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Broadly Speaking, The Southern And Western Desert And Mountain States Will Vote For The Candidate Who Endorses An Aggressive Military, A Role For Religion In Public Life, Laissez-faire Economic Policies, Private Ownership Of Guns And Relaxed Conditions For Using Them, Less Regulation And Taxation, And A Valorization Of The Traditional Family.

-Steven Pinker

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Broadly Speaking, The Southern

Steven Pinker

...

Broadly Speaking, The Southern And Western Desert And Mountain States Will Vote For The Candidate Who Endorses An Aggressive Military, A Role For Religion In Public Life, Laissez-faire Economic Policies, Private Ownership Of Guns And Relaxed Conditions For Using Them, Less Regulation And Taxation, And A Valorization Of The Traditional Family.

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Racism, Because It Favors Color Over Talent, Is Bad For Business.

We Can Shape Events In Each Other's Brains With Exquisite Precision.

Language Mavens Commonly Confuse Their Own Peeves With A Worsening Of The Language.

Consistent Style Prevents Presentation From Getting In The Way Of Content.

I Think The Reason That Swearing Is Both So Offensive And So Attractive Is That It Is A Way To Push People's Emotional Buttons, And Especially Their Negative Emotional Buttons. Because Words Soak Up Emotional Connotations And Are Processed Involuntarily By The Listener, You Can't Will Yourself Not To Treat The Word In Terms Of What It Means.

If Anything, Powerpoint, If Used Well, Would Ideally Reflect The Way We Think.

The Rules Of Friendship Are Tacit, Unconscious; They Are Not Rational. In Business, Though, You Have To Think Rationally.

Feminism As A Movement For Political And Social Equity Is Important, But Feminism As An Academic Clique Committed To Eccentric Doctrines About Human Nature Is Not. Eliminating Discrimination Against Women Is Important, But Believing That Women And Men Are Born With Indistinguishable Minds Is Not. Freedom Of Choice Is Important, But Ensuring That Women Make Up Exactly 50 Percent Of All Professions Is Not. And Eliminating Sexual Assaults Is Important, But Advancing The Theory That Rapists Are Doing Their Part In A Vast Male Conspiracy Is Not.

I Think A Lot Of Moral Debates Are Not Over What Is The Basis Of Justice, But Who Gets A Ticket To Play In The Game.

When A Scientist Considers All High-tech Mental Machinery Needed To Arrange Words Into Ordinary Sentences, Prescriptive Rules Are, At Best, Inconsequential Little Decorations. The Very Fact That They Have To Be Drilled Shows That They Are Alien To The Natural Workings Of The Language System. One Can Choose To Obsess Over Prescriptive Rules, But They Have No More To Do With Language Than The Criteria For Judging Cats At A Cat Show Have To Do With Mammalian Biology.

Modern Biblical Scholars Have Established That The Bible Is A Wiki. It Was Compiled Over Half A Millennium From Writers With Different Styles, Dialects, Character Names, And Conceptions Of God And Was Subjected To Haphazard Editing That Left It With Many Contradictions, Duplications And Non-sequiturs.

We Instinctively Fear Snakes, But We Appear Not To Be Afraid Of Fast Cars, Which Are A Real Danger Now. This Suggests Our Emotions Were Shaped By Our Evolutionary Environment Not The One We Grew Up In.

Being Smarter Gives You A Tailwind Throughout Life. People Who Are More Intelligent Earn More, Live Longer, Get Divorced Less, Are Less Likely To Get Addicted To Alcohol And Tobacco, And Their Children Live Longer.

What Is True For The Emotions May Also Be True For The Intellect. Some Of Our Perplexities May Come From A Mismatch Between The Purposes For Which Our Cognitive Faculties Evolved And The Purposes To Which We Put Them Today.

Terrorist Bombings, Like Rampage Shootings, Are Events That Maximize The Amount Of Publicity Per Amount Of Damage. That's Why People Do Them, Because They Know They Will Set Off A Media Frenzy.

By Denying People's Sense Of Visual Beauty In Painting And Sculpture , Melody In Music , Meter And Rhyme In Poetry , Plot And Narrative And Character In Fiction , The Elite Arts Wrote Off The Vast Majority Of Their Audience . They Purposely Excluded People Who Approach Art In Part For Pleasure And Edification In Favour Of Social One-upmanship And An Ever-narrowing, In-crowd Elite.

The Stuff Of Life Turned Out To Be Not A Quivering, Glowing, Wondrous Gel But A Contraption Of Tiny Jigs, Springs, Hinges, Rods, Sheets, Magnets, Zippers, And Trapdoors, Assembled By A Data Tape Whose Information Is Copied, Downloaded And Scanned.

Plants Can't Very Well Defend Themselves By Their Behavior, So They Resort To Chemical Warfare, And Plants Are Saturated With Toxins And Irritants To Deter Creatures Like Us Who Want To Eat Them.

Statisticians Tell Us That People Underestimate The Sheer Number Of Coincidences That Are Bound To Happen In A World Governed By Chance.

Language Pedants Hew To An Oral Tradition Of Shibboleths That Have No Basis In Logic Or Style, That Have Been Defied By Great Writers For Centuries, And That Have Been Disavowed By Every Thoughtful Usage Manual.

