" Pinker said: "We have no right to expect perfection.
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According to Dr. Pinker, that is the sole rational reading.
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Mr Pinker draws especial comfort from the decline of faith.
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Steven Pinker is a describer, a linguist and cognitive scientist.
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With "Enlightenment Now," Pinker hopes to return us to reality.
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The tests reveal that Pinker and I are third cousins.
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But it is pinker now — largely because of Beto O'Rourke.
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The pinks seem pinker and the greens greener than normal.
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Pinker says bemoaning unrealistic apocalyptic scenarios is dangerous to society.
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The book is "Enlightenment Now" by cognitive scientist Steven Pinker.
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Mr Garner has tangled with Mr Pinker and other descriptive linguists.
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The pinker the line, the more fibs the filmmakers have told.
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One way Pinker does it is by refusing to be pessimistic.
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When not attacking the populist right, Pinker lays into leftist intellectuals.
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So the more lycopene in the fruit, the pinker it appears.
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In sum, Pinker is widely regarded as a brilliant, accomplished man.
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This fight between Pinker and Enlightenment scholars is puzzling on some levels.
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The Chanels are back, and they're pinker, meaner, and sassier than ever.
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I hope Hickel, Roser, and Pinker alike can agree on that much.
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Other overhyped doomsday threats include mass starvation and resource scarcity, says Pinker.
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So why are Pinker and Enlightenment scholars like me talking past each other?
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Yann LeCun makes other arguments, as does Steven Pinker [another AI risk skeptic].
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The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has long been a loud votary of progress.
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Pinker, too, finds that people are afraid for civilization but hopeful about themselves.
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Psychologist Steven Pinker has a PhD from Harvard and is a professor there.
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"The prospect of meeting these challenges is by no means utopian," says Pinker.
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"It's not so much that her theories have been refuted," Dr. Pinker said.
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It's the pinkest we could come up with, and we've not seen anything pinker.
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But Hickel and Pinker, too, aren't interested merely in the granular disputes detailed above.
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Apple's new 12-inch MacBook is a faster, pinker upgrade from last year's MacBook.
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Steven Pinker: Unfortunately, it's all too easy for newsreaders to believe that apocalyptic picture.
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Sean Spicer was back from vacation, where he somehow got both pinker and oranger.
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How could Pinker know he wasn't elevating a temporary exception into an enduring rule?
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While Pinker elects himself the heir of Enlightenment, his whole approach betrays Enlightenment principles.
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Gates has been close with Epstein's other famous friends, including the scientist Steven Pinker.
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Though Dr. Pinker normally wears cowboy boots, he said he quite liked the loafers.
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Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard, has been known to take provocative positions.
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Oftentimes, the most important part of writing is rewriting, and Pinker recommends meticulous editing.
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You've had your quarrels with the Harvard professor Steven Pinker about his views on religion.
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I spoke with Mr. Pinker last week about some of the themes of his book.
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Samsung has released a new, pinker version of the flagship Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge.
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Jake Kasdan returned to direct the sequel, alongside co-writers Jeff Pinker and Scott Rosenberg.
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By believing that the world is getting worse, Pinker argues, we can make it so.
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As Steven Pinker has documented, we've seen a steady decline in wars and armed conflict.
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"It's not a reflection, in itself, of the mood of the country," Mr. Pinker said.
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There is one topic, however, on which Gates thinks Pinker is too optimistic: artificial intelligence.
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I sent a sample of GPT-2's prose to Steven Pinker , the Harvard psycholinguist.
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"He seems to be closer to setting an example than preaching or proselytizing," Mr. Pinker said.
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"I don't recall his telling me that the question pertained to the Epstein defense," Pinker said.
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Steven Pinker, a psychologist, has documented how human assessments of society are skewed by negativity bias.
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Global poverty has been reduced from 90% to 10% over the last 200 years, Pinker says.
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Pinker remained skeptical, however, telling CNN: "My guess is that it's a waste of taxpayer dollars."
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Specifically, a copy of "The Better Angels of Our Nature, " by Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker.
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I'm glad we have brilliant thinkers like Steven Pinker to help us see the big picture.
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"The Better Angels of Our Nature," Steven Pinker Proof that the world is becoming more peaceful.
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His contributions earned him access to Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, and the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker.
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"History tells us that attempts to make the world better tend to succeed," Mr. Pinker said.
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While preparing, or even over-preparing, for threats may seem harmless, there are risks, says Pinker.
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So the most powerful contributor to the fight against vaccine-preventable diseases was science, Pinker reminds us.
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Negative news is one reason why people consistently underestimate the progress humanity is making, complains Steven Pinker.
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Mr Norberg agrees with Steven Pinker, a psychologist, that humankind is also experiencing a "moral Flynn Effect".
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Fast-twitch muscle, which is more powerful but tires quickly, and which runs on carbohydrate, is pinker.
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I flipped it over, revealing a pinker underside, and popped it back in for another two minutes.
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Pinker cites statistics showing that, globally, there are now fewer victims of murder, war, rape, and genocide.
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Steven Pinker and others argue—convincingly, in my view—that the world has never been so peaceful.
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"The person who invents an affordable and efficient toilet should be made a saint," Mr. Pinker said.
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ENLIGHTENMENT NOW The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress By Steven Pinker 556 pp. Viking. $35.
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If Pinker doesn't have a grasp of AI, "humanity is in deep trouble," Musk says on Twitter.
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" Steven Pinker is a professor of psychology at Harvard University and is the author of "Enlightenment Now.
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And if you keep things subtle (like darker lashes or pinker cheeks), your friends definitely won't catch you.
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Two friends of theirs, being pinker, saw an opportunity to shore up what might otherwise melt into air.
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Pinker is Gates' favorite author, and the multi-billionaire helped propel of the scientist's writing to commercial success.
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Why, Pinker asked, would men be more pro-Trump now than they were when he first took office?
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I'd been charmed by Bologna earlier in my trip, the pink buildings that glowed even pinker at sunset.
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But today's situation reminds us of the weakness of the sort of Cartesian rationalism Pinker champions and represents.
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Pinker is particularly sharp on the dangers of ignoring or overriding the systems that make nuclear war unlikely.
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"In Europe there's more of a tradition of having intellectuals as part of popular culture," Dr. Pinker said.
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In any case, it is bad, and everyone but Steven Pinker seems to agree about that by now.
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"Kids' brains are developing more fully thanks to improved nutrition and a cleaner environment," he writes, crediting Pinker.
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Many, including Harvard's Steven Pinker, thought the phrasing signaled the event would be about partisan politics, not science.
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Vaccines, Pinker notes, have been critical to the progress we've made during the past century against death and disease.
