A successful learner, . . . must be constrained to draw some conclusions from the input and not others.
Steven PinkerThe Rights Revolutions too have given us ideals that educated people today take for granted but that are virtually unprecedented in human history, such as that people of all races and creeds have equal rights, that women should be free from all forms of coercion, that children should never, ever be spanked, that students should be protected from bullying, and that thereโs nothing wrong with being gay. I donโt find it at all implausible that these are gifts, in part, of a refined and widening application of reason.
Steven PinkerProbably Hobbes got it right when he said that a leviathan, a third party with a monopoly on the use of legitimate use of force in a territory, might be among the biggest violence reduction techniques ever invented.
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 PinkerModern biblical scholars have established that the bible is a wiki. It was compiled over half a millennium from writers with different styles, dialects, character names, and conceptions of God and was subjected to haphazard editing that left it with many contradictions, duplications and non-sequiturs.
Steven PinkerThe last 100 years of research into the human brain...sees the brain as an organ that works by physical principles just like the other organs in the body...our emotions and higher callings, such as religion, as well as our grubby low-level physical systems like stereo vision and motor control, are products of a machine.
Steven Pinker