YouSaid · the spoken record

Steven Pinker

lines on the record: 86
first: 2016-11-02
most recent: 2016-11-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I'm writing a book is tentative title is The New Enlightenment, a Manifesto for Science, Reason, Humanism, and Progress, where I argue that the Enlightenment philosophers got a lot of stuff right, that a lot of their dreams are starting to come true, that a lot of dimensions of human well-being, when quantified, as I try to do in the better angels of our nature, turn out to be going in a good direction that a lot of aspects of human life are improving. Thank you for your time. Thank you.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have the festering of conspiracy theories and all kinds of kooky beliefs that somehow the internet has not driven out, but if anything has created space for. How we as a broader culture can tilt the rules or the norms or the expectations so that if you believe something that's false eventually, you'll be embarrassed about it. I wish I knew, but that's obviously what we ought to be striving for.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'm hoping for that naming and shaming and arguments will make free speech, give free speech a greater foothold in academia. The fact that academia is not the only arena in which debates are held, that we also have think tanks and we also have a press. We also have the internet. How we could sort of set up the rules so that despite all of the quirks of human nature such as intellectual tribalism are overcome in our collective arena of discourse is I think an absolutely vital question and I just don't know the answer because we're seeing at the same time as there was the hope 20 years ago that the internet would break down the institutional barriers to the best ideas emerging. It hasn't worked out that way so far because we have”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I want to answer the last question, not in those terms. I think that the Want is an arena in which the rules of the game make it so that no matter how emotionally tied you are to your belief, if it's wrong, it'll be shown to be wrong, and it'll just be too embarrassing to hold on to it, or at least for other people to hold on to it indefinitely. That's what I consider to be the ideal of what science is all about and intellectual discourse in general. When it works, how to make it work better are really good questions. Certainly there are disturbing signs that the process in some ways is getting worse. I see Greg Lukayan office here and the director of Foundation for Individual Rights and Education, which is does a brilliant job in combating some of the restrictions on free speech that we're seeing in university campuses, which would be a paradigm case of going in the wrong direction in terms of setting up rules that allow the truth to come out in the long term.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be a Chinese diplomat or do business in China, so you don't know if it's Chinese that you should start with early or some other language, and that, of course, might change. But in general, there is a benefit to starting early. We don't know for sure. No one has identified a particular change in the plasticity of the brain that explains it. There probably is one, but we're just ignorant of what, if anything, changes in the brain that makes it harder to learn a language to native levels of mastery if you begin too late.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“New words all our lives, including names for people and places. Syntax may be somewhere in between. And in fact, I have a paper that's in one of these interminable cycles of revision and review doing kind of plea bargaining with journal referees to please publish our paper, which suggests as you speculate that when it comes to grammar, syntax and vocabulary, probably the beginning of the end for mastery comes in the teenage years, that something happens starting around the age of 15 or so that makes it harder to achieve native mastery if that's when you begin to learn a language. The younger is better. Of course, there are 6,000 languages, you don't necessarily know when you have a child that they're going to grow up.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is evidence for at least probably several critical periods, or at least sensitive periods in language acquisition. In particular, phonology, that is the sound pattern of the language, the accent, including in the case of Chinese tones, although that's also blends into the morphology, that is the distinctions among words. most sensitive, that often people who are perfectly articulate and fluent in a second language will give themselves away by their accent because the mastery of the accent seems to be more dependent on being of tender age when you acquire it than say syntax or vocabulary and at the end for that matter for vocabulary there is no critical period we learn”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the sense that there's a lot of commentary on fashion on what are you trying to communicate by your long hair, your short hair, or your fat lapels, your skinny lapels, and the answer may be nothing. That is, all you're communicating is it's different from what you're wearing, and I'm getting away with it. And so it's similar to cases in evolution, often in parasite host co-evolution, where simply being rare is an advantage. Being rare is an advantage paradoxically, it starts to become more common, meaning that you then have to look to something completely different. It's rare again. And that was Bell's analysis of fashion, and I think that will continue.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Instead, there's a value placed in simply being out of the mainstream enough that there's something special about you, combined with enough of an aura of confidence that it's not just that you're hopelessly unhip. Rather, you're seen as setting the next trend. And then eventually, so when everyone has long hair, you show up with a crew cut or vice versa. When everyone has fat lapels, you have skinny lapels or long, long skirt length or short skirt length. The people who have some claim to already being in the elite will then reinforce it with an unusual look, which then trickles down when it starts to be sold in Target, then the elite have to jump to yet another look. And so you get a kind of churning. This is unlike language in that it may not have a semiotics.