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In 1990 Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom, both then at MIT, published an article making a surprisingly controversial case.
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Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, pictured in 20103 at ASU with Epstein and Krauss, distanced himself from the disgraced financier.
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Samsung's camera, even without the beauty filter, makes me look a little pinker and healthier than I really am.
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Mr Pinker defends "more unique", whereas many pundits still reserve "unique" to mean an unscalable "one of a kind".
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What Pinker calls "emancipative values"—tolerance, feminism, and so on—are becoming more common even in old-fashioned societies.
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Last year, his two favorite books were "One is 'Enlightenment Now" by Steven Pinker and "Factfulness" by Han Rosling.
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" Even with its saturation coverage of the pipe bombs, Mr. Pinker argued on Twitter, "The press gets gamed again.
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In almost every way that can be measured, Pinker argues, life in the United States has never been better.
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"Steven Pinker has long been a darling of the white supremacist 'alt-right,'" noted the lefty journalist Ben Norton.
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Part of the problem is that Pinker succumbs to a version of the magical thinking he otherwise rails against.
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As the sky grew subtly pinker and purpler, other cars appeared: two families, a lone woman and a couple.
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"You'll often be shocked to find that what's obvious to you is not obvious to anyone else," says Pinker.
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"One is often surprised at how puzzling one's own prose is to oneself after some time passes," Pinker muses.
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If there's anyone who can put this moment into context, it's the Harvard psychology professor and polymath Steven Pinker.
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According to the Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, the answer is a resounding No. In his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker presents a mountain of evidence showing that violence has been declining for millennia—a trend that has continued through the twentieth century and up to the present.
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The meal was catered; Mr. Pinker said he wasn't sure if Mr. Zuckerberg had slaughtered any of the animals himself.
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Pinker said that over the years he has regularly offered his linguistic opinions to Dershowitz for use in various cases.
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While not included in the Hickel-Kenny consensus document, I would note that Hickel agrees with Gates, Pinker, Roser, etc.
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Steven Pinker made the subtext plain with his 2018 book Enlightenment Now, an exaggerated defense of the project of enlightenment.
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Steven Pinker, on the other hand, dedicates a significant share of his essay in Possible Minds to ridiculing the idea.
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In his new book, Enlightenment Now, Pinker makes a broader argument that, by all significant measures, humans are making progress.
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Pinker continues: Over the longer run, I think the forces of modernity prevail — affluence, education, mobility, communication, and generational replacement.
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Steven Pinker It's interesting that I sort of followed Bill's trajectory and ended up in a similar place by accident.
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The head spins as he trots past thinkers from Plato to Steven Pinker, frequently rendering tendentious judgments along the way.
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Many of those scientists were affiliated with Harvard, including physicist Lawrence Krauss, geneticist George Church, and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker.
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Books of The Times Steven Pinker doesn't just want you to be happy; he wants you to be grateful too.
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To that end, Pinker offers numbers to show that the world has, on the whole, become safer, healthier and wealthier.
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To state offhandedly, as Pinker does, that major Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire, Leibniz, or Kant might appear "out to lunch" to us today, while at the same time claiming that we're still basking in the sun of Enlightenment reason, raises serious questions about what Pinker is speaking of when he refers to the Enlightenment.
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Things have indeed, as Pinker documents in great detail, gotten better in pretty much every way—materially, morally, politically—since then.
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After all, why wouldn't someone like Pinker, who champions the era, get along with a bunch of scholars of the Enlightenment?
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In the broader universe of knowledge production today, at this moment, it's scientists like Pinker who hold most of the cards.
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It turns out that Enlightenment thinkers themselves, never mind Pinker's contemporary critics, had very different ideas from Pinker himself about progress.
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In any case, Pinker argues, it does not matter morally if some people get extremely wealthy, so long as poverty decreases.
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But if one claims to be making "the case for humanism," as Pinker does, isn't the way people live also important?
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Beyond basic creaturely survival, Pinker concludes, progress consists in allowing more and more people to define and embrace their own good.
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The Times sat down with Mr. Pinker to talk about what humanity needs to do to keep the good times rolling.
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Go a click in one direction and the group is enhanced by intellectuals with tony affiliations like Steven Pinker at Harvard.
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In "The Stuff of Thought," Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist and a professor at Harvard, listed a few functions of swearing.
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One of the earliest critiques came from Steven Pinker, a renowned psychology professor at Harvard, who criticized the March's diversity statement.
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Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist and author of Enlightenment Now, has expressed what is probably the most common complaint about postmodernism.
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Pinker examines 15 metrics of human progress, making the case that life is far better today than it has ever been.
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Pinker portrays Enlightenment scholars who criticize Enlightenment Now as "cultural pessimists" averse to "Western civilization," but this is hyperbolic and mostly wrong.
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On the topic of the potential risks of an extraterrestrial visit, she referred to research done by Harvard psychology professor, Steven Pinker.
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"Not as profound as [Steven] Pinker, [Paul] Scharre, [Hans] Rosling, " Gates admits, ticking off other authors that he's recommended in the past.
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In 1820, Pinker reports, more than 80 percent of human beings lacked basic education, and now more than 80 percent enjoy it.
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Nick Kristof has agreed that, notwithstanding global tragedies to which he often devotes his columns, life is, as Pinker argues, pretty great.
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Unlike the linguist—and new atheist—Steven Pinker, Gray regards the idea that the world is getting better as self-evidently silly.
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Pinker "talks about the progress we've made and how we could learn from the places we've made even faster progress," Gates explains.
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""He would abruptly change the subject, ADD-style, dismiss an observation with an adolescent wisecrack," Pinker said, calling Epstein an "intellectual impostor.
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Pinker urges us to overcome these cultural, psychological, political, and spiritual biases, and to take a more objective view of the world.
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Pinker shows that, during the past century, per-capita deaths from fire have declined by ninety per cent in the United States.
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"The conventional wisdom gave too little weight to the possibility that Trump would win," said Steven Pinker, the author and Harvard psychologist.
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Steven Pinker will be O.K. A fleeting Twitter blowup isn't going to bruise his long and successful career as a public intellectual.
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Not only is it unscientific; it's gratuitous, and Pinker ends up undermining his own arguments with a tendency to overstate his case.
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"The Future of Humanity," by Michio Kaku; "Enlightenment Now," by Steven Pinker; and "Capture: A Theory of the Mind," by David Kessler.
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To get help making sense of all these upheavals and tragedies, I reached out to Harvard psychology professor and polymath Steven Pinker.
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"This case is not at a posture where it can fairly and fully go to trial in May of this year," Pinker said.
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Pinker highlights the data on education, literacy, wealth, and longevity to make the broader case that life, on the whole, is getting better.
