was the case in Indonesia.42 “My favorite singer is Morrissey,” Ipeh told me. “I went to his show last year and was nervous that [Islamic] extremists would threaten to bomb it, and the show would be canceled.

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The world series for 1800 to 1960 was calculated by the authors on the basis of the Gapminder estimates of child mortality and the Gapminder series on population by country. For each estimate in that period a population-weighted global average was calculated. The 2017 child mortality rate was taken from the 2019 update of World Bank data. 36. Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2019), 86–87. 37. “PovcalNet: An Online Analysis Tool for Global Poverty Monitoring,” World Bank Group, accessed October 29, 2019, http://iresearch.worldbank.org/PovcalNet/home.aspx. 38.

Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend
by Barbara Oakley Phd
Published 20 Oct 2008

It appears we'll have some time to wait before we start seeing popular books with titles like He Really Is Driving You Crazy: Understanding Theta Wave Activity, or Bitch: The Science behind the Savagery. But genetics is as important as neuroscience in understanding the successfully sinister. Groundbreaking books such as Judith Rich Harris's The Nurture Assumption and Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate have served as fulcrums to help swing researchers off their centuries-long love affair with the idea that people are naturally good.12 Under this well-intentioned ideology, “evil” people were believed to be created and shaped solely by their environment. The advantage of this belief is that it gives researchers the comfort of thinking that humans have direct control over evil—that by somehow reengineering the social environment, human evil can be eliminated.

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Chomsky gave credence to the idea that the brain was composed of a modular set of units, with specialized, innately unique areas that were responsible for learning different things, such as language, mathematics, or the various motor skills. Another revolutionary investigator, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, cut his professional teeth on research related to language before moving on to write The Blank Slate. Pinker's brilliant book, along with the Judith Rich Harris's seminal The Nurture Assumption, was to help redefine psychology so that nature—genetics—was firmly shown to play an equal or even more crucial role than nurture—that is, the environment.

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Tony Becher and Paul Trowler, Academic Tribes and Territories, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press, 2001); Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 12. Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption (New York: Free Press, 1998); Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002). CHAPTER 1: IN SEARCH OF MACHIAVELLI 1. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, in L. J. Peter, Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time (New York: Bantam Books, 1979), p. 123. 2. Richard Christie, “Why Machiavelli?” in Studies in Machiavellianism, ed.

The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution
by Richard Wrangham
Published 29 Jan 2019

My experience in the Congo seems to be the norm for our species. * * * — From a comparative perspective, the rate of physical aggression among humans “at home” may be low, although from a moral perspective, it is still higher than most of us would wish. The evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, among others, has documented a decline in the probability of dying from violence within many countries over the past millennium, a trend for which we should all be grateful. Undoubtedly, life for millions of people would be more pleasant if the rate continued to decline.14 Nevertheless, from an evolutionary perspective, the human rate of physical aggression within social communities is already strikingly low.

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Proactive aggression is not produced by individuals in a fit of rage, or in an alcoholic haze, or out of a testosterone-induced failure of cortical control. It is a considered act by an individual or coalition that takes into account the likely costs. It has a strong tendency to disappear when it does not pay. The evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker testified to that effect. In his Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker documented in detail the multiple ways in which violence has declined in the most recent decades, centuries, and millennia. Almost all of the iniquities that Pinker wrote about stemmed from coalitionary proactive violence. If we continue to improve the protections in our societies, the level of damage will continue to recede.

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For reviewing individual chapters or sections, I similarly thank Ofer Bar-Yosef, Christopher Boehm, Fiery Cushman, Madeleine Geiger, Marc Hauser, Karl Heider, Rose McDermott, Dale Peterson, Matt Ridley, Kate Ross, John Shea, Barbara Smuts, Ian Wrangham, and Christoph Zollikofer. For advice on specific points, I am grateful to Johan van der Dennen, Paul Crook, Sylvia Kaiser, Steven Pinker, and Adrian Raine. For sharing unpublished data, I thank Cat Hobaiter, Nicole Simmons, Martin Surbeck, and Michael Wilson. In addition to those mentioned above, conversations and correspondence with numerous other friends, family, and colleagues over the years have been critically helpful.

Open: The Story of Human Progress
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Sep 2020

And I mean that in a literal sense. Humans shaped trade but trade also shaped the humans we became. This is the key to understanding how humans managed to take over the world and to inhabit all sorts of climates even though we have few environment-specific genetic adaptations. Evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker thinks that Homo sapiens’ peculiarities can be explained by the knowledge-using and socially interdependent ‘cognitive niche’ we inhabit. A couple of hundred thousand years ago, we simultaneously developed three unique traits: intelligence, language and cooperation. These are mutually reinforcing: incremental improvements in one of them make the other two more valuable, and thus change the social and physical environment – and with it evolutionary pressures for additional adaptations.8 Intelligence makes it possible to learn and store information and skills.

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If we did not regularly meet and communicate and exchange with individuals from other groups, they would forever remain the mysterious, dangerous outgroup, the barbarians at the gates. The ones whom we raid whenever we think we have an advantage, and who raid us when they think they do. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker has documented how much more frequent war was in our past before we opened economies, doors and minds to outsiders. Tribes raided and killed neighbouring tribes every time they thought they had a major advantage because of numbers or surprise, because why not? One less rival. Kings and princes genuinely believed war was the natural order of things, and peace was just a brief interlude during which one rearmed for the next battle.48 In a closed world we look at others through binoculars.

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‘Modern competition is described as the fight of all against all, but at the same time it is the fight of all for all,’ as the sociologist Georg Simmel put it in 1908.16 But this complexity also means it is impossible for anyone to fully comprehend all the links in even a very simple form of exchange. Steven Pinker believes many clashes over economics stem from this conflict between traditional, personal exchange and modern market exchange, ‘one of them intuitive and universal, the other rarefied and learned’.17 Suddenly, we can see the wealth of others but we don’t understand what they have contributed to get it.

Emergence
by Steven Johnson

—Erik Davis, The Village Voice “Thoughtful and lucid and charming and staggeringly smart, all of which I’ve come to expect from Steven Johnson. But it’s also important, I think—a rare, bona fide glimpse of the future.” —Kurt Andersen, author of Turn of the Century “A lucid discussion of a fascinating and timely set of ideas.” —Steven Pinker, professor of psychology, MIT, and author of How the Mind Works and Words and Rules “Emergence will make understanding ‘emerge’ in your own head, as Steven Johnson explains a lot of phenomena you may not even have noticed.” —Esther Dyson, author of Release 2.0 “Johnson’s clarity is a boon. . . .

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The Web’s city would simply be an undifferentiated mass of data growing more confusing with each new “building” that’s erected—so confusing, in fact, that the mapmakers (the Yahoos and Googles of the world) would generate almost as much interest as the city itself. And if the Web would make a miserable city, it would do even worse as a brain. Here’s Steven Pinker, the author of How the Mind Works, in a Slate dialogue with Wright: The Internet is in some ways like a brain, but in important ways not. The brain doesn’t just let information ricochet around the skull. It is organized to do something: to move the muscles in ways that allow the whole body to attain the goals set by the emotions.

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They deserve extra credit for suffering through all my overcaffeinated riffs on clusters and pointer nodes. This book was greatly enhanced by interviews I conducted with Manuel De Landa, Richard Rogers, Deborah Gordon, Rob Malda, Jeff Bates, Oliver Selfridge, Will Wright, David Jefferson, Evelyn Fox Keller, Rik Heywood, Mitch Resnick, Steven Pinker, Eric Zimmerman, Nate Oostendorp, Brewster Kahle, Andrew Shapiro, and Douglas Rushkoff. I recall more than a few casual conversations that also had an impact, primarily ones that involved David Shenk, Ruthie Rogers, Roo Rogers, Mitch Kapor, Kevin Kelly, Annie Keating, Nicholas Butterworth, Kim Hawkins, Rory Kennedy, Mark Bailey, Frank Rich, Denise Caruso, Liz Garbus, Dan Cogan, Penny Lewis, John Brockman, Rufus Griscom, Jay Haynes, Betsey Schmidt, Stephen Green, Esther Dyson, and my students at NYU’s ITP program, where Red Burns generously invited me to teach a graduate seminar on emergent software.

The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World's Leading Neuroscientists
by Gary Marcus and Jeremy Freeman
Published 1 Nov 2014

Today rapid digital sequencing technology can count individual RNA fragments that can subsequently be mapped back to the genome once it is known for an organism. In 2001, Paul Allen, cofounder of Microsoft, assembled a group of scientists, including James Watson of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Steven Pinker, then at MIT, to discuss the future of neuroscience and what could be done to accelerate neuroscience research. During these meetings the idea emerged that a complete 3D atlas of gene expression in the mouse brain would be of great use to the neuroscience community. The mouse was chosen due to the wealth of existing genetic studies and for practical reasons.

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Take away a neuron’s connections and it becomes deaf and mute, cut it off from inputs and it becomes unable to exert any influence whatsoever. The power of neurons derives from their collective action as part of brain networks, bound together by connections that allow them to interact, compete, and cooperate. “Brain cells fire in patterns,” as Steven Pinker once put it when challenged on the Colbert Report to explain brain function in five words. And these patterns are orchestrated by connections. Although we have known for a long time that neurons are connected into circuits, and that it is this circuit activity that drives all perception, thought, and action, I would argue that modern concepts of networks add an important new dimension.

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Then, like so many fads in psychology (Freud’s psychodynamic theory and Skinner’s behaviorism), neural networks begin to fade away, never quite making the transition from proofs of concept on toy problems (which were abundant) to realistic models of mind or brain. In the 1990s, journals and conferences were filled with demonstrations that showed how it was supposedly possible to capture simple cognitive and linguistic phenomena in any number of fields (such as models of how children acquired English past-tense verbs). But as Steven Pinker and I showed, the details were rarely correct empirically; more than that, nobody was ever able to turn a neural network into a functioning system for understanding language. Today neural networks have finally found a valuable home—in machine learning, especially in speech recognition and image classification, due in part to innovative work by researchers such as Geoff Hinton and Yann LeCun.

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity
by Byron Reese
Published 23 Apr 2018

Modern-day followers of Rousseau have a tendency to look back on this time through the rose-colored glasses of romanticism, harkening back to a simpler time, when humans lived in harmony with nature, uncorrupted by the trappings of the modern world. Most of us, if dropped back into that time to live out our days, would likely not conclude these were the good old days. To begin with, times were violent. The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker estimates that, based on studies of ancient human remains, nearly one in six ancient hunter-gatherers met with a violent end at the hands of another human. Compare this with just the one in thirty who died such a death in the “bloody” twentieth century, with its two world wars. Thus we can confidently say that life as an ancient hunter-gatherer was short, painful, and harsh.

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“After all,” they reason, “science doesn’t even have a way to describe how something like consciousness can exist, so how can it be a physical phenomenon?” Others interpret our lack of understanding as proving, or at least suggesting, that consciousness is just a mental process, and that absolutely nothing even hints otherwise. Harvard’s Steven Pinker writes that scientists “have amassed evidence that every aspect of consciousness can be tied to the brain.” He elaborates by pointing out, “Cognitive neuroscientists can almost read people’s thoughts from the blood flow in their brains.” For Pinker, it’s obvious that this is all just normal brain function.

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In addition, the historian Yuval Noah Harari speculates on what else to expect: When brains and computers can interact directly, that’s it, that’s the end of history, that’s the end of biology as we know it. Nobody has a clue what will happen once you solve this. . . . We have no way of even starting to imagine what’s happening beyond that. There are many who say this can’t be done. Steven Pinker sums up some of the difficulties: Brains are oatmeal-soft, float around in skulls, react poorly to being invaded, and suffer from inflammation around foreign objects. Neurobiologists haven’t the slightest idea how to decode the billions of synapses that underlie a coherent thought, to say nothing of manipulating them.

The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing
by Michael J. Mauboussin
Published 14 Jul 2012

When the researchers asked the patient why he picked what he did, the interpreter in the left brain kicked into gear: “Oh, that's simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.” Rather than saying, “I don't know,” the left hemisphere made up a response based on what it knew.6 Steven Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard, calls this part of the left hemisphere the baloney-generator. He wrote, “The spooky part is that we have no reason to believe that the baloney-generator in the patient's left hemisphere is behaving any different from ours as we make sense of the inclinations emanating from the rest of our brains.

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Gazzaniga, Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 294; see also Michael S. Gazzaniga, “The Split Brain Revisited,” Scientific American, July 1998, 50–55. For another outstanding source for this discussion, see Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross, Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980). 7. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002), 43. 8. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 5–7. 9. Arthur Danto, a professor of philosophy at Columbia University who has carefully analyzed what historians do, suggests that narrative sentences are fundamental to the craft.

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Mauboussin, Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2009), 107–108. 3. Matthew Rabin and Dimitri Vayanos, “The Gambler's Fallacy and Hot-Hand Fallacies: Theory and Application,” Review of Economic Studies 77, no. 2 (April 2010): 730–778. For a discussion of why the gambler's fallacy is not a fallacy in other areas of life, see Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997), 346–347. The classic paper on this topic is Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Belief in the Law of Small Numbers,” Psychological Bulletin 76, no. 2 (1971): 105–110. 4. The structure of the game is also very important. Phil Birnbaum illustrates this point by comparing professional basketball to baseball.

Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking
by Mehdi Hasan
Published 27 Feb 2023

I’ll lay out the different ways to end a speech on a high—and with listeners on your side. This book is chock-full of behind-the-scenes anecdotes and examples from my own debates—which have ranged from the Oxford Union in England to Kyiv in Ukraine. I’ll share secrets from my televised bouts with the likes of Erik Prince, John Bolton, Michael Flynn, Douglas Murray, Slavoj Žižek, Steven Pinker, and Vitali Klitschko, among many others. I’ll also unpack lessons on the art of rhetoric from luminaries ranging from the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle to the British comedian John Cleese to the Barbadian pop star Rihanna. People often ask me: “Can what you do really be taught?” The short answer is: yes.

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When you are citing hard facts at your opponent, and you have the sources to back you up, there’s no need for passion or anger, no need for a raised voice or animated tone. The facts speak for themselves. The receipts do the heavy lifting. Consider this exchange from an interview that I conducted with the acclaimed Harvard experimental psychologist, public intellectual, and bestselling author Steven Pinker. In 2018, Pinker appeared on UpFront to promote his book Enlightenment Now, which pushes the optimistic argument that human beings are better off than ever before, thanks to reason, science, and evidence-based thinking. It’s an argument he backs up with a bunch of social science data and a plethora of footnotes.

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Three counterarguments from me—and each with receipts. And those receipts, in turn, brought other experts into the conversation—on my side. When you let receipts talk, you build a chorus of sources on your side, all weighing in against your opponent. And if your opponent isn’t careful, their own words turn against them, too. Steven Pinker, Slavoj Žižek, John Bolton. These are sharp and savvy interlocutors. But if you have receipts, you don’t need to be intimidated by the intellect, qualifications, or confidence of an opponent. Those receipts become your unassailable weapon. And they can even become your signature weapon. In the fall of 2019, at a live taping of my then podcast, Deconstructed, in front of an audience in Washington, DC, I began by asking one of my guests, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, why she was supporting Bernie Sanders over Elizabeth Warren in the Democratic presidential primaries.

Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language
by Robert McCrum
Published 24 May 2010

Even more vengeful, in best Old Testament style, He ‘scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel, because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth.’ This ancient tale is a timely reminder that the world remains a patchwork of some 5,000 separate and competing languages. As Steven Pinker reminds us in The Language Instinct, we are wise to concede Noam Chomsky’s perception that, aside from mutually unintelligible vocabularies, ‘Earthlings speak a single language’. Nonetheless, the conspicuous differences between English and some of its obvious rivals, like Russian or Japanese, only serve to emphasise the differences, not the similarities.

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Epilogue: ‘A Thoroughfare for All Thoughts’ 275 Consider the powers of the earth: see Stephen Pinker, The Language Instinct (London, 2004). 275 ‘the whole earth was of one language’: Genesis 11: 1-9. 276 According to the British Council: reported in The Economist, 16 December 2006. 276 ‘As Steven Pinker reminds us’: Pinker, ibid., pp. 231-61. 277 ‘a thoroughfare for all thoughts’: in The Letters of John Keats 1814-1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), vol. 1, p. 193. 279 ‘There are more people’: Chris Patten, What Next? Surviving the Twenty-First Century (London, 2008), p. 427. 283 ‘to be born an English-speaker’: Sunday Times, 5 October 2008. 284 ‘when you are leading the world’: Serge Michel and Michel Beuret, China Safari: On the Trail of Beijing’s Expansion in Africa (New York, 2009), p. 11. 286 A new belief system is emerging: see James Boyle, The Public Domain (Yale, 2009). 287 Taha Mahmoud, a twenty-five-year-old computer programmer: reported in the Guardian, 30 July 2007.

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Peter Davidson (London, 1998). —, Nineteen Eighty–Four (London, 1949). George D. Painter, William Caxton (London, 1976). Patrick Parrinder, Nation and Novel: The English Novel from its Origins to the Present Day (Oxford, 2006). Chris Patten, What Next? Surviving the Twenty–First Century (London, 2008). Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (London, 2004). David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (London, 2004). Mordechai Richler, Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! (London, 1992). Miri Rubin, The Hollow Crown (London, 2005). Donald Sassoon, The Culture of the Europeans: From 1800 to the Present (London, 2006).

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 13 Nov 2012

Other minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos! My world is but one in a million alike embedded, alike real to those who may abstract them. How different must be the worlds in the consciousness of ant, cuttle-fish, or crab! —William James Is intelligence the goal, or even a goal, of biological evolution? Steven Pinker writes, “We are chauvinistic about our brains, thinking them to be the goal of evolution,”1 and goes on to argue that “that makes no sense…. Natural selection does nothing even close to striving for intelligence. The process is driven by differences in the survival and reproduction rates of replicating organisms in a particular environment.

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For a historical perspective on how far we have advanced, I suggest people read Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), in which he describes the “life of man” as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” For a modern perspective, the recent book Abundance (2012), by X-Prize Foundation founder (and cofounder with me of Singularity University) Peter Diamandis and science writer Steven Kotler, documents the extraordinary ways in which life today has steadily improved in every dimension. Steven Pinker’s recent The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011) painstakingly documents the steady rise of peaceful relations between people and peoples. American lawyer, entrepreneur, and author Martine Rothblatt (born in 1954) documents the steady improvement in civil rights, noting, for example, how in a couple of decades same-sex marriage went from being legally recognized nowhere in the world to being legally accepted in a rapidly growing number of jurisdictions.4 A primary reason that people believe that life is getting worse is because our information about the problems of the world has steadily improved.

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I have found this to be an invaluable method for harnessing the natural creativity of my dreams. Reader: Well, for the workaholics among us, we can now work in our dreams. Not sure my spouse is going to appreciate this. Ray: Actually, you can think of it as getting your dreams to do your work for you. Chapter 4: The Biological Neocortex 1. Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997), 152–53. 2. D. O. Hebb, The Organization of Behavior (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1949). 3. Henry Markram and Rodrigo Perrin, “Innate Neural Assemblies for Lego Memory,” Frontiers in Neural Circuits 5, no. 6 (2011). 4. E-mail communication from Henry Markram, February 19, 2012. 5.

Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages
by Guy Deutscher
Published 29 Aug 2010

For example, does the need to pay constant attention to certain aspects of experience train speakers to be especially sensitive to certain details or induce particular types of memory patterns and associations? These are exactly the questions we shall explore in the next chapters. For some critics, such as Steven Pinker, the fact that our mother tongue constrains neither our capacity to reason logically nor our ability to understand complex ideas is an irredeemable anticlimax. In his recent book, The Stuff of Thought, Pinker argues that since no one has ever managed to show that speakers of one language find it impossible, or even extremely difficult, to reason in a particular way that comes naturally to the speakers of another language, then any remaining effects of language on thought are mundane, unsexy, boring, even trivial.

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And as this habit of mind will be inculcated almost from infancy, it will soon become second nature, effortless and unconscious. The causal link between language and spatial thinking thus seems far more plausible than the case of language and hair color. Still, plausibility by no means constitutes proof. And as it happens, some psychologists and linguists, such as Peggy Li, Lila Gleitman, and Steven Pinker, have challenged the claim that it is primarily language that influences spatial memory and orientation. In The Stuff of Thought, Pinker argues that people develop their spatial thinking for reasons unrelated to language, and that languages merely reflect the fact that their speakers think in a certain coordinate system anyway.

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the acquired aptitudes of one generation: Gladstone 1858, 3:426. “progressive education”: Gladstone 1858, 3:495. Naturalness in concept learning: See Waxman and Senghas 1992. Yanomamö kinship terms: Lizot 1971. The innateness controversy: The most eloquent exposition of the nativist view is Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct (1994). Geoffrey Sampson’s The “Language Instinct” Debate (2005) offers a methodical refutation of the arguments in favor of innate grammar, as well as references to the voluminous academic literature on the subject. 5: PLATO AND THE MACEDONIAN SWINEHERD The flaws of the equal-complexity dogma: For a fuller argument, see Deutscher 2009.

The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive
by Brian Christian
Published 1 Mar 2011

If instead there was simply one list, called “Books I’ve, at the Very Least, Begun,” my life might be easier. 7. Barging In Listeners keep up with talkers; they do not wait for the end of a batch of speech and interpret it after a proportional delay, like a critic reviewing a book. And the lag between speaker’s mouth and listener’s mind is remarkably short. –STEVEN PINKER Spontaneity; Flow “Well, I mean, you know, there are different levels of difficulty, right? I mean, one obvious level of difficulty is that, you know, ‘be yourself’ would be an injunction in the first place, right, which suggests, of course, if you have to be told to be yourself, that you could in some way fail to be yourself.”

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Whereas Plato argues in The Republic that “the fairest class [of things is] that which a man who is to be happy [can] love both for its own sake and for the results,” Aristotle insists in The Nicomachean Ethics that any element of instrumentality in a relationship weakens the quality or nature of that relationship. 29 Philip Jackson, personal interview. 30 Sherlock Holmes, directed by Guy Ritchie (Warner Bros., 2009). 7. Barging In 1 Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (New York: Morrow, 1994). For more on how listener feedback affects storytelling, see, e.g., Janet B. Bavelas, Linda Coates, and Trudy Johnson, “Listeners as Co-narrators,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79, no. 6 (2000), 941–52. 2 Bernard Reginster, personal interview.

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(New York: Springer, 2008). 19 Hava Siegelmann, personal interview. 20 George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” Horizon 13, no. 76 (April 1946), pp. 252–65. 21 Roger Levy, personal interview. 22 Dave Ackley, personal interview. 23 Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner, see below) notes that “the Greater Dallas Council on Alcohol and Drug Abuse has compiled an extraordinarily entertaining index of cocaine street names.” 24 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). 25 Ezra Pound’s famous battle cry of modernism, “Make it new,” comes from his translation of the Confucian text The Great Digest, a.k.a. The Great Learning. 26 Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007). 27 Sun Tzu, The Art of War, translated by John Minford (New York: Penguin, 2003). 28 The phrase “euphemism treadmill” comes from Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate (New York: Viking, 2002). See also W. V. Quine, “Euphemism,” in Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1987). 29 The controversy over Rahm Emanuel’s remark appears to have originated with Peter Wallsten, “Chief of Staff Draws Fire from Left as Obama Falters,” Wall Street Journal, January 26, 2010. 30 Rosa’s Law, S.2781, 2010. 31 “Mr.

What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves
by Benjamin K. Bergen
Published 12 Sep 2016

For the most part, though, language researchers steer clear of studying profanity, even if it’s potentially fascinating, for fear of what will happen when their institutional review board evaluates their experimental materials or when a committee of their peers reads their publications during tenure deliberations. Nevertheless, a small cabal of researchers has been toiling away on profanity. With several exceptions, most notably psychologists Timothy Jay2 and Steven Pinker,3 they’ve largely done their work without much public attention. At least until recently, they’ve been practitioners of a secret science of swearing. But things have started to change, in large part because of changes in public language norms. The highly regulated public airwaves don’t carry the bulk of public communication as they once did.

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If analogous circuitry is indeed responsible for reflexive human swearing, then it provides privileged access to emotion in the brain, laying bare a speaker’s covert internal experiences unmediated by rational and deliberate planning. But there’s a caveat. This older, emotion-driven circuit doesn’t behave the same way in humans as it does in other animals. As both Timothy Jay and Steven Pinker have pointed out, the vocalizations we produce when spontaneously swearing are conventionalized—they’re the product of socially driven learning.27 Swearwords are a different beast from shrieks or growls in that they have a specific learned form—you swear specifically in English or Chinese or ASL, whereas a monkey just shrieks in Monkey

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Whenever the Blooms cried out flep! their kids looked at them like they were out of their flepping minds.3 Once they reach a certain age, kids actually learn most of their language from peers and older children, and they do a very good job of ignoring what they hear from their parents, as psychologist Steven Pinker points out.4 As a consequence, kids often come home with words that their parents don’t use and often don’t even know. They also come home using words the parents do know in ways that the parents would never imagine. Profanity is especially likely to be learned from peers, not only because it’s more likely to be said on the playground than at the dinner table but also because of what kids use it for.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Published 11 Apr 2005

See Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do (New York: Free Press, 1998); for a Harris profile that also provides an excellent review of the nature-nurture debate, see Malcolm Gladwell, “Do Parents Matter?” The New Yorker, August 17, 1998; and Carol Tavris, “Peer Pressure,” New York Times Book Review, September 13, 1998. / 141 “‘Here we go again’”: See Tavris, “Peer Pressure.” / 141 Pinker called Harris’s views “mind-boggling”: Steven Pinker, “Sibling Rivalry: Why the Nature/Nurture Debate Won’t Go Away,” Boston Globe, October 13, 2002, adapted from Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002). SCHOOL CHOICE IN CHICAGO: This material is drawn from Julie Berry Cullen, Brian Jacob, and Steven D. Levitt, “The Impact of School Choice on Student Outcomes: An Analysis of the Chicago Public Schools,” Journal of Public Economics, forthcoming; and Julie Berry Cullen, Brian Jacob, and Steven D.

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“One year we’re told bonding is the key, the next that it’s birth order. Wait, what really matters is stimulation. The first five years of life are the most important; no, the first three years; no, it’s all over by the first year. Forget that: It’s all genetics!” But Harris’s theory was duly endorsed by a slate of heavyweights. Among them was Steven Pinker, the cognitive psychologist and bestselling author, who in his own book Blank Slate called Harris’s views “mind-boggling” (in a good way). “Patients in traditional forms of psychotherapy while away their fifty minutes reliving childhood conflicts and learning to blame their unhappiness on how their parents treated them,” Pinker wrote.

Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries
by Kory Stamper
Published 14 Mar 2017

“I wish you would”: Quoted in transcripts from Charles Gibson, “Kennedy Letters: Insight into History,” ABC World News transcripts, Sept. 28, 2006. “I once asked a weapons specialist”: Geoffrey Nunberg, “Going Nucular,” Fresh Air, NPR, Oct. 2, 2002. Metcalf notes: Metcalf, Presidential Voices, 108. Steven Pinker, another linguist: Steven Pinker, “Pinker Contra Nunberg re Nuclear/Nucular,” Language Log, Oct. 17, 2008. But then we’d have to account: Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed., s.v. “thermonukes” and “nuclear.” “But which of these stories explains”: Nunberg, “Going Nucular.” NUDE: On Correspondence In 2015, BuzzFeed: “Black Women Try ‘Nude’ Fashion,” BuzzFeed, May 20, 2015.

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Nunberg has talked to some of these people, who all manage to say “\ˈnu-klē-ǝr\ family” and “\ˈnu-klē-ǝr\ medicine,” but anything having to do with weaponry is \ˈnü-kyə-lər\. “I once asked a weapons specialist at a federal agency about this, and he told me, ‘Oh, I only say “nucular” when I’m talking about nukes.’ ” Metcalf notes the same general pattern, though he gives no anecdata*12 to support his contention. Steven Pinker, another linguist who got in something of a mild slap fight with Nunberg over \ˈnü-kyə-lər\, drops that in 2008 he spoke to the Strategic Studies Group at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, and heard \ˈnü-kyə-lər\ from two senior analysts there. Interestingly, the earliest print instances we have of “nucular,” the spelled-out variation of the pronunciation that everyone hates, are in stories about and bulletins from people in the military, government, or nuclear sciences.

Origin Story: A Big History of Everything
by David Christian
Published 21 May 2018

Fifty million years ago, in this post-dinosaur, post-PETM world of chilly and erratic climate changes, our primate ancestors evolved. Part III * * * US Chapter 7 Humans: Threshold 6 A common language connects the members of a community into an information-sharing network with formidable collective powers. —STEVEN PINKER, THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT Humanity entire possesses a commonality which historians may hope to understand just as firmly as they can comprehend what unites any lesser group. —WILLIAM H. MCNEILL, “MYTHISTORY” The appearance of humans in our origin story is a big deal. We arrived just a few hundred thousand years ago, but today we are beginning to transform the biosphere.

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Was it, as American neuroanthropologist Terrence Deacon has argued, a new ability to compress large amounts of information into symbols (deceptively simple words like symbol that carry a huge informational cargo)? Or was it the evolution of new grammar circuits in the human brain that helped us combine words according to precise rules so as to convey a great variety of different meanings, as the linguist Noam Chomsky has suggested? This is a tempting idea because, as another linguist, Steven Pinker, puts it, the really difficult trick was “to design a code that can extrude a tangled spaghetti of concepts into a linear string of words” and to do this so efficiently that the hearer could quickly re-create the spaghetti of concepts from the linear string.17 Was human language enabled by the increased space for thinking available in an enlarged cortex, which could hold enough complex thoughts in place to form syntactically complex sentences or let an individual memorize the meanings of thousands of words?

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Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, loc. 5, Kindle: “Faithful social transmission … can work as a ratchet to prevent slippage backward—so that the newly invented artifact or practice preserves its new and improved form at least somewhat faithfully until a further modification or improvement comes along.” Tomasello calls this collaborative learning. 17. Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Penguin, 2015), 110. 18. This idea is suggested by Roth, The Long Evolution of Brains and Minds, 264; on the unique human capacity to remember many words, see Hurford, The Origins of Language, 119. 19.

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
by Kathryn Schulz
Published 7 Jun 2010

Almost the entirety of Plato’s Theaetetus is dedicated to dismantling Protagoras’s theory of knowledge, but for the issues I’m addressing here, see especially pp. 12–50. Keeler also provides considerable background on what the Sophists, Plato, and other early philosophers thought about the problem of errors of perception. (See especially pp. 1–21.) Steven Pinker. Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (W. W. Norton and Company, 1997), 8. David Brewster. David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic (Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly, 1883), 91. I tracked down this text after reading about it in Sully’s Illusions. Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin. The story of Robert-Houdin in Algeria can be found in Jim Steinmeyer’s Hiding the Elephant (De Capo Press, 2004), pp. 145–146.

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Actually, it’s not your eyes that are telling you this; it’s a handful of interpretative processes of the kind I just described. These processes are in play because, when it comes to determining the color of objects around us, our visual system can’t afford to be too literal. If it were, it would do nothing but measure the wavelength of light reflecting off a given object. In that case, as the psychologist Steven Pinker has pointed out, we would think that a lump of coal sitting in bright sunlight was white, and that a lump of snow inside a dark house was black. Instead, we’re able to correct for the presence of light and shadow so that the coal still appears fundamentally black and the snow still appears fundamentally white.

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In everyday life, we use phrases like “I know” to indicate that we don’t feel any uncertainty and phrases like “I believe” to indicate that we do—distinctions that are extremely helpful, and that we cannot jettison without resorting to the notoriously impractical and unpalatable option of complete capital-S Skepticism. My point here is only that knowledge, as a category, has limitations and assumptions we should come to understand—and that error is predicated on belief, which is, accordingly, a more useful conceptual tool for a book about wrongness. Justice William Douglas. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Penguin, 2003) 265. the brain mistakes an idea in the mind…for a feature of the real world. Specifically, scientists think that denial of disease arises when a part of the brain called the supplementary motor area remains unaffected by a brain injury.

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy
by Philip Coggan
Published 6 Feb 2020

More children survive to adulthood and they grow up to be taller, better educated, and have many more choices over how to live their lives than they did in medieval times. They have a far greater chance of dying peacefully in their beds of old age (see chart). These advances would not have been made without economic growth. As Steven Pinker recounts,9 back in 1800 no country in the world had a life expectancy higher than 40. Now the world average is around 70; an African born today can expect to live as long as a European born in the 1930s. In 2016, 4.2m babies died in the first year of life.10 That is a terrible number, but it has been steadily falling in recent years.

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The idea of the “noble savage”, of peace-loving tribes at home with nature, is quite persistent. But observations of modern hunter-gatherer tribes find that violent raids on their neighbours are quite common. Excavations in modern-day India uncovered the skeletons of one group of Stone Age hunter-gatherers; most were around 20 years old and none were over 40.19 Steven Pinker tells the tale of Őtzi, a human found frozen in the Alps, who lived 5,000 years ago. He had an arrowhead embedded in his shoulder, unhealed cuts on his hands, wounds on his head and chest, traces of blood from two other people on one of his arrowheads, and blood from a third on his dagger and from a fourth on his cape.

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“Worst tech predictions of all time”, The Daily Telegraph, June 29th 2017, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/0/worst-tech-predictions-of-all-time/thomas-watson-ibm-president-in-1943/ 7. Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization: A History 8. https://www.tudorsociety.com/childbirth-in-medieval-and-tudor-times-by-sarah-bryson 9. Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress 10. Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – And Why Things Are Better Than You Think 11. Ibid.; the figures comes from a World Bank study by Martin Ravallion and Shaohua Chen 12.

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
by Robert M. Sapolsky
Published 1 May 2017

(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000); W. Yang, “Nasty, Brutish, and Long,” New York, October 16, 2011. 4. S. Herman and D. Peterson, “Steven Pinker on the Alleged Decline of Violence,” Int Socialist Rev, November/December, 2012. 5. R. Douthat, “Steven Pinker’s History of Violence,” New York Times, October 17, 2011; J. Gray, “Delusions of Peace,” Prospect, October 2011; E. Kolbert, “Peace in Our Time: Steven Pinker’s History of Violence,” New Yorker, October 3, 2011; T. Cowen, “Steven Pinker on Violence,” Marginal Revolution, October 7, 2011. 6. C. Apicella et al., “Social Networks and Cooperation in Hunter-Gatherers,” Nat 481 (2012): 497. 7.