An Ideology Can Provide A Satisfying Narrative That Explains Chaotic Events And Collective Misfortunes In A Way That Flatters The Virtue And Competence Of Believers, While Being Vague Or Conspiratorial Enough To Withstand Skeptical Scrutiny.

As An Experimental Psychologist, I Have Been Trained Not To Believe Anything Unless It Can Be Demonstrated In The Laboratory On Rats Or Sophomores.

Northeastern And Most Coastal States Will Vote For The Candidate Who Is More Closely Aligned With International Cooperation And Engagement, Secularism And Science, Gun Control, Individual Freedom In Culture And Sexuality, And A Greater Role For The Government In Protecting The Environment And Ensuring Economic Equality.

One Of The Things That People Complain About Is Loneliness, Disconnectedness. If You Live In A Society Where Your Life Is Rarely Threatened And Most Of Your Relationships Are More On An Economic Exchange Basis, Then This Could Leave People Feeling Less Connected.

It's The Old Idea That The Process Of Evolution Is Some Push In The Direction Of Greater Complexity--in Particular Greater Intellectual Complexity. In One Twig Of The Tree Of Life, Namely Ours, Having A Big Brain Happened To Have Advantages. But That's Just What Worked For A Particular Species Of Primate 5 To 7 Million Years Ago.

As A Graduate Student, I Wrote A Long Paper Connecting The Dots Between Mathematical Models Of Learning And Language Development In Children. It Was Published In A Major Journal.

Of Course The Theory Of Evolution Would Be Vacuous If It Offered A Glib Explanation For Every Inexplicable Act.

Theory Of Evolution

Trivers, Pursuing His Theory Of The Emotions To Its Logical Conclusion, Notes That In A World Of Walking Lie Detectors The Best Strategy Is To Believe Your Own Lies. You Can’t Leak Your Hidden Intentions If You Don’t Think They Are Your Intentions. According To His Theory Of Self-deception, The Conscious Mind Sometimes Hides The Truth From Itself The Better To Hide It From Others. But The Truth Is Useful, So It Should Be Registered Somewhere In The Mind, Walled Off From The Parts That Interact With Other People.

The Human Capacity For Compassion Is Not A Reflex That Is Triggered Automatically By The Presence Of Another Living Thing.

Journalists Say That When A Dog Bites A Man, That Is Not News, But When A Man Bites A Dog, That Is News ... Thanks To The Mathematics Of Combinatorics, We Will Never Run Out Of News.

I Think This Confusion Leads Intellectuals And Artists Themselves To Believe That The Elite Arts And Humanities Are A Kind Of Higher, Exalted Form Of Human Endeavor.

By Exploring The Political And Moral Colorings Of Discoveries About What Makes Us Tick, We Can Have A More Honest Science And A Less Fearful Intellectual Milieu.

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Galileo Wrote That 'the Book Of Nature Is Written In The Language Of Mathematics; Without Its Help It Is Impossible To Comprehend A Single Word Of It.'

All Our Behaviours Are A Result Of Neurophysiological Activity In The Brain. There Is No Reason To Believe There Is Any Magic Going On.

People Do Not Think In English Or Chinese Or Apache; They Think In A Language Of Thought. This Language Of Thought Probably Looks A Bit Like All These Languagesbut Compared With Any Given Language, Mentalese Must Be Richer In Some Ways And Simpler In Others.

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Disgust Is Intuitive Microbiology

Probably Hobbes Got It Right When He Said That A Leviathan, A Third Party With A Monopoly On The Use Of Legitimate Use Of Force In A Territory, Might Be Among The Biggest Violence Reduction Techniques Ever Invented.

People Have Long Assumed That Violence Is Necessary For Political Change. Rulers Never Cede Power Voluntarily, The Argument Goes, So Progressives Have No Choice But To Contemplate The Use Of Force To Bring About A Better World, Mindful Of The Trade-off Between A Small Amount Of Violence Now And Acceptance Of An Unjust Status Quo Indefinitely.

Today We Take It For Granted That War Happens In Smaller, Poorer And More Backward Countries.

The Great Appeal Of The Doctrine That The Mind Is A Blank Slate Is The Simple Mathematical Fact That Zero Equals Zero.

Writers Acquire Their Technique By Spotting, Savoring, And Reverse-engineering Examples Of Good Prose.

Some People Believe That The Nuclear Bomb Should Be Awarded The Nobel Peace Prize, Since It Scared The Major Powers Away From War By Equating It With Doomsday.

With Violence, As With So Many Other Concerns, Human Nature Is The Problem, But Human Nature Is Also The Solution.

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The Moral, Then, Is That Familiar Categories Of Behavior - Marriage Customs, Food Taboos, Folk Superstitions, And So On - Certainly Do Vary Across Cultures And Have To Be Learned, But The Deeper Mechanisms Of Mental Computation That Generate Them May Be Universal And Innate.

By All Measures Men Are The More Violent Gender.

Fiction Is Empathy Technology.

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M.i.t. Has A Reputation For Turning Out Dilberts. They May Be Brilliant In What They Do, But No One Can Understand What They Say.

