People know there is a difference between what you do and what you accept. There is a difference between me knowing that people swear, me hearing people swear and me swearing, and everyone accepting that this is something you can do as much as you like.
Steven PinkerThe stirrings of morality emerge early in childhood. Toddlers spontaneously offer toys and help to others and try to comfort people they see in distress.
Steven PinkerIn many Muslim countries, witchcraft is not only on the books as a crime, but is commonly prosecuted. In 2009, for example, Saudi Arabia convicted a man for carrying a phone booklet with characters in an alphabet from his native Eritrea, which the police interpreted as occult symbols. He was lashed three hundred times and imprisoned for more than three years.
Steven PinkerUnfortunately, creative people are at their most creative when writing their autobiographies.
Steven PinkerWriters acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.
Steven PinkerWe adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other that laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view.
Steven PinkerAs technology accumulates and people in more parts of the planet become interdependent, the hatred between them tends to decrease, for the simple reason that you can't kill someone and trade with him too.
Steven PinkerThe typical imperative from biology is not "Thou shalt... ," but "If ... then ... else.
Steven PinkerThe foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.
Steven PinkerThe theory that religion is a force for peace, often heard among the religious right and its allies today, does not fit the facts of history.
Steven PinkerSpace and force pervade language. Many cognitive scientists (including me) have concluded from their research on language that a handful of concepts about places, paths, motions, agency, and causation underlie the literal or figurative meanings of tens of thousands of words and constructions, not only in English but in every other language that has been studied.
Steven PinkerTom Hanks, who starred in 'The Da Vinci Code,' turns out to be related to a number of the historic characters that feature in 'The Da Vinci Code,' including William the Conqueror and Shakespeare.
Steven PinkerI think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor.
Steven PinkerAs long as your ideology identifies the main source of the world's ills as a definable group, it opens the world up to genocide.
Steven PinkerWhenever you speak to someone, you are presuming the two of you have a certain degree of familiarity - which your words might alter. So every sentence has to do two things at once: convey a message and continue to negotiate that relationship.
Steven PinkerAn eye for beauty locks onto faces that show signs of health and fertility - just as one would predict if it had evolved to help the beholder find the fittest mate.
Steven PinkerAcademics lack perspective. In a debate on whether the world is round, they would argue, 'No,' because it's an oblate spheroid. They suffer from 'the curse of knowledge': the inability to imagine what it's like not to know something that they know.
Steven PinkerBut the 20th century suffered "two" ideologies that led to genocides. The other one, Marxism, had no use for race, didn't believe in genes and denied that human nature was a meaningful concept. Clearly, it's not an emphasis on genes or evolution that is dangerous. It's the desire to remake humanity by coercive means (eugenics or social engineering) and the belief that humanity advances through a struggle in which superior groups (race or classes) triumph over inferior ones.
Steven PinkerRegardless of its causes, thoughtlessly blaming the present is a weakness which, even if it is never outlawed, ought to be resisted. Though commonly flaunted as a sign of sophistication, it can be an opportunity for one-upmanship and an excuse for misanthropy, especially against the young.
Steven PinkerIn the speech sound wave, one word runs into the next seamlessly; there are no little silences between spoken words the way there are white spaces between written words. We simply hallucinate word boundaries when we reach the end of a stretch of sound that matches some entry in our mental dictionary.
Steven PinkerA successful learner, . . . must be constrained to draw some conclusions from the input and not others.
Steven PinkerI think a lot of moral debates are not over what is the basis of justice, but who gets a ticket to play in the game.
Steven PinkerIn our society, the best predictor of a man's wealth is his wife's looks, and the best predictor of a woman's looks is her husband's wealth.
Steven PinkerThe indispensability of reason does not imply that individual people are always rational or are unswayed by passion and illusion. It only means that people are capable of reason, and that a community of people who choose to perfect this faculty and to exercise it openly and fairly can collectively reason their way to sounder conclusions in the long run. As Lincoln observed, you can fool all of the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.
Steven PinkerSince the point of erotica is to offer the consumer sexual experiences without having to compromise with the demands of the other sex, it is a window into each sex's unalloyed desires. Pornography for men is visual, anatomical, impulsive, floridly promiscuous and devoid of context and character. Erotica for women is far more likely to be verbal, psychological, reflective, serially monogamous and rich in context and character. Men fantasise about copulating with bodies; women fantasise about making love to people.
Steven PinkerWhy are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?
Steven PinkerHuman nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control.
Steven PinkerIf crime is going down, you shouldn't be increasing resources for crime prevention. Or you should be taking note of what has worked and concentrate the crime-prevention methods on policies that have a track record of success.
Steven PinkerNature is a hanging judge," goes an old saying. Many tragedies come from our physical and cognitive makeup. Our bodies are extraordinarily improbable arrangements of matter, with many ways for things to go wrong and only a few ways for things to go right. We are certain to die, and smart enough to know it. Our minds are adapted to a world that no longer exists, prone to misunderstandings correctable only by arduous education, and condemned to perplexity about the deepest questions we can ascertain.
Steven PinkerSolving a problem in a hundred years is, practically speaking, the same as not solving it at all.
Steven PinkerWhy do people believe that there are dangerous implications of the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection?
Steven PinkerPeople consider the harms they inflict to be justified and forgettable, and the harms they suffer to be unprovoked and grievous.
Steven PinkerBut in most cases even the possibility that the correlations reflect shared genes is taboo.
Steven PinkerThe rules of friendship are tacit, unconscious; they are not rational. In business, though, you have to think rationally.
Steven PinkerIn a high tech world the cure for the tragic shortcomings and perilous fallacies of human intuition is education, but education in economics, evolutionary biology, probability and statistics - unfortunately most High School and College curricula have barely changed since Medieval times!
Steven PinkerLike the early days of the Internet, the dawn of personal genomics promises benefits and pitfalls that no one can foresee.
Steven PinkerAnything that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else increases your moral consideration for that other person.
Steven PinkerCognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the Web: They might as well not exist.
Steven PinkerWhen it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power to shock. 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.
Steven Pinker