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You want to look that's different enough, that distinguishes you. In Veblen's Day, that took the form of sumptuosity, that is fine fabrics and tailored suits that were unfakable enough that you were broadcasting the information that I can afford things that you can't. And you can't fake them with advances in clothing manufacture and everything manufacture with the everything becoming cheaper, you can't differentiate yourself through sumptuosity and riches and also through because of democratization and informalization. It's kind of tacky to kind of look like you belong in a Donald Trump hotel. That kind of flashy ostentation has kind of lost value as a status symbol.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it is a fascinating question, and I think we are seeing a kind of globalization of fashion combined with a globalization of youth culture that you can go to an awful lot of parts of the world and see similar baggy shorts in eras when baggy shorts are in fashion, or for that matter in elite fashion as well. It's actually quite astonishing what percentage of male elites wear neckties and jackets not too different from this. And I don't know, and it is surprising why there is such a reduction in diversity of fashion. At the same time, as that you have this globalization, there's also a churning over time. And there is an interesting theory.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That occurred long enough for it to be genetic change. So we know that the overt violent behavior can change really, really quickly. That just means that we don't need to invoke a genetic change for similar reductions of similar magnitude that we see in history.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I can't rule it out, and fellow economist Gregory Clark argued that in Europe, between the Middle Ages and the present, in a process that I actually wrote about in terms of the quite spectacular declines in rates of violence, he speculated might have been helped along by a genetic change. I'm a little more skeptical, but I can't rule it out. The reason I'm skeptical is that you can see similar violence that take place on timescales that couldn't possibly be due to Darwinian natural selection. For example, the fact that Germany went from the world's most militaristic culture to the world's most pacifist culture in pretty much a generation, or that the American homicide rate fell in half in eight years. There, you didn't have a turnover of generations.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there are two ideas that I think you've broached here. One of them is groups as the unit of analysis in evolution and natural selection. And if you Google false allure of group selection or pinker group selection, you'll see that I have pretty strong opinions on that. I think that the idea of group selection is a big blunder. So no, I don't think that there is a Darwinian process of differential survival of replicators that applies to groups in the way that it applies to genes. I think it's a bad analogy. The question of whether we, but you referred specifically to the case of violence. A frequently asked question that I get is, are we literally evolving to become less violent in the biologist sense, that genes that encourage violence are becoming less common in the gene pool? I doubt it.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would say unique. Other species communicate, but grammatical language in which the meaning of the combination depends on the arrangement of the meaning of the parts. And moreover, that the number of such combinations is unlimited. This goes back to the idea of recursion, which is nowadays often associated with Noam Chomsky, is something that without doing kind of procrastinate stretching, I don't think you see in other species. There are some aspects of bird song that are combinatorial, but birdsong has no semantics. That is, the calls don't mean anything. You can have some kinds of primate calls where maybe if you have two of them, they're in one order versus not the other, they're different circumstances in which they think of the primates out of them. I think it's different enough from...”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People had ideas that they struggle to express. They would coin a bit of jargon, they would invent a circumlocution, it would go viral, it would become entrenched as part of the language, and therefore, and language is, of course, always continuing that cycle. Our language is different from the language of the founders, which is different from the language of Shakespeare. So the fact that we're always adding to the language, we're losing bits of the language, as we talked about in the case of irregular verbs, shows that it isn't itself the medium of thought. And you can always invent a circumlocution if your language doesn't have a pre-existing word. And a lot of the brain is devoted to forms of thinking that are not just trading in words, not just assembling words. So I think Worf went too far, but there's no doubt.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't, though, endorse a version of linguistic determinism associated with Benjamin Wharf and Edward Sapier, according to which we can only think thoughts for which there are words in our language. If that were true, then you'd have to ask how did language originate in the first place? It wasn't kind of given to us by Martians. We develop language because we had ideas that existed prior to our being able to articulate them, for which we coined words. Language is always changing. Again, this gets back to Hayek's notion of spontaneous order and distributed intelligence that even though language is this, any given language is an exquisite system for conveying complex thoughts. It was never designed by a committee. It emerged because millions of”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reciprocity conferring a large benefit to someone else at a small cost to oneself. So it lubricates the kind of cooperation that is hyperdeveloped in humans. It's also, I think, tied in with the fact that we're a technological species that we've”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think language is central to everything else that's human. I think that it was very much figured in our evolution by making social cooperation that much easier, namely with language. For example, you can make an agreement to do a favor for someone now in exchange for a very different kind of payback or a payback very far in the future, something that you can't do when you're just bartering fiscal goods. I think that since we our species lives on information, information is the ultimate trade good because it is a non-rival good. You can share it with someone else without being deprived of it yourself, so it can be multiplied and that makes it the ideal medium of communication.