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Pinker makes a persuasive argument that the world is getting better—that we are living in the most peaceful time in human history.
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Respected Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker tweeted: Once again the press gets gamed, giving saturation coverage and agonized commentary to a minor event.
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Pinker has data like this in sphere after sphere, marking the progress we've made in health, the environment, safety, knowledge and overall happiness.
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Steven Pinker, a Harvard University cognitive scientist, said on Twitter that Google's actions could increase support for Mr. Trump in the tech industry.
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"There are many battles of history that were lost because of botched communication," says Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard University.
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Pinker says constant fear-mongering can make it harder for the human brain to correctly distinguish between a legitimate and a false threat.
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Weller: There's been a great deal written by people like Steven Pinker about how, in the macro, rates of violence are going down.
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Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, who had attended gatherings with Epstein, told the Times that Epstein had more or less advocated letting the impoverished die off because of "overpopulation":At one session at Harvard, Mr. Epstein criticized efforts to reduce starvation and provide health care to the poor because doing so increased the risk of overpopulation, said Mr. Pinker, who was there.
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The positive ones say Pinker argues convincingly that we should be deeply grateful for the Enlightenment and should put our stock in its legacy.
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This statement tidily exemplifies the disconnect, because this "handy rubric" view of the Enlightenment comes at a cost Pinker doesn't acknowledge but ought to.
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Enlightenment Now: The Case For Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, by Steven PinkerLove him or hate him, neuroscientist Steven Pinker is never not interesting.
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You don't have to be Pangloss (or Steven Pinker) to demur; a glance at the history of medicine is ample evidence to the contrary.
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Pinker told BuzzFeed News that when he offered his opinion to Dershowitz, he was unaware of the details of the client or the case.
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"My expertise was in the relationship between law and science, so it was natural that I would call on Pinker," Dershowitz told BuzzFeed News.
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Those who enjoy them are dying out: online searches for racial epithets correlate with interest in "Social Security" and "Frank Sinatra", Mr Pinker notes.
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Some want to tear down these institutions and start again—which would at the very least interrupt the incremental progress that Mr Pinker champions.
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As writers such as Steven Radelet, Stephen Pinker and the late Hans Roslin have explained, there is plenty of good news in the world.
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The Super pHresh (green) is a pink-berry shade on lighter skin tones and gets a bit pinker as it hits darker skin tones.
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Notice just how much pinker the blossoms are on the Canon JPEG, and how much brighter and warmer (potentially too warm) the image is.
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To understand what Trump's victory means for America and, even more, what it means for the future of civilization, I contacted Pinker via email.
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From the outset, Pinker insists that he can read progress off simple metrics such as how many people survive childhood and live relatively long.
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Pinker also flew on Epstein's private plane that was nicknamed the "Lolita Express," since his accusers testified that they were sex trafficked on it.
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Trump activates these vigilant instincts, Pinker says, and channels them into the most primitive interpretive circuits of our cortex, the ones rooted in tribalism.
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Pinker answered his own question: The latest battle of the sexes has the media, educational, and workplace establishments sympathizing with women and demonizing men.
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I'm most interested in the bright line that Pinker draws between the empirical spirit of science and the unreasoning obscurantism he suggests otherwise prevails.
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People like Steven Pinker make the case that life is steadily improving, and that reason and technology are the prime drivers of that improvement.
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Instead, Pinker argued, I think we're seeing a somewhat different psychological phenomenon: dynamically sorting ourselves into coalitions defined by moralistic condemnation of designated enemies.
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"And she was so damn smart," Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist and author who has championed Ms. Harris's work, said in a phone interview.
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That so many great minds, including household names like Pinker, Chomsky and Gould, give such wildly different accounts, could be seen as a scientific failure.
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Another one of his favorites is "The Better Angels of Our Nature," in which the author Steven Pinker argues that the world is getting better.
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A state of relative global order -- the Long Peace, as Steven Pinker describes it in "The Better Angels Of Our Nature" -- has existed since 1945.
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Pinker zooms back and examines the "big picture of human progress" since the late 18th century, right around the time the Enlightenment Age kicked off.
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If I could give each of you a graduation present, it would be a copy of "The Better Angels of Our Nature," by Steven Pinker.
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Mr Pinker is a fine English stylist; it is no surprise that he has opinions on whether some words and formations are better than others.
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Its strawberries have been bred for a uniform shape, for example, while Driscoll's raspberries are pinker and shinier, made to meet desires expressed by consumers.
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"Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide," its publisher states.
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I worry that there is a hidden danger in a work like "Enlightenment Now," by the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, which Rothman discusses at length.
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"Is there any idea so outlandish that it won't be published in a Critical/PoMo/Identity/'Theory' journal?" the psychologist and author Steven Pinker tweeted.
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Op-Ed Contributor This week, a video surfaced of a Harvard professor, Steven Pinker, which appeared to show him lauding members of a racist movement.
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"Google drives a big sector of tech into the arms of Trump: fires employee who wrote memo about women in tech jobs," Dr. Pinker wrote.
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Further, the idea that AI is both smart enough to take over and dumb enough to do so by accident is not logical, Pinker says.
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I skim a JSTOR Daily interview with Steven Pinker and pop over to Goodreads to add a couple of his books to my "To Read" list.
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I followed the same steps for the Turn Up Transformer, and ended with a slightly brighter, pinker color great for the office (or for happy hour!).
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Let me try to present the broader trends to you in a series of graphs produced by Harvard's Steven Pinker and Andrew Mack, published in Slate.
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My favorite is the Flame Red (sadly not coming to the US), which is a pinker version of the Solar Red I loved on the U11.
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In laying out his vision of betterment in Enlightenment Now, Pinker confronts alternative trends and looming threats for progress only in order to brush them off.
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Not only is authentic optimism not data-driven, but it may have to be established by heirs of reason and humanism who make Pinker look complacent.
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His principal poison, however, is alcohol rather than oil, and, as the whiskey washes through him, he thickens and slows, and his complexion turns perceptibly pinker.
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The problem is that even if Pinker is right, his analysis does not preclude a sustained period in which the anti-democratic right dominates American politics.
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" Steven Pinker (@sapinker) is a professor of psychology at Harvard University and the author of "The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.
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Pinker uses visuals to show the corresponding statistic from the U.S. and Europe in the 20th century, and includes all the deaths of both World Wars.
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From a more academic vantage point, Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, replied to my inquiry with a detailed critique of the A.P.A. guidelines.
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While no one can say what the stages between basic cries and intricate modern syntax were, Messrs Pinker and Bloom were confident in positing a gradual unfolding.