Look At Almost Any Passage, And You'll Find That A Paragraph Has Five Or Six Metaphors In It. It's Not That The Speaker Is Trying To Be Poetic, It's Just That That's The Way Language Works.

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The Likelihood That Inborn Differences Are One Contributor To Social Status Does Not Mean That It Is The Only Contributor.

An Enormous Amount Of Scientific Language Is Metaphorical. We Talk About A Genetic Code, Where Code Originally Meant A Cipher; We Talk About The Solar System Model Of The Atom As Though The Atom Were Like A Sun And Moon And Planets.

Dear White Fella When I Am Born I’m Black When I Grow Up I’m Black When I Am Sick I’m Black When I Go Out Ina Sun I’m Black When I Git Cold I’m Black When I Git Scared I’m Black And When I Die I’m Still Black. But You White Fella When You’re Born You’re Pink When You Grow Up You’re White When You Git Sick You’re Green When You Go Out Ina Sun You Go Red When You Git Cold You Go Blue When You Git Scared You’re Yellow And When You Die You’re Grey And You Got The Cheek To Call Me Coloured?

We Are Visual Creatures. Visual Things Stay Put, Whereas Sounds Fade.

The Elegant Study... Is Consistent With The Themes Of Modern Cognitive Neuroscience . Every Aspect Of Thought And Emotion Is Rooted In Brain Structure And Function, Including Many Psychological Disorders And, Presumably, Genius. The Study Confirms That The Brain Is A Modular System Comprising Multiple Intelligences, Mostly Nonverbal.

Psychological Disorders

I Don't Think Aggression Works Like Thirst Or Sleep. I Think Aggression Is More Elicited By Particular Situations. I Think It Can Be Mitigated.

I Don't Consider Myself To Be That Radical A Thinker.

A...reason We Are So-so Scientists Is That Our Brains Were Shaped For Fitness, Not For Truth. Sometimes Truth Is Adaptive, But Sometimes It Is Not.

You Wouldn't Believe The Kind Of Hate Mail I Get About My Work On Irregular Verbs.

The Linguistic Clumsiness Of Tourists And Students Might Be The Price We Pay For The Linguistic Genius We Displayed As Babies, Just As The Decrepitude Of Age In The Price We Pay For The Vigor Of Youth.

In Societies No Less Than Individuals, Acknowledging Our Limitations May Ultimately Be More Humane Than Denying Them.

Dominance In An Adaptation To Anarchy And It Serves No Purpose In A Society That Has Undergone A Civilising Process Or In An International System Regulated By Agreements And Norms. Anything That Deflates The Concept Of Dominance Is Likely To Drive Down The Frequency Of Fights Between Individuals And Wars.

A Successful Learner, . . . Must Be Constrained To Draw Some Conclusions From The Input And Not Others.

The European Wars Of Religion Were More Deadly Than The First World War, Proportionally Speaking, And In The Range Of The Second World War In Europe. The Inquisition, The Persecution Of Heretics And Infidels And Witches, They Racked Up Pretty High Death Tolls.

Most Intellectuals Today Have A Phobia Of Any Explanation Of The Mind That Invokes Genetics.

But The Newest Research Is Showing That Many Properties Of The Brain Are Genetically Organized, And Don't Depend On Information Coming In From The Senses.

We're Living In Primate Heaven. We're Warm, Dry, We're Not Hungry, We Don't Have Fleas And Ticks And Infections. So Why Are We So Miserable?

In Fact, Without A Specification Of A Creature's Goals, The Very Idea Of Intelligence Is Meaningless. A Toadstool Could Be Given A Genius Award For Accomplishing With Pinpoint Precision And Unerring Reliability, The Feat Of Sitting Exactly Where It Is Sitting. Nothing Would Prevent Us From Agreeing With The Cognitive Scientist Zenon Pylyshyn That Rocks Are Smarter Than Cats Because Rocks Have The Sense To Go Away When You Kick Them.

According To A Recent Study Of The Brains Of Identical And Fraternal Twins, Differences In The Amount Of Gray Matter In The Frontal Lobes Are Not Only Genetically Influenced But Are Significantly Correlated With Differences In Intelligence.

Just As Blueprints Don't Necessarily Specify Blue Buildings, Selfish Genes Don't Necessarily Specify Selfish Organisms. As We Shall See, Sometimes The Most Selfish Thing A Gene Can Do Is Build A Selfless Brain. Genes Are A Play Within A Play, Not The Interior Monologue Of The Players.

When It Comes To Explaining Human Thought And Behavior, The Possibility That Heredity Plays Any Role At All Still Has The Power To Shock. To Acknowledge Human Nature, Many Think, Is To Endorse Racism, Sexism, War, Greed, Genocide, Nihilism, Reactionary Politics, And Neglect Of Children And The Disadvantaged. Any Claim That The Mind Has An Innate Organization Strikes People Not As A Hypothesis That Might Be Incorrect But As A Thought It Is Immoral To Think.

Semantics Is About The Relation Of Words To Thoughts, But It Also About The Relation Of Words To Other Human Concerns. Semantics Is About The Relation Of Words To Reality - The Way That Speakers Commit Themselves To A Shared Understanding Of The Truth, And The Way Their Thoughts Are Anchored To Things And Situations In The World.

