Steven Pinker Quotes - Page 5

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• Terrorist bombings, like rampage shootings, are events that maximize the amount of publicity per amount of damage. That's why people do them, because they know they will set off a media frenzy.

  Steven Pinker

  Media, People, Events

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• You know that when Irving puts the dog in the car, it is no longer in the yard. When Edna goes to church, her head goes with her. If Doug is in the house, he must have gone through some opening unless he was born there and never left. If Sheila is alive at 9 A.M. and is alive at 5 P.M., she was also alive at noon. Zebras in the wild never wear underwear. Opening a jar of a new brand of peanut butter will not vaporize the house. People never shove meat thermometers in their ears. A gerbil is smaller than Mt. Kilimanjaro.

  Steven Pinker

  Dog, Zebras, People

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• I have never been a fan of science fiction. For me, fiction has to explore the combinatorial possibilities of people interacting under the constraints imposed by our biology and history. When an author is free to suspend the constraints, it's tennis without a net.

  Steven Pinker

  People, Tennis, Fans

  "Dangerous minds, lethal machines" by Steven Pinker, www.theguardian.com. August 26, 2004.

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• As an experimental psychologist, I have been trained not to believe anything unless it can be demonstrated in the laboratory on rats or sophomores.

  Steven Pinker

  Believe, Rats, Sophomore

  Steven Pinker (2015). “Words and Rules: The Ingredients Of Language”, p.84, Basic Books

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• Commerce is a noble profession, and Jews should get over any self-hatred they might harbor from contemplating the capitalist spirit of diaspora Judaism.

  Steven Pinker

  Self, Hatred, Noble

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• Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.

  Steven Pinker

  Art, Mind, Details

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• Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that and that the same genes that make parents talkative make children articulate.

  Steven Pinker

  Children, Mean, Kids

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• The costs of an ignorance of science are nor just practical ones like misbegotten policies, forgone cures, and a unilateral disarmament in national competitiveness. There is a moral cost as well. It is an astonishing fact about our species that we understand so much about the history of the universe. the forces that make it tick, the stuff it's made of; the origin of living things, and the machinery of life. A failure to nurture this knowledge shows a philistine indifference to the magnificent achievements humanity is capable of; like allowing a great work of art to molder in a warehouse.

  Steven Pinker

  Art, Ignorance, Achievement

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• I think the reason that swearing is both so offensive and so attractive is that it is a way to push people's emotional buttons, and especially their negative emotional buttons. Because words soak up emotional connotations and are processed involuntarily by the listener, you can't will yourself not to treat the word in terms of what it means.

  Steven Pinker

  Mean, Thinking, Emotional

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• If anything, Powerpoint, if used well, would ideally reflect the way we think.

  Steven Pinker

  Thinking, Way, Used

  "The Man Who Invented PowerPoint". Interview with Clay Chandler, bento.hult.edu.

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• Thinking is a physical process, the human brain is not exempt from evolution

  Steven Pinker

  Thinking, Brain, Evolution

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• Just as blueprints don't necessarily specify blue buildings, selfish genes don't necessarily specify selfish organisms. As we shall see, sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is build a selfless brain. Genes are a play within a play, not the interior monologue of the players.

  Steven Pinker

  Selfish, Player, Blue

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• Gossip is certainly one of the things that language is useful for, because it's always handy to know who needs a favor, who can offer a favor, who's available, who's under the protection of a jealous spouse. And being the first to get a piece of gossip is like engaging in insider trading: You can capitalize on an opportunity before anyone else can.

  Steven Pinker

  Jealous, Opportunity, Gossip

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• When people talk, they lay lines on each other, do a lot of role playing, sidestep, shilly-shally and engage in all manner of vagueness and innuendo. We do this and expect others to do it, yet at the same time we profess to long for the plain truth, for people to say what they mean, simple as that. Such hypocrisy is a human universal.

  Steven Pinker

  Mean, Simple, Long

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• Much of what is today called "social criticism" consists of members of the upper classes denouncing the tastes of the lower classes (bawdy entertainment, fast food, plentiful consumer goods) while considering themselves egalitarians.

  Steven Pinker

  Class, Criticism, Entertainment

  Steven Pinker (2003). “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, p.370, Penguin

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• Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with.

  Steven Pinker

  Technology, Humanity, Violence

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• Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality - the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world.

  Steven Pinker

  Reality, Understanding, World

  Steven Pinker (2007). “The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature”, p.18, Penguin

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• Of course the theory of evolution would be vacuous if it offered a glib explanation for every inexplicable act.

  Steven Pinker

  Theory Of Evolution, Atheism, Would Be

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• In fact, without a specification of a creature's goals, the very idea of intelligence is meaningless. A toadstool could be given a genius award for accomplishing with pinpoint precision and unerring reliability, the feat of sitting exactly where it is sitting. Nothing would prevent us from agreeing with the cognitive scientist Zenon Pylyshyn that rocks are smarter than cats because rocks have the sense to go away when you kick them.

  Steven Pinker

  Cat, Awards, Rocks

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• Effective education may also require co-opting old faculties to deal with new demands. . . Because much of the content of education is not cognitively natural, the process of mastering it may not always be easy and pleasant, notwithstanding the mantra that learning is fun.

  Steven Pinker

  Fun, Demand, May

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• With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.

  Steven Pinker

  Violence, Problem, Human Nature

  "What Comes Naturally" by Louis Menand, www.newyorker.com. November 25, 2002.

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• People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought. This language of thought probably looks a bit like all these languagesBut compared with any given language, mentalese must be richer in some ways and simpler in others.

  Steven Pinker

  Thinking, People, Chinese

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• By denying people's sense of visual beauty in painting and sculpture , melody in music , meter and rhyme in poetry , plot and narrative and character in fiction , the elite arts wrote off the vast majority of their audience . They purposely excluded people who approach art in part for pleasure and edification in favour of social one-upmanship and an ever-narrowing, in-crowd elite.

  Steven Pinker

  Art, Character, People

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• No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you're still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be.

  Steven Pinker

  Atrocities, Matter, Stills

  "Is Human Violence On The Wane?". Science Friday with Ira Flatow, www.npr.org. October 7, 2011.

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• An enormous amount of scientific language is metaphorical. We talk about a genetic code, where code originally meant a cipher; we talk about the solar system model of the atom as though the atom were like a sun and moon and planets.

  Steven Pinker

  Moon, Atoms, Ciphers

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