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Steven Pinker: There's a coherent alternative to religious, nationalist and reactionary movements, namely the ideals of the Enlightenment: that we can use knowledge to enhance human flourishing.
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Steven Pinker, in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, says the printing press was crucial to humanity's ethical development because it helped spread humanitarian ideas.
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Now a large new study led by Joshua Hartshorne of Boston College (with Mr Pinker and Joshua Tenenbaum as co-authors) has buttressed the critical-period hypothesis.
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" Mr Pinker contends that this braininess has moral consequences, since people who can reason abstractly can ask: "What would the world be like if everyone did this?
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It's Bill Gates's favorite book right now and Pinker was a recent guest on The Ezra Klein Show, so we're happy to give this recommendation a cosign.
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Pinker takes up his chief bête noire, Nietzsche, not by reading his works but by culling inflammatory quotations from another intellectual brief in favor of Enlightenment values.
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Pinker compiles a mountain of statistics as a rebuttal to pessimists and declinists on both the right and the left, from Dinesh D'Souza to Ta-Nehisi Coates.
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The men first met in 215 when Mr. Pinker visited Microsoft to talk about his book "The Language Instinct," about the evolution of language for human communication.
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I sat down with Dr. Pinker to talk about how science has made life better, and what humanity needs to do to keep the good times rolling.
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Immigration is one of a package of issues that fall under the broad category of liberalization — something Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, calls emancipation.
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Even when it comes to realistic threats, Pinker is relatively optimistic that things like nuclear war and climate change can, with careful and diligent work, be mitigated.
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I've been told that women are less intelligent because our brains are smaller, because we win fewer Nobel Prizes, and most frequently, because Steven Pinker said so.
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GOLDBERG: No. Look, I agree with that and you know, Steven Pinker makes a very similar argument to one of the ones that I make in my book.
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Or, as Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist, argues, an instinct for language-learning specifically, which fades as the brain ages and (in evolutionary terms) is no longer needed?
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Pinker agrees that the data supports the idea that capitalism is working for the world's poorest, and says that's a decisive rebuttal of Hickel's narrative of enduring persecution.
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Since medieval times the murder rate in most Western countries has fallen by a factor of nearly 100, estimates Stephen Pinker in "The Better Angels of Our Nature".
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Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist and author of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, has been arguing for years that this is an illusion.
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Once he gets around to acknowledging that climate change is an actual problem, Pinker spends much of his time attacking "climate justice warriors" for their anti-capitalist hysteria.
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It is disappointing and unconvincing to see Pinker wave these points aside or use debater's tricks to minimize them, skating past the contemporary anger at regress or stagnation.
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Pinker is a paragon of exactly the kind of intellectual honesty and courage we need to restore conversation and community, and the students are right to revere him.
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He helped start a program at Harvard with a $6.5 million donation, and he hosted dinner parties with luminaries like cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, according to the Times.
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Once tribalism becomes embedded in the political system, Pinker wrote, the full ingenuity of human cognition is recruited to valorize the champion and shore up the sacred beliefs.
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The primate overlooks a room painted flamingo pink, pinker even than the terra-cotta ramparts that encircle the old city a few miles from this quiet residential enclave.
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Pinker is a scientist — a psychologist, to be exact — and he prides himself on being thorough, valiantly fighting "progressophobia" with his voluble sentences and a fusillade of data.
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The first of these unsatisfying arguments, which I associate most closely with Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, is that the narrative of a world in crisis is simply wrong.
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"If there was more attention paid to clear writing and communication," says Pinker, "we could improve the efficiency of business, education, government — and the frustrations of everyday life."
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He wants to discuss Don Giovanni, Lord Byron, the writer Chantal Thomas, Steven Pinker, Frantz Fanon, Picasso, Simone de Beauvoir, the psychologist Grazyna Kochanska — all in two pages.
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For scholars such as Steven Pinker, a psychologist, and Francis Fukuyama, a political scientist, these are grounds for thinking that a world run by women would be more peaceful.
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After Jeffrey Epstein was indicted for sex crimes in 2006, his Harvard lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, called on the expertise of one of his Harvard colleagues, famous linguist Steven Pinker.
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The shade is pinker than what I use on the daily, but I have to say, I wasn't the least bit mad at how it brightened my olive complexion.
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What Pinker misses is the dark side of enlightenment, the bad things that have been bound up with progress and liberalization in the particular historical timeline we all occupy.
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There is no contradiction in claiming that, as Steven Pinker argues, the world is getting better in many important respects and also that the world is a complete mess.
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The lining was much pinker than the nude in the photo, and the overall shape of the dress was a lot more unflattering than the perfectly voluminous one pictured.
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"The Final Year" is stirring and saddening, but too well behaved by half; I wanted it to be a little less Steven Pinker and a little more Dwayne Johnson.
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Epstein's most notorious social connections included both President Trump and President Clinton, and he also mingled with prominent intellectuals and scientists like Lawrence Krauss, Steven Pinker, and Marvin Minsky.
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"It's something I don't do every day, to put it mildly," Dr. Pinker said of why he was inclined to accept the Boonper proposal to become a shoe mannequin.
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Steven Pinker of Harvard argues that a surge of literacy and an explosion of reading — novels in particular — "contributed to the humanitarian revolution," by helping people see other viewpoints.
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It's a pretty profound thing that looks at the rate of violence over history, and Pinker tries to look into it: Why have we been able to achieve that?
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But when asked about the antipathy his book elicits, Pinker lumps all critics together, whether they're "highbrow pundits" or "cultural critics" or academics who study the Enlightenment in humanities departments.
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Pinker is right to push back against tendencies to view the Enlightenment purely through a dark prism: as the prime driver and fundamental cause of racism, European barbarity, and colonialism.
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In this current era of cynicism and despair, Pinker dares to suggest that things are, slowly but surely, getting better—and that we have Enlightenment and humanist values to thank.
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There's the red meat, or akami, version, with its firm texture and relatively mild flavor, and the pinker version known as otoro that is filled with delicious oils and fats.
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The very past authorities Pinker invokes did not want to hawk psychic uppers for those in doubt and far more openly advertised the ambivalence of their own belief in progress.
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Reading your book, I thought about the story people like Steven Pinker tell, which is essentially that human history is a bumpy but nonetheless steady march of reason and progress.
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Which is why in many instances the interests that Pinker dismisses as irrational hugger-mugger, everything from astrology to spiritualism, have tended to strengthen during periods of real scientific ferment.
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A cognitive scientist and linguist, Pinker focused his study of human nature on our propensity for violence — and conversely, cooperation — in his 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature.
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I wanted to see how Pinker was looking back over the year that was 2016 — if the election of Trump, and all the global violence that followed, had changed anything.