The Theory That Religion Is A Force For Peace, Often Heard Among The Religious Right And Its Allies Today, Does Not Fit The Facts Of History.

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Mother Teresa Was The Very Embodiment Of Saintliness: White-clad, Sad-eyed, Ascetic And Often Photographed With The Wretched Of The Earth.

Thanks To The Redundancy Of Language, Yxx Cxn Xndxrstxnd Whxt X Xm Wrxtxng Xvxn Xf X Rxplxcx Xll Thx Vxwxls Wxth Xn "x" (t Gts Lttl Hrdr F Y Dn't Vn Kn Whr Th Vwls R)

Evolutionary Psychology Is One Of Four Sciences That Are Bringing Human Nature Back Into The Picture.

'capitalism' Is A Dirty Word For Many Intellectuals, But There Are A Number Of Studies Showing That Open Economies And Free Trade Are Negatively Correlated With Genocide And War.

The Doctrine Of The Sacredness Of The Soul Sounds Vaguely Uplifting, But In Fact Is Highly Malignant. It Discounts Life On Earth As Just A Temporary Phase That People Pass Through, Indeed, An Infinitesimal Fraction Of Their Existence…the Gradual Replacement Of Lives For Souls As The Locus Of Moral Value Was Helped Along By The Ascendency Of Skepticism And Reason

Of Course, Genes Can't Pull The Levers Of Our Behavior Directly. But They Affect The Wiring And Workings Of The Brain, And The Brain Is The Seat Of Our Drives, Temperaments And Patterns Of Thought.

Cognitive Psychology Tells Us That The Unaided Human Mind Is Vulnerable To Many Fallacies And Illusions Because Of Its Reliance On Its Memory For Vivid Anecdotes Rather Than Systematic Statistics.

Why Is It Surprising That Scientists Might Have Long Hair And Wear Cowboy Boots? In Fields Like Neuroscience, Where The Events You Are Recording Are So Minute, I Suspect Scientists Cultivate A Boring, Reliable Image. A Scientist With A Reputation For Flamboyance Might Be Suspect.

If You Look In General At People Who Live In Anarchy, They Have Quite High Rates Of Death From Either Homicide Or Warfare Or Both. Anarchy Is One Of The Main Reasons For Violence, And It May Be The Most Important.

If The Myth Of Pure Evil Is That Evil Is Committed With The Intention Of Causing Harm And An Absence Of Moral Considerations, Then It Applies To Very Few Acts Of So-called 'pure Evil' Because Most Evildoers Believe What They Are Doing Is Forgivable Or Justifiable.

It Begins With Skepticism. The History Of Human Folly, And Our Own Susceptibility To Illusions And Fallacies, Tell Us That Men And Women Are Fallible.

Knowledge Is A Continuous Fabric, In Which Ideas Are Connected To Other Ideas. Reason-free Zones, In Which People Can Assert Arbitrary Beliefs Safe From Ordinary Standards Of Evaluation, Can Only Corrupt This Fabric, Just As A Contradiction Can Corrupt A System Of Logic, Allowing Falsehoods To Proliferate Through It.

Consciousness Turns Out To Consist Of A Maelstrom Of Events Distributed Across The Brain. These Events Compete For Attention, And As One Process Outshouts The Others, The Brain Rationalizes The Outcome After The Fact And Concocts The Impression That A Single Self Was In Charge All Along.

However Much We Might Deplore The Profit Motive, Or Consumerist Values, If Everyone Just Wants I-pods We Would Probably Be Better Off Than If They Wanted Class Revolution.

In The 1970s, Many Intellectuals Had Become Political Radicals. Marxism Was Correct, Liberalism Was For Wimps, And Marx Had Pronounced That 'the Ruling Ideas Of Each Age Have Ever Been The Ideas Of Its Ruling Class.'

Perhaps The Most Extraordinary Popular Delusion About Violence Of The Past Quarter-century Is That It Is Caused By Low Self-esteem. That Theory Has Been Endorsed By Dozens Of Prominent Experts, Has Inspired School Programs Designed To Get Kids To Feel Better About Themselves, And In The Late 1980s Led The California Legislature To Form A Task Force To Promote Self-esteem. Yet Baumeister Has Shown That The Theory Could Not Be More Spectacularly, Hilariously, Achingly Wrong. Violence Is A Problem Not Of Too Little Self-esteem But Of Too Much, Particularly When It Is Unearned.

Unfortunately, Creative People Are At Their Most Creative When Writing Their Autobiographies.

Obviously No Language Is Innate. Take Any Kid From Any Race, Bring Them Up In Any Culture And They Will Learn The Language Equally Quickly. So No Particular Language Is In The Genes. But What Might Be In The Genes Is The Ability To Acquire Language.

Evolutionarily Speaking, There Is Seldom Any Mystery In Why We Seek The Goals We Seek — Why, For Example, People Would Rather Make Love With An Attractive Partner Than Get A Slap On The Belly With A Wet Fish.

There Is No Society Ever Discovered In The Remotest Corner Of The World That Has Not Had Something That We Would Consider The Arts. Visual Arts - Decoration Of Surfaces And Bodies - Appears To Be A Human Universal.

We Often Feel That A Clever Aphorism Captures A Truth That Would Require Pages To Defend In Any Other Way.

