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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!

-Steven Pinker

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In A High Tech

Steven Pinker

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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!

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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.

A Decent Government With An Effective, But Not Gratuitously Violent, Police Force And A Fair Court System Are Essential. This Deters And Incapacitates Psychopaths, Bullies And Hotheads - And If It Earns The Confidence Of The People, They Don't Have To Become Violent In Self-defence.

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.

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

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.

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.

Art Works Because It Appeals To Certain Faculties Of The Mind. Music Depends On Details Of The Auditory System, Painting And Sculpture On The Visual System. Poetry And Literature Depend On Language.

For All The Tribulations In Our Lives, For All The Troubles That Remain In The World, The Decline Of Violence Is An Accomplishment That We Can Savor - And An Impetus To Cherish The Forces Of Civilization And Enlightenment That Made It Possible.

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

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

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.

I Suspect Music Is Auditory Cheesecake, An Exquisite Confection Crafted To Tickle The Sensitive Spots Of... Our Mental Faculties.

We Will Never Have A Perfect World, But It's Not Romantic Or Naive To Work Toward A Better One.

A Perfect World

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

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.

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.

Disgust Is Intuitive Microbiology

If You Give People Literacy, Bad Ideas Can Be Attacked And Experiments Tried, And Lessons Will Accumulate.

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.

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.

You Could Think Of An Ecosystem As A Bunch Of Antagonistic Arms Races, Almost: Everything That An Animal Depends Upon For Food Is The Body Part Of Some Other Animal Or Plant Who Would Just As Soon Keep That Body Part For Itself.

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.

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

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

The Idea That Boys Want To Sleep With Their Mothers Strikes Most Men As The Silliest Thing They Have Ever Heard. Obviously, It Did Not Seem So To Freud, Who Wrote That As A Boy He Once Had An Erotic Reaction To Watching His Mother Dressing. But Freud Had A Wet-nurse, And May Not Have Experienced The Early Intimacy That Would Have Tipped Off His Perceptual System That Mrs. Freud Was His Mother. The Westermarck Theory Has Out-freuded Freud.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

In The Speech Sound Wave, One Word Runs Into The Next Seamlessly; There Are No Little Silences Between Spoken Words The Way There Are White Spaces Between Written Words. We Simply Hallucinate Word Boundaries When We Reach The End Of A Stretch Of Sound That Matches Some Entry In Our Mental Dictionary.

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.

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

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.'

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

Equal Treatment

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

I Think That Metaphor Really Is A Key To Explaining Thought And Language. The Human Mind Comes Equipped With An Ability To Penetrate The Cladding Of Sensory Appearance And Discern The Abstract Construction Underneath - Not Always On Demand, And Not Infallibly, But Often Enough And Insightfully Enough To Shape The Human Condition. Our Powers Of Analogy Allow Us To Apply Ancient Neural Structures To Newfound Subject Matter, To Discover Hidden Laws And Systems In Nature, And Not Least, To Amplify The Expressive Power Of Language Itself.

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.

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

Paris Hilton, It Turns Out, Is Related To Fellow Celebrity Jailbirds Zsa Zsa Gabor And G. Gordon Liddy.

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.

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

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.

There's A Misconception That Survival Of The Fittest Means Survival Of The Most Aggressive. The Adjective 'darwinian' Used To Refer To Ruthless Competition; You Used To Read That In Business Journals. But That's Not What Darwinian Means To A Biologist; It's Whatever Leads To Reproductive Success.

The More You Think About And Interact With Other People, The More You Realize That It Is Untenable To Privilege Your Interests Over Theirs.

My Politics Were Pretty Anarchistic Until 1969 When The Montreal Police Went On Strike. Within Hours, Mayhem And Rioting Broke Out And The Mounties Had To Be Called In To Restore Order. It Instilled In Me That One's Convictions Can Be Subjected To Empirical Test.

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.

Like The Early Days Of The Internet, The Dawn Of Personal Genomics Promises Benefits And Pitfalls That No One Can Foresee.