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Gates also gifted copies of some of his famously favorite books, including "Factfulness" by Hans Rosling and "Enlightenment Now" by Steven Pinker, as well as a "very generous" Michael's gift card.
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As a champion of Enlightenment values who sees progress everywhere, Pinker diverges from scholars who take greater interest in an Enlightenment history that explores negative things like racism or environmental decay.
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He also disputes a view, recently popularised in "The Better Angels of Our Nature" by Steven Pinker, that mankind has a natural lust for violence which has only recently been tamed.
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"We do experience a primitive apprehension welling up from our 'reptilian brain,'" Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychology professor, tells me, but we still interpret it in light of our belief system.
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"When poverty is defined in terms of what people consume rather than what they earn, we find that the American poverty rate has declined by 90 percent since 1960," Pinker writes.
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As Steven Pinker has argued, human beings have become steadily less violent over the last 500 years; per capita deaths from military conflict are most likely at an all-time low.
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When I broached this body of research with the cognitive scientist and religious skeptic Steven Pinker, he emphasized that it was by no means a vindication of religion as a whole.
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Instead of replying with reassurance, Christian sourly eats a pie containing what looks to be a pubic hair and drinks from a glass containing a liquid that's pointedly pinker than everyone else's.
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Part of this has to do with how newsrooms work: Reporters favor anomalies and novelty instead of slow and plodding progress, as Steven Pinker points out in his recent book, Enlightenment Now.
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Kirsten Gillibrand, and Karl Rove; entrepreneurs Ruth Zukerman (Flywheel), Tim Brown (Allbirds), Cindy Mi (VIPKID); authors Malcolm Gladwell, Steven Pinker, Roxane Gay and Salman Rushdie; celebrity chefs Marcus Samuelsson and many more.
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He launched the Origins Project at Arizona State, which aimed to engage the public with science events featuring celebrated public intellectuals, like the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker and the filmmaker Werner Herzog.
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"[We thought] 'let's just throw out the playbook as much as possible," recalled showrunner Josh Appelbaum, who co-created Zoo alongside his three producing partners Andre Nemec, Jeff Pinker, and Scott Rosenberg.
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"Pinker makes a persuasive argument that the world is getting better, that we are living in the most peaceful time in human history," the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft writes on Mic.
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Pinker cannot bring himself to admit the possibility that some things are getting better while others get worse, and that even the best trends are subject to frightening interruption or outright reversal.
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Pinker attempts valiantly to sidestep the need for what Kant called "rational faith," partly by narrowing his inquiry to the most minimal terms of advancement, terms he imagines no one could dispute.
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According to Pinker, in 1800, an Englishman in Britain with an average wage needed to work six hours to earn enough to purchase a hand-dipped candle that burned for an hour.
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Before the project's demise, however, Epstein attended its events, including a 2014 gala dinner celebrating the project's five-year anniversary, at which he was photographed with Krauss and Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker.
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Pinker is right about part of it: There are indeed people in my field whose first instinct is to protect our turf from the incursion of quantitative representations of literature, history, and philosophy.
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By dismissing "intellectuals" as merely interested in protecting our turf and attacking the Enlightenment, Pinker and his less astute allies avoid engaging with the kind of error correction that builds and refines knowledge.
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Hickel views Pinker and Gates as defenders of a neoliberal capitalist world order, where countries are urged to disinvest from important safety net programs and adopt deregulatory policies that could devastate their citizens.
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Professor Pinker, a Harvard psychologist, told the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel recently that if mankind wanted to stop climate change without stopping economic growth too, the world needed more nuclear energy, not less.
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The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, by Steven Pinker: It's about how humans have treated humans over time, and whatever happened to duels and witchcraft and slavery and feuds?
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An obscure document from Epstein's legal defense shows that Pinker weighed in on the precise meaning of a federal law about using the internet to entice minors into prostitution or other illegal sex acts.
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By this measure, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker shows in his book, "Enlightenment Now," that China, once a famine-stricken nation, had achieved in 2000 the same per-capita income that Sweden had in 11.53.
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" A Harvard professor, Steven Pinker, advises us to set aside "childlike intuitions and traditional dogmas" and recognize that what we conceive of as the soul is nothing more than "the activity of the brain.
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His jittery editing of interview footage in the Dolly section (including the impressive likes of Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker) plays at matching speech patterns to rhythmic and melodic motifs in the instrumental ensemble.
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But it turned out a lot more people wanted to get around the city than wanted to go the distance and the parent company was supplanted with something pinker and fuzzier a few years later.
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Bill Gates and Steven Pinker made the case for being optimistic about the direction of the world — in ending wars, in philanthropy, in reducing poverty — in an interview with the New York Times' Philip Galanes.
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Eric Pinker, Purdue's lawyer, made no mention of a potential bankruptcy while arguing to delay the May 28 trial in Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter's lawsuit against it, Johnson & Johnson and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd .
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Largely because of apostates like Friedrich Nietzsche, Pinker thinks, intellectuals would rather fret over espresso and wear black than acknowledge that it is a great time to be alive and that human potential is boundless.
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"If Elon Musk was really serious about the AI threat, he'd stop building those self-driving cars, which are the first kind of advanced AI that we're going to see," says Pinker on the podcast.
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What Pinker seems not to understand is that by dismissing the "intellectual" Enlightenment scholars who point out errors or trade-offs in his conception of the Enlightenment, he's limiting our collective knowledge of the historical Enlightenment.
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Pinker is unfortunately caught up in a larger culture war in which self-styled "rationalists" hew to an identity politics of "rationalism" to counter what they view as pernicious "postmodernism" in English, history, and philosophy departments.
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After a few dozen ounces of formula, my baby was clearly thriving, his skin pinker and damper and his dumps gaining in gravitas, but every scoop of Similac I bottled seemed to pile on my failure.
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In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker makes the case for reading as a "technology for perspective-taking" that has the capacity to not only evoke people's empathy but also expand it.
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Pinker is clear in Better Angles that it might not—for instance, there could be accessible "weapons of total destruction" (WTDs) that precipitate a global catastrophe, or authoritarian demagogues that misuse and abuse their political power.
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"As the world has gotten richer," Pinker explains, "nature has begun to rebound"—as if the failure of a few prophecies of ecological disaster to come to pass on schedule means the planet is infinitely resilient.
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The social scientist and psychologist Steven Pinker has been pictured seated next to Epstein at a dinner before, and joins a long list of influential scientists and researchers who had ties to the convicted sex offender.
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Pinker probably sincerely believes he's got an answer to this question, but honestly, when I consider his argument about the steady improvement of things, I just want to say: Well, let's check back in 50 years.