Everyone's Pedigree Merges Into Everyone Else's Pedigree. So If You Go Back Far Enough, Everyone Is Related.

The Foundation Of Individual Rights Is The Assumption That People Have Wants And Needs And Are Authorities On What Those Wants And Needs Are. If People's Stated Desires Were Just Some Kind Of Erasable Inscription Or Reprogrammable Brainwashing, Any Atrocity Could Be Justified.

So No, It's Not All In The Genes, But What Isn't In The Genes Isn't In The Family Environment Either. It Can't Be Explained In Terms Of The Overall Personalities Or The Child-rearing Practices Of Parents.

I Think That A Failure Of Statistical Thinking Is The Major Intellectual Shortcoming Of Our Universities, Journalism And Intellectual Culture.

Tom Hanks, Who Starred In 'the Da Vinci Code,' Turns Out To Be Related To A Number Of The Historic Characters That Feature In 'the Da Vinci Code,' Including William The Conqueror And Shakespeare.

I Have Never Been A Fan Of Science Fiction. For Me, Fiction Has To Explore The Combinatorial Possibilities Of People Interacting Under The Constraints Imposed By Our Biology And History. When An Author Is Free To Suspend The Constraints, It's Tennis Without A Net.

As Individual People, Embedded In Our Daily Lives, Of Course We're Interested In What Makes One Person Different From Another. We've Got To Hire One Person And Not Another, Marry One Person And Not Another.

Words Let Us Say The Things We Want To Say And Also Things We Would Be Better Off Not Having Said. They Let Us Know The Things We Need To Know, And Also Things We Wish We Didn't.

The Costs Of An Ignorance Of Science Are Nor Just Practical Ones Like Misbegotten Policies, Forgone Cures, And A Unilateral Disarmament In National Competitiveness. There Is A Moral Cost As Well. It Is An Astonishing Fact About Our Species That We Understand So Much About The History Of The Universe. The Forces That Make It Tick, The Stuff It's Made Of; The Origin Of Living Things, And The Machinery Of Life. A Failure To Nurture This Knowledge Shows A Philistine Indifference To The Magnificent Achievements Humanity Is Capable Of; Like Allowing A Great Work Of Art To Molder In A Warehouse.

There's Guilt About Our Treatment Of Native Peoples In Modern Intellectual Life, And An Unwillingness To Acknowledge There Could Be Anything Good About Western Culture.

Western Culture

Knowing There Is A World That Will Outlive You, There Are People Whose Well-being Depends On How You Live Your Life, Affects The Way You Live Your Life, Whether Or Not You Directly Experience Those Effects. You Want To Be The Kind Of Person Who Has The Larger View, Who Takes Other People's Interests Into Account, Who's Dedicated To The Principles That You Can Justify, Like Justice, Knowledge, Truth, Beauty And Morality.

Violent Movements Attract Thugs And Firebrands Who Enjoy The Mayhem. Violent Tactics Provide A Pretext For Retaliation By The Enemy And Alienate Third Parties Who Might Otherwise Support The Movement.

People Today Sometimes Get Uncomfortable With Empirical Claims That Seem To Clash With Their Political Assumptions, Often Because They Haven't Given Much Thought To The Connections.

Genes Are A Play Within A Play, Not The Interior Monologue Of The Players.

Something About The Topic Of Consciousness Makes People, Like The White Queen In Through The Looking Glass, Believe Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast.

Impossible Things

Students Do Everything On Laptops These Days, So I Definitely Think Electronic Books Are A Trend That's Going To Expand.

For One Thing, Before The 20th Century, There Were Plenty Of Genocides. We Tend To Forget About Them, Partly Because They Weren't As Well Documented And Partly Because, Until Recently, People Didn't Care. We Used Euphemisms Like 'sackings' And 'sieges' Instead Of Calling Them 'genocides.'

The More You Think About And Interact With Other People, The More You Realize That It Is Untenable To Privilege Your Interests Over Theirs, At Least Not If You Want Them To Listen To You. You Can’t Say That My Interests Are Special Compared To Yours Any More Than You Can Say That The Particular Spot That I Am Standing On Is A Unique Part Of The Universe Because I Happen To Be Standing On It That Very Minute.

Much Of What Is Today Called "social Criticism" Consists Of Members Of The Upper Classes Denouncing The Tastes Of The Lower Classes (bawdy Entertainment, Fast Food, Plentiful Consumer Goods) While Considering Themselves Egalitarians.

As Technology Accumulates And People In More Parts Of The Planet Become Interdependent, The Hatred Between Them Tends To Decrease, For The Simple Reason That You Can't Kill Someone And Trade With Him Too.

We Really Are Creatures Of A Violent World, Biologically Speaking - Watching Violence And Learning About It Is One Of Our Cognitive Drives.

I Spent 20 Years Doing Research On Regular And Irregular Verbs, Not Because I'm An Obsessive Language Lover But Because It Seemed To Me That They Tapped Into A Fundamental Distinction In Language Processing, Indeed In Cognitive Processing, Between Memory Lookup And Rule-driven Computation.