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In 1996 the archaeologist Lawrence Keeley of the University of Illinois synthesized the existing literature in his highly influential War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, ostensibly showing that the archaeological evidence for war is broad and ancient.55 A similar conclusion comes in the 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, by Harvard’s Steven Pinker.56 Cliché police be damned, you can’t mention this book without calling it “monumental.” In this monumental work Pinker argued that (a) violence and the worst horrors of inhumanity have been declining for the last half millennium, thanks to the constraining forces of civilization; and (b) the warfare and barbarity preceding that transition are as old as the human species.

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Beckerman et al., “Life Histories, Blood Revenge and Reproductive Success Among the Waorani of Ecuador,” PNAS 106 (2009): 8134. 66. The original research cited by Pinker and Fry: K. Hill and A. Hurtado, Ache Life History: The Ecology and Demography of a Foraging People (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1996). 67. S. Corry, “The Case of the ‘Brutal Savage’: Poirot or Clouseau? Why Steven Pinker, Like Jared Diamond, Is Wrong,” London: Survival International website, 2013. 68. K. Lorenz, On Aggression (MFJ Books, 1997); R. Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations (Delta Books, 1966); R. Wrangham and D. Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origin of Human Violence (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996). 69.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
by Steven Pinker
Published 24 Sep 2012

Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Epigraph Preface Chapter 1 - A FOREIGN COUNTRY Chapter 2 - THE PACIFICATION PROCESS Chapter 3 - THE CIVILIZING PROCESS Chapter 4 - THE HUMANITARIAN REVOLUTION Chapter 5 - THE LONG PEACE Chapter 6 - THE NEW PEACE Chapter 7 - THE RIGHTS REVOLUTIONS Chapter 8 - INNER DEMONS Chapter 9 - BETTER ANGELS Chapter 10 - ON ANGELS’ WINGS NOTES REFERENCES INDEX ALSO BY STEVEN PINKER ALSO BY STEVEN PINKER Language Learnability and Language Development Learnability and Cognition The Language Instinct How the Mind Works Words and Rules The Blank Slate The Stuff of Thought EDITED BY STEVEN PINKER Visual Cognition Connections and Symbols (with Jacques Mehler) Lexical and Conceptual Semantics (with Beth Levin) The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004 VIKING Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2RoRL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St.

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Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R oRL, England First published in 2011 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Copyright © Steven Pinker, 2011 All rights reserved Excerpts from “MLF Lullaby,” “Who’s Next?,” and “In Old Mexico” by Tom Lehrer. Excerpt from “It Depends on What You Pay” by Tom Jones. Excerpt from “Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag,” words and music by Joe McDonald. © 1965, renewed 1933 by Alkatraz Corner Music Co. LIBRARY OF CONGRES CATALOGING -IN-PUBLICATION DATA Pinker, Steven, 1954– The better angels of our nature: why violence has declined / Steven Pinker. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN : 978-1-101-54464-8 1.

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Wilson, Margo Wilson, Woodrow Wimer, Christopher Winfrey, Oprah Wirth, Christian witchcraft Witness (film) Wollstonecraft, Mary Wolpert, Daniel women: and abortion Amazons in American West antiwar views of attitudes toward competition for and domestic violence feminism feminization genital mutilation of in harems and Islam as leaders male control of as pacifying force peace activists postpartum depression as property rape of, see rape rights of self-defense for “Take Back the Night,” torture of violence against violence by violence over; see also sexual jealousy World Bank world government World Health Organization (WHO) World War I and antiwar views and influenza pandemic as literary war and nationalism onset of poison gas in and World War II World War II causes of destructiveness of and ethnic cleansing London Blitz in and Pearl Harbor and poison gas Wotman, Sara Wouters, Cas Wrangham, Richard Wright, Quincy Wright, Robert Xhosa people Yamaguchi, Tsutomu Yanomamö people Yates, Andrea Yemen Young, Liane Young, Maxwell Younger, Stephen young men: African American aggression of in American West in bachelor cults and code of honor and crime in criminal gangs and dominance and drug culture homicides by in prison socialization of terrorists tribal elders defied by Yugoslavia Zacher, Mark Zambia Zebrowitz, Leslie Zelizer, Viviana zero-sum games Zimbardo, Philip Zimring, Franklin Zipf, G. K. Źiźek, Slavoj Zola, Émile ALSO BY STEVEN PINKER Language Learnability and Language Development Learnability and Cognition The Language Instinct How the Mind Works Words and Rules The Blank Slate The Stuff of Thought EDITED BY STEVEN PINKER Visual Cognition Connections and Symbols (with Jacques Mehler) Lexical and Conceptual Semantics (with Beth Levin) The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004 Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Epigraph Preface Chapter 1 - A FOREIGN COUNTRY Chapter 2 - THE PACIFICATION PROCESS Chapter 3 - THE CIVILIZING PROCESS Chapter 4 - THE HUMANITARIAN REVOLUTION Chapter 5 - THE LONG PEACE Chapter 6 - THE NEW PEACE Chapter 7 - THE RIGHTS REVOLUTIONS Chapter 8 - INNER DEMONS Chapter 9 - BETTER ANGELS Chapter 10 - ON ANGELS’ WINGS NOTES REFERENCES INDEX ALSO BY STEVEN PINKER Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Epigraph Preface Chapter 1 - A FOREIGN COUNTRY Chapter 2 - THE PACIFICATION PROCESS Chapter 3 - THE CIVILIZING PROCESS Chapter 4 - THE HUMANITARIAN REVOLUTION Chapter 5 - THE LONG PEACE Chapter 6 - THE NEW PEACE Chapter 7 - THE RIGHTS REVOLUTIONS Chapter 8 - INNER DEMONS Chapter 9 - BETTER ANGELS Chapter 10 - ON ANGELS’ WINGS NOTES REFERENCES INDEX ALSO BY STEVEN PINKER

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age
by Roger Bootle
Published 4 Sep 2019

And, as in the military, there is great scope for the type of job available to humans within any given sector to change radically. It is widely believed that the challenge from robots and AI will be felt most acutely in manual occupations. Actually, it is not true that all manual jobs are acutely under threat. As noted above, robots continue to be poor at manual dexterity. According to the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker: “The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard.”20 Accordingly, many skilled, manual jobs look safe for the foreseeable future. These include plumbers, electricians, gardeners, builders, and decorators. That said, research from Mace suggests that by 2040, out of the 2.2 million jobs in the construction industry, 600,000 could be automated.

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But there is now in the developed world hardly any absolute poverty, at least poverty as we used to know it. Increased inequality is not going to mean people starving or living without shelter and warmth. (Matters are quite different in much of the rest of the world, but there AI-induced inequality is not likely to be a problem.) Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker says that some of the outrage of the anti-inequality movement is based on a misunderstanding. He points out that in Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (which I discussed in Chapter 6), there appears to be a confusion between relative and absolute. Piketty says: “The poor of the population are as poor today as they were in the past, with barely 5 percent of total wealth in 2010, as in 1910.”24 But Pinker points out that, since wealth was vastly larger in 2010 than a hundred years earlier, if the poorer half of the population owns the same proportion of the wealth, they are in fact vastly richer.25 Pinker also lays into the argument that societies that are more unequal are thereby less successful and less happy.

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But the Singularity is not inevitable. Indeed, far from it. With more than 60 years of studying cognitive science at MIT behind him, Noam Chomsky says that we are “eons away” from building human-level machine intelligence. He dismisses the Singularity as “science fiction.” The distinguished Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker broadly agrees. He has said: “There is not the slightest reason to believe in a coming singularity.” Admittedly, these are still early days and it is quite possible that either a breakthrough in what AI researchers are already doing, or a complete change of course, will deliver dramatic results.12 But it has to be said that the progress of AI toward anything like human general intelligence has been painfully slow.

The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest
by Yochai Benkler
Published 8 Aug 2011

But how do we explain helping individuals to whom we are not genetically related? How can this possibly improve our genetic fitness? Here reciprocity (the notion that cooperative acts will ultimately be reciprocated) provides an explanation. The simplest version is direct reciprocity, an idea introduced by Robert Trivers, whose work inspired Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and many others. Basically this says that when we are in a situation in which another individual can directly reciprocate our help by helping us back, we both recognize that we will be better off by cooperating than not. This basic dynamic is not confined to humans; it has been demonstrated through numerous animal studies.

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I will use a bit of all of these approaches in understanding what makes human cooperation work. Each reveals certain parts of the picture. And each imposes some constraints on our desire to confirm existing beliefs and ratify existing practices. None do so perfectly, but we have no better. We might as well get on with it. * Such as Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, and Steven Pinker. * Along with extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness. • CHAPTER 3 • STUBBORN CHILDREN, NEW YORK CITY DOORMEN, AND WHY OBESITY IS CONTAGIOUS: PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL INFLUENCES ON COOPERATION Washington Square Park. I was sitting with my kids in the playground. A group of children were digging and playing with trucks in the sandbox.

Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition
by Michael J. Mauboussin
Published 6 Nov 2012

A check of primary sources suggests Ayres made two errors in his equation (the constant should be a negative value and a decimal place is off). I believe this equation is correct. 7. Orley Ashenfelter, “Predicting the Quality and Prices of Bordeaux Wines,” Working paper no. 4, American Association of Wine Economists, April 2007. 8. Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W.W Norton & Company, 1997), 305–306. 9. J. Scott Armstrong, Monica Adya, and Fred Collopy, “Rule-Based Forecasting: Using Judgment in Time-Series Extrapolation” in Principles of Forecasting: A Handbook for Researchers and Practitioners, ed. J. Scott Armstrong (New York: Springer, 2001), 259–282; and John D.

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Rex Dalton, “Quarrel Over Book Leads to Call For Misconduct Inquiry,” Nature 431 (October 21, 2004): 889; Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do (New York: Free Press, 1998), 365–378; Frederic Townsend, “Birth Order and Rebelliousness: Reconstructing the Research in Born to Rebel,” Politics and the Life Sciences 19, no. 2 (2000): 135–156; Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002), 389–390; and Judith Rich Harris, No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), 83–114. 3. John Horgan, The Undiscovered Mind: How the Human Brain Defies Replication, Medication, and Explanation (New York: Free Press, 1999), 192. 4.

Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back
by Mark O'Connell
Published 13 Apr 2020

“There is a psychologist, quite famous, who has written a book about how everything has been getting better for humanity over time, and that this is the best moment in history to be alive.” “Are you talking about Steven Pinker?” “Maybe,” she said. “I am terrible with names.” “Voluminous mane of silver ringlets? Looks like Brian May out of Queen? Goes on about the Enlightenment all the time?” “Yes,” she said, “I think that’s him.” “I don’t find him particularly convincing,” I said, more dismissively than I intended to. She shrugged in a particularly French-seeming way, raising her eyebrows, dipping her head to one side. She was clearly not willing to sacrifice the last fifteen minutes of our session to a defense of Steven Pinker. There was a silence then, during which I gazed out the window and listened to the bell of an approaching tram, and fell to thinking about Pinker’s hair.

Designing the Mind: The Principles of Psychitecture
by Designing The Mind and Ryan A Bush
Published 10 Jan 2021

They do not run a simple loop, but an intricate system which factors innumerable inputs and calculations into its behaviors. The brain, like it or not, is a machine. Scientists have come to that conclusion, not because they are mechanistic killjoys, but because they have amassed evidence that every aspect of consciousness can be tied to the brain. - Steven Pinker, “The Mystery of Consciousness” The fact that our minds are machines does not preclude the vast richness of experience of which they are capable. It simply means that at its core, the ineffable complexity of human existence boils down to an operating system we can study and increasingly understand.

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That is why we not only can learn to control our emotions, if we want to live a great life, we must. The problem with the emotions is not that they are untamed forces or vestiges of our animal past; it is that they were designed to propagate copies of the genes that built them rather than to promote happiness, wisdom, or moral values. - Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works Critics would also be correct in stating that suppression, the brute force “willing away” of emotion, is ineffective and often backfires.6 I also would not recommend denying your bad feelings or attempting to hide them from others at all times. But these are far from the only methods to this expansive art.

Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity
by Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods
Published 13 Jul 2020

Friendliness drove this technological revolution by linking groups of innovators together in a way other hominin species never could. Self-domestication gave us a superpower, and in the blink of an evolutionary eye, we took over the world. And one by one, every other human species went extinct. * * * — Our capacity for friendliness toward strangers has continued to increase. The psychologist Steven Pinker argues that human violence has steadily declined over time.62 Yuval Harari writes that the “Law of the Jungle has finally been broken, if not rescinded…a growing segment of humankind has come to see war as simply inconceivable.”63 We have human self-domestication to thank for this. The concept of the intragroup stranger has allowed us to extend our love toward those we have never met.

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Hurtado, R. T. Boyd, “Hunter-gatherer Inter-band Interaction Rates: Implications for Cumulative Culture,” PLoS One 9, e102806 (2014). 61. K. Hill, “Altruistic Cooperation During Foraging by the Ache, and the Evolved Human Predisposition to Cooperate,” Human Nature 13, 105–28 (2002). 62. Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Penguin Books, 2012). 63. Y. N. Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (Random House, 2016). 64. R. C. Oka, M. Kissel, M. Golitko, S. G. Sheridan, N. C. Kim, A. Fuentes, “Population Is the Main Driver of War Group Size and Conflict Casualties,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, E11101–E11110 (2017). 6 Not Quite Human 1. “ ‘Burundi: The Gatumba Massacre: War Crimes and Political Agendas,’ ” (Human Rights Watch, 2004). 2.

The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World
by Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro
Published 11 Sep 2017

Raimo Vayrynen (London: Routledge, 2006); Nils Petter Gelditsch, “The Decline of War—The Main Issues,” International Studies Review 15, no. 3 (2013): 397–99; Lawrence Freedman, “Steven Pinker and the Long Peace: Alliance, Deterrence, and Decline,” Cold War History 14, no. 4 (2014): 657–72; John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989). 32. Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday, 3. 33. Freedman, “Steven Pinker and the Long Peace,” 658. 34. Ibid. 35. One of the frequently used datasets, Peter Brecke’s “Conflict Catalog,” http://www.cgeh.nl/data, includes 3,708 conflicts, with data on parties, fatalities, date, and duration.

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Scholars who observe these changes are sometimes called “declinists.”31 Declinists note, for example, that the major powers of the world have not fought a war against each other directly since the Second World War.32 Over the last several decades, the total number of conflicts has dropped by 40 percent.33 The deadliest, those that kill at least 1,000 people, have declined even further—by half.34 Several declinists argue that the decline in war has led to a decline in war deaths. Proving this claim, however, is difficult. Unfortunately, the available historical data on war deaths are much less complete and reliable than the data on territorial change.35 Combining data and narrative history, Steven Pinker concludes that though wars have become more deadly, they are less frequent, yielding fewer war-related deaths overall.36 The decline in interstate war is so widely accepted and well documented as to have almost become conventional wisdom.37 There is far less agreement, however, on its cause. Pinker points to a gradual evolution in human empathy, self-control, morality, and reason—the “better angels of our nature.”

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Ibid., 3.8.141. 75. Eric Robson, “The Armed Forces and the Art of War,” in The New Cambridge Modern History, eds. G. R. Potter and G. R. Elton, Vol. 7: The Old Regime, 1713–63, ed. J. O. Lindsay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 165. On the humanitarian revolution and Enlightenment humanism, see Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011), 129–92. 76. Bell, The First Total War; Carl Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political, trans. G. L. Ulem (New York: Telos Press, 2007), 36. 77. James Whitman, The Verdict of Battle: The Law of Victory and the Making of Modern War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); Randall Lesaffer, “Siege Warfare in Early Modern Europe,” in E.

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
by Daniel C. Dennett
Published 15 Jan 1995

On the contrary, {355} instead of just dutifully passing on their messages, correcting most of the typos as they go, brains seem to be designed to do just the opposite: to transform, invent, interpolate, censor, and generally mix up the "input" before yielding any "output." Isn't one of the hallmarks of cultural evolution and transmission the extraordinarily high rate of mutation and recombination? We seldom pass on a meme unaltered, it seems, unless we are particularly literal-minded rote learners. (Are walking encyclopedias hidebound?) Moreover, as Steven Pinker has stressed (personal communication), much of the mutation that happens to memes — how much is not clear — is manifestly directed mutation: "Memes such as the theory of relativity are not the cumulative product of millions of random (undirected) mutations of some original idea, but each brain in the chain of production added huge dollops of value to the product in a nonrandom way."

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CHOMSKY CONTRA DARWIN: FOUR EPISODES Chomsky, one might think, would have everything to gain by grounding his controversial theory about a language organ in the firm foundation of evolutionary theory, and in some of his writings he has hinted at a connection. But more often he is skeptical. — STEVEN PINKER 1994, p. 355 In the case of such systems as language or wings it is not easy even to imagine a course of selection that might have given rise to them. — NOAM CHOMSKY 1988, p. 167 A sizeable gulf in communication still exists between cognitive scientists who entered the field from Al or from the study of problem solving and concept-forming behavior, on the one side, and those who entered from a concern with language, on the other....

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In short, although Gould has heralded Chomsky's theory of universal grammar as a bulwark against an adaptationist explanation of language, and Chomsky has in return endorsed Gould's antiadaptationism as an authoritative excuse for rejecting the obvious obligation to pursue an evolutionary explanation of the innate establishment of universal grammar, these two authorities are supporting each other over an abyss. In December 1989, the MIT psycholinguist Steven Pinker and his graduate student Paul Bloom presented a paper, "Natural Language and Natural Selection," to the Cognitive Science Colloquium at MIT. Their paper, which has itself subsequently appeared as a target article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, laid down the gauntlet: Many people have argued that the evolution of the human language faculty cannot be explained by Darwinian natural selection.

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives
by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen
Published 22 Apr 2013

If anything, we’re more peaceful than we’ve ever been, with the amount of violence in human societies declining precipitously in the past several centuries due to developments like strong states (which monopolize violence and institute the rule of law), commerce (other people become more valuable alive than dead) and expanded international networks (which demystify and humanize the Other). As the psychologist Steven Pinker explains in The Better Angels of Our Nature, his excellent and comprehensive survey of this trend, historical exogenous forces like these “favor our peaceable motives” like empathy, moral sense, reason and self-control, which “orient [us] away from violence and toward cooperation and altruism.”

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Our gratitude to all our friends and colleagues whose ideas and thoughts we’ve benefited from: Elliott Abrams, Ruzwana Bashir, Michael Bloomberg, Richard Branson, Chris Brose, Jordan Brown, James Bryer, Mike Cline, Steve Coll, Peter Diamandis, Larry Diamond, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, James Fallows, Summer Felix, Richard Fontaine, Dov Fox, Tom Freston, Malcolm Gladwell, James Glassman, Jack Goldsmith, David Gordon, Sheena Greitens, Craig Hatkoff, Michael Hayden, Chris Hughes, Walter Isaacson, Dean Kamen, David Kennedy, Erik Kerr, Parag Khanna, Joseph Konzelmann, Stephen Krasner, Ray Kurzweil, Eric Lander, Jason Liebman, Claudia Mendoza, Evgeny Morozov, Dambisa Moyo, Elon Musk, Meghan O’Sullivan, Farah Pandith, Barry Pavel, Steven Pinker, Joe Polish, Alex Pollen, Jason Rakowski, Lisa Randall, Condoleezza Rice, Jane Rosenthal, Nouriel Roubini, Kori Schake, Vance Serchuk, Michael Spence, Stephen Stedman, Dan Twining, Decker Walker, Matthew Waxman, Tim Wu, Jillian York, Juan Zarate, Jonathan Zittrain and Ethan Zuckerman. We also want to thank the guys from Peak Performance, particularly Joe Dowdell and Jose and Emilio Gomez, for keeping us healthy during the final stages of writing.

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With more than four billion videos viewed daily: Alexei Oreskovic, “Exclusive: YouTube Hits 4 Billion Daily Video Views,” Reuters, January 23, 2012, http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/23/us-google-youtube-idUSTRE80M0TS20120123. CHAPTER 6 THE FUTURE OF CONFLICT, COMBAT AND INTERVENTION “orient [us] away from violence and toward cooperation and altruism”: Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011), xxv. “The world begins to look different”: Ibid., xxvi. deliberately excludes some 2.2 million ethnic Roma: Amnesty International (AI), “Romania Must End Forced Evictions of Roma Families,” press release, January 26, 2010, http://www.amnesty.org/en/for-media/press-releases/romania-must-end-forced-evictions-roma-families-20100126.

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities
by Michael Shellenberger
Published 11 Oct 2021

As such, the “New Deal, World War II, and the Cold War may have reduced homicide rates,” Roth writes, but “the crisis of legitimacy in the 1960s and 1970s (especially in the eyes of African-Americans) may have contributed to soaring homicide rates.”11 Homicide rates among unrelated adults in the United States follow closely the proportion of the public who trust their government to do the right thing and believe that most public officials are honest. As trust in government fell in the late sixties and early seventies, homicides increased. When trust in government rose in the fifties and mid-nineties, homicides decreased.12 Roth’s research is supported by Steven Pinker 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature. In it Pinker describes how violence has declined broadly since the dawn of civilization and specifically in recent American history. Pinker finds downward trends in wars, sectarian violence, anti-woman violence, and child abuse, which he suggests flow from historical trends like industrialization and urbanization.

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Facing widespread criticism and a recall campaign, the San Francisco Unified School District’s Board of Directors paused its school renaming initiative, ostensibly so it could focus on reopening the schools. Several well-known and respected scholars, journalists, and activists, including Columbia University’s John McWhorter, former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss, Harvard’s Steven Pinker, Coleman Hughes, and Chris Rufo, announced the creation of a new organization called Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, to push back against racial essentialism and intolerance.23 And in New York, New Jersey, and Virginia, Asian parents filed lawsuits to fight racial discrimination in high school admissions and defend meritocracy.24 No serious historian today would rank Harvey Milk’s advocacy of requiring people to pick up after their dogs as a particularly important aspect of his legacy.

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Ibid., xi–xii. 10. Ibid., 17. 11. Randolph Roth, “Yes We Can: Working Together Toward a History of Homicide That Is Empirically, Mathematically, and Theoretically Sound,” Crime, History and Societies 15, no. 2 (2011): 131–45, doi:10.4000/chs.1296. 12. Roth, American Homicide, 17. 13. Steven Pinker, Better Angels of Our Nature (New York: Penguin, 2011). 14. Eric Cummins, The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 8–9. 15. Ibid., photo insert. 16. Ibid., 26, 28. 17. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans.

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt
Published 14 Jun 2018

We discussed some alarming trends in this book, particularly in the chapters on America’s rising political polarization and rising rates of adolescent depression, anxiety, and suicide. These problems are serious, and we see no sign that either trend will be reversing in the next decade. And yet we are heartened and persuaded by cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker’s argument, in Enlightenment Now, that in the long run most things are getting better, quickly and globally. Pinker notes that there are many psychological reasons why people are—and have always been—prone to catastrophizing about the future. For example, some of the problems we discuss in this book are examples of the “problems of progress” that we described in the Introduction.

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We are grateful to the many friends, colleagues, and acquaintances who gave us valuable comments on one or more chapters, helped us analyze data, or provided their professional expertise: Jason Baehr, Andrew Becker, Caleb Bernard, Paul Bloom, Samantha Boardman, Bradley Campbell, Dennis Dalton, Clark Freshman, Brian Gallagher, Andrew Gates, Christopher Gates, Benjamin Ginsberg, Jesse Graham, Dan Griswold, Benjamin Haidt, Rebecca Haidt, Terry Hartle, Ravi Iyer, Robb Jones, Christina King, Susan Kresnicka, Calvin Lai, Marcella Larsen, Harry Lewis, Vanessa Lobue, Brian Lowe, Jason Manning, Ian McCready-Flora, John McWhorter, John Palfrey, Mike Paros, Nando Pelusi, Steven Pinker, Anne Rasmussen, Bradly Reed, Fabio Rojas, Kathleen Santora, Sally Satel, Steve Schultz, Mark Shulman, Nadine Strossen, Joshua Sullivan, Marianne Toldalagi, John Tomasi, Tracy Tomasso, Rebecca Tuvel, Lee Tyner, Steve Vaisey, Robert Von Hallberg, Zach Wood, and Jared Zuker. We thank Omar Mahmood for volunteering to create our website, TheCoddling.com.

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For a review of this literature, including the debate over whether “group selection” played a role in the human story, over and above individual selection, see Haidt (2012), chapter 9. For a contrary view, see: Pinker, S. (2012, June 18). The false allure of group selection. Edge. Retrieved from https://www.edge.org/conversation/steven_pinker-the-false-allure-of-group-selection 30. Chapter 10 of The Righteous Mind (Haidt, 2012) describes the “hive switch,” a psychological reflex in which self-interest is turned off and group interest becomes paramount; people lose themselves in the group. People can become tribal without the hive switch getting activated.

Free Will
by Sam Harris
Published 6 Mar 2012

Baumeister, E. J. Masicampo, & C. N. DeWall, 2009. Prosocial benefits of feeling free: Disbelief in free will increases aggression and reduces helpfulness. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 35: 260–268. 21. J. Diamond, 2008. Vengeance is ours. The New Yorker, April 21, 2001, pp. 74–87. 22. Steven Pinker, personal communication. INDEX actions: brain and, 69n freedom to reinterpret meaning of, 40 modification of, through punishment or incentives, 59–60 past, free will and, 6, 39–40, 77n as products of impersonal events, 27 seen as “self-generated,” 27–29 voluntary vs. involuntary, 12–13, 31–32, 41–42 see also intentions agency, sense of: experimental manipulation of, 24–25 free will and, 23–26 attention, directing of, as conscious act, 31–32 backward masking, 70n bacteria, in human bodies, 23–24 behavior, see actions brain: causal states of, 34 disorders and tumors of, 50, 51, 53–54, 55–56 dual systems in, 9, 32, 69n–70n medial prefrontal cortex of, 50, 58 as subject to laws of nature, 11–12 subliminal presentation of stimuli to, 70n–71n see also neurophysiology brain activity, as preceding consciousness of intent, 8–11 brain scans, 8–11, 24, 69n–72n chance, 27–28 see also luck change, possibility of, 62–63 child abuse, 3–4, 50, 51 choice: as causal brain state, 24 importance of, 34–35 as product of prior events, 34, 43–44 seeming spontaneity of, 6, 37 stories as explanations of, 35, 37, 43–44 see also intentions Clark, Tom, 20–23 cognition, 69n Cohen, Jonathan, 73n–74n compassion, 45 compatibilism, 15–26 free will as defined by, 16–17, 39–40, 74n moral responsibility and, 18 consciousness: delayed sensory feedback and, 73n as dependent on working memory, 72n free will and, 6, 26 intentions as appearing but not originating in, 8 unconscious origins of, 5, 7–14 Consciousness Explained (Dennett), 74n conservatives, free will and, 61–62 Coyne, Jerry, 76n criminals, criminal behavior: causes of, 3–5 as dangers to society, 52–53, 56 deterrence of, 56, 58–59 empathy for, 45–46 free will and, 17–18, 53 incarceration of, 53, 54, 58 moral responsibility and, 3, 17–18, 49–52 punishment of, see retribution rehabilitation of, 56, 58 Daniel (New Guinea highlander), 57 deliberative thinking, role of, 32–33 Dennett, Daniel, 20–23, 25, 33, 71n desires: mutually incompatible, 18–19 pathological, 18 determinism, 15, 74n fatalism vs., 33–34 moral responsibility and, 48–49 scientific validity of, 16, 29–30 DNA, mutations of, 29 Edelman, Gerald, 72n EEG (electroencephalogram), 8 Einstein, Albert, 75n–76n emotion, brain and, 69n emotional words, subliminal presentation of, 70n–71n empathy, 45–46 entitlement, sense of, 45 evolution, 29 existentialism, 40 experimental psychology, 69n–72n, 74n–75n fatalism, 46 determinism vs., 33–34 Ferriss, Tim, 36, 37 forgiveness, 45 fMRI, see functional magnetic resonance imaging freedom: as ability to act on beliefs, 38–39 sense of, as enhanced by loss of belief in free will, 46–47 social and political, 13 free will, as concept: as basis of justice system, 1, 23, 48, 54 compatibilist view of, see compatibilism consciousness and, 6, 26 conservatives and, 61–62 criminal behavior and, 17–18 determinist view of, see determinism hating and, 53–54 hypothetical requirements for, 13–14 as illusion, 5–6, 11, 22, 53 liberals and, 61 libertarianism and, 15–16, 74n luck vs., 4, 38, 53, 54, 61–62 past actions and, 6, 39–40, 77n rethinking justice system reliance on, 54, 56 retribution as dependent on sense of, 1 scientific validity lacking for, 6, 64–65 sense of agency and, 23–26 subjective validity lacking for, 6, 65 success and, 1 free will, sense of: chance and, 27–28 conceptual understanding of self vs., 22–23 as felt experience, 15, 22–23, 26 moral responsibility as dependent on, 16–17, 23, 27 as mystery, 64–65 as resulting from ignorance of unconscious origins of intentions, 13, 32, 60 seen as necessary illusion, 45–47 functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), 8 Greene, Joshua, 73n–74n hating, free will and, 53–54 Hayes, Steven, 1–4 Heisenberg, Martin, 27 Holocaust, 57 illusion: free will as, 5–6, 11, 22 necessary, sense of free will seen as, 45–47 incarceration, of criminals, 53, 54, 58 intentions: as appearing but not originating in consciousness, 8 brain activity as preceding consciousness of, 8–11 as causal brain state, 34 to do harm, 52–53 external and internal restraints on, 41–42 as product of prior events, 5–6, 19–20, 34, 60 soul and, 12 subjective mystery of, 13, 37–38, 39–40 unconscious origins of, 7–14 see also actions; choice ion channels, 27 justice system: and distinction between voluntary and involuntary actions, 31, 56 free will as basis of, 1, 23, 48 rethinking of reliance on free will, 54, 56 retribution and, 1, 48, 56 Komisarjevsky, Joshua, 1–4 laws of nature, 40 brain as subject to, 11–12 laziness, 62 liberals, free will and, 61 libertarianism, 15–16, 74n Libet, Benjamin, 8, 73n luck: free will vs., 4, 38, 53, 54, 61–62 moral responsibility and, 54 see also chance materialism, 11, 74n meaning, of actions, freedom to reinterpret, 40 medial prefrontal cortex, 50, 58 Meditations on Violence (Miller), 43–44 Miller, Rory, 43–44 moral responsibility, 48–60 and brain disorders, 50, 51, 53–54, 55–56 compatibilism and, 18 of criminals, 3 degrees of, 49–52 as dependent on sense of free will, 16–17, 23, 27 determination of, as dependent on overall complexion of mind, 49 determinism and, 48–49 and distinction between voluntary and involuntary actions, 31, 41–42 and fear of retribution, 58–59 luck and, 54 murder, 3–4, 12–13, 17, 18, 55, 57 mystery: origins of intentions as, 13, 37–38, 39–40 sense of free will as, 64–65 Nahmias, Eddy, 41–42 neuroimaging, 8–11, 24, 69n–72n neurophysiology, seen as part of the self, 20–22, 75n New Guinea, 57 New Yorker, 57 New York Times, 41–42 past actions, free will and, 6, 39–40, 77n Petit, Hayley, 2–3 Petit, Jennifer, 2–3 Petit, Michaela, 2–3 Petit, William, 2–3 philosophical materialism, 11, 74n philosophy, free will and, see compatibilism; determinism; libertarianism politics, 61–63 priming, 69n psychopaths, 51 punishment, see retribution quantum indeterminacy, 27, 29–30 rape, 3, 17, 46 rehabilitation, of criminals, 56, 58 religion, 18, 56 retribution: as dependent on sense of free will, 1 as deterrent, 58–59 human need for, 57–58 justice system and, 1, 48 religion and, 56 as resulting from ignorance of underlying causes of behavior, 55 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 75n–76n self, seen as comprising both conscious and unconscious processes, 20–22, 75n sensory feedback, consciousness and, 73n sin, 48, 56 soul, 56 intentions and, 12 libertarianism and, 16 stimuli, subliminal presentation of, 70n–71n stories, as explanation of choices, 35, 37, 43–44 Strawson, Galen, 74n, 75n success, free will and, 1 Supreme Court, U.S., 48 synaptic vesicles, 27 theology, 18, 56 unconscious, seen as part of the self, 20–22, 75n United States v.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next
by Jeanette Winterson
Published 15 Mar 2021

Uncanny Valley, Anna Wiener, 2020 The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir, 1949 Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Steven Levy, 1984 Psychology of Crowds, Gustave Le Bon, 1896 Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, Sheryl Sandberg, 2013 Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights, Helen Lewis, 2020 A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf, 1929 Your Computer Is on Fire, various editors, 2021 (haven’t read this at time of going to press but looks great) The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Steven Pinker, 2002 Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, Adrienne Rich, 1976 The Better Half: On the Genetic Superiority of Women, Sharon Moalem, 2020 Jurassic Car Park Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell, 1949 The War of the Worlds, H. G. Wells, 1898 People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent, Joseph Stiglitz, 2019 The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Elizabeth Kolbert, 2014 Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-hour Workweek, 2014, and Humankind: A Hopeful History, 2019, Rutger Bregman Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back, Mark O’Connell, 2020 The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker, 2011 Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside, Xiaowei Wang, 2020 Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Max Tegmark, 2017 The Alignment Problem: How Can Machines Learn Human Values?

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Wells, 1898 People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent, Joseph Stiglitz, 2019 The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Elizabeth Kolbert, 2014 Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-hour Workweek, 2014, and Humankind: A Hopeful History, 2019, Rutger Bregman Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back, Mark O’Connell, 2020 The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker, 2011 Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside, Xiaowei Wang, 2020 Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Max Tegmark, 2017 The Alignment Problem: How Can Machines Learn Human Values?, Brian Christian, 2021 I Love, Therefore I Am There is no reading list.

