If the cartoon were completely accurate, though, life would be a cacophany of spoinks. Steven Pinker More Quotes by Steven Pinker More Quotes From Steven Pinker Societies that empower women are less violent in every way. Steven Pinker empowering-womenempoweringway M.I.T. has a reputation for turning out Dilberts. They may be brilliant in what they do, but no one can understand what they say. Steven Pinker reputationbrilliantmay Plants can't very well defend themselves by their behavior, so they resort to chemical warfare, and plants are saturated with toxins and irritants to deter creatures like us who want to eat them. Steven Pinker toxinswarfarewant The reason I'm not a neurobiologist but a cognitive psychologist is that I think looking at brain tissue is often the wrong level of analysis. You have to look at a higher level of organization. Steven Pinker organizationbrainthinking Consciousness surely does not depend on language. Babies, many animals, and patients robbed of speech by brain damage are not insensate robots; they have reactions like ours that indicate that someone's home. Steven Pinker homeanimalbaby If you give people literacy, bad ideas can be attacked and experiments tried, and lessons will accumulate. Steven Pinker givingpeopleideas The 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 Pinker alliesreligiousdoe Though knowledge itself increasingly ignores boundaries between fields, professors are apt to organize their pedagogy around the methods and history of their academic subculture rather than some coherent topic in the world. Steven Pinker topicsfieldsworld The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero. Steven Pinker zerosimplemind Perhaps the most extraordinary popular delusion about violence of the past quarter-century is that it is caused by low self-esteem. That theory has been endorsed by dozens of prominent experts, has inspired school programs designed to get kids to feel better about themselves, and in the late 1980s led the California legislature to form a Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem. Yet Baumeister has shown that the theory could not be more spectacularly, hilariously, achingly wrong. Violence is a problem not of too little self-esteem but of too much, particularly when it is unearned. Steven Pinker self-esteemkidsschool If the myth of pure evil is that evil is committed with the intention of causing harm and an absence of moral considerations, then it applies to very few acts of so-called 'pure evil' because most evildoers believe what they are doing is forgivable or justifiable. Steven Pinker moralevilbelieve The more you think about and interact with other people, the more you realize that it is untenable to privilege your interests over theirs. Steven Pinker privilegepeoplethinking We are all members of the same flawed species. Putting our moral vision into practice means imposing our will on others. The human lust for power and esteem, coupled with its vulnerability to self-deception and self-righteousness, makes that an invitation to a calamity, all the worse when the power is directed at a goal as quixotic as eradicating human self-interest. Steven Pinker practiceselfmean Trivers, pursuing his theory of the emotions to its logical conclusion, notes that in a world of walking lie detectors the best strategy is to believe your own lies. You can’t leak your hidden intentions if you don’t think they are your intentions. According to his theory of self-deception, the conscious mind sometimes hides the truth from itself the better to hide it from others. But the truth is useful, so it should be registered somewhere in the mind, walled off from the parts that interact with other people. Steven Pinker believelyingthinking Racism, because it favors color over talent, is bad for business. Steven Pinker favorscolorracism All of the violence that doesn't occur doesn't get reported on the news. Steven Pinker newsviolence If anything, Powerpoint, if used well, would ideally reflect the way we think. Steven Pinker usedwaythinking Nature 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 Pinker makeupsmartjudging Dear White Fella When I am born I’m black When I grow up I’m black When I am sick I’m black When I go out ina sun I’m black When I git cold I’m black When I git scared I’m black And when I die I’m still black. But you white fella When you’re born you’re pink When you grow up you’re white When you git sick you’re green When you go out ina sun you go red When you git cold you go blue When you git scared you’re yellow And when you die you’re grey And you got the cheek to call me coloured? Steven Pinker growing-upwhiteyellow I think that metaphor really is a key to explaining thought and language. The human mind comes equipped with an ability to penetrate the cladding of sensory appearance and discern the abstract construction underneath - not always on demand, and not infallibly, but often enough and insightfully enough to shape the human condition. Our powers of analogy allow us to apply ancient neural structures to newfound subject matter, to discover hidden laws and systems in nature, and not least, to amplify the expressive power of language itself. Steven Pinker keyslawthinking