Academics Lack Perspective. In A Debate On Whether The World Is Round, They Would Argue, 'no,' Because It's An Oblate Spheroid. They Suffer From 'the Curse Of Knowledge': The Inability To Imagine What It's Like Not To Know Something That They Know.

All Of The Violence That Doesn't Occur Doesn't Get Reported On The News.

Of Course Genes Can’t Pull The Levers Of Our Behavior Directly. But They Affect The Wiring And Workings Of The Brain, And The Brain Is The Seat Of Our Drives, Temperaments And Patterns Of Thought. Each Of Us Is Dealt A Unique Hand Of Tastes And Aptitudes, Like Curiosity, Ambition, Empathy, A Thirst For Novelty Or For Security, A Comfort Level With The Social Or The Mechanical Or The Abstract. Some Opportunities We Come Across Click With Our Constitutions And Set Us Along A Path In Life.

In A High Tech World The Cure For The Tragic Shortcomings And Perilous Fallacies Of Human Intuition Is Education, But Education In Economics, Evolutionary Biology, Probability And Statistics - Unfortunately Most High School And College Curricula Have Barely Changed Since Medieval Times!

Morality Comes From A Commitment To Treat Other As We Wish To Be Treated, Which Follows From The Realization That None Of Us Is The Sole Occupant Of The Universe.

If You Aren't Just Brought Up In Your Tribe But Interact With Other People Either Directly Or Vicariously, Through Journalism And Literature, You See What Life Is Like From Other Points Of View And Are Less Likely To Demonize Them Or Dehumanize Others And More Likely To Empathize With Them.

The Strongest Argument Against Totalitarianism May Be A Recognition Of A Universal Human Nature; That All Humans Have Innate Desires For Life, Liberty And The Pursuit Of Happiness. The Doctrine Of The Blank Slate... Is A Totalitarian's Dream.

Pursuit Of Happiness

What A Dull Universe It Would Be If Everything In It Conformed To Our Expectations, If It Held Nothing To Surprise Or Baffle Us Or Confound Our Common Sense. A Century Ago No One Foresaw The Existence Of Black Holes, An Expanding Universe, Oceans On Jupiter's Moons, Or Dna. What Could Be More Enriching Than To Know That We Share A Common Origin With All Living Things, That We Are Kin To Chimpanzees, Redwoods And Mollusks? And Isn't It A Source Of Wonder To Realize That The Iron In Our Blood And The Calcium In Our Bones Were Created In The Bellies Of Supernovas?

Though Knowledge Itself Increasingly Ignores Boundaries Between Fields, Professors Are Apt To Organize Their Pedagogy Around The Methods And History Of Their Academic Subculture Rather Than Some Coherent Topic In The World.

Regardless Of Its Causes, Thoughtlessly Blaming The Present Is A Weakness Which, Even If It Is Never Outlawed, Ought To Be Resisted. Though Commonly Flaunted As A Sign Of Sophistication, It Can Be An Opportunity For One-upmanship And An Excuse For Misanthropy, Especially Against The Young.

I Try To Jog In Every City I Visit, And I Particularly Enjoy Harbour-front Paths That Let Me Ogle Big Ships, Railroad Bridges And The Ruins Of Factories And Warehouses.

Human Evolution, At First, Seems Extraordinary. How Could The Process That Gave Rise To Slugs And Oak Trees And Fish Produce A Creature That Can Fly To The Moon And Invent The Internet And Cross The Ocean In Boats?

Gossip Is Certainly One Of The Things That Language Is Useful For, Because It's Always Handy To Know Who Needs A Favor, Who Can Offer A Favor, Who's Available, Who's Under The Protection Of A Jealous Spouse. And Being The First To Get A Piece Of Gossip Is Like Engaging In Insider Trading: You Can Capitalize On An Opportunity Before Anyone Else Can.

Why Do People Believe That There Are Dangerous Implications Of The Idea That The Mind Is A Product Of The Brain, That The Brain Is Organized In Part By The Genome, And That The Genome Was Shaped By Natural Selection?

In Our Society, The Best Predictor Of A Man's Wealth Is His Wife's Looks, And The Best Predictor Of A Woman's Looks Is Her Husband's Wealth.

Solving A Problem In A Hundred Years Is, Practically Speaking, The Same As Not Solving It At All.

It Is True That Raids And Battles Killed A Tiny Percentage Of The Numbers That Die In Modern Warfare. But In Tribal Violence, The Clashes Are More Frequent, The Percentage Of Men In The Population Who Fight Is Greater, And The Rates Of Death Per Battle Are Higher.

Effective Education May Also Require Co-opting Old Faculties To Deal With New Demands. . . Because Much Of The Content Of Education Is Not Cognitively Natural, The Process Of Mastering It May Not Always Be Easy And Pleasant, Notwithstanding The Mantra That Learning Is Fun.

Aggression, Like Every Other Part Of Human Behavior We Take For Granted, Is A Challenging Engineering Problem!

I Think That Communism Was A Major Force For Violence For More Than 100 Years, Because It Was Built Into Its Ideology - That Progress Comes Through Class Struggle, Often Violent.

I Never Outgrew My Conversion To Atheism At 13, But At Various Times Was A Serious Cultural Jew.