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of kept their attitudes to themselves now feeling that they're allowed to get away with it, that some of the taboos have been broken, whether they will reassert themselves with the decline of Trump. We don't know. I kind of hope so. I think that there is a benign taboo against overtly racist and misogynistic and homophobic language, that there are ugly attitudes, and there always will be, and that there is a kind of benevolent hypocrisy and taboo where there are certain things that you just don't say in public because that does kind of legitimate them. They can be threatened. We saw that with taboo words for sexuality starting in the 60s, that words that you just could not say in print or on the airwaves are now common. That could happen. With racist and homophobic terms. I hope not. I'm too early to tell.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's possible that I don't think that Trumpism has shows that our attitudes have changed, that we're becoming more misogynistic or racist. And you can do some Google searches that are kind of quicker than Gallup or Pew polls to track some of these changes. Set Stephen's Davidowitz has shown that, for example, if you Google for various racist or sexist terms that are used in jokes, you get a pretty good barometer of racism that people may not be willing to admit to in public. If you do that, you don't see a sudden U-turn in the popularity of racist jokes in the last, say, six months. So I think it is more a question of people who”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, we haven't, the African American was, I think, took over pretty quickly sometime in the 1990s. I think Jesse Jackson was the force behind it. And we have gone now for more than 20-something years without a replacement of that, which might be a reflection of the fact that prejudice against African Americans is declining. In other cases, like Asian replacing Oriental, that stayed put, possibly because there was less prejudice against Asian people and there wasn't a need to find a fresh replacement for that.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Change in attitudes that you want to affect by changing the language will meet resistance in terms of the rest of our psychology. I don't think it's true that language determines your attitudes and beliefs, although it can push against them. And as long as there's still some kind of negative connotation to an entity, then changing the label for it will just result in the new label picking up the emotional aura of the concept rather than the other way around. And as long as there is prejudice against African Americans and where the connotation is not as positive as you'd like it to be, there'll be the urge to find a new label that has not yet absorbed the taint of the existing one.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She or the clumsy he or she. None of them have caught on. And the language doesn't change in terms of its, I mean, it does change, but not quickly and usually not by deliberate engineering when it comes to things like articles, pronouns, past tense and plural markers, and so on. So there'll be just a natural resistance. They're learned early. They are highly frequent. They are distributed across millions of people conversing with one another and so I don't think I have to worry about that changing too quickly. But sure, there are more respectful and less respectful ways of referring to people. And we've seen those change and they'll probably continue to change. What I call the euphemism treadmill refers to the fact that the reason that there often is a cycling is that the”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, they're politically motivated campaigns to change language can have an effect as we see in what I call the euphemism treadmill, that is the fact that we don't use the word Negro anymore, even though it was a perfectly respectful and unacceptable term through the 1970s Martin Luther King frequently referred to Negroes, the United Negro College Fund, and that got replaced by black, which then got replaced by African-American. But it's easier to do it with what linguists call open class vocabulary items, nouns and verbs than with closed class or grammatical items like pronouns. And since the 70s, there have been a number of proposals to introduce a gender-neutral pronoun into the English language so that we wouldn't have to say he or”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, dreams are, yeah, I think dreams are a kind of screensaver. It would violate many, much of what we know about physics for a dream to be able to prophecy the future and our understanding of physics, I think, is pretty good enough to rule out the possibility that dreams can be prophetic.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We almost certainly are, and we're in the midst of a mass extinction of languages. I don't think it will result in everyone speaking English, even under the most dire predictions, say 90% of languages go extinct. That leaves 600. And no one's going to be giving up Spanish or Hindi or Russian or Chinese anytime soon. And in fact, the growth of translation software and of national media combined with old-fashioned national pride and just the inertia of growing up with the language and feeling more comfortable in it means that we're not going to have a single language driving out all the others.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a big stack of bicycling magazines and I am obsessed about their difference in weight in grams between various kinds of derailer and water bottle cage.