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Contributors included Martin Rees, Steven Pinker, Gloria Origgi, Freeman Dyson, Max Tegmark, Judith Rich Harris, Peter Gabriel, Nina Jablonski, Bill Joy, Michael Shermer, Kevin Kelly, Gregory Benford, Sean Carroll, Frank Tipler, Steve Omohundro, and many, many others.
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For example, we're all aware of the gloomy statistics around wage stagnation and income inequality, but Pinker contends that we should not be nostalgic for the economy of the 299s, when jobs were plentiful and unions strong.
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Not only does Pinker argue that these advances fulfill Enlightenment hopes, he proposes they are a direct result of the Enlightenment itself, the period beginning after the Renaissance and Reformation when a group of thinkers insisted on the supremacy of rational inquiry over unthinking dogma, forged a commitment to the perfectibility of global life (in spite of the flaws of human nature), and promoted "humanism"—which Pinker defines as a reliance on institutions to counteract the evil and violent propensities of humankind while coaxing the capacity for cosmopolitan sympathy to its maximum.
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A key flashpoint is the surprisingly intense conflict between Steven Pinker, the Harvard cognitive psychologist and author of the widely discussed Enlightenment Now, and scholars in history, English, and philosophy departments — like me — who study the period professionally.
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As Pinker says in a recent Quillette interview: I use "the Enlightenment" as a handy rubric for that set of ideals [reason, science, and humanism] (since their most vehement and enduring expression can be found in that era).
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"To confirm our view of the 'plain meaning' of the words, we asked Steven Pinker … a noted linguist, to analyze the statute to determine the natural and linguistically logical reading or readings of the section," the pair wrote.
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In Better Angels, Pinker cited Norbert Elias, who in his 1939 book, The Civilizing Process, suggested that the cultivation of manners in early modern Europe had led to the decline of interpersonal violence over the past several centuries.
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As Steven Pinker puts it in his excellent book on why violence has declined over the centuries, The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Bible depicts a world that, seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery.
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A certain sort of person (see: cognitive scientist and popular author Steven Pinker) thinks that the way to keep science-p healthy is for scientists and scientific institutions to remain silent on contested questions of values and policy.
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The app, besides smoothing the skin out, removing wrinkles, and making the lips pinker, also enlarges the eyes to the point that io9 video editor Beth Elderkin and social media editor Emily Lipstein look like they're from another planet.
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Pinker described "neural enhancement" for healthy brains as being a "boondoggle," but he suggested that there could be some benefit for people suffering from brain-related diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease.
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Just as in his somewhat literal understanding of violence, Pinker simply cannot see something so straightforward as class rule, which has been massively reestablished in our time of inequality, with all the baleful effects it has had on politics.
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I put some of his reply into the generator window, clicked the mandala, added synthetic Pinker prose to the real thing, and asked people to guess where the author of "The Language Instinct" stopped and the machine took over.
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I'm what Pinker would dismissively call an "intellectual," a knowledge worker employed in an English department, trained in the literature, history, and philosophy of the Enlightenment, and prone to pointing out the occasional error in Pinker's understanding of the historical Enlightenment.
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Several magazines and newspapers reported at the time that the soon-to-be Princess Di was examined by Dr. Pinker, surgeon-gynecologist to the Queen, to ensure that she had an intact hymen (which, btw, isn't always a sign of virginity).
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Steven Pinker, a professor of linguistics, reckons a conservative estimate of the number of grammatical, 20-word sentences a human might produce is at least a hundred million trillion—far more than the number of grains of sand on Earth.
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On the flip side, you might remember back to January, when Harvard cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker said the March was compromising its mission—an apolitical march for evidence-based science, in his view—in order to satisfy "hard-left" rhetoric.
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Eric Pinker, Purdue's lawyer, made no mention of a potential bankruptcy while arguing that the May 28 trial in the lawsuit brought by Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter against it, Johnson & Johnson and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd should be delayed.
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Against prophecies of despair, Pinker wants to "restate the ideals of the Enlightenment in the language and concepts of the twenty-first century," using a slew of evidence to disprove the populists and intellectuals and fire up new rounds of progress.
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Undernourishment, extreme poverty, and violent crime have fallen worldwide, while literacy rates and the number of laws protecting minorities are on the rise—all of which Pinker credits to the cultivation of science-based research, democratic institutions, and bourgeois virtue.
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Pinker mentions various sources of pessimism—the "progressophobia" of liberal-arts professors, for instance—but directs most of his opprobrium toward the news media, which focus almost entirely on of-the-moment crises and systematically underreport positive, long-term trends.
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Simply having sex, it seems, is no longer sufficient in order to be truly "well" — now there are fancy subway ads for vitamins to increase women's libidos and multiple products that claim to make your vagina pinker (do not buy these).
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Pinker stressed that these calculations are not conscious: the actual thoughts and emotions running through people's brains are not about babies, cuckoldry, genes, investment or any of the concepts that enter into the ultimate, long-term, evolutionary explanation of people's motives.
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Just consider the contributors, among them Frank McCourt, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Lawrence H. Summers, Clayton M. Christensen, Steven Pinker, David Leonhardt, Duff McDonald, James Traub, Michael Winerip, Caitlin Flanagan, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Brian Stelter, Andrew Ross Sorkin (at age 22!).
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Veering onto firmer ground, I peered through binoculars at what now revealed itself to be a flock of Chilean flamingos — slightly pinker than their North American cousins, with grayish legs, red joints and a mostly black bill — at the water's edge.
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To the Editor: Re "Nuclear Power Can Save the World," by Joshua S. Goldstein, Staffan A. Qvist and Steven Pinker (Sunday Review, April 7): The writers' enthusiasm for carbon-free electricity is laudable, but the fixation on nuclear power is misguided.
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He took to wearing Harvard sweatshirts, gravitated to mingling with celebrity scientists like Stephen Jay Gould and Steven Pinker, and developed friendships with the former Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers and the law professor Alan Dershowitz, who later helped defend him.
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He took to wearing Harvard sweatshirts, gravitated to mingling with celebrity scientists like Stephen Jay Gould and Steven Pinker, and developed friendships with the former Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers and the law professor Alan Dershowitz, who later helped defend him.
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For this reason, it doesn't make sense to champion the value of knowledge while feeding public disdain of knowledge workers in English, history, and philosophy departments, none of which are monolithic blocs of "postmodernist" enemies of the Enlightenment Pinker imagines them to be.
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"My appearing in a couple of photos with Epstein is a bitter irony for me, because unlike a number of friends and colleagues I could never stand the guy and always tried to keep my distance," Pinker told BuzzFeed News by email.