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.

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)

Fiction Is Empathy Technology.

Language Is A Window Into Human Nature, But It Is Also A Fistula, An Open Wound Through Which We're Exposed To An Infectious World.

Parents Provide Their Children With Genes As Well As An Environment, So The Fact That Talkative Parents Have Kids With Good Language Skills Could Simply Mean That And That The Same Genes That Make Parents Talkative Make Children Articulate.

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.

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.

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

Theory Of Evolution

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

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

Astrology Had An Important Role In The Ancient World. You Can't Understand Many Things Unless You Know Something About Astrology - The Plays Of Shakespeare And So On.

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

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.

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.

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.

No Matter How Inured You Get To Atrocities, You're Still Always Stunned And Shocked By How Cruel And Wasteful Homo Sapiens Can Be.

I Get Drawn In When I Feel There Is Something Deep And Mysterious Going On Beneath The Surface Of Something.

Beneath The Surface

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 Reason I'm Not A Neurobiologist But A Cognitive Psychologist Is That I Think Looking At Brain Tissue Is Often The Wrong Level Of Analysis. You Have To Look At A Higher Level Of Organization.

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.

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?

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

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.

If Crime Is Going Down, You Shouldn't Be Increasing Resources For Crime Prevention. Or You Should Be Taking Note Of What Has Worked And Concentrate The Crime-prevention Methods On Policies That Have A Track Record Of Success.

Genetically Influenced Behavior Is Not Necessarily Good And Not Necessarily Unchangeable. Explanations Of Bad Behavior That Appeal To Genes Do Not Absolve A Person Any More Than Do Explanations That Appeal To Upbringing.

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.

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.

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.

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

If The Cartoon Were Completely Accurate, Though, Life Would Be A Cacophany Of Spoinks.

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.

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.

Forcing Modern Speakers Of English To Not - Whoops, Not To Split An Infinitive Because It Isn't Done In Latin Makes About As Much Sense As Forcing Modern Residents Of England To Wear Laurels And Togas.

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

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.

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.

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

You Know That When Irving Puts The Dog In The Car, It Is No Longer In The Yard. When Edna Goes To Church, Her Head Goes With Her. If Doug Is In The House, He Must Have Gone Through Some Opening Unless He Was Born There And Never Left. If Sheila Is Alive At 9 A.m. And Is Alive At 5 P.m., She Was Also Alive At Noon. Zebras In The Wild Never Wear Underwear. Opening A Jar Of A New Brand Of Peanut Butter Will Not Vaporize The House. People Never Shove Meat Thermometers In Their Ears. A Gerbil Is Smaller Than Mt. Kilimanjaro.

When People Talk, They Lay Lines On Each Other, Do A Lot Of Role Playing, Sidestep, Shilly-shally And Engage In All Manner Of Vagueness And Innuendo. We Do This And Expect Others To Do It, Yet At The Same Time We Profess To Long For The Plain Truth, For People To Say What They Mean, Simple As That. Such Hypocrisy Is A Human Universal.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

In Many Muslim Countries, Witchcraft Is Not Only On The Books As A Crime, But Is Commonly Prosecuted. In 2009, For Example, Saudi Arabia Convicted A Man For Carrying A Phone Booklet With Characters In An Alphabet From His Native Eritrea, Which The Police Interpreted As Occult Symbols. He Was Lashed Three Hundred Times And Imprisoned For More Than Three Years.

As Many Political Writers Have Pointed Out, Commitment To Political Equality Is Not An Empirical Claim That People Are Clones.

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.

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?

Climate Change Could Produce A Lot Of Misery And Waste Without Necessarily Leading To Large-scale Armed Conflict, Which Depends More On Ideology And Bad Governance Than On Resource Scarcity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Since The Point Of Erotica Is To Offer The Consumer Sexual Experiences Without Having To Compromise With The Demands Of The Other Sex, It Is A Window Into Each Sex's Unalloyed Desires. Pornography For Men Is Visual, Anatomical, Impulsive, Floridly Promiscuous And Devoid Of Context And Character. Erotica For Women Is Far More Likely To Be Verbal, Psychological, Reflective, Serially Monogamous And Rich In Context And Character. Men Fantasise About Copulating With Bodies; Women Fantasise About Making Love To People.