Antisemitism: Here and Now
by Deborah E. Lipstadt
Published 29 Jan 2019

Nussbaum describes BDS as a “symbolic” boycott that is intended to make a “public statement” about opposition to Israel’s policies.4 It’s another example of the attempt to toxify Israel. In response to an attempt in 2016 by the American Anthropological Association to sign on to the BDS initiative, the Harvard professor Steven Pinker issued a public statement that eloquently sums up the situation: [Are Israel’s] policies really so atrocious, so beyond the pale of acceptable behavior of nation-states, that they call for a unique symbolic statement that abrogates personal fairness and academic freedom? It helps to put the Israel-Palestine conflict in global and historical perspective—something that anthropologists, of all people, might be expected to do….Why no boycotts against academics from China, India, Russia, or Pakistan, to take a few examples, which have also been embroiled in occupations and violent conflicts, and which, unlike Israel, face no existential threat or enemies with genocidal statements in their charters?

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Why I’m an Anti-Anti-Zionist,” in Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israel-Palestine Conflict, ed. Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon (New York: Grove Press, 2003), pp. 226–32, reprinted in Tablet, August 13, 2014. 3. Drew Himmelstein, “Stanford Professors Take Stand Against Divestment,” Jweekly.com, March 12, 2015. 4. Nussbaum, “Against Academic Boycotts,” p. 47. 5. Steven Pinker, “Against Selective Demonization,” Against Anthro Boycott, https://www.facebook.com/​againstanthroboycott/​posts/​448002548722546. 6. Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 168–69, as quoted in Nelson and Brahm, The Case Against the Academic Boycott of Israel, p. 192. 7.

The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars
by Jo Marchant
Published 15 Jan 2020

Even seemingly subjective human attributes—our emotions, perceptions, morals—could be objectively explained as behavioral dispositions, selected for their survival value. And different conscious states were increasingly shown to correlate with physical states and mechanisms in the brain. Our awareness “can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or by insufficient oxygen,” pointed out Steven Pinker in his 1997 book How the Mind Works. So much, he said, for the supposedly immaterial soul. Science, it seemed, proved that consciousness is not a fundamental or necessary ingredient in the cosmos. Instead it’s a side effect or by-product of evolution, entirely caused by and dependent on the physical activity of our neurons.

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Respected figures are increasingly arguing that even without God, science is missing something big. In 2012, the atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel complained in his book Mind and Cosmos that the conventional mix of materialism and Darwinism “is incapable of providing an adequate account . . . of our universe.” He was widely criticized for it—Steven Pinker tweeted that the book exposed “the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker,” while Dennett said it was “not worth a damn”—but Nagel’s not alone. High-profile scientists, too, such as physicist Paul Davies and biologist Stuart Kauffman, reject the idea of a supernatural God but have questioned whether cosmic puzzles such as fine-tuning and consciousness can really be dismissed as random accidents.

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With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 130; quoted in Marin, “ ‘Mysticism’ in Quantum Mechanics.” The 1953 discovery: James Watson and Francis Crick, “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids,” Nature 171 (1953): 737–38. “bisected with a knife”: Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997), 64. grumbling questions: For example: Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life? (London: Allen Lane, 2006); Ryan Gillespie, “Cosmic Meaning, Awe and Absurdity in the Secular Age: A Critique of Religious Non-theism,” Harvard Theological Review 111 (2018): 461–87.

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature
by Steven Pinker
Published 10 Sep 2007

Table of Contents ABOUT THE AUTHOR Title Page Dedication Copyright Page PREFACE Chapter 1 - WORDS AND WORLDS Chapter 2 - DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE Chapter 3 - FIFTY THOUSAND INNATE CONCEPTS (AND OTHER RADICAL THEORIES OF ... Chapter 4 - CLEAVING THE AIR Chapter 5 - THE METAPHOR METAPHOR Chapter 6 - WHAT’S IN A NAME? Chapter 7 - THE SEVEN WORDS YOU CAN’T SAY ON TELEVISION Chapter 8 - GAMES PEOPLE PLAY Chapter 9 - ESCAPING THE CAVE NOTES REFERENCES INDEX Praise for The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker “Pinker brings an engaging and witty style to the study of subject matter that—were it not as important to us as it is complex—might otherwise be off-putting. . . . An inviting and important book. Everyone with an interest in language and how it gets to be how it is—that is, everyone interested in how we get to be human and do our human business—should read The Stuff of Thought.”

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[He] has changed the way we understand where we have come from and where we are going.” —Seth Lerer, The New York Sun “A fascinating look at how language provides a window into the deepest functioning of the human brain.” —Josie Glausiusz, Wired “A perceptive, amusing and intelligent book.” —Douglas Johnstone, The Times (London) “This is Steven Pinker at his best—theoretical insight combined with clear illustration and elegant research summary, presented throughout with an endearing wit and linguistic creativity which has become his hallmark. Metaphor, he says, with typical Pinkerian panache, ‘provides us with a way to eff the ineffable.’ The book requires steady concentration, but despite the abstract character of its subject matter it is not difficult to read.

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From politics to poetry, children’s wonderful malapropisms to slang, Pinker’s fluency in the nuances of words and syntax serves as proof of his faith in language as ‘a window into human nature.’ ” —Donna Seamon, Booklist “A book on semantics may not sound especially enticing, but with Pinker as your guide, pondering what the meaning of ‘is’ is can be mesmerizing.” —Details ABOUT THE AUTHOR Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology and Harvard College Professor at Harvard University. He is the author of seven books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, and The Blank Slate. He lives in Boston and Truro, Massachusetts. For Rebecca PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world
by Michael Pollan
Published 27 May 2002

The presence of flowers, as even I understood as a boy, is a reliable predictor of future food. People who were drawn to flowers, and who further could distinguish among them and then remember where in the landscape they’d seen them, would be much more successful foragers than people who were blind to their significance. According to the neuroscientist Steven Pinker, who outlines this theory in How the Mind Works, natural selection was bound to favor those among our ancestors who noticed flowers and had a gift for botanizing—for recognizing plants, classifying them, and then remembering where they grow. In time the moment of recognition—much like the quickening one feels whenever an object of desire is spotted in the landscape—would become pleasurable, and the signifying thing a thing of beauty.

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Possibly none at all: it’s a fallacy to assume that whatever is is that way for a good Darwinian reason. Just because a desire or practice is widespread or universal doesn’t necessarily mean it confers an evolutionary edge. In fact, the human penchant for drugs may be the accidental by-product of two completely different adaptive behaviors. This at least is the theory Steven Pinker proposes in How the Mind Works. He points out that evolution has endowed the human brain with two (formerly) unrelated faculties: its superior problem-solving abilities and an internal system of chemical rewards, such that when a person does something especially useful or heroic the brain is washed in chemicals that make it feel good.

Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference
by William MacAskill
Published 27 Jul 2015

—Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Give and Take “Effective altruism—efforts that actually help people rather than making you feel good or helping you show off—is one of the great new ideas of the twenty-first century. Doing Good Better is the definitive guide to this exciting new movement.” —Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and author of The Better Angels of Our Nature “Doing Good Better is a superb achievement. Will MacAskill, a leader of the effective altruism movement and a rising star in philosophy, now displays his talent for telling stories that pack a punch.

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(the death tolls from disasters form a fat-tailed distribution): A comprehensive overview is given by Anders Sandberg, “Power Laws in Global Catastrophic and Existential Risks,” unpublished paper, 2014. (Nassim Taleb describes these as Black Swans): Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House, 2007). most people who’ve died in war have died in the very worst wars: Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011). This is what the Skoll Global Threats Fund focuses on: “About Us/Mission & Strategy,” Skoll Global Threats Fund, http://www.skollglobalthreats.org/about-us/mission-and-approach/. GiveWell is currently investigating these sorts of activities: Alexander Berger, “Potential Global Catastrophic Risk Focus Areas,” GiveWell Blog, June 26, 2014, http://blog.givewell.org/2014/06/26/potential-global-catastrophic-risk-focus-areas/.

Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong-And the New Research That's Rewriting the Story
by Angela Saini
Published 29 May 2017

When the then president of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers, controversially suggested in 2005 that the shortfall of female scientists and mathematicians might be because of innate biological differences between women and men, Simon Baron-Cohen used this study to defend him. Harvard University cognitive scientist Steven Pinker and London School of Economics philosopher Helena Cronin have both deployed it to argue that innate differences between the sexes exist. It has even made it into a Bibleinspired self-help book, His Brain, Her Brain, about how “divinely designed differences” between the sexes can help strengthen a marriage.

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In his book The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating, published in 1994, he writes, “Because men’s and women’s desires differ, the qualities they must display differ,” adding that it makes sense for women to be naturally monogamous because “women over evolutionary history could often garner far more resources for their children through a single spouse than through several temporary sex partners.” This idea popped up again in a 1998 New Yorker article by the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker. Under the title “Boys Will Be Boys,” he used evolutionary psychology to defend US president Bill Clinton, whose affair with his intern Monica Lewinsky had just been made public. “Most human drives have ancient Darwinian rationales,” he writes. “A prehistoric man who slept with fifty women could have sired fifty children, and would have been more likely to have descendants who shared his tastes.

The Locavore's Dilemma
by Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu
Published 29 May 2012

And, just as important, globalization affords people all kinds of possibilities. About half a century ago, my parents never imagined how abundant and affordable their future food supply would turn out to be (let alone that one of their children would marry a foreigner and move to Canada). As the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker observes in The Better Angels of Our Nature, we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species’ existence. This blessed state of affairs, though, was a long time coming and was only made possible through the worldwide exchange of products, resources, ideas, and culture. Despite our current economic woes, we have almost vanquished famine.

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An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations Vol. 1, Book 4, Chapter 2: Of Restraints Upon the Importation from Foreign Countries of Such Goods as Can Be Produced at Home. .http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=237&chapter =212333&layout=html&Itemid=27. 55 For much evidence in this respect, see Steven Pinker. 2011. The Better Angels of our Nature. Viking. 56 Dennis T. Avery. 2000. Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Platics, 2nd edition. Hudson Institute, pp. 383–384. 57 We are not concerned here with rationing schemes, price controls, regulations and subsidies. This list was mainly derived from Karl Brandt (with Otto Schiller and Franz Ahlgrimm). 1953.

Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life
by Steven Johnson
Published 2 Jan 1999

To include biological perspectives in a discussion of human society by no means eliminates the validity of other kinds of explanations. What people like E. O. Wilson have proposed is not biological determinism, but rather biological consilience: the connecting of different layers of experience, each with its own distinct vocabulary and expertise, but each also possessing links up and down the chain. Steven Pinker describes it wonderfully: Good reductionism (also called hierarchical reductionism) consists not of replacing one field of knowledge with another but of connecting or unifying them. The building blocks used by one field are put under a microscope by another. The black boxes get opened; the promissory notes get cashed.

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He refers to these emotional cues as “somatic markers”-hints from your emotional subsystems that help you navigate complicated situations without having to process everything consciously: “trust this person,” “be on the lookout in this neighborhood.” 38. “I asked Baron-Cohen”: interview conducted January 2003. 39. “unable to detect fearful expressions”: Damasio, 1998, 65. 40. “both were seeing”: James, 89-90. 41. “cultural achievements of art”: This is one place where I think Steven Pinker and E. O. Wilson have it wrong. Here’s Pinker from The Blank Slate: “Modernism certainly proceeded as if human nature had changed. All the tricks that artists had used for millennia to please the human palate were cast aside. In painting, realistic depiction gave way to freakish distortions of shape and color and then to abstract grids, shapes, dribbles, splashes, and, in the $200,000 painting featured in the recent comedy Art, a blank white canvas.

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent
by Ben Shapiro
Published 26 Jul 2021

One day, you might be a ballyhooed champion of justice for standing up for gay rights or feminist ideals; the next day, you might be told that you have been banished to the cornfield for your refusal to acknowledge that a man calling himself a woman is not in fact a woman (Martina Navratilova or J. K. Rowling). One day, you might find yourself a hero of the intelligentsia for your cynicism about religion; the next, you might find yourself a villain for the great sin of suggesting that cancel culture breeds radicalization (Sam Harris or Steven Pinker). One day, you might be a well-respected opinion maker, considered de rigueur reading for your complex take on economics and sociology; the next, you might be considered a privileged white male worthy of excommunication (David Shor or Matthew Yglesias). This is not a question of Democrat or Republican.

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The history of Scientism is long and bleak—it contains support for eugenics, genocide, and massively misguided social engineering—but the popularity of Scientism hasn’t waned. Modern Scientism is a bit softer than all of that, but maintains the same premise: that science can answer all of our moral questions, that it can move us easily from the question of what is to the question of what ought to be done. Steven Pinker, a modern Scientism advocate, writes, “The Enlightenment principle that we can apply reason and sympathy to enhance human flourishing may seem obvious, trite, old-fashioned . . . I have come to realize that it is not.”19 The phrase “human flourishing” comes up a lot in the philosophy of Scientism.

The Strange Order of Things: The Biological Roots of Culture
by Antonio Damasio
Published 6 Feb 2018

After World War II, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the closest we have come to a desirable but so far unwritten international law, conferring the same rights to all humans; violations of those rights, in some parts of the world, can be brought before international tribunals as crimes against humanity. Humans are obligated to other humans and maybe one day they will also be obligated to other living species and to the planet they were born into. This is real progress. The circle of human concerns has definitely enlarged, as Amartya Sen, Onora O’Neill, Martha Nussbaum, Peter Singer, and Steven Pinker, among others, have noted.6 But why are we witnessing the weakening or collapse of the very establishments that have made these advances possible? Why have things gone wrong, once again, in humanity’s progress in ways that disturbingly resemble the past? Can biology help explain why? Is There a Biology Behind the Cultural Crisis?

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Amartya Sen, “The Economics of Happiness and Capability”; Onora O’Neill, Justice Across Boundaries: Whose Obligations? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Nussbaum, Political Emotions; Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011); Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Penguin Books, 2011). 7. See Haidt, Righteous Mind. 8. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents: The Standard Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010). 9. Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, Why War? The Correspondence Between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, trans.

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline
by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson
Published 5 Feb 2019

Hunger and disease are part of the problem: in medieval Europe, a typical Stage One society, about one third of all children died before the age of five, and if you did manage to grow up, chronic malnutrition meant that disease would probably carry you off in your fifties. If, that is, you weren’t killed. War and crime were constant threats in pre-industrial societies. And prehistory was even more violent. As Steven Pinker has observed, almost all prehistoric human specimens that have been preserved in bogs, ice fields, and the like show evidence of having died violently. “What is it about the ancients that they couldn’t leave us an interesting corpse without resorting to foul play?” he wondered.28 Hardly surprising, then, that from our first days until the Enlightenment, whether in China or the Americas or Europe or anywhere else, the population grew slowly if it grew at all.

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Donovan, The Native Population of the Americas in 1492 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 7. 26 Nathan Nunn and Nancy Quinn, “The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food and Ideas,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Spring 2010), p. 165. https://web.viu.ca/davies/H131/ColumbianExchange.pdf 27 World Population to 2300 (New York: United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs/Population Division, 2004), Table 2. All historical global population numbers are drawn from this table. http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/WorldPop2300final.pdf 28 Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Penguin, 2011). 29  Alfred Crosby, Germs, Seeds and Animals: Studies in Ecological History (New York: Routledge, 1994). 30 Pamela K. Gilbert, “On Cholera in Nineteenth Century England,” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History (2013). http://www.branchcollective.org/?

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 1 Mar 2015

Humans are masters of cognitive dissonance, and we allow ourselves to believe one thing in the laboratory and an altogether different thing in the courthouse or in parliament. Just as Christianity didn’t disappear the day Darwin published On the Origin of Species, so liberalism won’t vanish just because scientists have reached the conclusion that there are no free individuals. Indeed, even Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker and the other champions of the new scientific world view refuse to abandon liberalism. After dedicating hundreds of erudite pages to deconstructing the self and the freedom of will, they perform breathtaking intellectual somersaults that miraculously land them back in the eighteenth century, as if all the amazing discoveries of evolutionary biology and brain science have absolutely no bearing on the ethical and political ideas of Locke, Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson.

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Ling et al., ‘A New Antibiotic Kills Pathogens without Detectable Resistance’, Nature 517 (2015), 455–9; Gerard Wright, ‘Antibiotics: An Irresistible Newcomer’, Nature 517 (2015), 442–4. 21. Roey Tzezana, The Guide to the Future [in Hebrew] (Haifa: Roey Tzezana, 2013), 209–33. 22. Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 130–1; Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011); Joshua S. Goldstein, Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide (New York: Dutton, 2011); Robert S. Walker and Drew H. Bailey, ‘Body Counts in Lowland South American Violence’, Evolution and Human Behavior 34:1 (2013), 29–34; I.

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‘Evolution, Creationism, Intelligent Design’, Gallup, accessed 20 December 2014, http://www.gallup.com/poll/21814/evolution-creationism-intelligent-design.aspx; Frank Newport, ‘In US, 46 per cent Hold Creationist View of Human Origins’, Gallup, 1 June 2012, accessed 21 December 2014, http://www.gallup.com/poll/155003/hold-creationist-view-human-origins.aspx. 2. Gregg, Are Dolphins Really Smart?, 82–3. 3. Stanislas Dehaene, Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts (New York: Viking, 2014); Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). 4. Dehaene, Consciousness and the Brain. 5. Pundits may point to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, according to which no system of mathematical axioms can prove all arithmetic truths. There will always be some true statements that cannot be proven within the system.

Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To
by David A. Sinclair and Matthew D. Laplante
Published 9 Sep 2019

As yet, there is really no evidence in modern times that population levels correlate with, let alone cause, increases in human misery. Much to the contrary, in fact, our world is more populated today than it ever has been—and it’s a better place for more people, too. The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker put it this way in his book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress: “Most people agree that life is better than death. Health is better than sickness. Sustenance is better than hunger. Abundance is better than poverty. Peace is better than war. Safety is better than danger.

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Thus it is that wall-to-wall shelves dedicated to records and compact discs have been replaced by streaming music services; people who once needed vehicles for once-in-a-while travel now open an app on their phones to request a ride share; and entire wings of hospitals once used for storing patients’ records have been supplanted by handheld cloud-connected tablet computers. As Steven Pinker has pointed out, a lot of the time, energy, and money we once spent making “stuff” is now “directed toward cleaner air, safer cars and drugs for ‘orphan diseases.’ ”29 Meanwhile, the “experiences, not things” movements and the like are transforming the ways in which we save and spend money—and leaving us with less crap in our basements.

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Our World in Data’s Max Roser pointed out that in sub-Saharan Africa child mortality has dropped consistently over the past fifty years; whereas it was one in four in the 1960s, it’s now one in ten. M. Roser, “Child Mortality,” Our World in Data, https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality. 60. Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Viking, 2018), 51. 61. Among her many charms, gifts, and abilities, there was also a dry, self-deprecating wit. At a luncheon for women executives shortly before her death, Thompson said about what was her last marathon, “I didn’t get much attention, even though I was coming in first—I was the only one in my age group.”

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism
by Ed West
Published 19 Mar 2020

When, for example, quotas for women in politics are discussed on the radio it’s taken as a starting premise that, given true equality of opportunity, most industries would move towards a fifty–fifty gender balance, because differences between men and women must be socially constructed.16 This is certainly untrue, but anyone who said so on radio would be cast as wildly extreme, almost deranged. It’s partly that the Left’s vision of human nature is also a better selling point, a more optimistic story. Steven Pinker famously observed in his book The Blank Slate (2002) that ‘Sophisticated people sneer at feel-good comedies and saccharine romances in which all loose ends are tied and everyone lives happily ever after. Yet when it comes to the science of human beings, this same audience says: Give us schmaltz.’

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Many ‘were skilled artisans such as clockmakers who were threated economically and psychologically by changes that made their skills obsolete and their old social ties harder to sustain’. 11 In 1813 Owen had outlined his philosophy in A New View of Society, or Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character (London: Cadell and Davies, 1813). 12 Dr Lyman Warren, recorded in the Periodical Letters (1856) from New Harmony, Indiana. 13 He misquoted William Gladstone deliberately to make him seem more evil, quoting ‘this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power is entirely confined to classes of poverty’ without the context of the passage beforehand. He also falsified quotations by Adam Smith and even in the 1880s two Cambridge scholars found that the sources he cited were entirely out of date. 14 Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Viking, 2018). 15 Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology (Princeton: Princeton, 1995). 16 Giovanni Gentile, ‘The Doctrine of Fascism’, Enciclopedia Italiana (Roma: Treccani, 1932). 17 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/25/wristbands-red-doors-refugees-history-rhyming-holocaust-echoes-of-past. 18 https://twitter.com/adhofstra/status/691665680450637824. 8.

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safe_file-name=Thesis%2BCarl.pdf&file_format=application%2Fpdf&type_of_work=Thesis. 11 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/08/france-is-50-years-behind-the-state-scandal-of-french-autism-treatment. 12 https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-feb-18-oe-dufresne18-story.html. 13 Mao Zedong, ‘Introducing a Cooperative’ (15 April 1958). 14 https://osf.io/ezg2j/. 15 Locke argued that we were born without any preconceived ideas and so could all acquire the necessary knowledge to make us rational. 16 Broadly speaking. As Steven Pinker wrote in The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin, 2002), there are two types of feminism: ‘Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology. Gender feminism is an empirical doctrine committed to three claims about human nature.

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
Published 20 Jan 2014

As the roboticist Hans Moravec has observed, “It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult-level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility.”27 This situation has come to be known as Moravec’s paradox, nicely summarized by Wikipedia as “the discovery by artificial intelligence and robotics researchers that, contrary to traditional assumptions, high-level reasoning requires very little computation, but low-level sensorimotor skills require enormous computational resources.”28* Moravec’s insight is broadly accurate, and important. As the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker puts it, “The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. . . . As the new generation of intelligent devices appears, it will be the stock analysts and petrochemical engineers and parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines.

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Hans Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 15. 28. “Moravec’s Paradox,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, April 28, 2013, http://en.wiki pedia.org/w/index.php?title=Moravecpercent27s_paradox&oldid=540679203. 29. Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (New York: HarperPerennial ModernClassics, 2007), p. 190–91. 30. Christopher Drew, “For iRobot, the Future Is Getting Closer,” New York Times, March 2, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/03/technology/for-irobot-the-future-is-getting-closer.html. 31. Danielle Kucera, “Amazon Acquires Kiva Systems in Second-Biggest Takeover,” Bloomberg, March 19, 2012, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-19/amazon-acquires-kiva-systems-in-second-biggest-takeover.html (accessed June 23, 2013). 32.

The Post-American World: Release 2.0
by Fareed Zakaria
Published 1 Jan 2008

Ted Robert Gurr and a team of scholars at the University of Maryland’s Center for International Development and Conflict Management tracked the data carefully and came to the following conclusion: “the general magnitude of global warfare has decreased by over sixty percent [since the mid-1980s], falling by the end of 2004 to its lowest level since the late 1950s.”1 Violence increased steadily throughout the Cold War—increasing sixfold between the 1950s and early 1990s—but the trend peaked just before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and “the extent of warfare among and within states lessened by nearly half in the first decade after the Cold War.” Harvard’s polymath professor Steven Pinker argues “that today we are probably living in the most peaceful time in our species’ existence.”2 One reason for the mismatch between reality and our sense of it might be that, over these same decades, we have experienced a revolution in information technology that now brings us news from around the world instantly, vividly, and continuously.

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Notes 2. The Cup Runneth Over 1. Ted Robert Gurr and Monty G. Marshall, Peace and Conflict 2005: A Global Survey of Armed Conflicts, Self-Determination Movements, and Democracy, Center for International Development and Conflict Management, University of Maryland, College Park (June 2005). 2. Steven Pinker, “A Brief History of Violence” (talk at Technology, Entertainment, Design Conference, Monterey, Calif., March 2007). 3. Kevin H. O’Rourke, “The European Grain Invasion, 1870–1913,” Journal of Economic History 57, no. 4 (Dec. 1997): 775–801. 4. For a good, accessible discussion of the late nineteenth-century “positive supply shock,” see Gary Saxonhouse, “The Integration of Giants into the Global Economy,” AEI: Asian outlook, no. 1 (Jan. 31, 2006). 5.

Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 1 Jan 2002

Hassing, “Darwinian Natural Right?,” Interpretation 27 (2000): 129–160; and Larry Arnhart, “Defending Darwinian Natural Right,” Interpretation 27 (2000): 263–277. 18 Arnhart (1998), pp. 31–36. 19 Donald Brown, Human Universals (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), p. 77. 20 See, for example, Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom, “Natural Language and Natural Selection,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (1990): 707–784; and Pinker, The Language Instinct (New York: HarperCollins, 1994). 21 For a critique, see Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) pp. 57–60. 22 The argument about time was made by Benjamin Lee Whorf with regard to the Hopi, while the argument about color was a commonplace in anthropology textbooks.

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Sloan, ed., Controlling Our Desires: Historical, Philosophical, Ethical, and Theological Perspectives on the Human Genome Project (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), p. 367. 26 It is in fact very difficult to come up with a Darwinian explanation for the human enjoyment of music. See Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), pp. 528–538. 27 See, for example, Arthur Peacocke, “Relating Genetics to Theology on the Map of Scientific Knowledge,” in Sloan (2000), pp. 346–350. 28 Laplace’s exact words were: “We ought then to regard the present state of the universe [not just the solar system] as the effect of its anterior state and as the cause of the one which is to follow.

The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It)
by Michael R. Strain
Published 25 Feb 2020

Princeton University Press, 2017, 484. 29.Gordon, 464. 30.Centers for Disease Control, Age-adjusted death rates for selected causes of death, by sex, race, and Hispanic origin: United States, selected years 1950–2017 (Trend Tables). Health United States–2018. 31.Gordon, 471. 32.Gordon, 455. 33.Gordon, 400. 34.Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Penguin, 2018, 59. 35.Pinker, 251. 36.Pinker, 251. 37.Pinker, 256. 38.Pinker, 257. 39.Susanna Locke, “You’re Less Likely to Die in a Car Crash Nowadays - Here’s Why.” Vox. Published April 6, 2014. Accessed October 19, 2018. 40.CNN Newsroom, “Sen.

The Future of War
by Lawrence Freedman
Published 9 Oct 2017

The historian John Keegan wondered whether: ‘War… may well be ceasing to commend itself to human beings as a desirable or productive, let alone rational, means of reconciling their discontents.’3 The political scientist John Mueller had long taken a similar view: ‘like duelling and slavery, war does not appear to be one of life’s necessities’. It was a ‘social affliction, but in certain important respects it is also a social affectation that can be shrugged off.’4 The cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, published in 2011, marshalled a great array of sources to offer an even more encouraging prospect. Slowly but surely over human history, he reported, there had been a steady move away from reliance on violence to settle disputes.5 The reason for this was normative progress, for among ‘influential constituencies in developed countries’ there was a growing ‘conviction that war is inherently immoral because of its costs to human well-being.’

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Perhaps as many as 1 million died in prison or forced deportations while it was underway.20 Demographic analysis suffered because the last pre-war census was falsified to play down the impact of the forced collectivisation of the 1930s.21 So while most estimates of the costs of war to the Soviet Union stayed close to 28 million, some reputable analysts considered it reasonable to go as high as 35 million.22 Estimates of military deaths ranged from 5 to 14 million and of civilian deaths from 7 to more than 18 million. COW’s figure of 7.5 million Soviet battle deaths, with no mention of civilian deaths, was certainly too low, and barely conveyed one aspect of the Soviet experience. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker used 55 million total dead for the Second World War, but if numbers from the higher end of the range with Germany and the Soviet Union were taken, as well as China, where the true numbers are also hard to calculate but have been put conservatively at 14 million, then the total approached 85 million.23 With the more recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the cost of occupying those countries was much less than that of dealing with the insurgencies.

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This first appeared as ‘The Long Peace: Elements of Stability in the Postwar International System’, International Security 10.4 (1986). 3. John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Knopf, 1993) 59. 4. John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989) 13. 5. Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (London: Penguin Books, 2011). 6. Pinker 290–1. 7. Pinker 50. 8. Human Security Report Project, Human Security Report 2013: The Decline in Global Violence: Evidence, Explanation, and Contestation (Vancouver: Human Security Press, 2013). 9.

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
by Walter Isaacson
Published 9 Mar 2021

Author’s interviews with Ting Wu, George Church, Jennifer Doudna; Johnny Kung, “Increasing Policymaker’s Interest in Genetics,” pgEd briefing paper, Dec. 1, 2015. 13. Jennifer Doudna, “Embryo Editing Needs Scrutiny,” Nature, Dec. 3, 2015. 14. George Church, “Encourage the Innovators,” Nature, Dec. 3, 2015. 15. Steven Pinker, “A Moral Imperative for Bioethics,” Boston Globe, Aug. 1, 2015; Paul Knoepfler, Steven Pinker interview, The Niche, Aug. 10, 2015. 16. Author’s interviews with Jennifer Doudna, David Baltimore, and George Church; International Summit on Human Gene Editing, Dec. 1–3, 2015 (National Academies Press, 2015); Jef Akst, “Let’s Talk Human Engineering,” The Scientist, Dec. 3, 2015. 17.

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“Banning human-germline editing could put a damper on the best medical research and instead drive the practice underground to black markets and uncontrolled medical tourism.”14 Church’s bio-enthusiasm was given a boost in the popular press by one of his Harvard colleagues, the well-known psychology professor Steven Pinker. “The primary moral goal for today’s bioethics can be summarized in a single sentence,” he wrote in an op-ed for the Boston Globe. “Get out of the way.” He took a brutal swipe at the entire profession of bioethicists. “A truly ethical bioethics should not bog down research in red tape, moratoria, or threats of prosecution based on nebulous but sweeping principles such as ‘dignity,’ ‘sacredness,’ or ‘social justice,’ ” he argued.

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Published 1 Jan 2001

However, they believe that the reason lies in the way things are presented to us in the current environment. To them, we are optimized for a set of probabilistic reasoning, but in a different environment than the one prevailing today. The statement “Our brains are made for fitness not for truth” by the scientific intellectual Steven Pinker, the public spokesmen of that school, summarizes it all. They agree that our brains are not made for understanding things but think that they are not biased, or only biased because we do not use them in their real habitat. Strangely, the Kahneman-Tversky school of researchers did not incur any credible resistance from the opinions of the economists of the time (the general credibility of conventional economists has always been so low that almost nobody in science or in the real world ever pays attention to them).

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I drew the idea from Daniel Kahneman’s presentation in Rome in April 2003 (Kahneman, 2003). Cognitive errors in forecasting: Tversky and Kahneman (1971), Tversky and Kahneman (1982), and Lichtenstein, Fischhoff and Phillips (1977). Utopian/tragic: The essayist and prominent (scientific) intellectual Steven Pinker popularized the distinction (originally attributable to the political scholar Thomas Sowell). See Sowell (1987), Pinker (2002). Actually, the distinction is not so clear. Some people actually believe, for instance, that Milton Friedman is a utopist in the sense that all ills come from governments and that getting rid of government would be a great panacea.

Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes
by Maria Konnikova
Published 3 Jan 2013

I am incredibly grateful to everyone who has been there to guide and support me throughout it all: to my family and wonderful friends, I love you all and wouldn’t have even gotten started, let alone finished, with this book without you; and to all of the scientists, researchers, scholars, and Sherlock Holmes aficionados who have helped guide me along the way, a huge thank you for your tireless assistance and endless expertise. I’d like to thank especially Steven Pinker, the most wonderful mentor and friend I could ever imagine, who has been selfless in sharing his time and wisdom with me for close to ten years (as if he had nothing better to do). His books were the reason I first decided to study psychology—and his support is the reason I am still here. Richard Panek, who helped shepherd the project from its inception through to its final stages, and whose advice and tireless assistance were essential to getting it off the ground (and keeping it there).

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Prelude For those interested in a more detailed history of mindfulness and its impact, I would recommend Ellen Langer’s classic Mindfulness. Langer has also published an update to her original work, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility. For an integrated discussion of the mind, its evolution, and its natural abilities, there are few better sources than Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate and How the Mind Works. Chapter One: The Scientific Method of the Mind For the history of Sherlock Holmes and the background of the Conan Doyle stories and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s life, I’ve drawn heavily on several sources: Leslie Klinger’s The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes; Andrew Lycett’s The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes; and John Lellenerg, Daniel Stashower, and Charles Foley’s Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters.

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World
by Adam Grant
Published 2 Feb 2016

When identical twins grow up in the same family, they’re no more similar to each other than identical twins who are separated at birth and raised by different families. “The same is true of non-twin siblings—they are no more similar when reared together than when reared apart,” Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker summarizes. “And adopted siblings are no more similar than two people plucked off the street at random.” This holds for originality. In adulthood, adopted siblings don’t resemble each other at all in tendencies toward non-conformity or risk taking, despite having been raised by the same parents.

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Averett, and Benjama Witoonchart, “Birth Order and Risky Adolescent Behavior,” Economic Inquiry 44 (2006): 215–33; Daniela Barni, Michele Roccato, Alessio Vieno, and Sara Alfieri, “Birth Order and Conservatism: A Multilevel Test of Sulloway’s ‘Born to Rebel’ Thesis,” Personality and Individual Differences 66 (2014): 58–63. When identical twins grow up: Steven Pinker, “What Is the Missing Ingredient—Not Genes, Not Upbringing—That Shapes the Mind?,” Edge, edge.org/response-detail/11078, and The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin Books, 2003); Eric Turkheimer and Mary Waldron, “Nonshared Environment: A Theoretical, Methodological, and Quantitative Review,” Psychological Bulletin 126 (2000): 78–108; Robert Plomin and Denise Daniels, “Why Are Children in the Same Family So Different from Each Other?