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every time you monkey with a gene, you are taking some chance that something will go wrong, admittedly CRISPR CAS9 has become extraordinarily accurate. But if you're talking about changing 1,000 genes in your offspring or 10,000 genes, we're so risk-averse in genetic manipulation, even when it comes to our tomatoes. People won't eat a tomato that's genetically modified. The idea that you're going to take that kind of risk with your children I think is extraordinarily unlikely that we'll get there from here. Do you want me to speculate about the scientific fiction scenario in which we do? Sure, especially. I mean, I don't think it would be a terrible thing, but I think it's kind of a idle speculation because I just don't think we're going to have to worry about it.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Depends on what the trade-offs are. I mean, we don't know how much boost in brain power you can get without an increase in chances of brain cancer or of other trade-offs, of a neural network that's too dense actually is stupider. So I guess I'm rooted enough in what we know about behavioral genetics not to think that these science fiction scenarios are not particularly productive. I don't think we, I think it's probably a scenario that we're not going to have to worry about just because it's too complicated. We're not going to want to, especially since”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm skeptical of the premise. As someone who is very interested in genetically influenced traits and was kind of excited in the 90s at the possibility that we'd find the gene for this or the gene for that, and there were a number of discoveries which turned out to be false alarms, now more and more I appreciate that even traits that have a heavy genetic component, which most traits do, The genetic influence is distributed over thousands and thousands of genes, each of which increment or decrement the trait by a smidgen, and many of which have a mixture of positive and negative effects. So the idea that you'll put in the gene for musical ability in your child just turns out to be factually incorrect. That's not the way genes.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most academics, I think, secretly watch TV as a guilty pleasure and then deny it. I think I'm kind of the other way around. I just don't watch a whole lot of TV and I feel like I ought to watch more.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You probably know this. Absolutely. Very influential. Absolutely. He had the supremes on, I think, more than any other, any single act in an era where America just barely desegregated, started to desegregate. So yes, I like Hill Street Blues. I don't even know if that's available on streaming. I like cheers.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, let's see. I like the Ed Sullivan show. Why is Sullivan? Well, because you could say, where else could you see Italian acrobats and then a Jewish comedian and then the Beatles?”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They could, yeah, but it could be unrecognizable under the most extreme scenarios of what could happen. But it would be pretty miserable if you imagine the number of people that would die and the number of decrement in prosperity. So it would be pretty bad. I wouldn't say it would extinguish us as a species. The reasons that you mentioned”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ah I think it depends. It just depends on the race between poaching and habitat destruction on the one hand and conservation and ecotourism on the other. I don't think they have to. They could, but I don't think they have to.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“not the other primates. I don't think they'll be a shortage of monkeys. Monkeys are like rats. As you know, you go to India and they're everywhere. Great apes.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“then everyone can live a lot better if you aren't all living by the sword. It's just as plausible to me that as civilizations advance, rather than having more and more destructive wars, they could continue the trend that we've been on since World War II and they eventually make war obsolete. That's another plausible trajectory. And indeed, the idea that the worst aspects of this particular primate, in such a way that we are too quick to anger, we're too quick to defend our dominance, that that's the only way for intelligence to evolve, I think, is parochial. It's saying that what we see in Homo sapiens is the only way that intelligent beings can come into existence. I don't think we should be constrained by that.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think there's a natural arc toward destruction of civilizations. And in fact, one could make the argument that it goes the other direction, that as you become more advanced, civilizations develop mechanisms that make conflict less likely, which I think is the trajectory we have gone on so far. Again, I'm not willing to prophecy that it'll continue. You blow a lot of stuff up, you kill people, and you don't end up with anything that you couldn't have gotten by some other means. As soon as you become too belligerent, you give other people an incentive to destroy you. That may not be avoidable in Hobbesian anarchy, but if you can have some kind of system either of world government or of the functional equivalent like international norms in the United Nations and a set of expectations,”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“up for no reason other than attracting publicity. And there are certain kinds of violence that are so pointless that just no one really wants to do it. One of the reasons that we've gone now more than 70 years without a nuclear weapon being used in war is that they're just not terribly useful as weapons to accomplish anything. I mean, they're useful to deter an existential threat and all-out invasion. That's presumably why North Korea wants them. But they haven't been used on the battlefield because leading a huge radioactive crater is just not a very coherent war goal. You could imagine some apocalyptic cult where destruction for its own sake is so desirable that they would do anything possible. And we don't know how many people like that there are.