The Fact That People Can Forget These Simple Truths When Intellectualizing About Children Shows How Far Modern Doctrines Have Taken Us. They Make It Easy To Think Of Children As Lumps Of Putty To Be Shaped Instead Of Partners In A Human Relationship.

Space And Force Pervade Language. Many Cognitive Scientists (including Me) Have Concluded From Their Research On Language That A Handful Of Concepts About Places, Paths, Motions, Agency, And Causation Underlie The Literal Or Figurative Meanings Of Tens Of Thousands Of Words And Constructions, Not Only In English But In Every Other Language That Has Been Studied.

People Consider The Harms They Inflict To Be Justified And Forgettable, And The Harms They Suffer To Be Unprovoked And Grievous.

I Think Students Should Know Something About Religion As A Historical Phenomenon, In The Same Way That They Should Know Something About Socialism And Humanism And The Other Great Ideas That Have Shaped Political Philosophies And Therefore The Course Of Human Events.

As Long As Your Ideology Identifies The Main Source Of The World's Ills As A Definable Group, It Opens The World Up To Genocide.

In The Past Two Decades Anthropologists Have Gathered Data On Life And Death In Pre-state Societies Rather Than Accepting The Warm And Fuzzy Stereotypes. What Did They Find? In A Nutshell: Hobbes Was Right, Rousseau Was Wrong.

Morality Is Not Just Any Old Topic In Psychology But Close To Our Conception Of The Meaning Of Life. Moral Goodness Is What Gives Each Of Us The Sense That We Are Worthy Human Beings.

Meaning Of Life

We Can Make Fun Of Hockey Fans, But Someone Who Enjoys Homer Is Indulging The Same Kind Of Vicarious Bloodlust.

Evolution Is An Indispensable Component Of Any Satisfying Explanation Of Our Psychology.

I Do Look For Openings Where I Can Overturn Popular Misconceptions, But Unlike Christopher Hitchens, I Am Neither A Contrarian Nor A Lone Heretic. I Like To Have A Significant Number Of Academics Watching My Back.

But In Most Cases Even The Possibility That The Correlations Reflect Shared Genes Is Taboo.

We Are All Members Of The Same Flawed Species. Putting Our Moral Vision Into Practice Means Imposing Our Will On Others. The Human Lust For Power And Esteem, Coupled With Its Vulnerability To Self-deception And Self-righteousness, Makes That An Invitation To A Calamity, All The Worse When The Power Is Directed At A Goal As Quixotic As Eradicating Human Self-interest.

The Brain Is Not A Bag Of Traits. It's Startlingly Complex. There Are Few Or No Single Genes With A Consistent Effect On The Mind.

Morality, Then, Is Not A Set Of Arbitrary Regulations Dictated By A Vengeful Deity And Written Down In A Book; Nor Is It The Custom Of A Particular Culture Or Tribe. It Is A Consequence Of The Interchangeability Of Perspectives And The Opportunity The World Provides For Positive-sum Games.

The Supposedly Immaterial Soul, We Now Know, Can Be Bisected With A Knife, Altered By Chemicals, Started Or Stopped By Electricity, And Extinguished By A Sharp Blow Or By Insufficient Oxygen.

Humans Are So Innately Hardwired For Language That They Can No More Suppress Their Ability To Learn And Use Language Than They Can Suppress The Instinct To Pull A Hand Back From A Hot Surface.

Thinking Is A Physical Process, The Human Brain Is Not Exempt From Evolution

One Can Choose To Obsess Over Prescriptive Rules, But They Have No More To Do With Human Language Than The Criteria For Judging Cats At A Cat Show Have To Do With Mammalian Biology.

Without Goals The Very Concept Of Intelligence Is Meaningless

Whenever You Speak To Someone, You Are Presuming The Two Of You Have A Certain Degree Of Familiarity - Which Your Words Might Alter. So Every Sentence Has To Do Two Things At Once: Convey A Message And Continue To Negotiate That Relationship.

Technology, Ideology, And Social And Cultural Changes Periodically Throw Out New Forms Of Violence For Humanity To Contend With.

We Adults Protect Ourselves With Laws, Police, Workplace Regulations And Social Norms And There Is No Conceivable Reason Why Children Should Be Left More Vulnerable, Other That Laziness Or Callousness In Considering What Life Is Like From Their Point Of View.

I Like Ice Hockey. No One Is Ever Going To Ask Me To Write About That As A Metaphor For Life.

I Would Argue That Nothing Gives Life More Purpose Than The Realization That Every Moment Of Consciousness Is A Precious And Fragile Gift.

Heritability Pertains To The Entirety Of The Genome, Not To A Single Gene.

An Eye For Beauty Locks Onto Faces That Show Signs Of Health And Fertility - Just As One Would Predict If It Had Evolved To Help The Beholder Find The Fittest Mate.

The Stirrings Of Morality Emerge Early In Childhood. Toddlers Spontaneously Offer Toys And Help To Others And Try To Comfort People They See In Distress.

Evolutionary Psychologists Seem To Want To Unmask Our Noblest Motives As Ultimately Self-interested - To Show That Our Love For Children, Compassion For The Unfortunate And Sense Of Justice Are Just Tactics In A Darwinian Struggle To Perpetuate Our Genes.