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"Though I did this as a favor to a friend and colleague, and not as either a paid expert witness or as a part of a defense team, knowing what I know now I do regret writing the letter," Pinker said by email.
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I'm fairly confident that is not what director Ruben Fleischer had in mind when he picked up the script by Kelly Marcel, Scott Rosenberg and Jeff Pinker about an alien-life form that achieves symbiosis with a human host, giving him otherwordly powers.
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This difference, Pinker wrote in an email, emerges from that fact that males of many mammalian species compete for dominance (which in traditional societies translated into more mating opportunities, hence more offspring), including the dominance of their group relative to other group.
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Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, argues that it is the activation of group identity — of the friend-enemy type, about which I have written before — that is driving hostile polarization: Certainly there is a tribal flavor to political polarization.
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" In one of the periodic showdowns among Edgemen, that line was cited, dismissively, by Steven Pinker, who was responding to archeology professor Steven Mithen's critique of Pinker's 22016 argument for a model of the mind as a "system of organs of computation.
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" Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, argues in his book "The Better Angels of Our Nature" that "violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species' existence.
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Professor Pinker, in his superb book "The Better Angels of Our Nature," explores whether the spread of affordable fiction and journalism beginning in the 18th century expanded empathy by making it easier for people to imagine themselves in the shoes of others.
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For all the curves of destruction—deforestation, ocean acidification, CO2—the other curves that we mark our progress by, like lifespan, infant mortality, rising prosperity, and the Stephen Pinker curve of less conflict on a per capita basis, these are all doing great.
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"This includes the possibility that we will be annihilated by artificial intelligence, whether as direct targets of their will to power or as collateral damage of their single-mindedly pursuing some goal we give them," writes Pinker in The Globe and Mail.
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Pinker suggested rather that One could argue that what today's men need is more encouragement to enhance one side of the masculine virtues — the dignity, responsibility, self-control, and self-reliance — while inhibiting others, such as machismo, violence, and drive for dominance.
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To the Editor: Re "Nuclear Power Can Save the World," by Joshua S. Goldstein, Staffan A. Qvist and Steven Pinker (Sunday Review, April 7): Will it take another Chernobyl or Fukushima, possibly in an American city, to quiet the disinformation coming from nuclear activists?
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Before and after his year in prison, in 2008, Epstein lavished money and attention on scientists—biologist Stephen Jay Gould, biochemist George Church, evolutionary scientist Martin Nowak, linguist Steven Pinker, physicist Murray Gell-Mann, physicist Stephen Hawking, and AI researcher Marvin Minsky, among many others.
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In the book, Pinker — a psychology professor at Harvard University and the author of 10 books — presents "the big picture of human progress," according to Amazon, and points to data that shows life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge and happiness are on the rise worldwide.
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" This cognitive bias basically means that "when you know something, it's extraordinarily difficult to know what it's like not to know it, " Pinker tells CNBC Make It. "Your own knowledge seems so obvious that you're apt to think that everyone else knows it, too.
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The two best books he's read in 2018 so far are "Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress" by Steven Pinker and "Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World — and Why Things Are Better Than You Think" by Hans Rosling.
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Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychology professor, explores the gains in a terrific book due out next month, "Enlightenment Now," in which he recounts the progress across a broad array of metrics, from health to wars, the environment to happiness, equal rights to quality of life.
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As Pinker sees it, today's "intellectuals" are like Leavis, whose haughty, vitriolic response to Snow all but vindicated Snow's argument that the separation of scientific and literary cultures was standing the way of furthering knowledge, and that the prejudices of people like Leavis were fueling that separation.
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It falls now to Pinker and like-minded champions of knowledge to decide, as they currently occupy the Leavis position in the disciplinary hierarchy, whether they want to be Leavises — vitriolic critics punching down — or Snows, arguing for the collaborative pursuit of knowledge across disciplinary divides.
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Although Pinker deemed Elias "the most important thinker you have never heard of," he ignored Elias's claim, inspired by Nietzsche, that as people carefully moderated their outward, visible relations, they also began to do the same inside, regulating themselves into a new kind of pacified state.
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"For females," Pinker continued, such a risk is insane: they won't bear any more offspring if they are more dominant (since unlike males, their reproductive output is fixed by the time it takes to gestate and nurse a baby), and their offspring can't survive without them.
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Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard and author of the forthcoming book "Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress," emailed me his thoughts: The answer lies in raw tribalism: when someone is perceived as a champion of one's coalition, all is forgiven.
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" That's unfortunate, Mr. Pinker argues, because while someone might use these facts to support bigoted views, that needn't be the case, because "for each one of these facts, there are very powerful counterarguments for why they don't license racism and sexism and anarcho-capitalism and so on.
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I don't understand the science behind the pH shift that happens, or why it pleasantly surprises me every time I look in the mirror after I've put it on despite the fact that the sheer tint always gives the same shiny, your-lips-but-pinker effect.
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In 2002, Brockman, his wife and business partner Katinka Matson, and the leading scientists Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett were pictured on Epstein's jet flying to TED in Monterey, California — the multiday technology, entertainment, and design conference that the billionaires' dinners were held during.
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Over the course of the sign language project, some critics, such as linguist Noam Chomsky and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, complained that Koko didn't really understand what she was doing or saying, and that she was merely copying the researchers' hand movements, or trying to earn rewards and praise.
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And then the other one I would say — my husband and I often read books and then pass them to each other, and this one is currently his favorite book, so I'm reading it, and I'm loving it, but I'm only a quarter way through: Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker.
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Joining defiant rationalism to political centrism in an irrepressibly upbeat tone, Pinker insisted that the sky is the limit on possibility if humanity sticks to its tried-and-true devices of pacification: the gentle sociability of commerce, the feminization of boorish men, and the continuing expansion of sympathy for others.
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And a few individual writers have done the same in recent years, with "Accidence Will Happen" by Oliver Kamm (the language columnist for the Times of London), "The Joy of Syntax" by June Casagrande (a copy editor and columnist) and "The Sense of Style" by Steven Pinker (a Harvard psychologist).
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Pinker emailed in response to my inquiry, that Trump is almost a caricature of a contestant to be Alpha baboon: aggressive, hypersensitive to perceived threats to his dominance, boastful of his status and physical attributes (including his genitals), even the physical display of colorful big hair and a phallic red tie.
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That is to say, Pinker doesn't spend much time on the decline of social trust, the breakdown of family life, the polarization of national life, the spread of tribal mentalities, the rise of narcissism, the decline of social capital, the rising alienation from institutions or the decline of citizenship and neighborliness.