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's very easy. I think it's too easy to be a pessimist and to say that I can imagine bad things, therefore they are certain, which I think has been a default in a lot of our discourse. The other is how much a desire is there for that kind of destruction. That is, we could see the rate, I think the rate limiting step on terrorist destruction is how many people think that it's a good idea to cause a lot of damage for no particular reason. We could have Sarnayev brothers in this audience, and there could be a pressure cooker that would blow up in the next few minutes. I don't think there will be. But clearly there's no technological or economic impediment to that. The amount of violence that we see is not limited by cost of technology. It's limited by the number of people who think that it would be a good idea to blow a lot of stuff.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I guess there are two. One is that every form of physical accomplishment follows an exponential curve of getting cheaper and cheaper. For example, plane travel hasn't gotten faster and faster if you extrapolate from the Wright brothers to, say, 1957, then it just totally leveled off. In fact, if anything might be a little bit slower for a number of reasons. So it is not necessarily true that there'll be a $10,000 nuclear weapon. I'm not an expert on nuclear proliferation, but my reading is that there isn't. You still need the thousands of centrifuges and so on. So that's one at least topic to explore. Again, I'm not an optimist in saying, oh, relax, it'll never happen.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't know. My optimism doesn't consist of prophecy in that sense. That is my optimism consists of looking at what has happened. And noting that, first of all, that the pessimistic view is factually incorrect, namely people believe that we're living in unusually violent times and we're not, how to project that into the future is a separate set of questions. And there are many unknowns that I just, I'm not arrogant enough to know the answer to. It's something that we could debate. We could explore them, but I am not an optimist in the sense of saying, well, let's just extrapolate the curves in the future without asking questions like that.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where do I begin? Yeah, where to begin. Biggest mistake Maybe I'm going to punt on that. Okay, that's fine. Why don't I just say that so as not to convey the impression that I've never made mistakes? There are so many. Where do I begin?”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, maybe just that passage. Like any art form photography is many things. And first and foremost, it's a simulacrum of perceptual experience. It's possible because visual perception doesn't consist of knowing the external world directly, but rather making hypotheses about it via a two-dimensional array of light that's reflected from it. That is then in tension with the fact that the photograph itself is a splash of geometric and colored patches. And the challenge of photographers It is to both convey a sense of something out there, but also for that two-dimensional patch to itself be an aesthetically pleasing object. And as a photographer, I'm always cognizant of what will that two-dimensional patchwork of color look like and what is it a photograph of?”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mime in the park. He's being pelted with zucchini. Then since I've already called your attention to the mime, now I want to add information about him. If he happens to be the brunt of an action, then the passive voice is the way to begin the next sentence with him, as opposed to saying some people are throwing zucchini at him, where he gets put the focus of the sentence, which is the best place to introduce new information. And in fact, as I point out in the sense of style, The two most famous style guides in the English language, namely Orwell's Politics in the English Language and Strunkenweit's The Elements of Style, both accidentally use the passive in the very sentence in which they say don't use the passive.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So would have thought. But it is the case is overdrawn because no construction could have survived in the language for more than 1,500 years if it didn't serve some purpose. And there are circumstances in which the passive is the better choice. In particular, when you, when the topic of the conversation, the entity that's already in the spotlight is the done to or acted upon. Another rule of style, aside from avoiding the passive, is start the sentence with the given information, the topic, and the sentence with the new information, the focus. If you're already talking about something that is done to, then that's the logical way to begin the next sentence, and the passive voice makes that possible. If I'm talking about, if I'm saying, you look at that”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It has its underrated. In the following sense, you open up any style manual and one of the first bits of advice is don't use the passive. That's too crude. Academics overuse the passive, or maybe I should say the passive voice is overused by academics. That's better. But”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can override some of our biases and instincts, either through confrontations with reality, through education, through debate. And we do know that people who are experienced in market transactions, for example, don't fall for the kinds of fallacies that behavioral economists are so fond of pointing out. You really can't turn a person into a money pump, even though in the lab I can set up a demo that shows that people can be intransitive in their preferences.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think that it's missing. I'm completely out of my depth here, but I do think that it is too quick to dismiss classical economics. I don't think there is maybe another false dichotomy, but that the idea that the rational actor and models derived from it are obsolete because humans make certain irrational choices, have certain rules of thumb that can't be normatively defended. Those aren't necessarily incompatible because even though every individual human brain might have its quirks and be irrational, it is possible for a collective enterprise that works by certain rules to have a kind of rationality that none of the individual minds has. Also, it's possible, because we're corrigible, because the mind is many parts.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source