Steven Pinker Quotes:
A hostility to modernity is shared by ideologies that have nothing else in common – a nostalgia for moral clarity, small-town intimacy, family values, primitive communism, ecological sustainability, communitarian solidarity, or harmonies with the rhythms of nature.
Steven Pinker
Academics 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 Pinker
Astrology had an important role in the ancient world. You can’t understand many things unless you know something about astrology – the plays of Shakespeare and so on.
Steven Pinker
Being smarter gives you a tailwind throughout life. People who are more intelligent earn more, live longer, get divorced less, are less likely to get addicted to alcohol and tobacco, and their children live longer.
Steven Pinker
But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don’t depend on information coming in from the senses.
Steven Pinker
‘Capitalism’ is a dirty word for many intellectuals, but there are a number of studies showing that open economies and free trade are negatively correlated with genocide and war.
Steven Pinker
read more: Top 10 Sophia Loren Quotes On Life
Capitalism saved the world, and there is even a heretical theory now, moving up from the level of individuals to countries: countries that trade more and have more open economies are less likely to fight wars and less likely to have genocides.
Steven Pinker
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Cognitive 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 Pinker
Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.
Steven Pinker
Human evolution, at first, seems extraordinary. How could the process that gave rise to slugs and oak trees and fish produce a creature that can fly to the moon and invent the Internet and cross the ocean in boats?
Steven Pinker
Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control.
Steven Pinker