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The men who are pressing to make abortion illegal, some of whom would ban contraception as well, are not only, as Pinker says, unaware of the evolutionary forces motivating them, they appear to be in many respects ignorant of the havoc they would create if they are successful in their efforts.
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On a recent afternoon, I waited in Mr. Gates's office, admiring its striking view of Lake Washington and Mount Rainier in the distance, where I was joined by Mr. Pinker, 210, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and the author of 210 books, two of them Pulitzer Prize finalists.
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Resolutely skeptical, he's particularly tough on those who believe that war is becoming obsolete, from the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Norman Angell — whose popular book arguing that warfare was economically futile came out a few years before the outbreak of World War I — to the excellent psychologist Steven Pinker today.
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The power of bad news is magnified, Pinker writes, by a mental habit that psychologists call the "availability heuristic": because people tend to estimate the probability of an event by means of "the ease with which instances come to mind," they get the impression that mass shootings are more common than medical breakthroughs.
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The idea that Mr. Pinker, a liberal, Jewish psychology professor, is a fan of a racist, anti-Semitic online movement is absurd on its face, so it might be tempting to roll your eyes and dismiss this blowup as just another instance of social media doing what it does best: generating outrage.
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In " Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress ," the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker looks at recent studies and finds that majorities in fourteen countries—Australia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Norway, Singapore, Sweden, Thailand, the U.A.E., and the United States—believe that the world is getting worse rather than better.
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Which is why if Pinker and others are genuinely worried about a waning appreciation of the inquiring scientific spirit, they should consider the possibility that some of their own smug secular certainties might be part of the problem — that they might, indeed, be stifling the more comprehensive kind of curiosity upon which the scientific enterprise ultimately depends.
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The death rate analysis figures into a wider debate about war, genocide, and the deadliness of the modern era, Stone said, that pits scholars such as Harvard's Steven Pinker, who see violence as declining worldwide, against those such as Aaron Clauset of the University of Colorado, Boulder, who see peace as far more fragile and war as more deadly now.
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Pinker cited the questions raised in the work of Kurzban and Peter DeScioli, a political scientist at Stony Brook, wondering why so much of our moralizing does not consist in pondering how to universalize the maxim of our actions or to bring about the greatest good for the greatest number, but rather of condemning, demonizing, or scapegoating a designated sinner.
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It's appropriately on brand for the warmer, pinker, fuzzier Lyft to create partnerships and take in money from strategic allies – be it a vehicle manufacturer or an established rideshare service like it did with Didi in China (Lyft and Didi allow passengers to use each other's platform when visiting each other's territory) and for the darker, seemingly more button-up Uber to not do that.
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For the next couple of decades, Galsworthy served as Conrad's consigliere—lobbying the Royal Literary Fund ("No living writer of English, to my mind, better deserves support"), fielding Conrad's queries about his son's education ("I am sending you the prospectus to look at"), playing " 'in between' man" during a dispute with the agent J. B. Pinker ("Conrad asks me to ask you to write to him").
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In terms of politics, Pinker argues, the asymmetry is there, and it could affect gut-level sympathies: men toward politicians that embrace violence (the police and army) to enhance the competitive formidability of their perceived group against other "tribes," be they foreign countries or rival races or ethnicities within their own country; women toward politicians that promise benefits to the health and education of children.
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I travel often and see them a lot: at airport bookstores, where Steven Pinker and Yuval Noah Harari (both of whom blurbed "Upheaval") and Diamond, of course, deserve permanent shelves; and in the air, where I've noticed that a pretty disproportionate fraction of readers who read in the quiet of 20193,22019 feet have a preference for writers who write from the viewpoint of 230,2000 feet.
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Seekh kebabs, made with lamb that's coarsely ground by hand, come out of the tandoor juicier and pinker than the usual; Mumbai-style tandoori macchi, a skewered pompano rubbed with ground mustard seeds and cilantro, is lightly charred and smoky after roasting, but still moist; bhatti da murgh, a double-marinated chicken thigh and drumstick, is so thickly crusted with coriander and cumin that it crunches when you bite it.
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"Imagine Seema, an illiterate woman in a poor country who is village-bound, has lost half her children to disease, and will die at fifty, as do most of the people she knows," Pinker writes: Now imagine Sally, an educated person in a rich country who has visited several cities and national parks, has seen her children grow up, and will live to eighty, but is stuck in the lower middle class.
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Possible Minds, edited by John Brockman and published last week by Penguin Press, asks 240 important thinkers — including Max Tegmark, Jaan Tallinn, Steven Pinker, and Stuart Russell — to each contribute a short essay on "ways of looking" at AI. Architects of Intelligence, published last November by Packt Publishing, promises us "the truth about AI from the people building it" and includes 403 conversations between Martin Ford and highly regarded researchers, including Google Brain founder Andrew Ng, Facebook's Yann LeCun, and DeepMind's Demis Hassabis.
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To recap, here are the main differences between the new 9.7-inch iPad and the previous generation: it supports Apple Pencil it has the A10 Fusion chip it comes in a new shade of gold that's slightly pinker (though not as pink as the original rose gold) To be clear, these are all good features (even the new gold color is nice), but none fundamentally change the iPad in a way that suddenly makes them a must-have device for schools.
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In his response to my inquiry, Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, focused primarily on why men would be particularly concerned about any practice that would increase the sexual autonomy of women: Restricting abortion is an example of men's restrictions on women's reproductive capacity, which has taken many forms in various cultures and historical periods: chaperones, veils, wigs, burqas, niqabs, chadors, segregation by sex, confinement, foot-binding, genital mutilation, chastity belts, restrictions on birth control, double standards for adultery, violent sexual jealousy and laws and customs that make a woman the property of her husband.
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It would be impossible for a reasonable person to watch the eight-minute video and come away thinking Mr. Pinker's point is to praise the alt-right rather than to make a psychological argument about political correctness, alt-right recruitment and how to better fight that movement's bigoted ideas Now, maybe you disagree with certain parts of this argument — I do, in that I think Mr. Pinker overstates the intensity of campus political correctness — but it's hard to have that debate in the first place when such a wildly skewed version of Mr. Pinker's point is spreading like wildfire on the internet.
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The other dogma, Pinker argued, is that repressing emotions is bad and expressing them is good — a folk theory with roots in romanticism, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Hollywood, but which is contradicted by a large literature showing that people with greater self-control, particularly those who repress anger rather than "venting," lead healthier lives: they get better grades, have fewer eating disorders, drink less, have fewer psychosomatic aches and pains, are less depressed, anxious, phobic, and paranoid, have higher self-esteem, are more conscientious, have better relationships with their families, have more stable friendships, are less likely to have sex they regretted, are less likely to imagine themselves cheating in a monogamous relationship.
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