In Culture After Culture, People Believe That The Soul Lives On After Death, That Rituals Can Change The Physical World And Divine The Truth, And That Illness And Misfortune Are Caused And Alleviated By Spirits, Ghosts, Saints ... And Gods.

As Every Student In Philosophy 101 Learns, Nothing Can Force Me To Believe That Anyone Except Me Is Conscious. This Power To Deny That Other People Have Feelings Is Not Just An Academic Exercise But An All-too-common Vice, As We See In The Long History Of Human Cruelty.

The Idea That Children Are Passive Repositories To Be Shaped By Their Parents Has Been Massively Overstated. A Child's Peer Group Is A Far Greater Determinant Of Its Development And Achievements Than Parental Aspiration.

The Art Of Photography Is All About Directing The Attention Of The Viewer.

Working Out What It Would Take To Program Goodness Into A Robot Shows Not Only How Much Machinery It Takes To Be Good But How Slippery The Concept Of Goodness Is To Start With.

Consciousness Surely Does Not Depend On Language. Babies, Many Animals, And Patients Robbed Of Speech By Brain Damage Are Not Insensate Robots; They Have Reactions Like Ours That Indicate That Someone's Home.

Anything That Makes It Easier To Imagine Trading Places With Someone Else Increases Your Moral Consideration For That Other Person.

Democracy Is An Imperfect Way Of Steering Between The Violence Of Anarchy And The Violence Of Tyranny, With The Least Violence You Can Get Away With.

The Typical Imperative From Biology Is Not "thou Shalt... ," But "if ... Then ... Else.

My Opinions About Human Nature Are Shared By Many Psychologists, Linguists, And Biologists, Not To Mention Philosophers And Scholars Going Back Centuries.

Some People Think That Evolutionary Psychology Claims To Have Discovered That Human Nature Is Selfish And Wicked. But They Are Flattering The Researchers And Anyone Who Would Claim To Have Discovered The Opposite. No One Needs A Scientist To Measure Whether Humans Are Prone To Knavery. The Question Has Been Answered In The History Books, The Newspapers, The Ethnographic Record, And The Letters To Ann Landers. But People Treat It Like An Open Question, As If Someday Science Might Discover That It's All A Bad Dream And We Will Wake Up To Find That It Is Human Nature To Love One Another.

Pre-state Societies Were Far More Violent Than Our Own.

Equity Feminism Is A Moral Doctrine About Equal Treatment That Makes No Commitments Regarding Open Empirical Issues In Psychology Or Biology.

Equal Treatment

If People Are Innately Saddled With Certain Sins And Flaws, Like Selfishness, Prejudice, Sort-sightedness, And Self-deception, Then Political Reform Would Seem To Be A Waste Of Time.

Equality Is Not The Empirical Claim That All Groups Of Humans Are Interchangeable; It Is The Moral Principle That Individuals Should Not Be Judged Or Constrained By The Average Properties Of Their Group.

Photography Is A Demanding Action Sport. The Light Can Change So Quickly. I Often Find Myself Sprinting So That I Can Catch The Perfect Light Falling On A Photogenic Subject.

I Teach Classes 28 Weeks Of The Year, But The Rest Of The Time I Do Research And Write Books.

Societies That Empower Women Are Less Violent In Every Way.

Empowering Women

Language Surely Does Affect Our Thoughts, Rather Than Just Labeling Them For The Sake Of Labeling Them. Most Obviously, Language Is The Conduit Through Which People Share Their Thoughts And Intentions And Thereby Acquire The Knowledge, Customs, And Values Of Those Around Them."

People Are Under The Impression That Dictionaries Legislate Language. What A Dictionary Does Is Keep Track Of Usages Over Time.

Many Artists And Scholars Have Pointed Out That Ultimately Art Depends On Human Nature.

Reason Is Non-negotiable. Try To Argue Against It, Or To Exclude It From Some Realm Of Knowledge, And You've Already Lost The Argument, Because You're Using Reason To Make Your Case. ... We Don't "believe" In Reason.

The Elevation Of Parochial Values To The Realm Of The Sacred Is A License To Dismiss Other People's Interests, And An Imperative To Reject The Possibility Of Compromise

Babies Are Born With The Instinct To Speak, The Way Spiders Are Born With The Instinct To Spin Webs. You Don't Need To Train Babies To Speak; They Just Do. But Reading Is Different.

Economic Libertarians And Christian Evangelicals, United By Their Common Enemy, Are Strange Bedfellows In Today's Republican Party, Just As The Two Georges - The Archconservative Wallace And The Uberliberal Mcgovern - Found Themselves In The Same Democratic Party In 1972.

Maybe Philosophical Problems Are Hard Not Because They Are Divine Or Irreducible Or Meaningless Or Workaday Science, But Because The Mind Of Homo Sapiens Lacks The Cognitive Equipment To Solve Them. We Are Organisms, Not Angels, And Our Minds Are Organs, Not Pipelines To The Truth. Our Minds Evolved By Natural Selection To Solve Problems That Were Life-and-death Matters To Our Ancestors, Not To Commune With Correctness Ot To Answer Any Question We Are Capable Of Asking.

Overcoming Naive Impressions To Figure Out How Things Really Work Is One Of Humanity's Highest Callings.

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