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
by Alan Cooper
Published 24 Feb 2004

These subjects were highly educated, mature, and rational individuals, and they all strongly denied being emotionally affected by cognitive friction, even though the objective evidence was incontrovertible. Harvard cognitive neuroscientist Steven Pinker corroborates this thesis in his remarkable book, How the Mind Works. He says, "People hold many beliefs that are at odds with their experience but were true in the environment in which we evolved, and they pursue goals that subvert their own well-being but were adaptive in that environment."[3] [3] Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works, W.W. Norton & Company, 1997, ISBN 0-39304535-8. I absolutely love this wonderful, eye-opening, literate, amusing, readable book.

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 21 Mar 2013

Birds do it, bees do it . . . free market economies do it. And now we have the fractals with which to catch them all in the act. Scientists from across the spectrum leaped on the systems bandwagon, applying what began as a mathematical proof of market equilibrium to, well, pretty much everything. Linguist Steven Pinker saw in Hayek and systems theory a new justification for his advancement of evolutionary psychology and his computational theory of mind: “Hayek was among the first to call attention to the emergence of large-scale order from individual choices. The phenomenon is ubiquitous, and not just in economic markets: What makes everyone suddenly drive SUVs, name their daughters Madison rather than Ethel or Linda, wear their baseball caps backwards, raise their pitch at the end of a sentence?

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(New York: Random House, 2009). 11. Archibald MacLeish, “Bubble of Blue Air,” New York Times, December 25, 1968, p. 1. 12. Lenora Foerstal and Angela Gilliam, Confronting Margaret Mead: Scholarship, Empire, and the South Pacific (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 126–27. 13. Steven Pinker, quoted in Nick Gillespie, “Hayek’s Legacy,” Reason, January 2005. 14. James Surowiecki, quoted in Gillespie, ibid. 15. See Manuel De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 16. Jeff Sommer, “A Market Forecast That Says ‘Take Cover,’” New York Times, July 3, 2010. 17.

The End of Men: And the Rise of Women
by Hanna Rosin
Published 31 Aug 2012

Questionnaires and studies measuring hostile acts show that men remain more likely than women to hit or yell or deliver what they believe to be electric shocks. Neuroscientist Lise Eliot explains the crude logic of this phenomenon in Pink Brain, Blue Brain: “You can’t face down a fierce opponent if you’re distracted by how he might be feeling.” In The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker attributes the historical decrease in violence partly to the feminization of culture. It’s not merely that men are vastly more likely to play violent games, vote for warlike policies, or commit violent crimes, or that women like to start pacifist organizations, he writes. What’s driving the change is a vast feminization of culture of the kind conservatives like to complain about, a swapping of the old manly codes of martial glory for a more feminine emphasis on justice and empathy.

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global homicide statistics show that men:”2011 Global Study on Homicide,” United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2011, p.70. http://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/statistics/Homicide/Globa_study_on_homicide_2011_web.pdf. Neuroscientist Lise Eliot explains: Lise Eliot, Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow into Troublesome Gaps—and What We Can Do About It (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), p. 260. attributes the historical decrease in violence : Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011). Jesse Prinz points out in his recent influential article: Jesse Prinz, “Why Are Men So Violent?” Psychology Today, February 3, 2012. As best-selling crime writer Patricia Cornwell: Sam Tanenhaus, “Violence That Art Didn’t See Coming,” The New York Times, February 24, 2010.

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
by David Wallace-Wells
Published 19 Feb 2019

This complexity may also be one reason we cannot see the threat of escalating war very clearly, choosing to regard conflict as something determined primarily by politics and economics when all three are in fact governed, like everything else, by the conditions established by our rapidly changing climate. Over the last decade or so, the linguist Steven Pinker has made a second career out of suggesting that, in the West especially, we are unable to appreciate human progress—are in fact blind to all of the massive and rapid improvements the world has witnessed in less violence and war and poverty, reduced infant mortality, and enhanced life expectancy.

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Cullen et al., “Climate Change and the Collapse of the Akkadian Empire: Evidence from the Deep Sea,” Geology 28, no. 4 (April 2000): pp. 379–82; Kyle Harper, “How Climate Change and Disease Helped the Fall of Rome,” Aeon, December 15, 2017, https://aeon.co/ideas/how-climate-change-and-disease-helped-the-fall-of-rome. six categories: Center for Climate and Security, “Epicenters of Climate and Security: The New Geostrategic Landscape of the Anthropocene” (Washington, D.C., June 2017), pp. 12–17, https://climateandsecurity.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/1_eroding-sovereignty.pdf. linguist Steven Pinker: For Pinker’s case for the world’s improvement, see Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2012); for his argument about why we can’t appreciate that improvement, see Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Viking, 2018).

The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism
by Ruth Kinna
Published 31 Jul 2019

Indeed, though an atheist he has also acknowledged that his ‘Presbyterian upbringing’ had an important effect ‘inasmuch as it was rooted in the principles of popular sovereignty, the perfectibility of man, and the belief that it was neither safe nor right to act against one’s conscience’.20 Behind convergence is the idea that it is possible to decouple what Steven Pinker calls the ‘primary colors of our moral sense’ from the political theologies that institutionalize them. Recent research suggests that [p]eople everywhere, at least in some circumstances and with certain other folks in mind, think it’s bad to harm others and good to help them. They have a sense of fairness: that one should reciprocate favors, reward benefactors and punish cheaters.

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, an interview with bell hooks, Randy Lowens, June 2009, Common Struggle/Lucha Común, online at http://nefac.net/bellhooks [last access 4 June 2018]. 20 Andrew Stevens, ‘Looking Back at Anger’, an interview with Stuart Christie, 3am Magazine, 2004, online at http://www.3ammagazine.com/politica/2004/apr/interview_stuart_christie.html [last access 15 June 2018]. 21 Steven Pinker, ‘The Moral Instinct’, The New York Times Magazine, 13 January 2008, online at https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html [last access 4 June 2018]. 22 Peter Kropotkin, ‘Letter to French and British Trade Union Delegates’ [1901], in I. McKay (ed.), Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology (Edinburgh, Oakland, and Baltimore: AK Press, 2014), p. 360. [359–61]. 23 Holly Devon, ‘Defending the Collective: an Interview with Malik Rahim’, Iron Lattice, 11 April 2017, online at http://theironlattice.com/index.php/2017/04/11/defending-the-collective-an-interview-with-malik-rahim/ [last access 4 June 2018]. 24 Holly Devon, ‘Defending the Collective: an Interview with Malik Rahim’. 25 Tim Shorrock, ‘The Street Samaritans’, Mother Jones, March/April 2006, online at https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/03/street-samaritans-2/ [last access 4 June 2018]. 26 Neille Ilel, ‘A Healthy Dose of Anarchy’, Reason, December 2006, online at https://reason.com/archives/2006/12/11/a-healthy-dose-of-anarchy [last access 4 June 2018]. 27 Murray Rothbard, ‘The Political Thought of Étienne de la Boétie’, introduction to The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude by Etienne de la Boétie, trans.

The Four Horsemen
by Christopher Hitchens , Richard Dawkins , Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett
Published 19 Mar 2019

*21 William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925): US Democratic politician and orator; anti-evolution activist, representing the World Christian Fundamentals Association at the Scopes trial of 1925. *22 Noam Chomsky (b. 1928): US linguist and multidisciplinary scholar; highly influential in study of mind and language. *23 Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), p. ix. *24 John Cornwell (b. 1940): British academic and writer; works include Hitler’s Pope (1999), a critical work on Pope Pius XII. *25 In May 2005, British anti-war activist and MP George Galloway (who would debate with Christopher Hitchens in September on the Iraq War) was alleged to have profited from the UN’s oil-for-food programme in Iraq, which he denied in testimony before a US Senate committee, saying: ‘I am not now, nor have I ever been, an oil trader – and neither has anyone on my behalf.

The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
by Richard Dawkins
Published 1 Jan 2004

A historically minded swift, understandably proud of flight as self-evidently the premier accomplishment of life, will regard swiftkind -- those spectacular flying machines with their swept-back wings, who stay aloft for a year at a time and even copulate in free flight -- as the acme of evolutionary progress. To build on a fancy of Steven Pinker, if elephants could write history they might portray tapirs, elephant shrews, elephant seals and proboscis monkeys as tentative beginners along the main trunk road of evolution, taking the first fumbling steps but each -- for some reason -- never quite making it: so near yet so far. Elephant astronomers might wonder whether, on some other world, there exist alien life forms that have crossed the nasal rubicon and taken the final leap to full proboscitude.

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Nobody thinks writing goes back more than a few thousand years, and everyone agrees that brain anatomy didn't change to coincide with anything so recent as the invention of writing. In theory, speech could be another example of the same thing. Nevertheless, my hunch, supported by the authority of linguists such as Steven Pinker, is that language is older than the Leap. We'll come back to the point a million years further into the past, when our pilgrimage reaches Homo ergaster(erectus). If not language itself, perhaps the Great Leap Forward coincided with the sudden discovery of what we might call a new software technique: maybe a new trick of grammar, such as the conditional clause, which, at a stroke, would have enabled 'what if' imagination to flower.

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Other scientists, studying the base of the skull, have concluded that even Neanderthals, as recently as 60,000 years ago, were speechless. The evidence is that their throat shape would not have allowed the full range of vowels that we deploy. On the other hand, as the linguist and evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker has remarked, 'e lengeege weth e smell nember ef vewels cen remeen quete expresseve'. If written Hebrew can be intelligible without vowels, I don't see why spoken Neander or even Ergaster couldn't too. The veteran South African anthropologist Philip Tobias suspects that language may pre-date even Homo ergaster, and he may just possibly be right.

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future
by John Brockman
Published 18 Jan 2011

Dennett The Rediscovery of Fire: Chris Anderson The Rise of Social Media Is Really a Reprise: June Cohen The Internet and the Loss of Tranquility: Noga Arikha The Greatest Detractor to Serious Thinking Since Television: Leo Chalupa The Large Information Collider, BDTs, and Gravity Holidays on Tuesdays: Paul Kedrosky The Web Helps Us See What Isn’t There: Eric Drexler Knowledge Without, Focus Within, People Everywhere: David Dalrymple A Level Playing Field: Martin Rees Move Aside, Sex: Seth Lloyd Rivaling Gutenberg: John Tooby The Shoulders of Giants: William Calvin Brain Candy and Bad Mathematics: Mark Pagel Publications Can Perish: Robert Shapiro Will the Great Leveler Destroy Diversity of Thought?: Frank J. Tipler We Have Become Hunter-Gatherers of Images and Information: Lee Smolin The Human Texture of Information: Jon Kleinberg Not at All: Steven Pinker This Is Your Brain on Internet: Terrence Sejnowski The Sculpting of Human Thought: Donald Hoffman What Kind of a Dumb Question Is That?: Andy Clark Public Dreaming: Thomas Metzinger The Age of (Quantum) Information?: Anton Zeilinger Edge, A to Z (Pars Pro Toto): Hans Ulrich Obrist The Degradation of Predictability—and Knowledge: Nassim N.

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In the thirteen years since I finished graduate school, the Internet has steadily and incontrovertibly advanced the argument that computer science is not just about technology but about human beings as well—about the power of human beings to collectively create knowledge and engage in self-expression on a global scale. This has been a thrilling development, and one that points to a new phase in our understanding of what people and technology can accomplish together, and about the world we’ve grown to jointly inhabit. Not at All Steven Pinker Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology; Harvard University; author, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature As someone who believes both in human nature and in timeless standards of logic and evidence, I’m skeptical of the common claim that the Internet is changing the way we think.

Conscious Capitalism, With a New Preface by the Authors: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business
by John Mackey , Rajendra Sisodia and Bill George
Published 7 Jan 2014

Consider the following: Until 150 years ago, slavery was widely accepted by a large number of people around the world and was the law of the land in many countries; 100 years ago, most people (including many women) thought it acceptable to deny women the right to vote; 75 years ago, colonialism was still widespread and generally accepted; 50 years ago, most people accepted racial segregation as a way of life; 40 years ago, few people knew much or cared about environmental issues; 25 years ago, communism was still seen by many as a viable way to organize our economic and political lives.8 One key indicator of rising consciousness is declining violence. As Steven Pinker documents in his recent book, the present era is “less violent, less cruel and more peaceful” than any other in human history. There is less violence in families, in neighborhoods, and among countries. The probability of dying violently, through war, terrorism, attacks by animals, or murder, is lower than any time previously.

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GfK Mediamark Research & Intelligence, “Median Age, Household Income and Individual Employment Income,” GfK MRI Spring Technical Guide, www.gfkmri.com/mri/techguide/spr2011/med_age_hhi_iei_sp11.pdf. 8. Women were granted the right to vote in the United States in 1920. Shockingly, women did not have the right to vote in most of Switzerland until 1971; in 2010, a majority of Switzerland’s cabinet ministers were women. 9. Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011). These examples illustrate that as we become more conscious, our ethical standards and practices evolve upward to higher levels. Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan’s research provides evidence that our ethics tend to evolve over time up several distinct ethical levels or stages from “obedience to avoid punishment” at the first stage up to “universal justice and love” at the highest stage.

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
by Steven Pinker
Published 1 Jan 2014

Contents Prologue Chapter 1: GOOD WRITING Chapter 2: A WINDOW ONTO THE WORLD Chapter 3: THE CURSE OF KNOWLEDGE Chapter 4: THE WEB, THE TREE, AND THE STRING Chapter 5: ARCS OF COHERENCE Chapter 6: TELLING RIGHT FROM WRONG Notes Glossary References Acknowledgments Follow Penguin BY THE SAME AUTHOR Language Learnability and Language Development Learnability and Cognition The Language Instinct How the Mind Works Words and Rules The Blank Slate The Stuff of Thought The Better Angels of Our Nature Language, Cognition, and Human Nature: Selected Articles EDITED BY STEVEN PINKER Visual Cognition Connections and Symbols (with Jacques Mehler) Lexical and Conceptual Semantics (with Beth Levin) The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004 To Susan Pinker and Robert Pinker who have a way with words Prologue I love style manuals. Ever since I was assigned Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style in an introductory psychology course, the writing guide has been among my favorite literary genres.

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Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, Block D, Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North, Gauteng 2193, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England www.penguin.com First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC 2014 First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane 2014 Copyright © Steven Pinker, 2014 Illustration credits Page 52: MacNelly editorial, © Jeff MacNelly – distributed by King Features 57: CartoonStock 61: James Stevenson/The New Yorker Collection/www.cartoonbank.com 79: Shoe © 1993 Jeff MacNelly – distributed by King Features 202: Bizarro used with permission of Dan Piraro, King Features Syndicate and the Cartoonist Group.

Architects of Intelligence
by Martin Ford
Published 16 Nov 2018

I explored what it would take to make neural networks better, and I think those arguments are still very relevant today. The next book I wrote was called The Birth of the Mind, and was about understanding how genes can build the innate structures in our mind. It comes from the Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker tradition of believing that there are important things built into the mind. In the book, I tried to understand what innateness might mean in terms of molecular biology and developmental neuroscience. Again, I think the ideas there are quite relevant today. In 2008 I published Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind.

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In the same way, I think of myself as not a native speaker of machine learning or AI, but as someone who is coming to AI from the cognitive sciences and has fresh insights. I did a lot of computer programming throughout my childhood and thought a lot about artificial intelligence, but I went to graduate school more interested in the cognitive sciences than artificial intelligence. During my time at graduate school, I studied with the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, where we looked at how children learn the past tense within a language and then examined that using the precursors to deep learning that we had at the time, namely multi-layer and two-layer perceptrons. In 1986, David Rumelhart and James L. McClelland published a paper titled Parallel Distributed Processing: explorations in the microstructure of cognition, which showed that a neural network could learn the past tense of English.

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We need to make very serious contemplations, which does not mean that we’re not going to have moral ethics; it does. It just means that it needs to be balanced to realize that we are in a tough spot. For example, there’s a couple of books that have come out, like Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World, and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, by Hans Rosling, and Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Those books basically say that the world’s not bad, and that although everyone says how terrible it is, all the data says it’s getting better, and it’s getting better faster. What they’re not contemplating is that the future is dramatically different to the past.

Radicals Chasing Utopia: Inside the Rogue Movements Trying to Change the World
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 12 Jun 2017

Most psychologists believe that these foundational traits—which are part inherited part nurtured—are more or less fixed by the age of about thirty. Sean N. Boileau, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, and Gay Male Intimate Partner Preference Across Racial Lines (ProQuest LLC, 2008); Melinda Wenner, ‘Political preferences in half genetic’, Live Science, 24 May 2007. See also Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Allen Lane, 2002). 14. Katherine A. MacLean, Matthew W. Johnson and Roland R. Griffiths, ‘Mystical experiences occasioned by the hallucinogen psilocybin lead to increases in the personality domain of openness’, Journal of Psychopharmacology, November 2011; Maia Szalavitz, ‘Magic Mushrooms Trigger Lasting Personality Change’, Time, October 2011; Scott McGreal, ‘Psilocybin and personality’, Psychology Today, September 2012. 15.

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This shift created new social relations, notably norms of privacy, ownership and patriarchy. Dieter thinks that before this ‘Great Separation’ man lived in highly developed cultures that had access to ‘higher cosmic knowledge’ than we do today and that were connected to creation in an entirely different way. But according to author Steven Pinker, the shift from hunter-gatherer tribes to agricultural civilisation resulted in a fivefold decrease in rates of violent death. Rates of violence have been on the decline ever since, albeit with spikes. In current hunter-gatherer communities, homicide rates dwarf rates in Europe and North America. 19.

The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World
by Steven Radelet
Published 10 Nov 2015

THE DECLINE IN CONFLICT AND VIOLENCE Hand in hand with the spread of democracy have come reductions in war, conflict, and violence. Most people have a hard time believing this fact, since the daily news provides a stream of stories of war, conflict, and violence. But while violence has not ended, there is much less of it. Much less. The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker documented the decline in global violence during the latter part of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.13 He shows, with abundant data and examples from around the world, that despite the pessimistic views to the contrary, we live in the most peaceful time in world history.

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Larry Diamond, The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World (New York: Times Books, 2008), p. 256. 12. Thomas Carothers, “The End of the Transition Paradigm,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 1 (January 2002): 5–21, www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles-files/gratis/Carothers-13-1.pdf. 13. Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Penguin Books, 2011). 14. Ibid., p. 302. The data are from figure 6.4, p. 304. 15. Uppsala Conflict Data Program, “UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset, v.4-2014, 1946–2013,” June 12, 2014, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden, www.pcr.uu.se/research/ucdp/datasets/ucdp_prio_armed_conflict_dataset.

The Confidence Game: The Psychology of the Con and Why We Fall for It Every Time
by Maria Konnikova
Published 28 Jan 2016

Still, the gambler insists that the next one will be the lucky winner. It’s been a long time coming, but it’s right around the corner, in the next toss of the die, turn of the wheel, flip of the card. Life is not a casino, and often the gambler’s fallacy isn’t a fallacy at all. It’s an accurate adaptation to changing events. As Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker notes in How the Mind Works, “It would not surprise me if a week of clouds really did predict that the trailing edge was near and the sun was about to be unmasked, just as the hundredth railroad car on a passing train portends the caboose with greater likelihood than the third car.” And so, when it comes to events that really are chance, from gambles on craps tables to gambles in stocks, and events that, while not completely chance, are governed by a high degree of uncertainty, like financial investments, our gambler’s fallacy (now properly fallacious) is all the more likely to persist: after all, at times it’s not a fallacy at all.

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Thank you to Josh Rothman, to the indispensable fact checkers and copy editors who have worked to make my pieces what they are, and, of course, to David Remnick, for believing in my future as a writer. I’ve been lucky to have a number of incredible mentors, but I want to thank especially Katherine Vaz, who believed in me from the moment I stepped into her writing class as a confused eighteen-year-old; Steven Pinker, who has taught me so much of what I know and has been a constant source of inspiration; and Walter Mischel, for hours of wisdom, beautiful art, and always thought-provoking conversation. And a final, most heartfelt thank-you to the people who’ve had to put up with me the longest, and somehow still decided to stick around.

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge
by Matt Ridley

Here is an eighteenth-century, middle-class Scottish professor saying that morality is an accidental by-product of the way human beings adjust their behaviour towards each other as they grow up; saying that morality is an emergent phenomenon that arises spontaneously among human beings in a relatively peaceful society; saying that goodness does not need to be taught, let alone associated with the superstitious belief that it would not exist but for the divine origin of an ancient Palestinian carpenter. Smith sounds remarkably like Lucretius (whom he certainly read) in parts of his Moral Sentiments book, but he also sounds remarkably like Steven Pinker of Harvard University today discussing the evolution of society towards tolerance and away from violence. As I will explore, there is in fact a fascinating convergence here. Pinker’s account of morality growing strongly over time is, at bottom, very like Smith’s. To put it at its baldest, a Smithian child, developing his sense of morality in a violent medieval society in Prussia (say) by trial and error, would end up with a moral code quite different from such a child growing up in a peaceful German (say) suburb today.

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Women who found strong, confident, mature and ambitious men attractive tended to leave more descendants than those who fell for weak, fearful, youthful or retiring men. It is truly strange that in my youth such explanations for universal human characteristics were verboten. The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker argues that, in stark contrast to the blank-slate dogma, our emotions and faculties have been adapted by natural selection for reasoning and communicating, have a common logic across cultures, and are difficult to erase or redesign from scratch. They come from within, not without. Learning can only happen because we have innate mechanisms to learn.

The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters
by Diane Coyle
Published 21 Feb 2011

This theory about the willingness to help others in the valid expectation of being helped by them in turn originated in 1971 with an article by biologist Robert Trivers entitled “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism,”7 and was further elaborated in 1976 by Richard Dawkins in his classic, The Selfish Gene.8 As Steven Pinker explains it, reciprocal altruism is not a calculating, selfish thought process but the outcome of a set of human emotions: “Sympathy prompts a person to offer the first favor, particularly to someone in need for whom it would go the furthest. Anger protects a person against cheaters who accept a favor without reciprocating, by impelling him to punish the ingrate or sever the relationship.

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NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR 1 Hobbes (1651), Rousseau (1754). 2 See for example Camerer et al. (2003) for a scholarly survey, or Ariely (2008) for a popular introduction. 3 See Smith (1982) and papers in Bardsley et al. (2009), for example. 4 Levitt and List (2009). See also Levitt and Dubner’s Superfreakonomics (2009). Besides, as Steven Pinker has written: “When psychologists say ‘most people’ they usually mean ‘most of the two dozen sophomores who filled out a questionnaire for beer money.’ ” Pinker (2008). 5 List (2008). 6 Haidt (2006). 7 Trivers (1971). 8 Dawkins (1976). 9 Pinker (2008). 10 De Waal (2008), 18. 11 Ibid., 162. 12 Sigmund et al. (2002). 13 Hume (1739). 14 Sala-i-Martin (2002a, b). 15 Heshmati (2006). 16 Milanovic (2005). 17 Bourguignon and Coyle (2003). 18 Milanovic (2005). 19 These updated figures convert local currencies to dollars (so they can be compared) at purchasing power parity exchange rates, which differ significantly from earlier estimates, and the effect is to reduce the figures in “PPP dollars” for incomes in countries such as India and China.

The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure
by Yascha Mounk
Published 19 Apr 2022

According to careful studies by anthropologists who have looked at human skeletons recovered in archaeological digs, for example, prehistoric societies and early human settlements suffered from enormous rates of violent death. But as rulers gradually gained the power to enforce their rules, the levels of violence fell markedly. “Between the late Middle Ages and the 20th century,” Steven Pinker writes in The Better Angels of Our Nature, “European countries saw a tenfold-to-fiftyfold decline in their rates of homicide.” Even today, those parts of the world in which the state is weak suffer from much higher levels of violence than those parts of the world in which the state is strong.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT According to careful studies: Debra L. Martin and Ryan P. Harrod, “Bioarchaeological Contributions to the Study of Violence,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 156 (February 2015): 116–45, https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.22662. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Between the late Middle Ages”: Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011), xxiv. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In El Salvador, where: Based on data from 2017. On the United States, Singapore, and El Salvador, see UNODC, Global Study on Homicide 2019 (United Nations: Vienna, Austria, 2019), 17, https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/gsh/Booklet2.pdf.

Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class
by Charles Murray
Published 28 Jan 2020

It’s not just that the role of the shared environment is less than that of genes; that role is usually small, especially with regard to the child’s eventual cognitive repertoires as an adult. This story has been known in broad outline within the behavior genetics community since the 1980s. It was first exposed to a general audience in 1998 when Judith Harris published The Nurture Assumption.3 It got wider attention in 2002 when Steven Pinker recounted it in his bestseller The Blank Slate.4 It has subsequently been referenced in many magazine and book-length discussions of parenting.5 At first glance, the claim that parental socialization doesn’t make much difference is counterintuitive. The family environment, including socioeconomic status (SES), must surely have a major influence on children’s outcomes.

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Nothing we learn will justify rank-ordering human groups from superior to inferior—the bundles of qualities that make us human are far too complicated for that. Nothing we learn will lend itself to genetic determinism. We live our lives with an abundance of unpredictability, both genetic and environmental. Above all, nothing we learn will threaten human equality properly understood. I like the way Steven Pinker put it: “Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.”1 My conclusions are so cautious that they shouldn’t be controversial. If the preceding chapters haven’t persuaded you of that, a summing up in this chapter is not going to do the job.

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So it is with human nature: The important thing is not the heritabilities of specific traits but the way that the heritability of a variety of linked traits forms an interpretable mosaic. Even psychologists who are leading scholars of heritability shy away from putting the pieces together or acknowledging that the pieces can be put together—such is the shadow that has become associated with human nature. In Steven Pinker’s words, “To acknowledge human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged. Any claim that the mind has an innate organization strikes people not as a hypothesis that might be incorrect but as a thought it is immoral to think.”14 That description, written near the turn of the new century, still applies two decades later.

The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting
by Anne Trubek
Published 5 Sep 2016

Even small differences matter, according to Wolf, whose research finds that brains process capital letters in a different neurological way than they do lowercase letters. Each individual person’s development follows somewhat this same evolutionary trend, just much, much more quickly. As Wolf puts it, “It took 2000 years to get from Sumer to Greek alphabet, but we expect our children to master it in 2000 days.”2 The linguist Steven Pinker uses another analogy: “Children are wired for sound, but print is an optional accessory that must be painstakingly bolted on.”3 The key neurological function that we want to bolt into children’s brains is cognitive automaticity, the ability to write without consciously being aware one is doing it.

Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals
by Tyler Cowen
Published 15 Oct 2018

My smartphone is as good as his. The very existence of an advanced civilization—the product of cumulative economic growth—confers immense benefits to ordinary citizens, including their ability to educate and entertain themselves and choose one life path over another. For further arguments along these lines, I recommend Steven Pinker’s recent book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.9 The economic growth of the wealthier countries benefits the very poor as well, though sometimes with considerable lags. The distribution of wealth changes over time, and not all growth trickles down, but as an overall historical average, the bottom quintile of an economy shares in growth.10 You can see this by comparing the bottom quintile in, say, the United States to the bottom quintile in India or Mexico.

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future
by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson
Published 26 Jun 2017

† Alan Turing proved that a basic computer that stores a program could be thought of as a universal computing machine that, in principle, could be instructed to solve any problem solvable by an algorithm. ‡ As the linguist Steven Pinker points out in his 1994 book The Language Instinct, a child who is upset with her parent’s choice for bedtime reading could construct a complex sentence like “Daddy, what did you bring that book that I don’t want to be read to out of up for?” Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 23. § A tragic case study provided strong evidence that after a certain age, children can no longer acquire language.

Work Rules!: Insights From Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead
by Laszlo Bock
Published 31 Mar 2015

.… [T]he Fire pent up in their own Hearts is struggling to break out… [and] there are no Means within Reach that can be any Security to them.255 Now, the chilling of congregants was exactly what Edwards hoped to achieve. And as they say in government, mission accomplished. Setting aside the religious context, which my tenth-grade class left me far from qualified to opine on, Edwards’s underlying premise is that “natural Men” are bad and require some intervention to avoid a horrific end. Steven Pinker, in The Better Angels of Our Nature, argues that the world has become a better place over time, at least when measured by incidences of violence. In the pre-state, hunter-gatherer era, 15 percent of people died violently, declining to 3 percent in the early Roman, British, and Islamic empires.

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Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. A Sermon Preached at Enfield, July 8th, 1741,” ed. Reiner Smolinski, Electronic Texts in American Studies Paper 54, Libraries at University of Nebraska–Lincoln, http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1053&context=etas. 256. Steven Pinker, “Violence Vanquished,” Wall Street Journal, September 24, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424053111904106704576583203589408180. 257. United States Congress House Special Committee to Investigate the Taylor and Other Systems of Shop Management, The Taylor and Other Systems of Shop Management: Hearings before Special Committee of the House of Representatives to Investigate the Taylor and Other Systems of Shop Management (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1912), 3: 1397, http://books.google.com/books?

The Village Effect: How Face-To-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter
by Susan Pinker
Published 30 Sep 2013

Pagani et al., “Prospective Associations Between Early Childhood Television Exposure and Academic, Psychosocial, and Physical Well-being by Middle Childhood,” Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine 164, no. 5 (2010); Sylvain-Jacques Desjardins, “Toddlers and TV: Early Exposure Has Negative and Long Term Impact,” Forum (University of Montreal), May 3, 2010. 31. David Biello, “Fact or Fiction: Archimedes Coined the Term ‘Eureka’ in the Bath,” Scientific American, December 8, 2006. 32. Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (New York: William Morrow, 1994). 33. D. A. Christakis et al., “Audible Television and Decreased Adult Words, Infant Vocalizations, and Conversational Turns: A Population-Based Study,” Archives of Pediatric Adolescent Medicine 163, no. 6 (2009). 34. F. J. Zimmerman and D.

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Ruedy et al., “The Cheater’s High: The Unexpected Affective Benefits of Unethical Behavior,” paper presented at annual meeting of the Academy of Management, Boston, 2012. 7. Drake Bennett, “Confidence Game: How Imposters Like Clark Rockefeller Capture Our Trust Instantly,” Boston Globe, August 17, 2008. 8. Edward O. Wilson, “Kin Selection as the Key to Altruism: Its Rise and Fall,” Social Research 72, no. 1 (2005); Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (New York: Viking, 2011). 9. Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby, The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2009); M.

Greater: Britain After the Storm
by Penny Mordaunt and Chris Lewis
Published 19 May 2021

In 2019, the US-based Commonwealth Fund, a respected global health think tank, ranked the British health system as the best of eleven other wealthy countries.12 In the past twenty years, British life expectancy has increased another three years.13 Like many other countries, the British are living longer, healthier, wealthier lives than ever before, and the Happiness Index is on the rise, too.14 Yet there remains a widespread belief that Britain is living in the worst of times, that these storms have brought only bad things. As Steven Pinker and many others have pointed out, this is also untrue: ‘People today live far more years in the pink of health than their ancestors lived altogether, healthy and infirm years combined.’15 The problem is, the facts are no longer enough. How Britain feels is important, too. That’s where this book comes in.

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Penny Mordaunt and Chris Lewis April 2021 NOTES 1 http://www.eiu.com/topic/democracy-index 2 https://www.economist.com/schools-brief/2018/08/04/against-the-tyranny-of-the-majority 3 https://www.carnegieuktrust.org.uk/blog/never-doubt-a-small-group-of-committed-individuals-can-change-the-world/ 4 https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/highest-immigrant-population-in-the-world.html 5 https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/11/these-are-the-countries-migrants-want-to-move-to/ 6 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/uk-will-fall-to-7th-in-gdp-rankings-say-experts-288h5g8qq 7 https://blogs.ncvo.org.uk/2018/07/26/new-volunteering-data-out-today/ 8 https://www.cafonline.org/about-us/media-office-news/uk-is-one-of-the-top-10-most-generous-countries-in-the-world 9 https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings-articles/world-university-rankings/top-universities-world-2019 10 https://www.theguardian.com/science/datablog/2016/oct/08/which-countries-have-had-the-most-nobel-prize-winners 11 https://www.ft.com/content/54e31212-17f1-11e4-b842-00144feabdc0 12 https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jul/02/is-the-nhs-the-worlds-best-healthcare-system 13 https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/whats-happening-life-expectancy-uk 14 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-47637378 15 Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress https://www.amazon.co.uk/Enlightenment-Now-Science-Humanism-Progress/dp/0525427570 16 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXczSof201U 17 https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20161110-the-name-for-britain-comes-from-our-ancient-love-of-tattoos 18 https://medium.com/daliaresearch/who-has-the-most-tattoos-its-not-who-you-d-expect-1d5ffff660f8 19 https://www.youtube.com/watch?

When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought
by Jim Holt
Published 14 May 2018

He quotes the brain scientist Michael Merzenich, a pioneer of neuroplasticity and the man behind the monkey experiments in the 1960s, to the effect that the brain can be “massively remodeled” by exposure to the Internet and online tools like Google. “THEIR HEAVY USE HAS NEUROLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES,” Merzenich warns in caps—in a blog post, no less. Many in the neuroscience community scoff at such claims. The brain is not “a blob of clay pounded into shape by experience,” Steven Pinker has insisted. Its wiring may change a bit when we learn a new fact or skill, but its basic cognitive architecture remains the same. And where is the evidence that using the Internet can “massively remodel” the brain? The only germane study that Carr is able to cite was undertaken in 2008 by Gary Small, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA.

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He can’t help finding the digital world “cool,” adding, “I’m not sure I could live without it.” Perhaps what he needs are better strategies of self-control. Has he considered disconnecting his modem and FedExing it to himself overnight, as some digital addicts say they have done? After all, as Steven Pinker has noted, “distraction is not a new phenomenon.” Pinker scorns the notion that digital technologies pose a hazard to our intelligence or well-being. Aren’t the sciences doing well in the digital age? he asks. Aren’t philosophy, history, and cultural criticism flourishing too? There is a reason the new media have caught on, Pinker observes: “Knowledge is increasing exponentially; human brainpower and waking hours are not.”

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 11 Apr 2011

Male reproductive strategy maximizes success by seeking out as many sexual partners as possible, while the female reproductive strategy involves harboring the resources of the fittest male for her offspring. Since these strategies work at cross-purposes, the argument goes, there is a strong evolutionary incentive to develop capacities for outwitting the partner, in which language plays a large role.21 Another evolutionary psychologist, Steven Pinker, argues that language, sociability, and mastery of the environment all reinforced one another and created evolutionary pressures for further development.22 This then explains the need for increased brain size, since a very large portion of the neocortex, which is the part of the brain possessed by behaviorally modern humans but not by chimps or archaic humans, is devoted to language.23 The development of language not only permits the short-term coordination of action but also opens up the possibility of abstraction and theory, critical cognitive faculties that are unique to human beings.

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Alexander, “The Evolution of Social Behavior,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 5 (1974): 325–85. 21 Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (New York: Doubleday, 2000); Geoffrey Miller and Glenn Geher, Mating Intelligence: Sex, Relationships, and the Mind’s Reproductive System (New York: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2008). 22 Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom, “Natural Language and Natural Selection,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (1990): 707–84. 23 George E. Pugh, The Biological Origin of Human Values (New York: Basic Books, 1977), pp. 140–43. 24 For a compilation of evidence on the universality of religion, see Nicholas Wade, The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures (New York: Penguin, 2009), pp. 18–37. 25 See, for example, Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, 2007); and Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006). 26 Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). 27 See Wade, Faith Instinct, chap. 5. 28 This view is especially associated with Émile Durkheim.

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Pugh, The Biological Origin of Human Values (New York: Basic Books, 1977), pp. 140–43. 24 For a compilation of evidence on the universality of religion, see Nicholas Wade, The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures (New York: Penguin, 2009), pp. 18–37. 25 See, for example, Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, 2007); and Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006). 26 Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). 27 See Wade, Faith Instinct, chap. 5. 28 This view is especially associated with Émile Durkheim. See The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Free Press, 1965). For a critique, see the chapter on Durkheim in E. E. Evans-Pritchard, A History of Anthropological Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1981). 29 See, for example, Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997), pp. 554–58. 30 According to Douglass North, “While we observe people disobeying the rules of a society when the benefits exceed the costs, we also observe them obeying the rules when an individualistic calculus would have them do otherwise. Why do people not litter the countryside?

Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent
by Harvey Silverglate
Published 6 Jun 2011

—Errol Morris, documentary film-maker, winner of the Academy Award for The Fog of War, producer and director of the legendary documentary The Thin Blue Line “This brilliant book lays out the terrifying threat to human rights posed by vindictive federal prosecutions, often sold as moralistic crusades to a gullible press and public. Anyone who cares about American democracy should read this gripping and vitally important expose.” —Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor, Harvard University, and author of The Stuff of Thought “Harvey A. Silverglate masterfully chronicles federal prosecutors’ vindictive enlistment of opaque criminal prohibitions to snare the unwary and to stunt civil society. A bloated criminal code that fails to warn before it strikes is tyranny’s first cousin.”

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Petsi’s Pies Bakery & Café in Cambridge, which allowed me at crucial points to escape/hide there for hours at a time when I had to get away from the pressures of law practice and my other assorted activities and obligations, in order to read, think, write and revise a difficult section of this book. Steven Pinker, friend of liberty in all its manifestations, who generously read the manuscript and even did a jacket blurb. Ellen S. Podgor, law professor, blogger, and criminal defense practitioner of unusual skill and insight, an essential resource for the legal world, who understood this project perfectly. 282 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Daniel Poulson, research assistant, now young lawyer, who was so helpful during his tenure working for me.

The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain
by Daniel Gardner
Published 23 Jun 2009

Evolutionary psychologists argue that this urge to punish wrongdoing is hardwired because it is an effective way to discourage bad behavior. “People who are emotionally driven to retaliate against those who cross them, even at a cost to themselves, are more credible adversaries and less likely to be exploited,” writes cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker. Whatever its origins, the instinct for blame and punishment is often a critical component in our reactions to risks. Imagine there is a gas that kills 20,000 people a year in the European Union and another 21,000 a year in the United States. Imagine further that this gas is a by-product of industrial processes and scientists can precisely identify which industries, even which factories, are emitting the gas.

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“Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets of frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution—all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history,” writes Steven Pinker. “But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light.” We are, in a phrase, more civilized. This is very good news, indeed. Just don’t expect to hear about it on CNN. 10 The Chemistry of Fear "Our bodies have become repositories for dozens of toxic chemicals,” begins a report from Greenpeace.

Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth
by Stuart Ritchie
Published 20 Jul 2020

Estelle Dumas-Mallet et al., ‘Poor Replication Validity of Biomedical Association Studies Reported by Newspapers’, PLOS ONE 12, no. 2 (21 Feb. 2017): e0172650; https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0172650 30.  This isn’t to let popular science books by non-scientists off the hook: they’re also prone to major problems. In his review of Malcolm Gladwell’s book of collected essays, What the Dog Saw, Steven Pinker coined the term ‘Igon Values Problem’ to describe a case where Gladwell had butchered the word ‘eigenvalues’ (a mathematical concept that’s important in many statistical analyses) – he’d presumably heard one of his interviewees say it and then never bothered to look it up. Igon Values are all too common in popular science writing, highlighting gaps in understanding that can occur when the writer isn’t an expert in the subject at hand.

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Igon Values are all too common in popular science writing, highlighting gaps in understanding that can occur when the writer isn’t an expert in the subject at hand. But as we’re about to see, scientists themselves, even writing about their own topics of expertise, can produce books with problems just as bad as the Igon Values. Steven Pinker, ‘Malcolm Gladwell, Eclectic Detective’, New York Times, 7 Nov. 2009; https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Pinker-t.html 31.  Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (New York: Ballantine Books, 2008): pp. 6, 15. Dweck also presented a very popular TEDx talk, with a total of 13.5 million views at this writing – 10.2m at the TED website and 3.3 on YouTube – in which she states that it is a ‘basic human right of children, all children, to live in places that promote growth’.

The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins
Published 12 Sep 2006

Other theories miss the point of Darwinian explanations altogether. I’m talking about suggestions like ‘religion satisfies our curiosity about the universe and our place in it’, or ‘religion is consoling’. There may be some psychological truth here, as we shall see in Chapter 10, but neither is in itself a Darwinian explanation. As Steven Pinker pointedly said of the consolation theory, in How the Mind Works: ‘it only raises the question of why a mind would evolve to find comfort in beliefs it can plainly see are false. A freezing person finds no comfort in believing he is warm; a person face-to-face with a lion is not put at ease by the conviction that it is a rabbit.’

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And finally, as though all this were not enough, he declared that for every individual, such as you and me, for example, who does not believe either in God or in his own immortality, the natural law is bound immediately to become the complete opposite of the religion-based law that preceded it, and that egoism, even extending to the perpetration of crime, would not only be permissible but would be recognized as the essential, the most rational, and even the noblest raison d’être of the human condition.88 Perhaps naïvely, I have inclined towards a less cynical view of human nature than Ivan Karamazov. Do we really need policing – whether by God or by each other – in order to stop us from behaving in a selfish and criminal manner? I dearly want to believe that I do not need such surveillance – and nor, dear reader, do you. On the other hand, just to weaken our confidence, listen to Steven Pinker’s disillusioning experience of a police strike in Montreal, which he describes in The Blank Slate: As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin’s anarchism. I laughed off my parents’ argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose.

Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age
by Steven Johnson
Published 14 Jul 2012

The two essential books on our strange unwillingness to accept the progressive trends around us are Gregg Easterbrook’s The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse and Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. On long-term trends in human violence, see Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. I. THE PEER PROGRESSIVES For more on the history of the Legrand Star, see “The Longest Run: Public Engineers and Planning in France,” by Cecil O. Smith, Jr., published in The American Historical Review. The “legible” vision of state hierarchy is powerfully analyzed in James C.

Team Human
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 22 Jan 2019

Dubner, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (New York: William Morrow, 2005). The problem with the story is that it’s not true Brandon Keim, “Did Cars Save Our Cities from Horses?” Nautilus, November 7, 2013. They measure improvement as a function of life expectancy or reduction in the number of violent deaths Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (London: Penguin, 2011). Capitalism no more reduced violence than automobiles saved us from manure-filled cities Nassim Taleb, “The Pinker Fallacy Simplified,” FooledBy Randomness.com/pinker.pdf. 53. Online task systems pay people pennies per task to do things that computers can’t yet do Eric Limer, “My Brief and Curious Life as a Mechanical Turk,” Gizmodo, October 28, 2014. 55.

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity
by Toby Ord
Published 24 Mar 2020

Furthermore, the meanings of these phrases shift with the stakes: “highly unlikely” suggests “small enough that we can set it aside,” rather than neutrally referring to a level of probability.3 This causes problems when talking about high-stakes risks, where even small probabilities can be very important. And finally, numbers are indispensable if we are to reason clearly about the comparative sizes of different risks, or classes of risks. For example, when concluding his discussion of existential risk in Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker turned to natural risks: “Our ancestors were powerless to stop these lethal menaces, so in that sense technology has not made this a uniquely dangerous era in the history of our species but a uniquely safe one.”4 While Pinker is quite correct that we face many natural threats and that technology has lowered their risk, we can’t conclude that this makes our time uniquely safe.

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Using the future reward function helps with the problem of agents resisting human efforts to bring their reward function into better alignment, but it exacerbates the problem of agents being incentivized to “wire-head”—changing their own reward function into one that is more easily satisfied. 95 Several of these instrumental goals are examples of “distribution shifts”—situations where the agent faces importantly different situations during deployment that lead to it taking actions that were never exhibited during training or testing. In this case, the agent may never have opportunities to become more powerful than its human controllers during testing, and thus never have a need to exhibit its behaviors involving deception or seizing control of resources. 96 For example, in Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker (2018, pp. 299–300) says of AI risk scenarios that they: “depend on the premises that… (2) the AI would be so brilliant that it could figure out how to transmute elements and rewire brains, yet so imbecilic that it would wreak havoc based on elementary blunders of misunderstanding.” 97 Also, note that an agent may well be able to notice the general issue that its values are likely to be misaligned with ours (warranting an adversarial approach to humanity) even without having a perfect understanding of our values.

A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, Eighth Edition: Chicago Style for Students and Researchers
by Kate L. Turabian
Published 14 Apr 2007

Do not precede it with Mr., Mrs., Ms., or Professor (see 24.2.2 for the use of Dr., Reverend, Senator, and so on). When you mention a source thereafter, use just the last name: According to Steven Pinker, “claims about a language instinct . . . have virtually nothing to do with possible genetic differences between people.”1 Pinker goes on to claim that . . . Except when referring to kings, queens, and popes, never refer to a source by his or her first name. Never this: According to Steven Pinker, “claims about a language instinct . . . ” Steven goes on to claim that . . . 7.6 Use Footnotes and Endnotes Judiciously If you are using bibliography-style citations (see 3.2.1), you will have to decide as you draft how to use footnotes and endnotes (for their formal requirements, see chapter 16).

Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality From Camp Meeting to Wall Street
by Jackson Lears

We have no language to express these ways of seeing and being. But maybe we could develop one. The recovery of a “grammar of animacy” would challenge the reductionist imperative at the heart of technocratic rationality, which requires its devotees to reject any vestiges of vitalism they can sniff in the cultural atmosphere. As Steven Pinker says, “Intelligence … has often been attributed to some kind of energy flow or force field”—a point of view he derides as little more than “spiritualism, pseudo-science, and sci-fi kitsch.” Pinker is here playing the classic custodian of conventional wisdom, policing the boundaries of responsible opinion with any ideological weapons available, including the rhetoric of scientific expertise.

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“Does life only make sense”: Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (2010), 53, 113, 119. “he pauses. I wait”: Robert McFarlane, Underland (2019), 65, 67. “Does it change the way”: Ibid., 69. “Living wood, left long”: Ibid., 92, 104. “the force which causes”: Ibid., 112. “grammar of animacy”: Ibid. “Intelligence … has often been”: Steven Pinker, cited in Riskin, The Restless Clock, 347. “niche construction”: Kevin Laland, Blake Matthews, and Marcus Feldman, “An Introduction to Niche Construction Theory,” Evolutionary Ecology 30 (2016), 191–202. “quantum jumps”: Erwin Schrodinger, What Is Life? [1944] (Canto Classics ed., 2012), 34, 113.

How the Mind Works
by Steven Pinker
Published 1 Jan 1997

For it alters completely the way one thinks about thinking, and its unforseen consequences probably can’t be contained by a book’ Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times ‘A landmark in popular science … A major public asset’ Marek Kohn, Independent ‘The humour, breadth and clarity of thought … make this work essential reading for anyone curious about the human mind’ Raymond Dolan, Observer ABOUT THE AUTHOR Steven Pinker, a native of Montreal, studied experimental psychology at McGill University and Harvard University. After serving on the faculties of Harvard and Stanford universities he moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is currently Peter de Florez Professor of Psychology. Pinker has studied many aspects of language and of visual cognition, with a focus on language acquisition in children.

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He is a fellow of several scientific societies, and has been awarded research prizes from the National Academy of Sciences and the American Psychological Association, graduate and undergraduate teaching prizes from MIT, and book prizes from the American Psychological Association, the Linguistics Society of America and the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of The Language Instinct, available in Penguin, and Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language. HOW THE MIND WORKS Steven Pinker PENGUIN BOOKS PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England www.penguin.com First published in the USA by W.

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All over the world, when people are asked to talk about themselves, they begin with their parentage and family ties, and in many societies, especially foraging groups, people rattle off endless genealogies. For adoptees, childhood refugees, or descendants of slaves, curiosity about biological kin can drive a lifelong quest. (Entrepreneurs hope to exploit this motive when they send out those computer-generated postcards that offer to trace Steven Pinker’s ancestors and find the Pinker family seal and coat of arms.) Of course, people ordinarily do not test each other’s DNA; they assess kinship by indirect means. Many animals do it by smell. Humans do it with several kinds of information: who grows up together, who resembles whom, how people interact, what reliable sources say, and what can be logically deduced from other kin relationships.

My Start-Up Life: What A
by Ben Casnocha and Marc Benioff
Published 7 May 2007

by William Poundstone The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, by Patrick Lencioni The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Business Law, by Constance Bagley Good to Great, by Jim Collins On Becoming a Leader, by Warren Bennis 179 180 APPENDIX C Information Rules, by Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian eBoys, by Randal Stross Fooled by Randomness, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb Compassionate Capitalism, by Marc Benioff Love Is the Killer App, by Tim Sanders Globalization The World Is Flat, by Tom Friedman Creative Destruction, by Tyler Cowen Globaloney, by Michael Veseth Money Makes the World Go Round, by Barbara Garson How “American” Is Globalization? by William Marling Intellectual Life The Blank Slate, by Steven Pinker The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, by Erving Goffman Reflections by an Affirmative Action Baby, by Stephen Carter Integrity, by Stephen Carter The Accidental Asian, by Eric Liu Mind Wide Open, by Steven Johnson Socrates Café, by Chris Phillips Self-Renewal, by John Gardner Public Intellectuals, by Richard Posner Psychology Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, by Robert Cialdini Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl Biography/Memoir My Life, by Bill Clinton This Boy’s Life, by Tobias Wolff Swimming Across, by Andy Grove All Over But the Shoutin’, by Rick Bragg Personal History, by Katherine Graham Emerson: Mind on Fire, by Robert Richardson In an Uncertain World, by Robert Rubin The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion Religion End of Faith, by Sam Harris The Universe in a Single Atom, by the Dalai Lama APPENDIX C The World’s Religions, by Huston Smith The Bhagavad-Gita Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, by Anne Lamott Under the Banner of Heaven, by Jon Krakauer Politics/Current Affairs Ghost Wars, by Steve Coll Running the World, by David Rothkopf Founding Brothers, by Joseph Ellis A Conflict of Visions, by Thomas Sowell Going Nucular, by Geoffrey Nunberg America at the Crossroads, by Francis Fukuyama Holidays in Hell, by P.

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know
by Richard Watson
Published 5 Nov 2013

Historically, our approach to AI has been brute force, but once parallel computing techniques become established (quantum or DNA computing, for instance—see Chapter 17) true AI could be achieved very rapidly. “The main lesson of 35 years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. The mental abilities of a four-year-old that we take for granted … in fact, solve some of the hardest engineering problems ever conceived.” Steven Pinker, psychologist, cognitive scientist and author Nevertheless, two big questions remain. First, is the human brain essentially just a machine with a bunch of wiring and some chemistry and electricity thrown in, or is there much more to it than that? If the human brain is simply a collection of atoms, then surely it can be only a matter of time before we design machines that can match and possibly exceed human capabilities.

Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason
by Dave Rubin
Published 27 Apr 2020

He has convinced me that societies run better when they operate under a belief system that stems from timeless, age-old biblical truths. This doesn’t mean he wants people to be religious, per se—in fact, I’ve never once heard him say this. He simply wants people to take their moral codes from an objective reality outside of themselves. Initially, I wasn’t convinced by this. Like Steven Pinker and Sam Harris, I leaned toward the idea that human beings can conceive similar ideas without the need for religious aspect. Old stories were just that—old stories—and surely they could be replaced with newer, better ones that were more relevant to our modern world. If we as a species had progressed, then surely our stories had to progress along with us.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
by James Gleick
Published 1 Mar 2011

.”♦ She explained the idea and the word this way: When I was a child, my mother used to read aloud to me from Percy’s Reliques, and one of my favorite poems began, as I remember: Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands, Oh, where hae ye been? They hae slain the Earl Amurray, And Lady Mondegreen. There the word lay, for some time. A quarter-century later, William Safire discussed the word in a column about language in The New York Times Magazine. Fifteen years after that, Steven Pinker, in his book The Language Instinct, offered a brace of examples, from “A girl with colitis goes by” to “Gladly the cross-eyed bear,” and observed, “The interesting thing about mondegreens is that the mishearings are generally less plausible than the intended lyrics.”♦ But it was not books or magazines that gave the word its life; it was Internet sites, compiling mondegreens by the thousands.

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♦ “WHICH, WHILE IT WAS EMPLOYED IN THE CULTIVATION”: Samuel Johnson, preface to A Dictionary of the English Language (1755). ♦ WE POSSESS NOW A MORE COMPLETE DICTIONARY: John Simpson, ed., The First English Dictionary, 24. ♦ “WHAT I SHALL HEREAFTER CALL MONDEGREENS”: “The Death of Lady Mondegreen,” Harper’s Magazine, November 1954, 48. ♦ “THE INTERESTING THING ABOUT MONDEGREENS”: Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (New York: William Morrow, 1994), 183. 4. TO THROW THE POWERS OF THOUGHT INTO WHEEL-WORK ♦ The original writings of Charles Babbage and, to a lesser extent, Ada Lovelace are increasingly accessible. The comprehensive, thousand-dollar, eleven-volume edition, The Works of Charles Babbage, edited by Martin Campbell-Kelly, was published in 1989.

Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing
by Kevin Davies
Published 5 Oct 2020

Eradicating genetic disease is not bad in itself, he says, but our technology won’t stop with reverting to healthy forms of genes. We could introduce novel variations that have not been encountered in our species before. * * * In the summer of 2015, after the initial furor around CRISPR and human embryos, Harvard professor Steven Pinker wrote a strident op-ed in the Boston Globe. In a world that promised a biomedical bonanza to improve people’s health and longevity, Pinker argued, “the primary moral goal for today’s bioethics can be summarized in a single sentence. Get out of the way.”48 While individuals must be protected from harm, a “truly ethical bioethics” should not hold back research in red tape or moratoria, nor should it sow panic about potential future harms or bandy about perverse analogies with Nazi atrocities or science-fiction dystopias like—you guessed it—Brave New World or Andrew Niccol’s sci-fi film Gattaca.

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Kenan Malik, “Fear of dystopian change should not blind us to the potential of gene editing,” Guardian, July 22, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/21/designer-babies-gene-editing-curing-disease. 47. Henry T. Greely, “Human Germline Genome Editing: An Assessment,” CRISPR Journal 2, (2019): 253–265, https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/crispr.2019.0038. 48. Steven Pinker, “The moral imperative for bioethics,” Boston Globe, August 1, 2015, https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/07/31/the-moral-imperative-for-bioethics/JmEkoyzlTAu9oQV76JrK9N/story.html. 49. Michael J. Sandel, “The case against perfection,” Atlantic, April 2004, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/04/the-case-against-perfection/302927/. 50.

Exercised: The Science of Physical Activity, Rest and Health
by Daniel Lieberman
Published 2 Sep 2020

Violence is woven into every culture, including hunter-gatherer societies, calling into question assumptions that we are naturally benign and unaggressive.7 I thus also give credit to Thomas Hobbes and his followers who see human tendencies toward aggression as ancient, intrinsic, and sometimes adaptive.8 As detailed comprehensively by Steven Pinker, our species has become exponentially less violent only very recently thanks to social and cultural constraints, many fostered by the Enlightenment.9 How, then, do we reconcile our extraordinary capacities for cooperation and conflict avoidance (Rousseau) with our capacities for aggression (Hobbes)?

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Listed alphabetically they are Brian Addison, Coren Apicella, Meir Barak, Francis Berenbaum, Claude Bouchard, Dennis Bramble, Henrik Bunge, Ambrose Burfoot, Eamon Callison, Terence Capellini, Rachel Carmody, David Carrasco, David Carrier, Eric Castillo, Silvino Cubesare, Adam Daoud, Irene Davis, Sarah DeLeon, Maureen Devlin, Pierre D’Hemecourt, Peter Ellison, Carolyn Eng, David Felson, Paul Gompers, Michael Gurven, Brian Hare, Kristen Hawkes, Erin Hecht, Joe Henrich, Kim Hill, Dorothy Hintze, Michael Hintze, Jenny Hoffman, Mikko Ijäs, Josphine Jemutai, Joice Jepkirui, Mette Yun Johansen, Yana Kamberov, Erwan Le Corre, Kristi Lewton, Louis Liebenberg, Claire Lo, Zarin Machanda, Huian Mathre, Chris McDougall, Dave McGillivray, Jordan Metzl, Thomas Milani, Randolph Nesse, Lena Nordin, Robert Ojiambo, Paul Okutoyi, Erik Otarola-Castillo, Bente Pedersen, David Pilbeam, Steven Pinker, Yannis Pitsiladis, Mary Prendergast, Arnulfo Quimare, Michael Rainbow, Humberto Ramos Fernandez, Alonso Ramos Vaca, David Reich, Neil Roach, Campbell Rolian, Maryellen Ruvolo, Bob Sallis, Meshack Sang, Lee Saxby, Rob Shave, Freddy Sichting, Timothy Sigei, Martin Surbeck, Cliff Tabin, Adam Tenforde, Victoria Tobolsky, Ben Trumble, Madhu Venkadesan, Anna Warrener, William Werbel, Katherine Whitcome, Brian Wood, Gabriela Yañez, Andrew Yegian, and Katherine Zink.

The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth
by Michael Spitzer
Published 31 Mar 2021

Culture is what transmits non-genetic information across generations via archival group memories. We have encountered distant descendants of Pleistocene musical memory in the walking song-historians of the African griots, Australian Aboriginal people and Native Americans. All this refutes the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker’s egregious put-down of music as ‘auditory cheesecake’ with no evolutionary significance.85 The truth could not be further away. The Cambridge music scholar Ian Cross has contended that the very ‘semantic indeterminacy’ of music, what he terms music’s ‘floating intentionality’ or flexibility of meaning, has been invaluable for hominins in their negotiation of social situations of uncertainty or ambiguity.86 Far from being a derivative luxury, what the philosopher Daniel Dennett calls a ‘spandrel’, music always conferred evolutionary advantage.87 But the long view does reveal a stark truth about the nature of music across the aeons, and a certain darkness.

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Although The Blue Danube is a shock, the waltz’s motions materialise from the rotations of the bone, as if music was there all along, even though the apemen are mostly silent. But what if music wasn’t a mere back-seat passenger of evolution, but a faculty that chivvied it along? The linguist Steven Pinker’s egregious put-down that music was ‘auditory cheesecake’ – delicious, to be sure, but otherwise a meaningless pattern of pretty sounds – couldn’t be more wrong.1 Maybe, in the evolution from ‘Ugh!’ to Beethoven, music was always in the driving seat. This chapter speculates on the evolution of music across the 4 million years between australopithecines, Kubrick’s apemen, and the arrival of bone flutes approximately 40,000 years bp (before present).

Sex, Time, and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution
by Leonard Shlain
Published 2 Aug 2004

This led to the fundamental prerequisite for language—agreement among individuals that a particular sign or sound stands for a specific thing.11 The influential linguist Noam Chomsky advanced the idea that language may not be due to natural selection at all, and gained an important ally in Stephen Jay Gould, who admonished evolutionary biologists for jumping to the conclusion that language evolved to solve an environmental challenge. Gould believed that language might be the end result of a long ago process far removed from its present use. Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom have attempted to bridge the gap between the Chomskyites and Darwinists by proposing a middle ground. Perhaps, they posit, language developed as an offshoot of a form of mental thinking they call mentalese that in turn was in response to environmental stresses. The brain’s ability to think in these abstract terms was necessary to reconstruct a true picture of the world.12 Owen Jesperson posits that language grew out of a form of play.13 William Calvin proposed that language evolved out of our need to master complex serial maneuvers.14 As do Doreen Kimura and Philip Lieberman,15 Calvin argues that the complex serial gesture of accurately throwing a stone can be likened to the motor skill necessary to assemble sequentially a syntactically and grammatically correct sentence.

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Parallel with speech’s sexual-selection function, language was undoubtedly proving its merit in social relations, toolmaking, child-rearing, and hunting. Once human speech had jump-started, any tiny mutation that came along afterward and incrementally improved speech survived to make it to the next generation. Thus, fluency became the signature feature of the human species. Steven Pinker, extolling the wonders of human language, observes that information is the sole commodity that a person can give away and keep at the same time.28 I would add that sexual pleasure is also something that a person can confer on another and personally enjoy simultaneously. The linkage between sex and language can be further divined by noting that the English language tacitly acknowledges that sex was the primary force behind the evolution of speech.

Buyology
by Martin Lindstrom
Published 14 Jul 2008

They also served to remind me, over and over again, that miraculously, human beings have “minds” that can puzzle over, speculate about, and explore in depth their own “brains” (just imagine if your foot could observe its own footness). In addition, Rita Carter’s cogent, entertaining Mapping the Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) clarified the geography of the brain for me even further. How the Mind Works by cognitive scientist Steven Pinker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997) is also a masterful and hugely enjoyable synthesis of brain science. I cannot recommend all four books more highly. But there always comes a moment, after reading a book, when you want to but can’t ask the author a follow-up question that’s just occurred to you. Which is why my thanks go again to Dr.

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek
by Rutger Bregman
Published 13 Sep 2014

.” – Zygmunt Bauman, one of the world’s most eminent social theorists, author of more than 50 books “If you’re bored with hackneyed debates, decades-old right-wing and left-wing clichés, you may enjoy the bold thinking, fresh ideas, lively prose, and evidence-based arguments in Utopia for Realists.” – Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of The Blank Slate and The Better Angels of Our Nature “This book is brilliant. Everyone should read it. Bregman shows us we’ve been looking at the world inside out. Turned right way out we suddenly see fundamentally new ways forward.

Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy
by Pistono, Federico
Published 14 Oct 2012

sid=180945&cid=14970571 136 Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books, Jean-Baptiste Michel, Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva Presser Aiden, Adrian Veres, Matthew K. Gray, William Brockman, The Google Books Team, Joseph P. Pickett, Dale Hoiberg, Dan Clancy, Peter Norvig, Jon Orwant, Steven Pinker, Martin A. Nowak, and Erez Lieberman Aiden, 2010. Science. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2010/12/15/science.1199644 137 Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some Empirical Evidence, Richard A. Easterlin, 1974. University of Pennsylvania. http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/04/16/business/Easterlin1974.pdf 138 The happiness-income paradox revisited, Richard A.

Think Like an Engineer: Use Systematic Thinking to Solve Everyday Challenges & Unlock the Inherent Values in Them
by Mushtak Al-Atabi
Published 26 Aug 2014

Intelligence has been observed in other living creatures as well. Artificial intelligence is the capacity that is programmed into machines (computers) enabling them to respond to new situations and learn. Intelligence can refer to the mental ability to think, learn, recognise patterns, logically predict outcomes, and respond to a variety of stimuli. Steven Pinker, the author of ‘How the Mind Works,’ defines intelligence as the ability to attain goals in the face of obstacles by means of decisions based on rational (truth-obeying) rules. Intelligence Quotient (IQ) is the measure of the ability to comprehend logical, geometrical, and mathematical challenges.

Cartesian Linguistics
by Noam Chomsky
Published 1 Jan 1966

But the 33 Cartesian Linguistics picture of a child as born with a mind that is largely unformed and plastic and of language as a set of ‘behaviors’ or linguistic phenomena outside the head and shaped to conform to ‘reality’ and the community still attracts the great majority of philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists. It takes many forms: there are few acknowledged behaviorists left, though many functionalists and connectionists of various sorts. It is not clear why. Steven Pinker in The Language Instinct (1995, 406–7) illustrates the empiricist idea of a plastic mind in his discussion of what he calls the “standard social science model” by quoting the views of the anthropologist Margaret Mead and the psychologist James Watson. Mead had suggested that human nature must be infinitely malleable because people can be educated to such different roles, and Watson claimed that if he were given a child, he could, by training, turn it into whatever one desired – a fireman, banker, or revolutionary.

On Nature and Language
by Noam Chomsky
Published 16 Apr 2007

Thus, citing some of Darwin’s cautious speculations, he writes that “we thus learn two important lessons” about “human language evolution”: that “the structure and function of human language can be 78 Language and the brain accounted for by natural selection,” and that “the most impressive link between human and nonhuman-animal forms of communication lies in the ability to express emotional state.” Similarly, Steven Pinker “shows how a Darwinian account of language evolution is the only possible account, . . . because natural selection is the only mechanism that can account for the complex design features of a trait such as language” (my emphasis). It would be remarkable if something had been “shown” about the evolution of human language, let alone the vastly more ambitious claim cited; or if we could “learn” anything significant from speculations about the topic.

The Other Side of Happiness: Embracing a More Fearless Approach to Living
by Brock Bastian
Published 25 Jan 2018

Over the past forty years, there has been a significant decrease in the incidental exercise children are exposed to, such as walking to school.11 More often than not we prefer to drive our children to school than let them run the risk of being unsupervised. One reason we do this is because we think the world is simply not as safe today as it used to be. The thing is, there is plenty of evidence showing the world is actually safer than it has ever been. Take a recent book by Steven Pinker, the influential thinker and professor of psychology at Harvard University, titled The Better Angels of Our Nature.12 Pinker has compiled an overwhelming amount of evidence to show the enormous decrease in the incidence of violence. This includes military conflicts, homicides, genocides, torture, criminal injustice, and the violent treatment of children, homosexuals, animals and racial and ethnic minorities.

The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human, and How to Tell Them Better
by Will Storr
Published 3 Apr 2019

When researchers put people in flotation tanks: Brain and Culture, Bruce Wexler (MIT Press, 2008) pp. 76–77. Another study found 67 per cent of male participants: ‘Just Think: The challenges of the Disengaged Mind’, Timothy D. Wilson et al., Science, July 2014, 345(6192), pp. 75–7. John Bransford and Marcia Johnson: The Sense of Style, Steven Pinker (Penguin, 2014) p. 147. One clever study asked restaurant employees to circle: Mindwise, Nicholas Epley (Penguin, 2014) p. 50. Another test found that eight in every ten: The Domesticated Brain, Bruce Hood (Pelican, 2014) p. 222. using a language millions of years older: The Political Brain, Drew Westen (Public Affairs, 2007) p. 57.

This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain
by William Davies
Published 28 Sep 2020

The critic (who plays such a pivotal role in the liberal vision of the public sphere, as seen by Kant and Habermas) risks being ignored or unfollowed, and is therefore replaced by the troll, who denounces and attacks for spectacular effect. This means the rise of a new type of celebrity evaluator – Piers Morgan, Brendan O’Neill, Simon Cowell – who commands clicks and views by issuing judgements crafted for maximum controversy. Similarly, a new type of celebrity rationalist – Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Toby Young – emerges, to perform a pastiche of enlightenment for the benefit of fans and anti-fans. The quest to be rated, liked and clicked is unrelenting, in what Gilles Deleuze perceptively identified in 1992 as the new ‘societies of control’. The value of a given statement is in how appealing (or shocking or funny …) it seems right now, and not how successfully it serves as a description of the past or as a promise for the future.

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought
by Andrew W. Lo
Published 3 Apr 2017

Herodotus tells a compelling story, but the real world has provided enough heartbreaking examples of children raised without language to know what really happens.27 Such children usually never learn any human language fluently, even though they were born with the innate potential to learn any language. Without exposure to language in the early stages of development, the human brain develops in such a way that makes full acquisition of language extremely difficult, if not impossible, as an adult. What does this mean for the evolution of the human brain? The linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker believes that the most specialized modes of thought in the human brain, like those dealing with language, are the ones that have been subject to the most evolutionary pressure under natural selection.28 The ability to communicate complicated ideas between individuals must have been tremendously useful to early members of Homo sapiens; therefore, it shouldn’t be surprising that natural selection favored linguistic abilities.

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To make a rough generalization, a sociobiological theory will try to explain a social phenomenon in terms of current biological adaptation. An evolutionary psychological theory will try to explain a social phenomenon in terms of past neurological adaptation. One of the most compelling examples of this approach is Steven Pinker’s theory of language development, mentioned earlier.55 Who hasn’t been fascinated by how quickly small children move from baby talk to complete sentences, somehow picking up most of the rules of grammar along the way? Pinker believes this is an example of a biological instinct, one that emerged at a point in human evolution when communication was a key selective advantage.

Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Published 27 Nov 2012

When randomness concentrates, we get the second type, the sneaky Extremistan. 5 Note that people invoke an expression, “Balkanization,” about the mess created by fragmented states, as if fragmentation was a bad thing, and as if there was an alternative in the Balkans—but nobody uses “Helvetization” to describe its successes. 6 A more rigorous reading of the data—with appropriate adjustment for the unseen—shows that a war that would decimate the planet would be completely consistent with the statistics, and would not even be an “outlier.” As we will see, Ben Bernanke was similarly fooled with his Great Moderation, a turkey problem; one can be confused by the properties of any process with compressed volatility from the top. Some people, like Steven Pinker, misread the nature of the statistical process and hold such a thesis, similar to the “great moderation” in finance. CHAPTER 6 Tell Them I Love (Some) Randomness Maxwell in Extremistan—Complicated mechanisms to feed a donkey—Virgil said to do it, and do it now The point of the previous chapter was that the risk properties of the first brother (the fragile bank employee) are vastly different from those of the second one (the comparatively antifragile artisan taxi driver).

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Anecdotal knowledge and power of evidence: A reader, Karl Schluze, wrote: “An old teacher and colleague told me (between his sips of bourbon) ‘If you cut off the head of a dog and it barks, you don’t have to repeat the experiment.’ ” Easy to get examples: no lawyer would invoke an “N=1” argument in defense of a person, saying “he only killed once”; nobody considers a plane crash as “anecdotal.” I would go further and map disconfirmation as exactly where N=1 is sufficient. Sometimes researchers call a result “anecdotal” as a knee-jerk reaction when the result is exactly the reverse. Steven Pinker called John Gray’s pointing out the two world wars as counterevidence to his story of great moderation “anecdotal.” My experience is that social science people rarely know what they are talking about when they talk about “evidence.” BOOK III: A Nonpredictive View of the World Decision theorists teaching practitioners: To add more insults to us, decision scientists use the notion of “practical,” an inverse designation.

Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society
by Nicholas A. Christakis
Published 26 Mar 2019

Psychologist Paul Ekman has proposed a universal connection between core emotions and many facial expressions—particularly for happiness, anger, disgust, sadness, and fear—and suggested an evolutionary basis for them.25 Such expressions are innate, even if their exact manifestations upon the human face can sometimes be culturally shaped.26 The study of the universal features of language, championed by linguist Noam Chomsky, psychologist Steven Pinker, and others, provides another fertile area for discerning universals.27 And ethnomusicologists have verified another category of cultural universal: musical forms.28 A sample of three hundred and four musical recordings from around the world yielded numerous “statistical universals” (meaning there were few exceptions to the patterns) across nine geographic areas; these spanned features related to pitch and rhythm as well as performance style and social context.

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—Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness “Nicholas Christakis is a pioneer in bridging the conceptual chasm between the choices of individual people and the shaping of an entire society. In this timely and fascinating book, he shows how the better angels of our nature, rooted in our evolutionary past, can bring forth an enlightened and compassionate civilization.” —Steven Pinker, author of Enlightenment Now “In a book of great wisdom and unusual breadth, Christakis pulls together philosophy, history, anthropology, sociology, genetics, and evolutionary biology to make an extraordinarily optimistic argument: evolution has prewired us for goodness. At a moment when the dark history of the early twentieth century suddenly seems relevant again, it’s a relief to be reminded of why so many efforts to reengineer human society have failed—and of why the better side of human nature often triumphs in the end.”

I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works: Why Your World, Work, and Brain Are Being Creatively Disrupted
by Nick Bilton
Published 13 Sep 2010

Emily Nussbaum, Jack Dorsey, Andrew Hearst, Joel Johnson, Dennis Crowley, Alex Rainert, Karen Bonna Rainert, Eric Beug, Dick Lipton, Naveen Selvadurai, Richard Nash, Brian Lam, Lux Alptraum, Nick Denton, Jonah Lehrer, Dan O’Sullivan, Nick Carr, Nicholas Felton, Kati London, Nora Abousteit, Bre Pettis, Tim Hannay, Steven Pinker, Dave Morin, Clifford Nass, Maria Popova, Red Burns, Tom Igoe, Anil Dash, Fred Wilson, Chloe Sladden, Max Whitney, New York University’s ITP students and alumni, Linda Stone, Gideon Lichfield, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Jack Shafer, Michael Caruso, Baratunde Thurston, Frank Rose, Joe Wikert, Jimmy DiResta, Dan Gillmor, Sarah Slobin, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Chris Anderson, Mathias Crawford, Noah Robischon, the ladies and gentlemen of the Academy, Paul Berger, Kevin Slavin, Deborah Auer, Lane Becker, Jennifer Rodriguez Thor Muller, Denise & Michael, Aida & Jorge, Nancy & Sylvia, Cathy, Monica & Franky, Lissa and Debbie, Katie Cotton, Deborah Estrin, Diane Sawyer, Gillian Reagan, Nate Tabor, Zach Klein, Gary Vaynerchuk, Alicia Gibb, Andrew Savikas, Rachel D.

Thinking Machines: The Inside Story of Artificial Intelligence and Our Race to Build the Future
by Luke Dormehl
Published 10 Aug 2016

McCarthy’s ‘introduction to Artificial Intelligence’ course at Stanford was reportedly so unfocused that students took to calling it ‘Uncle John’s Mystery Hour’ behind his back. In the way that dogs are said to resemble their owners, is it any surprise that the focus of these researchers’ AI programs tended to be on lofty goals rather than mundane (but potentially more useful) feats? As the psychologist Steven Pinker summed it up: ‘The main lesson of [the first] thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard.’ Changing Ambitions Facing these kinds of challenges, Good Old-Fashioned AI started to run into problems. From the 1970s, the field cooled off as the optimism of previous decades dissipated.

The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems-And Create More
by Luke Dormehl
Published 4 Nov 2014

If a potential relationship is deemed not attractive enough for us on some level, a holiday is too expensive, or a laptop won’t carry out the tasks we are buying it for, we dismiss it and move on to the next option. However, is this really the right way to think about love? In his book How the Mind Works, the experimental psychologist and author Steven Pinker poses a question very similar to the one asked in the Stable Marriage algorithm described at the start of this chapter: namely, how can a person be sure in a relationship that their partner will not leave them the moment that it is rational to do so? Pinker gives the potentially problematic example of a more physically attractive “10-out-of-10” neighbor moving in next door to us.

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be
by Diane Coyle
Published 11 Oct 2021

People playing games, whether in the lecture hall or in life, might have other aims such as harmonious social relationships that make their seemingly unintelligent or irrational choices perfectly reasonable. For the word ‘rational’ is ambiguous. Economists mean ‘logically consistent’. Normal people often mean ‘reasonable’ instead. Daniel Kahneman and other cognitive scientists have shown that generally economic rationality has to be learnt (Kahneman 2011). Steven Pinker has pointed out that humans did not evolve to think about numbers and find calculation hard, and that, ‘The logic of the market is cognitively unnatural’ (Pinker 2007). The default assumption in economics remains that humans think in the ‘slow’ way, making logical calculations; but this is energy-intensive and tiring, and we economise on it.

How to Predict the Unpredictable
by William Poundstone

The bug isn’t in the software but in our heads. The New York bus schedule means little on busy corners, where traffic and lights cause buses to arrive in an approximation of randomness. Yet it doesn’t seem random at all. It seems like you wait twenty minutes for a bus, then two or three arrive in tandem. Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker tells of an experiment in which volunteers had to press a button whenever they heard a beep. The subjects knew the beeps were supposed to occur randomly in time. They complained that the machine was broken: “The beeps are coming in bursts. They sound like this: ‘beepbeepbeepbeepbeep … beep … beepbeep … beepitybeepitybeepbeepbeep.”

How Democracy Ends
by David Runciman
Published 9 May 2018

Many democracies, even in the West, are less elderly than Japan and Greece, more volatile, more impatient, and potentially a lot more violent. One does not have to go to Caracas to get a glimpse of an alternative future. Chicago will do. The claim that violence is in overall decline – most famously made by Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of our Nature (2011) – has underpinned some of my argument in this book.92 That picture has grown more complicated in recent years. A significant part of Pinker’s case was based on falling crime rates across the US, from their highs in the 1970s and 1980s down to historic lows in the 2010s.

How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks
by Robin Dunbar and Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar
Published 2 Nov 2010

For me, it might be the strains of a Buddy Holly song, or a snatch of one of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, or the skirl of massed bagpipes. But why is it that music moves us so? [Page 69] Perhaps surprisingly, music has remained until very recently one of the Cinderella areas of modern science, something too trivial for real scientists to dirty their hands with – evolutionary cheesecake, as the linguist Steven Pinker put it. And yet, as evolutionary biologists will never tire of pointing out, something that a species is prepared to devote so much time – and money! – to cannot be a trivial by-product. Whenever animals invest that much time and effort in something, it’s usually because it is of fundamental biological importance.

The Dark Cloud: How the Digital World Is Costing the Earth
by Guillaume Pitron
Published 14 Jun 2023

And for good reason: ‘[S]ome activists were socialists who went on to become executives in big oil companies’, effectively betraying the very ideals they fought for, paving stones in hand, explained the expert, who concluded by saying that, fifty years later, ‘I feel like history is repeating itself.’ Can you prove him wrong? History has shown that we should distrust the fears sparked by new inventions. From newspapers, cinema, and paperbacks, to the telephone, ‘New forms of media have always caused moral panics’, Canadian psychologist Steven Pinker points out.23 In the fifteenth century, the printing press was seen as a ‘danger to the soul’, and in the twentieth century, the radio was disparaged as a threat to good morals and democracy. In the 1960s, it was argued that television would destroy our mental and physical wellbeing.24 Information and communication technologies attract similar criticism, along with the novel addition of causing harm to the environment.

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
by Walter Isaacson
Published 6 Oct 2014

A visit to the New York City police command system in Manhattan reveals how computers scan thousands of feeds from surveillance cameras as part of a Domain Awareness System, but the system still cannot reliably identify your mother’s face in a crowd. All of these tasks have one thing in common: even a four-year-old can do them. “The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard,” according to Steven Pinker, the Harvard cognitive scientist.12 As the futurist Hans Moravec and others have noted, this paradox stems from the fact that the computational resources needed to recognize a visual or verbal pattern are huge. Moravec’s paradox reinforces von Neumann’s observations from a half century ago about how the carbon-based chemistry of the human brain works differently from the silicon-based binary logic circuits of a computer.

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I have attributed the opinions in the book to Kelly, who is the director of IBM research. 9. Larry Hardesty, “Artificial-Intelligence Research Revives Its Old Ambitions,” MIT News, Sept. 9, 2013. 10. James Somers, “The Man Who Would Teach Computers to Think,” Atlantic, Nov. 2013. 11. Gary Marcus, “Why Can’t My Computer Understand Me,” New Yorker, Aug. 16, 2013. 12. Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (Harper, 1994), 191. 13. Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (Prentice Hall, 1995), 566. 14. Author’s interview with Bill Gates. 15. Nicholas Wade, “In Tiny Worm, Unlocking Secrets of the Brain,” New York Times, June 20, 2011; “The Connectome of a Decision-Making Neural Network,” Science, July 27, 2012; The Dana Foundation, https://www.dana.org/News/Details.aspx?

A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order
by Richard Haass
Published 10 Jan 2017

Haass, War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009). 2. George H. W. Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of Congress on the Persian Gulf Crisis and the Federal Budget Deficit,” Washington, DC, September 11, 1990, George Bush Presidential Library and Museum, https://bush41library.tamu.edu/archives/public-papers/2217. 3. See, for example, Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Penguin, 2011); G. John Ikenberry, “The Myth of Post–Cold War Chaos,” Foreign Affairs 75, no. 3 (May/June 1996), www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/1996-05-01/myth-post-cold-war-chaos; James Dobbins, “Reports of Global Disorder Have Been Greatly Exaggerated,” Foreign Policy, July 22, 2015, http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/07/22/reports-of-our-global-disorder-have-been-greatly-exaggerated-russia-china-us-leadership/; Michael A.

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream
by Tyler Cowen
Published 27 Feb 2017

Or if you wish to use the language of financial economics, the possibility of cyclical patterns in history is right now the single biggest source of systemic, undiversifiable risk. There is in recent times a sneaking suspicion that similar kinds of cyclical patterns may hold in global affairs and foreign policy as well. As Steven Pinker demonstrated in his best-selling book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, most measures of conflict have been falling since the end of the Second World War. That’s great, but should we expect such a trend to continue? Pinker’s tale is that peace begets more peace, as peace brings prosperity, which in turn encourages peace all the more.

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
by Ross Douthat
Published 25 Feb 2020

But China’s future also might illustrate a different hypothesis, which is that the near future will see a kind of convergence-in-decadence between the world’s rising great powers and its existing empires, in which growth and progress in the non-Western world levels off and political futility increases, and it turns out that the problems discussed in part 1—the stagnation and sclerosis of an aging society—are waiting to greet China (and India and Brazil and Turkey and Nigeria…) as well. In this future, the reality of decadence as I’ve described it would be compatible with a lot of the boosterism about the “rise of the rest,” and the arguments about dramatic recent global progress associated with liberal optimists like Harvard’s Pangloss, Steven Pinker. On the surface, the almost-everything-is-getting-better arguments that Pinker has made in books like Enlightenment Now and The Better Angels of Our Nature seem in tension with my thesis, but not necessarily or completely. Pinker’s optimistic take could be accurately describing the very real gains to human welfare that are achieved by developing nations as they follow Europe, the United States, and East Asia down the liberal-capitalist path.

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
by Hans Rosling , Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund
Published 2 Apr 2018

Our thinking on the ten instincts was influenced by the work of a number of brilliant cognitive scientists. Some of the books that completely changed our thinking about the mind and about how we should teach facts about the world are: Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational (2008), The Upside of Irrationality (2010), and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty (2012); Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (1997), The Stuff of Thought (2007), The Blank Slate (2002), and The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011); Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) (2007); Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011); Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test (2014); Philip E.

Bike Boom: The Unexpected Resurgence of Cycling
by Carlton Reid
Published 14 Jun 2017

And while cycling may only bloom once cities provide cycleway grids, how will such grids be provided in those cities where cycle usage is currently low? The historical background to such questions is what I set out to examine in Bike Boom. Carlton Reid Newcastle upon Tyne May 2017 | Introduction “No one has ever recruited activists to a cause by announcing that things are getting better…” —Steven Pinker HOW DO WE MEASURE WHETHER A BIKE BOOM IS, or is not, happening? By mileage cycled, or bicycles sold? There are good stats for the latter, fewer and often less reliable ones for the former. Or how about modal-share, the percentage split between different modes of transport? Some cities have certainly seen expanded cycle usage—for instance, between 2000 and 2015 New York City witnessed a 381 percent growth in its bikeway network and a 207 percent rise in bicycle trips—but dig down and the impressive jumps often turn out to be starting from pitifully low bases.

Thinking in Bets
by Annie Duke
Published 6 Feb 2018

Robert MacCoun, for several great conversations on the topic of outcome blindness. Gary Marcus, for engaging me in some long conversations on subjects that helped form the ideas of the book. I first met Gary when we were in grad school, when I was a student of Lila’s and he was a student of Steven Pinker’s. We reconnected years later after I started working on this book, and the conversations I have been lucky to have with him about memory and time were invaluable. Gabriele Oettingen and her husband Peter Gollwitzer, psychology professors at NYU, who were kind enough to have a very long lunch with me to talk about mental contrasting.

The Virtue of Nationalism
by Yoram Hazony
Published 3 Sep 2018

But as Gat emphasizes, illiterate societies have their own means of wide-scale cultural transmission, including a network of religious centers around the country, the gathering of the public on market days to hear news, and traveling musicians, poets, storytellers, and readers. See Gat, Nations, 12–13. 48. On “collective autonomy,” see Miller, Nationality, 88–89. 49. On violence in the order of tribes and clans, see Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (New York: Penguin, 2012), especially 47–55. 50. In a federal or similar regime, there will be local courts and local police, and even local laws. But these are still answerable to the national government, which oversees them. See Chapter XV. 51. J. G. Herder, Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind, 324.

Strategy Strikes Back: How Star Wars Explains Modern Military Conflict
by Max Brooks , John Amble , M. L. Cavanaugh and Jaym Gates
Published 14 May 2018

Grant once had some disparaging comments on President Jefferson Davis’s own inclination to do the same) or co-opting Tarkin’s military expertise and blurring the line between civil and military decision making, the story lines of Star Wars offer clear-cut examples of universal and timeless themes that animate all discussions of strategic civil-military relationships.34 Duties of obedience and scope of authority under principles of agency, the sovereign’s source of political legitimacy, a military commander’s discretion, and loyalty pop up within these hallowed scenes. They can be instructive starting points for thinking through present difficulties and future civil-military crises. If we are careful, we can target them as easily as Luke did with womp rats in his T-16 back home. Notes 1. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), quoted in Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (London: Penguin Books, 2012), 33. Hobbes was a scholar and translator of the first historian of war (or true historian, period), Thucydides; see Thucydides’s epic The History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner, bk. 1.76 (New York: Penguin Classics, 1954), 80, describing Athens’s fear, honor, and self-interest as rationally determining its relations with the other Greek city-states, including Sparta.

Outnumbered: From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter-Bubbles – the Algorithms That Control Our Lives
by David Sumpter
Published 18 Jun 2018

The first customer’s random choice of Cox has led to four more joint purchases. Ian Stewart has been bought four times. Richard Dawkins and Philip Ball have sold three books each. At this stage, it is not clear which author is most popular. After 500 sales the picture is very different. Figure 9.1b shows that Steven Pinker is by far the most popular author, with strong links to Daniel Kahneman, Susan Greenfield and Philip Ball, who are also selling well. Richard Dawkins and Brian Cox have fallen behind, and several other good authors have failed to take off. In the simulation, some authors become very popular, as more and more connections are made to them, and other authors sink into obscurity.

More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (Updated and Expanded)
by Michael J. Mauboussin
Published 1 Jan 2006

Examples include the crawl swim stroke (which only became widespread within the past 200 years), overhand free-throw shots in basketball, and the Fosbury flop for high jumpers. 5 “Moore’s law is the empirical observation that at our rate of technological development, the complexity of an integrated circuit, with respect to minimum component cost will double in about 24 months” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore’s_Law). 6 Juan Enriquez, As the Future Catches You (New York: Crown Business, 2000), 62-65. 7 See http://nickciske.com/tools/binary.php. 19. Pruned for Performance 1 Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 150-51. 2 Alison Gopnik, Andrew Meltzoff, and Patricia Kuhl, The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind (New York: First Perennial, 2001), 186-87. 3 Joseph LeDoux, Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are (New York: Viking, 2002), 79-81. 4 Robert Aunger, The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think (New York: Free Press, 2002), 185. 5 Barbara Clancy and Barbara Finlay, “Neural Correlates of Early Language Learning,” in Language Development: The Essential Readings, ed.

Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends
by Martin Lindstrom
Published 23 Feb 2016

In no particular order I’d like to thank: Tony Tsieh, Jeff Weiner, Ryan Holmes, Deepak Chopra, Danny Sullivan, Tim Ferriss, Gary Vanyerchuk, Martin Shervington, Sarah Hill, Michelle Killebrew, Muhammad Yunus, David Edelman, Meg Whitman, Denis Labelle, Dr. Jane Goodall, Dharmesh Shah, Beth Comstock, Thomas Friedman, David Sable, Chris Brogan, Michael Hyatt, Jeff Bullas, Don Peppers, Charlene Li, Rand Fishkin, Pam Moore, Nicolas Bordas, Peter Shankman, Steven Pinker, Richard Florida, Mike Allton, Jay Baer, Brian Solis, Steve Rubel, Neil Patel, Mark Schaefer, Jonah Berger, Chad Dickerson, Josh Leibowitz, Erica Hill, Niall Ferguson, Lee Odden, Jonathan Becher, John Jantsch, Yifat Cohen, Robert Cialdini, Andrew Hunt, Matt Heinz, Joe Pulizzi, Joseph Stiglitz, Michael Brenner, Michael Gold, John Rampton, Shawn Collins, Chris Ducker, David Skok, John Lee Dumas, Lee Odden, Jonathan Salem Baskin, Brent Csutoras, Heidi Cohen, Bill Tancer, Anita Newton, Matthew Barby, Craig Rosenberg, Brian Massey, Jon Haidt, Tom Fishburne, Roger Dooley, Pamela Wilson.

Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It
by Gabriel Wyner
Published 4 Aug 2014

If only they looked closer, they’d find hundreds of languages that defy the standard grammatical patterns. To fit all of these languages, we’d need language acquisition devices preprogrammed with an enormous amount of information. Perhaps kids are just good at inferring patterns. If you’d like to get a good feel for Chomsky’s side of the story, check out Steven Pinker’s wonderful book, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: HarperPerennial, 2010. If you’d like to check out the other side of the debate, read Nicholas Evans and Stephen C. Levinson, “The Myth of Language Universals: Language Diversity and Its Importance for Cognitive Science,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32, no. 05 (2009): 429–448. 3 No amount of drilling a particular grammar rule … will enable a student to skip a developmental stage: Note that these developmental stages don’t prevent you from memorizing and using a few phrases with relatively advanced grammar.

Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty First Century City
by Anna Minton
Published 24 Jun 2009

GÖRTEMAKER, Eva Braun: Life with Hitler BRIAN COX AND JEFF FORSHAW, The Quantum Universe: Everything that Can Happen Does Happen NATHAN D. WOLFE, The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age NORMAN DAVIES, Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe MICHAEL LEWIS, Boomerang: The Meltdown Tour STEVEN PINKER, The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes ROBERT TRIVERS, Deceit and Self-Deception: Fooling Yourself the Better to Fool Others THOMAS PENN, Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England DANIEL YERGIN, The Quest: Energy, Security and the Remaking of the Modern World MICHAEL MOORE, Here Comes Trouble: Stories from My Life ALI SOUFAN, The Black Banners: Inside the Hunt for Al Qaeda JASON BURKE, The 9/11 Wars TIMOTHY D.

The Ghost Map: A Street, an Epidemic and the Hidden Power of Urban Networks.
by Steven Johnson
Published 18 Oct 2006

I’m indebted to a number of people who read the manuscript and improved the book immensely with their thoughts and corrections: Carl Zimmer, Paul Miller, Howard Brody, Nigel Paneth, Peter Vinten-Johansen, and Tom Koch. A number of scholars were kind enough to comment on specific sections of the manuscript, or to answer my questions about the material: Sherwin Nuland, Steven Pinker, Ralph Frerichs, John Mekalanos, Sallie Patel, and Stewart Brand. My research assistant, Ivan Askwith, was once again an invaluable collaborator, as was Russell Davies, who came through with some last-minute additions from the streets (and libraries) of London. Whatever errors remain are mine alone.

Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era
by Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith
Published 17 Aug 2015

So instead of focusing on characteristics that matter, we turn to narrow skills that can be tested. We’re a bit like the drunk who loses his keys at night in some distant location, but looks for them under a streetlight since it’s a place where he can see. And people who should know better, like Harvard professor of psychology Steven Pinker, argue that the sole criteria elite schools should use in selecting their incoming classes is standardized test performance.19 The standardized test industry has sprawled to include alternatives to the SAT (the ACT), subject-matter tests (AP, SAT subject tests), professional school admissions tests (LSAT, MCAT, GRE), and ubiquitous state standardized tests required by the No Child Left Behind Act—seeping into every nook and cranny of our schools.

We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent
by Nesrine Malik
Published 4 Sep 2019

And they haven’t even pulled the knife out much less heal the wound …’ This fondness of measuring the present in terms of how much better it is than the past, rather than how bad it is objectively, is not merely a feature of conservative thinking. It is also beloved of a certain type of neo-liberal intellectual. Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist, is a promoter of an inexorable enlightenment. In his book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress he coins any resistance or complaint as ‘progressophobia’. By framing progressophobia as a hallmark of right-wing thinking, Pinker has managed to Trojan horse this deeply conservative view into the halls of Harvard and earn the praise of Bill Gates who called Enlightenment Now his ‘new favourite book of all time’.

Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Changed Our World
by Andrew Leigh
Published 14 Sep 2018

Alm, Steven 97–8 Amazon 7, 131–2, 137, 144, 167 American Economic Association’s Randomized Controlled Trials registry 199 American Psychological Association, and Joseph Jastrow 51 Ames, Phil 184–5 ‘anchoring’ effect 133 Andrade, Leandro 101 Annie Hall 208–9 Anson, Commodore George, and scurvy 1–3 Archilochus 104 Aristotle 156 artefactual field experiments 176 Arthroscopy 20 Ashenfelter, Orley 194 ASSISTments, and online learning tools 77 Auden, W.H. 125 Australian National University 167, 186, 201 ‘automaticity’ 87–8 Badabla, Saa 161 Banerjee, Abhijit 121 Banerji, Rukmini 189–90 Barksdale, Jim 6 Battered Women’s Movement 89 Battlers and Billionaires 167 Belmont Report 186 Benin political campaign, and Saka Lafia 160 BETA 171 see also Michael Hiscox Beyond Scared Straight 8 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation 77, 103 biometrically identified smartcards 111 see also Karthik Muralidhan Blane, Gilbert 4 Blattman, Chris 88, 209 Bloom, Nicholas 139 Bloomberg Philanthropies 211 Booker, Senator Cory 86 Borges, Jorge Luis, and ‘The Lottery in Babylon’ 181 Boston Consulting 139 Bown, Stephen 1 Brindley, Giles 168 Bristol, Muriel 52 British Medical Journal 12 ‘broken windows policing’ 209 Broockman, David 163–4 Brookings Institution 44 see also Ron Haskins Bush, President George W. 125, 155 California Votes Initiative 153 Campbell, Donald 205 Campbell Collaboration 8, 198 Capitol One 128–9 see also Nigel Morris; Rich Fairbank Carlyle, Thomas 44 Carr, NSW Premier Bob 95 Chalmers, Iain 28 Chatterbooks program 76 see also Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) ‘cherrypick’ 36,196 Chicago ‘Parent Academy’ 9 childhood learning programs 65, 68, 70–2, 191 see also 21st Century Community Learning Centers; ‘1001 critical days’ movement; Abecedarian Project; Early Years Education Program; Head Start; Perry Preschool; Sesame Street; West Heidelberg early years centre Choong, Peter 17–18, 21 Christoforetti, John 22 Cifu, Adam 31 Civis Analytics 159 Clark medal 121 see also Esther Duflo Clinton, President Bill 41, 59, 105 Coby, Gary, and the Trump campaign 154 Cochrane 28, 31, 198 see also Archie Cochrane; Iain Chalmers Cochrane, Archie 27–8, 190 Cochrane Collaboration 28 cognitive behavioural therapy 87–8 Colbert, Stephen 125 college program trials 82–3, 169 Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) 14, 54 Community Led Total Sanitation 116 control groups 44, 78, 93, 118, 138, 192, 211 and ‘encouragement design’ 187 see also medical randomised trials; political campaign strategies; randomised trials; social field experiments conventional laboratory experiments 176–7 see also Steven Pinker Cook, James 4 Cook, Scott, and Intuit 207 Cooney, Joan 63 correlation 11, 106, 149 counterfactual 9–10, 74, 82, 149, 192–3 Cowdery, Nicholas 96 credible comparison groups 10, 37, 72 Creedence Clearwater Revival, and ‘Fortunate Son’ 42 CrimeSolutions.gov 101 criminal justice experiments ‘Becoming a Man’ program 87 and CrimeSolutions.gov 101 Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement (HOPE) 97–9 ‘incapacitation effect’ 99 and Liberian experiment 88 Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment 90–1 Neighbourhood Watch 94, 183 and Street Narcotics Unit 92–3 and ‘three strikes’ law’ 99, 101 see also Drug Courts; policing programs; restorative justice experiments; US Police Foundation CVS pharmacy 133–4 Danish State Serum Institute 26 ‘data and safety monitoring boards’ 187 Deaton, Angus 6, 12, 124 ‘deep canvassing’ 163–4 ‘Development Innovation Ventures’ 210 see also Maura O’Neill; Michael Kremer dibao 108 Dive, Roger 96 ‘double-blind’ studies 26 driving licence experiment India 109 see also Sendhil Mullainathan Drug Courts 95–6, 98, 182 Duflo, Esther 121–2, 206 Dukakis, Michael 151 Durkheim, Emile 91 Dziak, John 131 Early Years Education Program 71–2 Earned Income Tax Credit 41 Easterly, William 112 eBay 130, 132 Edna McConnell Clark Foundation 211 Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) 75–6, 211 Einstein, Albert 208 Eliot, Charles 51 ‘encouragement design’ 187 ethics 72, 98, 109, 118, 182, 186–8 see also medical randomised trials ethics committees 186–7 see also 1964 Declaration of Helsinki; Belmont Report; ‘data and safety monitoring boards’ evidence-based medicine 24, 26–7 see also Alvan Feinstein; Archie Cochrane; David Sackett ‘experimental ideal’ 194 Experiments in Governance and Politics Network 199 Facebook 138, 143–5, 154–5 see also Sheryl Sandburg Fairbank, Rich 128–9 family violence 85, 89–90 see also The Battered Women’s Movement; Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment Farrer, William 127 Feinstein, Alvan 27 Fenner, Frank 168 Feynman, Richard, on scientific integrity 205 Fibiger, Johannes 26 Finckenauer, James 8 Finland government experiment 46 Fisher, Ronald 52–4, 127 see also ‘modern synthesis’ and ‘The evolution of sexual preference’ 53 ‘fixed mindset’ 6 Fleischer, David 163–5 FlyBuys loyalty card, and Coles supermarket empire 134–5 Flynn, James, and the ‘Flynn effect’ 73 Food and Drug Administration 29, 188 Fox, President Vincente 117 framed field experiments 176 Frankfurt, Harry 205 Freedom from Hunger 212 French government experiment 46 Fryer, Roland 79 ‘fuel league table’ 136 fundraising strategies 156–9 and the ‘lead donor’ 157 and the ‘once and done’ campaign 158 Salvation Army’s ‘Red Kettle Christmas drive 157 and the ‘Science of Philanthropy Initiative’ 159 Garner, Alan 183–4 see also Head Injury Retrieval Trial Gawande, Atul, on ‘pointless medical care’ 34 ‘general equilibrium’ effect 191 Gerber, Alan 149,151–3 German government unemployment incentive 45 Get Out the Vote 149 see also Alan Gerber; Donald Green GiveDirectly 107 Glover, Danny 7 Gneezy, Uri 178 Goldacre, Ben 185 Google 7, 131, 141–4, 154, 208 and researching a book title 166–7 see also Eric Schmidt; Marissa Mayer Gopnik, Alison 65–6 Gore, Al 155 Gosnell, Harold, and political campaigns 148–50 Graber, Ben 60 Grameen Bank 105 see also Muhammad Yunus Green, Donald 149, 151–3, 163 see also Get Out the Vote Grigg, Sue 37 see also ‘Journey to Social Inclusion’ Gueron, Judith 57–62, 206 see also Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC); Project Independence H&R Block 82 Halpern, David 171, 206 see also Nudge Unit Harford, Tim 190, 205 Harlem Children’s Zone 79 Harrah’s casino 127–8 see also Gary Loveman Harris, Ian, and medical randomised trials 21, 34 Harrison, Glenn, and categories of randomised experiments 176 Haskins, Ron 44 Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement (HOPE) 97–9 see also Steven Alm ‘Hawthorn effect’ 138 Haygarth, John, and the placebo effect 23–4 Head Injury Retrieval Trial 183–4 Head Start 192 ‘healthy cohort’ effect 12 Highest Paid Person’s Opinion (HiPPO) 6 Hill, Austin Bradford 54–7 and Principles of Medical Statistics 55 and streptomycin trial 56 Hiscox, Michael 171 see also BETA HMS Salisbury 3 HMS Wager 2 Holmes, Oliver Wendell Sr, and materia medica 25–6 ‘incapacitation effect’ 99 Incredible Years Basic Parenting Programme 69 Innovations for Poverty Action 123 International Clinical Trials Registry Platform 199 Ioannidis, John 196–7 James Cook University 33 James Lind Alliance 28 see also Iain Chalmers Jastrow, Joseph 50–1 J.B.

Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy
by Dani Rodrik
Published 8 Oct 2017

François Bourguignon and Christian Morrisson, “Inequality Among World Citizens: 1820–1992,” American Economic Review, vol. 92, 2002: 727–744. 10. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992, Blackwell, Cambridge, MA, 1992; Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 1983; Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Viking, New York, 2011; Elie Kedourie, Nationalism, 4th ed., Blackwell, New York, 1993; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised ed., Verso, London, 2006. 11. Quoted in Elie Kedourie, Nationalism, 7. 12.

A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution
by Jennifer A. Doudna and Samuel H. Sternberg
Published 15 Mar 2017

Noting (with considerable oversimplification) that gene editing could “virtually eradicate genetic birth defects” and significantly lower the harm caused by chronic diseases, Savulescu and his coauthors argued that “to intentionally refrain from engaging in life-saving research is to be morally responsible for the foreseeable, avoidable deaths of those who could have benefitted. Research into gene-editing is not an option, it is a moral necessity.” A month later, Steven Pinker, the acclaimed Harvard scholar, vented his general frustration at the overly cautious reactions to biotechnological advances like CRISPR in an opinion article in the Boston Globe. Instead of creating red tape or introducing prohibitive regulations, he argued that “the primary moral goal for today’s bioethics can be summarized in a single sentence.

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
by David Eagleman
Published 29 May 2011

Spatial sequence synesthetes differ in that they experience sequences explicitly in three dimensions as automatic, consistent, and concrete configurations. See Eagleman, “The objectification of overlearned sequences”, and Cytowic and Eagleman, Wednesday Is Indigo Blue. 11 Nagel, The View from Nowhere. 12 See Cosmides and Tooby, Cognitive Adaptations, for an overview, and Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate for an excellent in-depth read. 13 Johnson and Morton, “CONSPEC and CONLERN.” 14 Meltzoff, “Understanding the intentions of others.” 15 Pinker, The Blank Slate. 16 Wason and Shapiro, “Reasoning,” and Wason, “Natural and contrived experience” 17 Cosmides and Tooby, Cognitive Adaptions. 18 Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby, The Adapted Mind 19 Cosmides and Tooby, “Evolutionary psychology: A primer,” 1997; http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html 20 James, The Principles of Psychology. 21 Tooby and Cosmides, Evolutionary Psychology: Foundational Papers (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 22 Singh, “Adaptive significance” and “Is thin really beautiful,” and Yu and Shepard, “Is beauty in the eye?”

Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do
by Jeremy Bailenson
Published 30 Jan 2018

Chris Milk, “How virtual reality can create the ultimate empathy machine,” filmed March 2015, TED video, 10:25, https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_ milk_how_virtual_reality_can_create_the_ultimate_empathy_machine #t-54386. 4. Ibid. 5. John Gaudiosi, “UN Uses Virtual Reality to Raise Awareness and Money,” Fortune, April 18, 2016, http://fortune.com/2016/04/18/un-uses-virtual- reality-to-raise-awareness-and-money/. 6. See Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature (New York: Viking, 2011) and Peter Singer’s The Expanding Circle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 7. J. Zaki, “Empathy: A Motivated Account,” Psychological Bulletin 140, no. 6 (2014): 1608–47. 8. Susanne Babbel, “Compassion Fatigue: Bodily symptoms of empathy,” Psychology Today, July 4, 2012, https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/somatic-psychology/201207/compassion-fatigue. 9.

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business
by Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro
Published 30 Aug 2021

This was the genius of Barefoot College’s innovation: The middle-aged women who went through its program became not only a literal source of power for their villages, but also powerful themselves. Bunker and Meagan understood the potential of technology to change the power map for the better. Over the course of history, technological and scientific advances have done more than just greatly improve our daily existence, as psychologist Steven Pinker notes in his book Enlightenment Now. They have also brought us closer to becoming “like lords and possessors of Nature,” in the words of French scientist and philosopher René Descartes.10 For Descartes, science and technology were the gateway for people to understand, interpret, and analyze nature, and thereby gain a measure of control over Mother Nature herself.11 We have become so astoundingly powerful that we have even developed plans to prevent massive asteroids from hitting Earth and annihilating us.12 The digital revolution that reached warp speed at the turn of the twenty-first century has increased our power at a staggering pace.II In 1989, at one of the world’s largest physics laboratories, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau invented a new network for sharing and searching information.

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism
by John Elkington
Published 6 Apr 2020

Put another way, our society changed more in the last 50 years than at any other time in history. More startling, we changed more in the last 50 years than in the entirety of human existence.13 [Original author’s emphases.] There are commercially successful super optimists on the theme of where all of this is taking us. People like Steven Pinker and the late Hans Rosling have argued that we are living in the most peaceful times ever, statistically speaking. In the last hundred years, we have seen the average human life expectancy nearly doubled—indeed, as I wrote these words, my father was ninety-eight, my mother ninety-six. Such things do not go on forever, however.14 And the threat of the Anthropocene epoch is that our species, so successful in improving its own life expectancy and living conditions over a generation or two, may so disrupt the wider world that the very foundations of nature and civilization crack.

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
by Elizabeth Kolbert
Published 11 Feb 2014

A first print run of forty-five hundred copies quickly sold out, and a second run of nine thousand was ordered up. (In a letter to his fiancée, Lyell boasted that this represented “at least 10 times” as many books as any other English geologist had ever sold.) Lyell became something of a celebrity—the Steven Pinker of his generation—and when he spoke in Boston more than four thousand people tried to get tickets. For the sake of clarity (and a good read), Lyell had caricatured his opponents, making them sound a great deal more “unphilosophical” than they actually were. They returned the favor. A British geologist named Henry De la Beche, who had a knack for drawing, poked fun at Lyell’s ideas about eternal return.

Wasps: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy
by Michael Knox Beran
Published 2 Aug 2021

“It’s a short-sighted view, Scott-King.” “There, head master, with all respect, I differ from you profoundly. I think it the most long-sighted view it is possible to take.” Perhaps it is, but neither Scott-King nor, perhaps, the WASPs themselves sufficiently grappled with the objection raised by the headmaster. Harvard’s Steven Pinker dismisses the humane approach as so much archaic “literarism,” and putting tradition and sentimentality to one side, there are good reasons to think that the eutrapelian idea of developing the various aspects of one’s nature is little more than a mystical mumbo-jumbo justification for what was once a practical necessity.

…

What concerned Trilling as much or more than the narrowing of political liberalism was the narrowing of the liberally educated mind, its loss of eutrapelian suppleness. “variousness”: See Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination. “cared for and cherished”: Heart of Emerson’s Journals, ed. Perry, 314. “quite vanish”: See Trilling’s essay on The Princess Casamassima in The Liberal Imagination. “literarism”: Steven Pinker, “The Trouble with Harvard,” New Republic, September 4, 2014. Pinker associates this “literarism” with a “bohemian authenticity” which he contrasts unfavorably with “worldly success and analytical brainpower.” Pinker was criticizing an essay in which William Deresiewicz defended the traditional liberal arts approach to education in which “the humanities are still accorded pride of place” and an “allegiance to real educational values” is maintained.

NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children
by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
Published 2 Sep 2008

Jusczyk, “Infants’ Use of Synchronized Visual Information to Separate Streams of Speech,” Child Development, vol. 76, no. 3, pp. 598–613 (2005). Iger, Robert, Letter to Mark A. Emmert regarding press release concerning study on children’s language development and media viewing, Seattle Post-Intelligencer (Aug. 14, 2007). http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/327427_letter14ww.html Jackendoff, Ray, and Steven Pinker, “The Nature of the Language Faculty and Its Implications for Evolution of Language (Reply to Fitch, Hauser, and Chomsky),” Cognition, vol. 97, no. 2, pp. 211–225 (2005). Jusczyk, Peter W., “How Infants Begin to Extract Words from Speech,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 3, no. 9, pp. 323–328 (1999).

The Road Ahead
by Bill Gates , Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson
Published 15 Nov 1995

Gaines, Donald Knuth, David Halberstam, or any of my other longtime favorite writers. I would also like to have it signal me when a new book appears on some topic that interests me: economics and technology, learning theories, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and biotechnology, to name a few. I was quite stimulated by a book called The Language Instinct, written by Steven Pinker, a professor at MIT, and I'd like to know about new books or articles on its ideas. You'll also be able to find surprises by following links other people have set up. Today, users like to browse the Internet's World Wide Web, checking the display pages or home pages that include links to other pages with information about a company or links to other companies' pages.

Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence
by Richard Yonck
Published 7 Mar 2017

In fact, it can be argued that we are more human today than at any time in our rather checkered past. If we measure humanity by the ability to strive for and attain a world that is more humane, less violent, and increasingly respectful of those not of our own tribe, then we have achieved just that. Steven Pinker lays this out in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, detailing how we have managed to build a world that is safer and more peaceful than at any other time in history. This in spite of many people’s newscast-instilled perceptions that death and destruction lurk around every corner. Pinker argues that this improvement has not been due to a change in our biology or cognition, but rather because of “the changes in our cultural and material milieu that have given our peaceable motives the upper hand.”

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner
Published 14 Sep 2015

If you know cognitive psychology, you know that the heuristics-and-biases school of thought has not gone unchallenged. Skeptics are impressed by how stunningly accurately System 1 can perform. People automatically and seemingly optimally synthesize meaningless photons and sound waves into language we infuse with meaning (Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works, New York: Norton, 1997). There is dispute over how often System 1 heuristics lead us astray (Gerd Gigerenzer and Peter Todd, Simple Heuristics that Make Us Smart, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) and how hard it is to overcome WYSIATI illusions via training or incentives (Philip Tetlock and Barbara Mellers, “The Great Rationality Debate: The Impact of the Kahneman and Tversky Research Program, Psychological Science 13, no. 5 [2002]: 94–99).

Beyond: Our Future in Space
by Chris Impey
Published 12 Apr 2015

All three types of artifact date from about 80,000 years ago, and there are even earlier hints of abstract thinking. This evidence points to a gradual accumulation of knowledge, skills, and culture over several hundred thousand years, rather than a “Great Leap Forward.” Regardless of when we evolved these uniquely human capabilities, renowned psychologist Steven Pinker put his finger on a problem, the problem of why. He wonders, “Why do humans have the ability to pursue abstract intellectual feats such as science, mathematics, philosophy, and law, given that the opportunities to exercise these talents did not exist in the foraging lifestyle in which humans evolved, and would not have parlayed themselves into advantages in survival and reproduction even if they did?”

Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope
by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn
Published 14 Jan 2020

,” The New York Times, April 2, 2018. right-wing politicians in the South defend Confederate statues: These points are well made by Krugman, ibid. “risks driving even more of the working class into the Republican camp”: Sawhill, The Forgotten Americans, 13. wrong for a man to beat his wife with a belt or stick: Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 408. A 1963 poll found: Karlyn Bowman, “Interracial Marriage: Changing Laws, Minds and Hearts,” Forbes, January 13, 2017. See also Eleanor O’Neil, Heather Sims and Karlyn Bowman, “AEI Political Report: The Trump Presidency: Change, Change, Change,” AEI, January 13, 2017.

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
by Anand Giridharadas
Published 27 Aug 2018

By this he meant the rising populist anger, for which he blamed himself in a modest way. Of course, it wasn’t only curators and arbiters like him who protected their own worldview and shut out others. It was also the elite audiences who heard only what they wanted to hear. He gave the example of Steven Pinker’s popular TED talk on the decline of violence over the course of history, based on his book The Better Angels of Our Nature. Pinker is a respected professor of psychology at Harvard, and few would accuse him of pulling his punches or yielding to thought leadership’s temptations. Yet his talk became a cult favorite among hedge funders, Silicon Valley types, and other winners.

Split-Second Persuasion: The Ancient Art and New Science of Changing Minds
by Kevin Dutton
Published 3 Feb 2011

But not all psychopaths are as accommodating as Lecter. Their facility for flouting social norms, for doing the unexpected, can, as we’ve just seen with Pierre Williams, often be electrifying. And significantly enhances their capacity to charm and persuade. In his book The Stuff of Thought, the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker talks about implicatures. An implicature is a linguistic device that allows us to say what we mean by saying stuff that we … well, don’t mean. A classic example is often heard at the dinner table. Imagine that you’re sitting down with a group of strangers and want someone to pass you the salt and pepper.

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans
by Melanie Mitchell
Published 14 Oct 2019

General intelligence isn’t about the number of abilities, but about the integration between those abilities.”9 But wait. Given the rapidly increasing pile of narrow intelligences, how long will it be before someone figures out how to integrate them and produce all of the broad, deep, and subtle features of human intelligence? Do we believe the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, who thinks all this is business as usual? “Human-level AI is still the standard fifteen to twenty-five years away, just as it always has been, and many of its recently touted advances have shallow roots,” Pinker declared.10 Or should we pay more attention to the AI optimists, who are certain that this time around, this AI spring, things will be different?

The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science
by Michael Strevens
Published 12 Oct 2020

They may write books about beauty in nature that celebrate the ideas of Pythagoras and Plato, like the theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek. They may champion the aesthetic and moral importance of natural diversity, like Rachel Carson and E. O. Wilson. They may explore the implications of human cognition for life and history, like the psychologists Alison Gopnik and Steven Pinker. These thinkers are, precisely because of their expansive interests, far more likely to be known to most readers than the great, silent, scientific majority upon whose minds scientific training has fixed ponderous iron clamps. The clamps are, however, the norm. They are the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ standard mechanism for turning out new scientists, instilling the iron rule by psychological stratagems rather than by enlightenment or persuasion.

Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another
by Matt Taibbi
Published 7 Oct 2019

Meanwhile, the Washington Post by that first night was running chin-scratching analyses like, “Donald Trump’s ‘Schlonged’: A linguistic investigation.” With its unique brand of unimaginative pretentiousness, the paper somehow managed to cite quotes from both Ben Franklin and Harvard University professor Steven Pinker. The Pinker quote read: “Headline writers often ransack the language for onomatopoeic synonyms for ‘defeat’ such as drub, whomp, thump, wallop, whack, trounce, clobber, smash, trample, and Obama’s own favorite, shellac (which in fact sounds a bit like schlong).” All of this column space devoted to “schlong” was not going to other subjects.

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire
by Rebecca Henderson
Published 27 Apr 2020

Max Roser, “Economic Growth,” Our World in Data, Nov. 24, 2013, https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth; Max Roser et al., “World Population Growth,” Our World in Data, May 9, 2013, https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth; “World Population by Year,” Worldometers, www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-population-by-year/. 6. R. J. Reinhart, “Global Warming Age Gap: Younger Americans Most Worried,” Gallup.com, Sept. 4, 2019, https://news.gallup.com/poll/234314/global-warming-age-gap-younger-americans-worried.aspx; Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Viking, 2018). 7. Rosling et al., Factfulness, 60. More formally, per Wp is a “Watt-Peak” or a watt’s worth of capacity under optimal conditions. 8. Better Business Better World (London: Business and Sustainable Development Commission, Jan. 2017), http://report.businesscommission.org/uploads/BetterBiz-BetterWorld_170215_012417.pdf. 9.

The Road to Conscious Machines
by Michael Wooldridge
Published 2 Nov 2018

To understand the difference between Statements 1a and 1b, for example, you would need to know something about demonstrations (demonstrations often lead to violence), and councillors (that they have the power to grant or deny permits for demonstrations to take place, and that they will try to avoid situations that lead to violence). Another similar challenge for AI involves understanding of the human world, and the unwritten rules that govern our relationships within it. Consider the following short dialogue from the psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker: Bob: ‘I’m leaving you.’ Alice: ‘Who is she?’ Can you explain this dialogue? Of course you can. It’s a staple of TV soap operas: Alice and Bob are in a relationship, and Bob’s announcement leads Alice to believe that Bob is leaving her for another woman – and she wants to know who the other woman is.

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis
by Scott Patterson
Published 5 Jun 2023

his literary agent and the organizer of the proceedings, John Brockman, had written: Here’s some specifics re: the agenda: FRIDAY NIGHT 6pm Cocktails—Mezzanine Level 7pm Dinner—Mezzanine Level—Studio 5 SATURDAY MORNING 7:30 Breakfast Mezzanine Level—Studio 4 8:30 Depart by bus to Space X (about 20–30 minutes) To accommodate Craig Venter who can only arrive at Space X in the afternoon, if possible, I will move Elon Musk’s talk and tour of the facility to 4pm, instead of during the lunch break. 7:30 Dinner—Spago 176 N Canon Dr Beverly Hills, CA 90210 With the blockbuster success of The Black Swan, Taleb had gained entry into one of the most elite intellectual salons in America, Brockman’s Edge Foundation, an informal collection of (mostly male) scientists and thinkers that included Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Danny Kahneman, and Murray Gell-Mann (discoverer of the quark) as well as tycoons such as Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, and future disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. The idea behind the salon was simple: put a bunch of smart people together in a room, have them talk, and see what comes out on the other end.

Not the End of the World
by Hannah Ritchie
Published 9 Jan 2024

She is also deputy editor and lead researcher at the highly influential online publication Our World in Data, which brings together the latest data and research on the world’s largest problems and makes them accessible for a general audience. Her research appears regularly in the New York Times, Economist, Financial Times, BBC, WIRED, New Scientist, and Vox, and in bestselling books including Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, Hans Rosling’s Factfulness and Bill Gates’s How to Prevent a Climate Disaster. In 2022, Ritchie was named Scotland’s Youth Climate Champion and New Scientist called her ‘the woman who gave Covid-19 data to the world.’ OceanofPDF.com

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction
by Derek Thompson
Published 7 Feb 2017

Thanks to those whose work inspired this book, directly and implicitly: Raymond Loewy, Stanley Lieberson, Michael Kaminiski, Chris Taylor, Bill Bryson, Malcolm Gladwell, Jonah Berger, Steven Johnson, Tom Vanderbilt, Robert Gordon, David Suisman, Paul Barber, Elizabeth Margulis, John Seabrook, Charles Duhigg, Daniel Kahneman, Steven Pinker, Oliver Sacks, Michael Wolff, Nate Silver, Dan Ariely, Jonathan Franzen, Conor Sen, Felix Salmon, Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Chris Martin, Marc Andreessen, and Umberto Eco. Thanks to those whose conversations inspired this book, directly and implicitly: Drew Durbin, Lincoln Quirk, Michael Diamond, Jordan Weissmann, Robbie dePicciotto, Laura Martin, Maria Konnikova, Mark Harris, Spencer Kornhaber, Rececca Rosen, Alexis Madrigal, Bob Cohn, John Gould, Don Peck, James Bennet, Kevin Roose, Gabriel Rossman, Jesse Prinz, Duncan Watts, Anne Messitte, Andrew Golis, Aditya Sood, Nicholas Jackson, Seth Godin, the Diamonds, the Durbins, and Kira Thompson.

Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins
by Garry Kasparov
Published 1 May 2017

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers. 4. You hide, They seek. 5. Paranoids are not paranoids because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.” CHAPTER 11. HUMAN PLUS MACHINE but on our creation and use of tools. The works of cognitive scientist Steven Pinker and his colleagues has convinced me that the origins of the development of human language are unknown and possibly unknowable, as befits “the hardest problem in science,” as Pinker’s essay on the subject is titled. It was probably fortuitous that I did not have the chance to discuss language evolution with him during our brief encounters at the Oslo Freedom Forum, or this book might have ended up being even longer.

Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners
by Michael Erard
Published 10 Jan 2012

“There’s really no limit to the human capacity for language except for things like having enough time to get enough exposure to the language,” said Suzanne Flynn, a psycholinguist at MIT who studies bilingualism and trilingualism. “It gets easier the more languages you know.” Harvard University psycholinguist Steven Pinker agreed. Asked if there is any theoretical reason someone couldn’t learn dozens of languages, he replied: “No theoretical reason I can think of, except eventually interference—similar kinds of knowledge can interfere with one another.” But there are real limits—ask hyperpolyglots themselves. Out of respect for Erik Gunnemark, I’ll count only the contemporary superlearners.

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future
by Martin Ford
Published 4 May 2015

.* A number of top researchers with expertise in brain science have expressed this view. Noam Chomsky, who has studied cognitive science at MIT for more than sixty years, says we’re “eons away” from building human-level machine intelligence, and that the Singularity is “science fiction.”8 Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker agrees, saying, “There is not the slightest reason to believe in a coming singularity. The fact that you can visualize a future in your imagination is not evidence that it is likely or even possible.”9 Gordon Moore, whose name seems destined to be forever associated with exponentially advancing technology, is likewise skeptical that anything like the Singularity will ever occur.10 Kurzweil’s timeframe for the arrival of human-level artificial intelligence has plenty of defenders, however.

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
by David Epstein
Published 1 Mar 2019

By experimenting, they could figure out that pressing buttons in a sequence that resulted in the bottom right bulb being lit was the way to score points and earn money. Essentially, they had to move the light from upper left to bottom right. * Psychologists still hotly debate the contributions to and implications of the Flynn effect. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker characterized the gains as more than just a shift of thinking: “No historian who takes in the sweep of human history on the scale of centuries could miss the fact that we are now living in a period of extraordinary brainpower.” * Flynn also told me that he gave the test to pupils at a British secondary school that sends a lot of students to the London School of Economics, as well as to juniors and seniors at LSE.

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language
by Gretchen McCulloch
Published 22 Jul 2019

content=block+capitals%2Cblock+letters%2Call+caps%2Call+uppercase%2Ccaps+lock&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3. Jean-Baptiste Michel, Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva Presser Aiden, Adrian Veres, Matthew K. Gray, The Google Books Team, Joseph P. Pickett, Dale Hoiberg, Dan Clancy, Peter Norvig, Jon Orwant, Steven Pinker, Martin A. Nowak, and Erez Lieberman Aiden. 2010. “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books.” Science. American Association for the Advancement of Science. Corpus of Historical American English: Mark Davies. 2010. Corpus of Historical American English: 400 Million Words, 1810–2009.

Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together
by Thomas W. Malone
Published 14 May 2018

Here we focus on the groups themselves, not their biological members, and we focus on the evolution that occurs through transmitting ideas and behaviors socially, not via biological genes. See Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975); Edward O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012); Steven Pinker, “The False Allure of Group Selection,” in The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, ed. David M. Buss (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2015). 7. Zeynep Ton, The Good Jobs Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs and Boost Profits (Seattle, WA: Amazon Publishing / New Harvest, 2014). 8.

Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization
by Edward Slingerland
Published 31 May 2021

Drugs that induce positive emotions give a false signal of a fitness benefit. This signal hijacks incentive mechanisms of “liking” and “wanting,” and can result in continued use of drugs that no longer bring pleasure…Drugs of abuse create a signal in the brain that indicates, falsely, the arrival of a huge fitness benefit.28 The evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker similarly sees our modern use of intoxicants as a result of the confluence of two features of the human mind: our liking for chemical rewards and our ability to problem solve. A substance that manages to pick the pleasure lock in our brain, however accidentally, is going to become a focus of our goal-seeking and innovation, even if the pursuit of this substance has—from a purely adaptive perspective—neutral or negative consequences.29 Our sex drive, as we’ve noted, is another good example of this dynamic.

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World
by Cade Metz
Published 15 Mar 2021

” * * * — GARY Marcus came from a long line of thinkers who believe in the importance of nature, not just nurture. They’re called nativists, and they argue that a significant portion of all human knowledge is wired into the brain, not learned from experience. This is an argument that has spanned centuries of philosophy and psychology, running from Plato to Immanuel Kant to Noam Chomsky to Steven Pinker. The nativists stand in opposition to the empiricists, who believe that human knowledge comes mostly from learning. Gary Marcus studied under Pinker, the psychologist, linguist, and popular science author, before building his own career around the same fundamental attitude. Now he was wielding his nativism in the world of artificial intelligence.

A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life
by Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein
Published 14 Sep 2021

Among those imagining a chimpy past, without recognizing that this is what he was doing, was 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who famously declared that humans, in our “state of nature” (that is, without government), are destined to live lives that are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”21 More recently, intellectual luminaries from Sigmund Freud to Steven Pinker have, similarly, imagined that humans need civilization to save us from our basest instincts. It is true that chimps tend toward war rather than peace, and are often found fighting at the edges of their territories. Bonobos, in comparison, tend toward peace rather than war, and at the edges of their territories, they’re more likely to be sharing food with another troop than beating up on each other.

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World
by Pedro Domingos
Published 21 Sep 2015

Convolutional neural networks, the current deep learning champion, are described in “Gradient-based learning applied to document recognition,”* by Yann LeCun, Léon Bottou, Yoshua Bengio, and Patrick Haffner (Proceedings of the IEEE, 1998). “The $1.3B quest to build a supercomputer replica of a human brain,” by Jonathon Keats (Wired, 2013), describes the European Union’s brain modeling project. “The NIH BRAIN Initiative,” by Thomas Insel, Story Landis, and Francis Collins (Science, 2013), describes the BRAIN initiative. Steven Pinker summarizes the symbolists’ criticisms of connectionist models in Chapter 2 of How the Mind Works (Norton, 1997). Seymour Papert gives his take on the debate in “One AI or Many?” (Daedalus, 1988). The Birth of the Mind, by Gary Marcus (Basic Books, 2004), explains how evolution could give rise to the human brain’s complex abilities.

The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality
by Angus Deaton
Published 15 Mar 2013

Kofi Annan, 2012, “Momentum rises to lift Africa’s resource curse,” New York Times, September 14, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/14/opinion/kofi-annan-momentum-rises-to-lift-africas-resource-curse.html?_r=0. POSTSCRIPT: WHAT COMES NEXT? 1. Jared Diamond, 2004, Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed, Viking. 2. Olson, Rise and decline of nations. 3. Steven Pinker, 2011, The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined, Viking. 4. Kenny, Getting better. Index Page numbers for entries occurring in figures are followed by an f and those for entries in tables, by a t. AARP, 199 Acemoglu, Daron, 193, 216 advance market commitments, 321 Africa: commodity exports of, 286–87; democracy in, 304; economic growth in, 234–35, 283–84, 283f, 285–87, 328; foreign aid in, 284–86, 285f, 287–88, 296, 313; health care spending in, 120–21; health perceptions in, 122; heights in, 159, 161–62, 164; HIV/AIDS in, 25, 34, 40, 151, 154; life expectancies in, 108; mortality causes in, 151; population growth in, 250; poverty in, 46, 250, 251.

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution
by Pieter Hintjens
Published 11 Mar 2013

The market is brutal about how it values genes with survival value. The hero in the zombie movie either stays and fights, or runs to save his family. Of course in most times and locations, life is not confrontational. Though we notice the wars, they are spaced with long periods of peace, and Steven Pinker has argued convincingly that over time society has become progressively more peaceful. The thing about violent confrontation is that it takes just one mistake to lose one's life. Peace is not risky, yet being too nice in a time of violence is the kind of mistake that wipes out entire genetic lines.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Published 28 Jan 2020

A great many existing solutions are not yet globally distributed, and critical issues like water scarcity, climate change, and global hunger are heading in the wrong direction. Yet, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out, dozens of other indicators are trending up. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, to offer a different example, Harvard’s Steven Pinker eloquently demonstrates that war and strife have reached all-time lows, and we are living in the most peaceful time in human history. Also the healthiest. Whether you’re measuring by decreasing infant mortality and teenage birthrates, the number of deaths from malaria, the death toll from famine, or our ever-expanding life spans, here too the indicators show incredible progress.

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models
by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann
Published 17 Jun 2019

Are you surprised to learn that there is a 50 percent chance of getting a run of four heads in a row during any twenty-flip sequence? Streaks like this are often erroneously interpreted as evidence of nonrandom behavior, a failure of intuition called the clustering illusion. Look at the pair of pictures on the next page. Which is randomly generated? These pictures come from psychologist Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature. The left picture—the one with the obvious clusters—is actually the one that is truly random. The right picture—the one that intuitively seems more random—is not; it is a depiction of the positions of glowworms on the ceiling of a cave in Waitomo, New Zealand.

Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought
by Barbara Tversky
Published 20 May 2019

Maneesh Agrawala, Gemma Anderson, Mireille Betrancourt, Gordon Bower, Jonathan Bresman, Jerry Bruner, David Bryant, Stu Card, Daniel Casasanto, Roberto Casati, Juliet Chou, Eve Clark, Herb Clark, Tony Cohn, Michel Denis, Susan Epstein, Yvonne Eriksson, Steve Feiner, Felice Frankel, Nancy Franklin, Christian Freksa, Randy Gallistel, Rochel Gelman, Dedre Gentner, John Gero, Valeria Giardino, Susan Goldin-Meadow, Pat Hanrahan, Eric Henney, Bridgette Martin Hard, Julie Heiser, Kathy Hemenway, Azadeh Jamalian, Danny Kahneman, Andrea Kantrowitz, T. J. Kelleher, David Kirsh, Stephen Kosslyn, Pim Levelt, Steve Levinson, Elizabeth Marsh, Katinka Matson, Rebecca McGinnis, Julie Morrison, Morris Moscovitch, Lynn Nadel, Jane Nisselson, Steven Pinker, Dan Schacter, Roger Shepard, Ben Shneiderman, Ed Smith, Masaki Suwa, Holly Taylor, Herb Terrace, Anthony Wagner, Mark Wing-Davey, Jeff Zacks. For not enough years, there was Amos, and his voice stays with me. The kids, too, my second biggest fans, I can hear all of them echoing him, shouting, “Go, Mom,” the way I shouted at them watching their soccer games.

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect
by David Goodhart
Published 7 Sep 2020

And the spirit of the old autodidact, who just had an urge to read up on everything about, say, botany, has not disappeared even in a more educated society. There will always be a substantial minority with a thirst for knowledge for its own sake, as can be seen from the reach of intellectual popularizers like Brian Cox and Martin Rees in the United Kingdom, Steven Pinker and Jared Diamond in the United States, and Yuval Noah Harari across Europe and North America. Also coming back into its own is the old generalist model of the nineteenth-century educated person. This is now called “cross-domain knowledge” and often combines both scientific and artistic forms of thinking, as has always been the case with architecture.

The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset That Drives Extraordinary Results
by Andrew McAfee
Published 14 Nov 2023

As philosopher Michael Hannon summarizes, “The most politically knowledgeable individuals tend to be the most partisan, and… the most knowledgeable and passionate voters are also the most likely to think in corrupted, biased ways… Attempts to remedy voter ignorance are problematic because partisans tend to become more polarized when they acquire more information.” If you think of us humans as wise Homo sapiens, the remedy for this kind of biased thinking is clear. It’s self-improvement. It’s becoming aware of our biases and training ourselves to overcome them. Two of my favorite recent books about how to do this are Adam Grant’s Think Again and Steven Pinker’s Rationality, both published in 2021. I learned a lot from both of them, and hope that they’ve made me a more clear, less biased thinker. But when I switch from the Homo sapiens to the Homo ultrasocialis perspective, I see a risk with this approach to making better decisions. Training ourselves to think again and be more rational has many benefits, but it also gives our press secretaries powerful new material to work with.

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy
by Robert W. McChesney
Published 5 Mar 2013

See, for example, Jim Taylor, Raising Generation Tech (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2012). 19. For examples of this overlap, see Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011); and Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012). 20. Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (New York: Morrow, 1994). 21. This point is discussed in Spencer Wells, The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey (New York: Random House, 2003); and Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology
by Kentaro Toyama
Published 25 May 2015

And the desire for glory through activism can be just as strong as that for glory through wealth. Many activists put on a mantle of public service but still seek recognition or hero status.49 There are, however, hopeful signs. The recent rise of the creative class in the developed world is something never before seen. Gender disparities around the world are shrinking. And as psychologist Steven Pinker cataloged in his tour de force The Better Angels of Our Nature, rates of human violence have fallen across the long run of civilization.50 That more and more people are shifting their concerns to something other than corporate climbing, Wall Street riches, and selfish esteem suggests the dawn of a new aspiration.

Finance and the Good Society
by Robert J. Shiller
Published 1 Jan 2012

But all these behaviors serve a common purpose as “bu ering mechanisms” to reconcile con icting interests. 14 De Waal wonders why patterns of limited aggression, in the context of the patterns of reconciliation that follow aggression, are not seen by more people today as a good thing, worthy of appreciation as promoting a stable and e ective society. Unfortunately, these patterns of aggression and reconciliation evolved in small groups, and they do not always function well on a national or international scale: human institutions must be built that exploit these behavior patterns in a constructive manner. Steven Pinker, in his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, reviews a number of studies showing that in the past few thousand years human society has evolved into one that makes better use of these built-in behavior patterns to reduce aggression, and that violence has dramatically subsided since the hunter-gatherer days of our species.

Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live
by Nicholas A. Christakis
Published 27 Oct 2020

I benefited from my collaboration with my Chinese colleagues, including Jayson Jia, Jianmin Jia, and others, in order to track SARS-2 in its early days in China. And Cavan Huang, a terrific graphic designer, developed all the figures. I am very grateful to my dear friend Dan Gilbert for feedback on parts of the manuscript and to my other colleagues who read it, including Amy Cuddy, Paul Farmer, Jeff Flier, Steven Pinker, and William Nordhaus. My siblings, Quan-Yang Duh, Dimitri Christakis, and Anna-Katrina Christakis, also offered useful insights. I am very grateful to several foundations that have generously supported my lab in recent years, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the NOMIS Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and also to the Tata Group for its long-term alliance with Yale University.

What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View
by William MacAskill
Published 31 Aug 2022

I discuss the risks from nuclear war and climate change in Chapter 6. 60. The term “Long Peace” was first coined in 1986 by John Lewis Gaddis in an article that noted a systemic absence of war, not just an absence of great-power wars (Gaddis 1986). More recently, in The Better Angels of Our Nature, psychologist Steven Pinker argued that there has been a longterm decline in war, especially since World War II, as part of a general civilisational decline in violence of all kinds (Pinker 2011). Political scientists like John Mueller (2009) and Azar Gat (2013, 149) have made similar points. 61. One database, compiled by the Future of Life Institute, counts at least twenty-five close calls during the Cold War (Future of Life Institute, n.d.). 62.

Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--And How to Think Deeply Again
by Johann Hari
Published 25 Jan 2022

You might ask: What if there are counterveiling trends, happening at the same time, which make our attention better? Nadine has shown that experiencing violence damages your ability to focus. But over the past century, there has been a big fall in violence in the Western world. I know this runs contrary to what we read in the news, but it’s true—Professor Steven Pinker, in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, lays out the evidence for this very clearly. This seems counterintuitive, in part because we are constantly fed images of violence and threat on television and the web, but it is a fact that you are far less likely to be violently attacked or murdered than your ancestors.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
by Robert J. Gordon
Published 12 Jan 2016

Homicide rates by state show a sharp geographical distribution, with New England joined by the northern states along the Canadian border west of Wisconsin all having very low homicide rates, while the highest rates were found in the southern tier of states, led by Louisiana.117 In 2007, African Americans were homicide victims at almost ten times the rate of whites, and both blacks and whites in the south were more violent than their counterparts in the north. Black-on-black homicides relative to white-on-white homicides in New York City rose from three times as many to thirteen times as many between 1850 and 1950. In Steven Pinker’s interpretation, democracy “came too early” to America, in contrast to Europe, where the state had long ago disarmed the people and acquired a monopoly on violence as a method of policing. The extreme was the American south, where a reliance on “self-help justice” to settle disputes and achieve retaliation was preferred to strong government-based policing.

…

The homicide rate exhibited cycles through the twentieth century, with peak rates between eight and ten per 100,000 population, both between 1921 and 1936 and again between 1970 and 1996 (see figure 7–8). The increase in murders in the 1970s and 1980s was accompanied by an increase in other less serious crimes, changing citizens’ perceptions of the world around them. Steven Pinker describes this change: The flood of violence from the 1960s through the 1980s reshaped American culture, the political scene, and everyday life. Mugger jokes became a staple of comedians, with mentions of Central Park getting an instant laugh as a well-known death trap. New Yorkers imprisoned themselves in their apartments with batteries of latches and deadbolts, including the popular “police lock,” a steel bar with one end anchored in the floor and the other propped against the door.

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier
by Edward L. Glaeser
Published 1 Jan 2011

Even the Great Depression failed to dim big-city lights. The enduring strength of cities reflects the profoundly social nature of humanity. Our ability to connect with one another is the defining characteristic of our species. We grew as a species because we hunted in packs and shared our kills. Psychologist Steven Pinker argues that group living, the primitive version of city life, “set the stage for the evolution of humanlike intelligence.” We built civilizations and culture together, constantly learning from one another and from the past. New technologies from the book to Google have failed to change our fundamentally social nature.

Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time
by Michael Shermer
Published 1 Jan 1997

Because humans share a universal evolved architecture, all ordinary individuals reliably develop a distinctively human set of preferences, motives, shared conceptual frameworks, emotion programs, content-specific reasoning procedures, and specialized interpretation systems— programs that operate beneath the surface of expressed cultural variability, and whose designs constitute a precise definition of human nature. In his new book, How the Mind Works (W. W. Norton, 1997), Steven Pinker describes these specialized computational devices as "mental modules." The "module" is a metaphor, and is not necessarily located in a single spot in the brain, and should not be confused with the nineteenth century notion of phrenologists who allocated specific bumps on the head for specific brain functions.

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together
by Bruce Schneier
Published 14 Feb 2012

quite violent Steven A. LeBlanc and Katherine E. Register (2003), Constant Battles: Why We Fight, St. Martin's Press. David M. Buss (2006), The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill, Penguin. Bureau of Justice Statistics (1994), “Violent Crime,” U.S. Department of Justice. some argue Steven Pinker (2011), The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Viking. kill in war Dave Grossman (1995), On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Little, Brown & Co. with other primates Lars Rodseth, Richard W. Wrangham, Alisa M. Harrigan, and Barbara B.

The Unpersuadables: Adventures With the Enemies of Science
by Will Storr
Published 1 Jan 2013

On the wall, framed in wood, a topless woman arcs her back in lascivious, fleshy pastels. The consulting room contains two deep and squashily inviting sofas and many hundreds of books – a confusing library that ranges over a vast coven of subjects, including mind, language, conspiracy, reality, radar: Steven Pinker, Opus Dei, cybernetics, social cognition, Understanding Radar, Radar Principles. There is a small television with a selection of children’s DVDs, steel bowls filled with plastic toy figures and a chaise-longue with a crowd of teddies resting in its crook. On the floor, shoved beneath a table, a large cloth boy gazes sadly into space.

The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy
by Seth Mnookin
Published 3 Jan 2012

The fact that for many people the threat of being afflicted with smallpox was not enough to overcome an innate resistance to having infected pus smeared on an open wound can likely be attributed in part to a phenomenon called the “disgust response.” In a 2001 paper, sociologists Valerie Curtis and Adam Biran speculated about a possible evolutionary explanation for what the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has called human beings’ “intuitive microbiology”: “Bodily secretions such as feces, phlegm, saliva, and sexual fluids, as well as blood, wounds, suppuration, deformity, and dead bodies, are all potential sources of infection that our ancestors are likely to have encountered,” Curtis and Biran wrote.

Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs
by Johann Hari
Published 20 Jan 2015

Pietrusza, Rothstein, 2. 16 Rothstein, Now I’ll Tell, 78 17 Ibid., 42. 18 Pietrusza, Rothstein, 43; Rothstein, Now I’ll Tell, 20. 19 Rothstein, Now I’ll Tell, 30. 20 Ibid., 142–43. 21 Clarke, Reign of Rothstein, 305. 22 Rothstein, Now I’ll Tell, 97. 23 Pietrusza, Rothstein, 198. 24 Daniel Okrent, The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, 221. 25 Jonnes, Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams, 77. 26 Katcher, Big Bankroll, 238. 27 Valentine, Strength of the Wolf, 7. 28 Rothstein, Now I’ll Tell, 172. 29 Tosches, King of the Jews, 209. 30 Clarke, Reign of Rothstein, 5. 31 Ed Vuiliamy, Amexica, 4. 32 “Indict Arnold Rothstein: Charged With Shooting Two Detectives,” New York Times, June 7, 1919. 33 Tosches, King of the Jews, 288. Clarke, Reign of Rothstein, 6–7, 40–48. 34 Ibid., 52. 35 Rothstein, Now I’ll Tell, 130. 36 Pietrusza, Rothstein, 321. 37 Ibid., 323. 38 Reinarman and Levine, Crack in America, 68. Steven Pinker hints at this in his excellent book The Better Angels of Our Nature, in which he points out that “as drug trafficking has increased” in Jamaica, Mexico, and Colombia, “their rates of homicide have soared.” See page 89. Miller, Case for Legalizing Drugs, 67–68. 39 Clarke, Reign of Rothstein, 50. 39 Rothstein, Now I’ll Tell, 120. 40 Ibid., 34. 41 Ibid., 52. 42 Ibid., 34. 43 Ibid., 16. 44 Ibid., 31-3. 45 Katcher, Big Bankroll, 214. 46 Clarke, Reign of Rothstein, 32. 47 Ibid., 304. 48 Rothstein, Now I’ll Tell, 116. 49 Ibid., 238. 50 Ibid., 240. 51 Ibid., 241. 52 Ibid., 237. 53 Katcher, Big Bankroll, 1. 54 Sherwin D.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 1 Jan 2011

Aldcroft, British Transport-An Economic Survey From the Seventeenth Century to the Twentieth (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1969), 124–31; Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 3 For a detailed discussion of the unprecedented peacefulness of the last few decades, see in particular Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011); Joshua S. Goldstein, Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide (New York: Dutton, 2011); Gat, War in Human Civilization. 4 ‘World Report on Violence and Health: Summary, Geneva 2002’, World Health Organization, accessed 10 December 2010, http://www.who.int/whr/2001/en/whr01_annex_en.pdf.

The Blind Watchmaker; Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design
by Richard Dawkins
Published 1 Jan 1986

Helena Cronin’s beautifully written The Ant and the Peacock, and Matt Ridley’s equally clear The Red Queen would be bound to influence any rewriting of the chapter on sexual selection. Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea would colour my historical and philosophical interpretations at all points, and his refreshing forthrightness would embolden my critical chapters. Mark Ridley’s magisterial Evolution would be an ever-open source of instruction for me and my readers. Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct might have inspired me to tackle the subject of language from an evolutionary point of view, had he not already done it so well. The same applies to ‘Darwinian medicine’ were it not for Randolph Nesse and George Williams’s excellent book on the subject (albeit the title wished by the publishers upon the unfortunate authors is the perversely unhelpful ‘Why we get sick’).

The Science of Language
by Noam Chomsky
Published 24 Feb 2012

Hirsh-Pasek, Kathy and Roberta Golinkoff (1996) The Origins of Grammar: Evidence From Early Language Comprehension. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hornstein, Norbert (2005) “Empiricism and Rationalism as Research Strategies.” In McGilvray (2005a), pp. 145–163. Hornstein, Norbert and Louise Antony (2003) Chomsky and His Critics. Oxford: Blackwell. Jackendoff, Ray and Steven Pinker (2005) “The Nature of the Language Faculty and Its Implications for the Evolution of Language.” Cognition 97: 211–25. Jacob, François (1977) “Darwinism Reconsidered.” Le Monde, Sept. 1977, pp. 6–8. Jacob, François (1980) The Statue Within. New York: Basic Books. Jacob, François (1982) The Possible and the Actual.

Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire
by Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson
Published 15 Jan 2019

This research showed that when identical twins did not look alike, their attainments were significantly different (despite being genetically identical) compared to other identical twins, but when non-identical twins looked very alike, their attainments were almost as similar as found in actual identical twins that looked alike, despite not being genetically identical. (Their similar appearance presumably being the cause of them being misclassified.) 38 ‘The recent revival of ideas about race and IQ began with a seemingly benign scientific observation. In 2005, Steven Pinker, one of the world’s most prominent evolutionary psychologists, began promoting the view that Ashkenazi Jews are innately particularly intelligent – first in a lecture to a Jewish studies institute, then in a lengthy article in the liberal American magazine the New Republic the following year. This claim has long been the smiling face of race science; if it is true that Jews are naturally more intelligent, then it’s only logical to say that others are naturally less so.’

Adam Smith: Father of Economics
by Jesse Norman
Published 30 Jun 2018

Smith’s picture is thus of a social, economic and political order bootstrapping itself into existence over time, the product not of any individual mind or minds or initial founding act, but evolving as the unintended consequence of endlessly repeated social interactions. The result is a dynamic theory of political and economic development, which anticipates—and often sets the terms for—the work of a host of distinguished modern writers, from Norbert Elias and Steven Pinker on the decline of violence, to Deirdre McCloskey on the bourgeois virtues and Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson on ‘extractive’ and ‘inclusive’ institutions as causes of national economic failure and success. A THEORY OF NORMS But if commercial society emerges as a co-evolved system of institutions, laws and manners, this in turn raises questions about the source of the moral values and behaviour that underlie it.

The Future Is Asian
by Parag Khanna
Published 5 Feb 2019

The common Western predicaments of aging populations, rising debt, eroding industrial base, wealth concentration, low trust in institutions, and weakening social fabric are thus neither evenly distributed nor similarly managed across the West. The US political system is not the West’s leading model of good governance. Over the past decade, the US standard of living, as measured by median income, has actually fallen, while education, health care, public safety, and other areas are weakening. According to the social psychologist Steven Pinker, the United States is “backward” compared to most of the rest of its Western peers. The exorbitant privilege of controlling the world’s leading reserve currency affords the US monetary stability despite twin deficits, but it cannot mask either the country’s deep inequalities or the lack of meaningful remedies for them.5 In politics, the United States suffers from an abundance of representation and a deficit of administration.

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events
by Robert J. Shiller
Published 14 Oct 2019

Santa Barbara, CA: Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1962, http://ucf.digital.flvc.org/islandora/object/ucf%3A5123. Michel, Jean-Baptiste, Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva Presser Aiden, Adrian Veres, Matthew K. Gray, The Google Books Team, Joseph P. Pickett, Dale Hoiberg, Dan Clancy, Peter Norvig, Jon Orwant, Steven Pinker, Martin A. Nowak, and Erez Lieberman Aiden. 2011. “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books.” Science 331(6014):176–82. Miguel, Edward, Shanker Satyanath, and Ernest Sergenti. 2004. “Economic Shocks and Civil Conflict: An Instrumental Variables Approach.” Journal of Political Economy 112(4):725–53.

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement
by David Brooks
Published 8 Mar 2011

Edgerton Craig MacAndrew and Robert B. Edgerton, Drunken Comportment: A Social Explanation (Clinton Corners, NY: Percheron Press, 2003). 39 couples having coffee Dacher Keltner, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 2009), 195. 40 But if you bump Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 328. 41 Cities in the South Marc D. Hauser, Moral Minds: The Nature of Right and Wrong (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), 134. 42 A cultural construct Guy Deutscher, “You Are What You Speak,” The New York Times Magazine, August 26, 2010, 44. 43 Her head was filled Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 177. 44 They seem to be growing David Halpern, The Hidden Wealth of Nations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 76. 45 “Cultures do not exist” Thomas Sowell, Migrations and Cultures: A World View (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 378. 46 Haitians and Dominicans share Lawrence E.

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 31 Dec 1998

Science News 149, no. 17 (April 27, 1996): 269. 17 Washoe and Koko (male and female gorillas, respectively) are credited with acquiring American Sign Language (ASL). They are the most famous of the communicating primates. Viki, a chimpanzee, was taught to vocalize three words (mama, papa, and cup). Lana and Kanzi (female chimpanzees) were taught to press buttons with symbols.Steven Pinker reflects upon researchers’ claims that apes fully comprehend sign language. In The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (New York: Morrow, 1994), he notes that the apes learned a very crude form of ASL, not the full nuances of this language. The signs they learned were crude mimics of the “real thing.”

Civilization: The West and the Rest
by Niall Ferguson
Published 28 Feb 2011

A number of eminent historians generously read all or part of the manuscript in draft, as did a number of friends as well as former and current students: Rawi Abdelal, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Bryan Averbuch, Pierpaolo Barbieri, Jeremy Catto, J. C. D. Clark, James Esdaile, Campbell Ferguson, Martin Jacques, Harold James, Maya Jasanoff, Joanna Lewis, Charles Maier, Hassan Malik, Noel Maurer, Ian Morris, Charles Murray, Aldo Musacchio, Glen O’Hara, Steven Pinker, Ken Rogoff, Emma Rothschild, Alex Watson, Arne Westad, John Wong and Jeremy Yellen. Thanks are also due to Philip Hoffman, Andrew Roberts and Robert Wilkinson. All surviving errors are my fault alone. At Oxford University I would like to thank the Principal and Fellows of Jesus College, their counterparts at Oriel College and the librarians of the Bodleian.

Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation
by Michael Pollan
Published 22 Apr 2013

GÖRTEMAKER,Eva Braun: Life with Hitler BRIAN COX AND JEFF FORSHAW, The Quantum Universe: Everything that Can Happen Does Happen NATHAN D. WOLFE, The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age NORMAN DAVIES, Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe MICHAEL LEWIS, Boomerang: The Meltdown Tour STEVEN PINKER, The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes ROBERT TRIVERS, Deceit and Self-Deception: Fooling Yourself the Better to Fool Others THOMAS PENN, Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England DANIEL YERGIN, The Quest: Energy, Security and the Remaking of the Modern World MICHAEL MOORE, Here Comes Trouble: Stories from My Life ALI SOUFAN, The Black Banners: Inside the Hunt for Al Qaeda JASON BURKE, The 9/11 Wars TIMOTHY D.

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
by Matt Ridley
Published 17 May 2010

They include: Bruce Ames, Terry Anderson, June Arunga, Ron Bailey, Nick Barton, Roger Bate, Eric Beinhocker, Alex Bentley, Carl Bergstrom, Roger Bingham, Doug Bird, Rebecca Bliege Bird, the late Norman Borlaug, Rob Boyd, Kent Bradford, Stewart Brand, Sarah Brosnan, John Browning, Erwin Bulte, Bruce Charlton, Monika Cheney, Patricia Churchland, Greg Clark, John Clippinger, Daniel Cole, Greg Conko, Jack Crawford, the late Michael Crichton, Helena Cronin, Clive Crook, Tony Curzon Price, Richard Dawkins, Tracey Day, Dan Dennett, Hernando de Soto, Frans de Waal, John Dickhaut, Anna Dreber, Susan Dudley, Emma Duncan, Martin Durkin, David Eagleman, Niall Ferguson, Alvaro Fischer, Tim Fitzgerald, David Fletcher, Rob Foley, Richard Gardner, Katya Georgieva, Gordon Getty, Jeanne Giaccia, Urs Glasser, Indur Goklany, Allen Good, Oliver Goodenough, Johnny Grimond, Monica Guenther, Robin Hanson, Joe Henrich, Dominic Hobson, Jack Horner, Sarah Hrdy, Nick Humphrey, Anya Hurlbert, Anula Jayasuriya, Elliot Justin, Anne Kandler, Ximena Katz, Terence Kealey, Eric Kimbrough, Kari Kohn, Meir Kohn, Steve Kuhn, Marta Lahr, Nigel Lawson, Don Leal, Gary Libecap, Brink Lindsey, Robert Litan, Bjørn Lomborg, Marcus Lovell-Smith, Qing Lu, Barnaby Marsh, Richard Maudslay, Sally McBrearty, Kevin McCabe, Bobby McCormick, Ian McEwan, Al McHughen, Warren Meyer, Henry Miller, Alberto Mingardi, Graeme Mitchison, Julian Morris, Oliver Morton, Richard Moxon, Daniel Nettle, Johann Norberg, Jesse Norman, Haim Ofek, Gerry Ohrstrom, Kendra Okonski, Svante Paabo, Mark Pagel, Richard Peto, Ryan Phelan, Steven Pinker, Kenneth Pomeranz, David Porter, Virginia Postrel, C.S. Prakash, Chris Pywell, Sarah Randolph, Trey Ratcliff, Paul Reiter, Eric Rey, Pete Richerson, Luke Ridley, Russell Roberts, Paul Romer, David Sands, Rashid Shaikh, Stephen Shennan, Michael Shermer, Lee Silver, Dane Stangler, James Steele, Chris Stringer, Ashley Summerfield, Ray Tallis, Dick Taverne, Janice Taverne, John Tooby, Nigel Vinson, Nicholas Wade, Ian Wallace, Jim Watson, Troy Wear, Franz Weissing, David Wengrow, Tim White, David Willetts, Bart Wilson, Jan Witkowski, Richard Wrangham, Bob Wright and last, but certainly not least, Paul Zak, who employed me as white-coated lab assistant for a day.

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide
by Henry Jenkins
Published 31 Jul 2006

Garfinkel, James Gee, Lisa Gitelman, Wendy G o r d o n , N i c k H a h n , M a r y Beth Haralovich, John Hartley, Heather Hendershott, Matt H i l l s , M i m i Ito, M a r k Jancovich, Steven Johnson, Sara G w e n l l i a n Jones, Gerard Jones, Louise Kennedy, Christina Klein, Eric Klopfer, Robert Kozinets, Ellen Kushner, Christopher Ireland, Jessica Irish, K u r t Lancaster, Brenda Laurel, C h a p Lawson, Geoffrey L o n g , Peter L u d l o w , Davis Maston, Frans M a y r a , Robert Metcalfe, Scott M c C l o u d , Grant McCracken, Jane M c G o n i g a l , E d w a r d M c N a l l y , Tara McPherson, Jason Mittell, Janet Murray, Susan J. Napier, Angela N d l i a n i s , Annalee N e w i t z , Tasha Oren, Ciela Pearce, Steven Pinker, Warren Sack, Katie Salens, N i c k Sammond, K e v i n Sandler, Greg Shaw, Greg Smith, Janet Sonenberg, Constance Steinkuehler, M a r y Stuckey, D a v i d Surman, Steven J. Tepper, D o u g Thomas, C l i v e Skenovano pro studijni ucely ix x Acknowledgments Thompson, Sherry Turkle, Fred Turner, W i l l i a m Uricchio, Shenja van der Graaf, Jesse Walker, Jing Wang, Yuichi Washida, D a v i d Weinberger, P a m Wilson, Femke Wolting, Chris Wright, and Eric Zimmerman.

The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money
by Bryan Caplan
Published 16 Jan 2018

The content of education is mixed at best: pockets of greatness, surrounded by insipid busywork. The pedagogy is poor: frankly, most teachers are boring. The students are worse: no matter how great their teachers, few yearn for the life of the mind. Private education is arguably slightly better, but it’s cut from the same cloth as public education. Harvard University’s Steven Pinker sadly reports that the best students in the world yawn at the best teachers in the world: A few weeks into every semester, I face a lecture hall that is half-empty, despite the fact that I am repeatedly voted a Harvard Yearbook Favorite Professor, that the lectures are not video-recorded, and that they are the only source of certain material that will be on the exam.

Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization
by Scott Barry Kaufman
Published 6 Apr 2020

Hayes, codeveloper of acceptance and commitment therapy and author of A Liberated Mind “In this wise, creative, surprising, and exceedingly humane book, Scott Barry Kaufman provides a hierarchy of needs for the modern world, blending the insights of humanistic psychology with the finding of cutting-edge science.” —Paul Bloom, Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology, Yale University, and author of Against Empathy “Scott Barry Kaufman revivifies the wisdom of humanistic psychology for a new millennium. He does it with evidence and discernment, without turning the world into a nail.” —Steven Pinker, professor of psychology, Harvard University, and New York Times–bestselling author of Enlightenment Now “Synthesizing Maslow’s wisdom with modern research, Scott Barry Kaufman takes our understanding of the good life to higher planes. Maslow would have been proud!” —Tal Ben-Shahar, cofounder of the Happiness Studies Academy “There are many books about happiness.

As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age
by Matthew Cobb
Published 15 Nov 2022

.… The development of science and technology is unavoidable.’16 When scientists muse about the political and sociological consequences of their work, the results are often unedifying. This was no exception. Other commentators claimed that the potential therapeutic benefits completely outweighed any other considerations. Psychologist Steven Pinker took to the pages of the Boston Globe, telling bioethicists to ‘get out of the way’ of biomedical research in general and gene editing in particular, warning hyperbolically that even a one-year delay in implementing an effective treatment ‘could spell death, suffering, or disability for millions of people’.17 Henry Miller – a one-time physician and long-standing and determined opponent of regulation on any genetic technology – presented a similar view in the letters page of Science, leading with a muscular clarion call: ‘Germline Gene Therapy: We’re Ready’.

The omnivore's dilemma: a natural history of four meals
by Michael Pollan
Published 15 Dec 2006

Consider the sole type of used tissue you'd be willing to share.) Disgust is an extremely useful adaptation, since it prevents omnivores from ingesting hazardous bits of animal matter: rotten meat that might carry bacterial toxins or infected bodily fluids. In the words of Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, "Disgust is intuitive microbiology." Yet helplful as it is, our sense of taste is not a completely adequate guide to what we can and cannot eat. In the case of plants, for instance, it turns out that some of the bitterest ones contain valuable nutrients, even useful medicines. Long before the domestication of plants (a process in which we generally selected for nonbitterness), early humans developed various other tools to unlock the usefulness of these foods, either by overcoming their defenses or overcoming our own aversion to how they taste.

A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World
by William J. Bernstein
Published 5 May 2009

Those seeking a precise citation for this famous quotation will have difficulty. The sentiment permeates Bastiat's writings about trade but is never so succinctly stated. This phrasing may be the work of Cordell Hull, who was fond of quoting Bastiat. See Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 1:363-365. 20. Steven Pinker, "A History of Violence," New Republic (March 19, 2007); World Health Organization, http://www.who.int/whr/2004/annex/topic/en/annex- 2-en.pdf, accessed March 28, 2007. 21. United States Census Bureau, "Historical Income Tables-People," http: //www.census.govlhhes/www/income/histinc/p05ar.html, accessed April 3, 2007. 22.

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 2 Jun 2021

See also Richard Herrnstein, ‘IQ’, Atlantic 228 (3) (September 1971); Richard Herrnstein, IQ in the Meritocracy (London, Allen Lane, 1973) 26 Adrian Wooldridge, ‘Bell Curve Liberals: How the Left Betrayed IQ’, New Republic, 27 February 1995 27 R. A. Fisher, ‘The Correlation between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 52 (1918), pp. 399–433 28 Robert Plomin, Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are (London, Allen Lane, 2018). See also Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (London, Allen Lane, 2002) and Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption (London, Bloomsbury, 1999) 29 Thomas J. Bouchard Jr et al., ‘Sources of Human Psychological Differences: The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart’, Science 250 (4978) (12 October 1990), pp. 223–8 30 Freddie DeBoer, ‘The Progressive Case for the SAT’, Jacobin, 30 March 2018 31 Shannon Watkins, ‘Goodbye Meritocracy, Hello … What?’

The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life
by Robert Wright
Published 1 Jan 1994

Chimp societies demonstrate how a complex and competitive social landscape would favor various intellectual strengths—not just remembering who has helped or hurt you, but cataloguing personality quirks of allies or enemies and monitoring social dynamics, sensing shifts in allegiance. “Machiavellian intelligence” is the term of art. (A “Machiavellian” intelligence needn’t include deception, but it can. The evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker describes a chimp who was shown several boxes containing food and one containing a snake; he led other chimps over to the snake and, “after they fled screaming, feasted in peace.”) We tend to overlook the deeply social orientation of human intelligence, precisely because it is so deep. But the mental tricks that constitute it become vivid when suddenly they’re missing.

The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again
by Robert D. Putnam
Published 12 Oct 2020

(New York: Hill & Wang, 1966); Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Edwards, New Spirits; Benjamin Parke De Witt, The Progressive Movement: A Non-Partisan Comprehensive Discussion of Current Tendencies in American Politics (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2013); Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917, American Politics and Political Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Allen Freeman Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890–1914 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984); Michael E. McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003). CHAPTER 2: ECONOMICS: THE RISE AND FALL OF EQUALITY 1 Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Viking, 2018). The standard (and more nuanced) account of American technological change and economic progress is Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U. S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). 2 Charles I.

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated
by Gautam Baid
Published 1 Jun 2020

Richard Feynman taught me the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something. Seneca, Aurelius, Epictetus, and Ryan Holiday enlightened me on the virtues of stoicism and of being in control of our personal reaction to any event in our lives. Will Durant, Ariel Durant, and Yuval Noah Harari educated me on the history of human civilization. Steven Pinker and Hans Rosling instilled great optimism in me about the constant, ongoing improvements in our world on a daily basis. My life truly epitomizes Isaac Newton’s saying: “If I have seen further, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.” The Joys of Compounding is my heartfelt tribute to all of my teachers who helped me achieve financial independence, become a better and wiser person, and embark on the path to a fulfilling and meaningful life.

Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
by Robert Wright
Published 28 Dec 2010

Chimp societies demonstrate how a complex and competitive social landscape would favor various intellectual strengths—not just remembering who has helped or hurt you, but cataloguing personality quirks of allies or enemies and monitoring social dynamics, sensing shifts in allegiance. “Machiavellian intelligence” is the term of art. (A “Machiavellian” intelligence needn’t include deception, but it can. The evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker describes a chimp who was shown several boxes containing food and one containing a snake; he led other chimps over to the snake and, “after they fled screaming, feasted in peace.”) We tend to overlook the deeply social orientation of human intelligence, precisely because it is so deep. But the mental tricks that constitute it become vivid when suddenly they’re missing.

The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time
by Yascha Mounk
Published 26 Sep 2023

Some evidence suggests that preagricultural societies were comparatively egalitarian, though they also suffered from very high rates of violence. See, for example, D. W. Harding, “Hierarchical or Egalitarian?,” in Rewriting History: Changing Perceptions of the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT mired in endemic conflict: See Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT norms of the community: See the idea of the “cage of norms” introduced by Acemoglu and Robinson in The Narrow Corridor. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Christian crusaders converted: See Christopher Tyerman, God’s War: A New History of the Crusades (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 159.

The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter
by Joseph Henrich
Published 27 Oct 2015

Then, in chapter 11, we’ll bring all these observations together and focus on the impacts of this culture-driven process of self-domestication on our psychology. This view contrasts sharply with the canonical view of the evolution of human cooperation. For decades, evolutionary researchers, from Richard Dawkins to Steven Pinker, have argued that humans are able to organize and cooperate so effectively because our psychology has been shaped by the evolutionary forces of kin selection and reciprocal altruism (reciprocity).2 Our kin psychology evolved genetically because it permits us to bestow help or benefits on individuals who are genealogically related to us and thus likely to share particular altruistic genes.

The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall
by Mark W. Moffett
Published 31 Mar 2019

Mark Moffett’s astounding stories of animal societies persuaded me that the future of human cities have been foretold by the ants. Read this manifesto if you like to have your mind changed.” —Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired Magazine and author of The Inevitable “In the past quarter century, there has emerged a genre of Big History that includes such epic books as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens. Mark Moffett’s The Human Swarm is destined to be included in future lists of such books that not only add to our understanding of who we are, how we got here, and where we’re going, but change our perspective of how we fit in the larger picture of life on Earth.

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't
by Nate Silver
Published 31 Aug 2012

—Nate Silver Brooklyn, NY NOTES INTRODUCTION 1. The Industrial Revolution is variously described as starting anywhere from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. I choose the year 1775 somewhat arbitrarily as it coincides with the invention of James Watt’s steam engine and because it is a nice round number. 2. Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, Kindle edition, 2011); locations 3279–3282. 3. Much of the manuscript production took place at monasteries. Belgium often had among the highest rates of manuscript production per capita because of its abundant monasteries.

Facebook: The Inside Story
by Steven Levy
Published 25 Feb 2020

At first they were relatively low-key, but as people learned about them, they took on an aspect of marketing, as he would announce the year’s resolution with great fanfare, and close the year out with a report. In 2010, he decided to learn Mandarin. (Cynics postulated that it was a ploy to curry favor with the Chinese leaders, who had banned Facebook from their country.) Another year, he vowed to read a book every two weeks, skipping from Steven Pinker to William James to Henry Kissinger. He took a more private approach to 2011’s resolution, a vow to go vegetarian, eating only meat that he killed himself. It rose out of his genuine curiosity about what it meant to consume living things. “I think many people forget that a living being has to die for you to eat meat, so my goal revolves around not letting myself forget that and being thankful for what I have,” he wrote to a reporter when the news leaked.

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities
by Eric Kaufmann
Published 24 Oct 2018

Yet even civil wars have been on the decline since 1991. This is because, as Andreas Wimmer notes, civil wars tend to take place in waves during periods when empires, including the Soviet Union, break up.3 Now that most of the world’s empires have been consigned to the dustbin of history, we should see fewer systemic bouts of civil war. Steven Pinker argues this is part of a pattern of declining violence in human history. It’s more profitable to trade with countries than to invade them, and state sovereignty removes the insecurity that leads to private violence.4 This doesn’t mean we’ve seen the end of war: religious and ethnic divisions are the basis for most civil wars such as those in Syria and Afghanistan.

Rationality: From AI to Zombies
by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Published 11 Mar 2015

And it should also be mentioned that, while abused children have a much higher probability of growing up to abuse their own children, a good many of them break the loop and grow up into upstanding adults. Culture is not nearly so powerful as a good many Marxist academics once liked to think. For more on this I refer you to Tooby and Cosmides’s “The Psychological Foundations of Culture”2 or Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate.3 But the upshot is that if you have a little baby AI that is raised with loving and kindly (but occasionally strict) parents, you’re pulling the levers that would, in a human, activate genetic machinery built in by millions of years of natural selection, and possibly produce a proper little human child.

…

So the next time you see someone talking about how they’re going to raise an AI within a loving family, or in an environment suffused with liberal democratic values, just think of a control lever, pried off the bridge. * 1. McDermott, “Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Stupidity.” 2. Tooby and Cosmides, “The Psychological Foundations of Culture.” 3. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002). 262 Dreams of AI Design After spending a decade or two living inside a mind, you might think you knew a bit about how minds work, right? That’s what quite a few AGI wannabes (people who think they’ve got what it takes to program an Artificial General Intelligence) seem to have concluded.

The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty
by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson
Published 23 Sep 2019

In 1978, the anthropologist Carol Ember systematically documented that there were very high rates of warfare in hunter-gatherer societies—a shock to her profession’s image of “peaceful savages.” She found frequent warfare, with a war at least every other year in two-thirds of the societies she studied. Only 10 percent of them had no warfare. Steven Pinker, building on research by Lawrence Keeley, compiled evidence from twenty-seven stateless societies studied by anthropologists over the past two hundred years, and estimated a rate of death caused by violence of over 500 per 100,000 people—over 100 times the current homicide rate in the United States, 5 per 100,000, or over 1,000 times that in Norway, about 0.5 per 100,000.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
by David Graeber and David Wengrow
Published 18 Oct 2021

Despite all this, many modern writers treat Leviathan in the same way others treat Rousseau’s Discourse – as if it were laying the groundwork for an evolutionary study of history; and although the two have completely different starting points, the result is rather similar.10 * * * — ‘When it came to violence in pre-state peoples,’ writes the psychologist Steven Pinker, ‘Hobbes and Rousseau were talking through their hats: neither knew a thing about life before civilization.’ On this point, Pinker is absolutely right. In the same breath, however, he also asks us to believe that Hobbes, writing in 1651 (apparently through his hat), somehow managed to guess right, and come up with an analysis of violence and its causes in human history that is ‘as good as any today’.11 This would be an astonishing – not to mention damning – verdict on centuries of empirical research, if it only happened to be true.

Why the West Rules--For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future
by Ian Morris
Published 11 Oct 2010

We are sociable. Maybe big-brained animals got this way because they were smart enough to see that groups have more eyes and ears than individuals and do better at spotting enemies. Or maybe, some evolutionists suggest, living in groups came before big brains, starting what the brain scientist Steven Pinker calls a “cognitive arms race” in which those animals that figured out what other animals were thinking—keeping track of friends and enemies, of who shared and who didn’t—outbred those whose brains were not up to the task. Either way, we have evolved to like one another, and our ancestors chose to exploit Earth’s movement up the Great Chain of Energy by forming bigger permanent groups.

Strategy: A History
by Lawrence Freedman
Published 31 Oct 2013

: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 2004). 5. George Lakoff, Whose Freedom? The Battle Over America’s Most Important Idea (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006). 6. Drew Westen, The Political Brain (New York: Public Affairs, 2007), 99–100, 138, 147, 346. 7. Steven Pinker, “Block That Metaphor!,” The New Republic, October 9, 2006. 8. Lutz, Words that Work, 3. As with many other effective political communicators, he went back to Orwell’s famous 1946 essay on “Politics and the English Language,” which stressed the importance of plain English; brevity; avoiding pretentious, meaningless, and foreign words; and jargon.

The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
by Iain McGilchrist
Published 8 Oct 2012

So music has been seen as a pointless ‘exaptation’ of language: that is to say, an adaptation of a skill, originally developed for its competitive advantage in one area, to a quite different purpose.42 Thus typing could be seen as an exaptation of the digital skill developed for making tools: it was not the pressure to out-publish one’s colleagues that caused the skill to develop in the first place, any more than we have legs in order to give employment to tailors. Music has to be, on such an account, an irrelevant spin-off from something with more of a competitive cutting edge – namely, language: Steven Pinker certainly sees it as such, and even suggests that music is as meaningless and self-indulgent as pornography or a taste for fatty food.43 Nonetheless the evidence does not stack up in favour of music being an exaptation of language – rather the reverse. If language evolved later, it looks like it evolved from music.

Engineering Security
by Peter Gutmann

Levin, Journal of Vision, Vol.1, No.3 (December 2001), Article No.12. [580] “Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention”, Michael Posner (ed), Guilford Press, 2004. [581] “Cognitive Factors in Aviation Display Design”, Christopher Wickens, Steven Fadden, David Merwin and Patricia Ververs, Proceedings of the 17th Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC’98), Vol.1, October 1998, p.E32/1. [582] “Inattentional Blindness”, Arien Mack and Irvin Rock, MIT Press, 1998. [583] “How the Mind Works”, Steven Pinker, W.W.Norton and Company, 1997. [584] “A Remote Vulnerability in Firefox Extensions”, Christopher Soghoian, 30 May 2007, http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2007/05/remotevulnerability-in-firefox.html. [585] “Secure Internet Letterhead”, Phillip Hallam-Baker, W3C Workshop on Transparency and Usability of Web Authentication, March 2006, http://www.w3.org/2005/Security/usability-ws/papers/27-phbakerletterhead