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

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.

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

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."

The World Has Far Too Much Morality.

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

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

After Their Return From Babylon, The Practice Of Human Sacrifice Died Out Among The Jews, But Survived As An Ideal In One Of Its Break-away Sects, Which Believed That God Accepted The Torture-sacrifice Of An Innocent Man In Exchange For Not Visiting A Worse Fate On The Rest Of Humanity. The Sect Is Called Christianity.

Why Are Empirical Questions About How The Mind Works So Weighted Down With Political And Moral And Emotional Baggage?

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

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.

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.

The Problem With The Emotions Is Not That They Are Untamed Forces Or Vestiges Of Our Animal Past; It Is That They Were Designed To Propagate Copies Of The Genes That Built Them Rather Than To Promote Happiness, Wisdom, Or Moral Values.

Most Wars Are Not Fought Over Shortages Of Resources Such As Food And Water, But Rather Over Conquest, Revenge, And Ideology.

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

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

Cognitive Psychology Has Shown That The Mind Best Understands Facts When They Are Woven Into A Conceptual Fabric, Such As A Narrative, Mental Map, Or Intuitive Theory. Disconnected Facts In The Mind Are Like Unlinked Pages On The Web: They Might As Well Not Exist.

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 Over The World, Belief In The Supernatural Has Authorised The Sacrifice Of People To Propitiate Bloodthirsty Gods, And The Murder Of Witches For Their Malevolent Powers.

The Task Of Evolutionary Psychology Is Not To Weigh In On Human Nature, A Task Better Left To Others. It Is To Add The Satisfying Kind Of Insight That Only Science Can Provide: To Connect What We Know About Human Nature With The Rest Of Our Knowledge Of How The World Works, And To Explain The Largest Number Of Facts With The Smallest Number Of Assumptions.

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

But The 20th Century Suffered "two" Ideologies That Led To Genocides. The Other One, Marxism, Had No Use For Race, Didn't Believe In Genes And Denied That Human Nature Was A Meaningful Concept. Clearly, It's Not An Emphasis On Genes Or Evolution That Is Dangerous. It's The Desire To Remake Humanity By Coercive Means (eugenics Or Social Engineering) And The Belief That Humanity Advances Through A Struggle In Which Superior Groups (race Or Classes) Triumph Over Inferior Ones.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Commerce, Trade And Exchange Make Other People More Valuable Alive Than Dead, And Mean That People Try To Anticipate What The Other Guy Needs And Wants. It Engages The Mechanisms Of Reciprocal Altruism, As The Evolutionary Biologists Call It, As Opposed To Raw Dominance.

There's A Common Criticism Of Evolutionary Psychology That It's Fatalistic And It Dooms Us To Eternal Strife, 'why Even Try To Work Toward Peace If We're Just Bloody Killer Apes And Violence Is In Our Genes?'

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Human Nature Is Complex. Even If We Do Have Inclinations Toward Violence, We Also Have Inclination To Empathy, To Cooperation, To Self-control.

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.

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.

The 9/11 Strikes Left An Indelible Impact On Our Minds, But In Relative Terms, The Scale Of Casualties Actually Wasn't All That High.

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.

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?

Since Violence Is Largely A Male Pastime, Cultures That Empower Women Tend To Move Away From The Glorification Of Violence And Are Less Likely To Breed Dangerous Subcultures Of Rootless Young Men.

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.

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.

Conventions Are Unstated Agreements Within A Community To Abide By A Single Way Of Doing Things - Not Because There Is Any Inherent Advantage To The Choice, But Because There Is An Advantage To Everyone Making The Same Choice.

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.

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.

Nature Is A Hanging Judge," Goes An Old Saying. Many Tragedies Come From Our Physical And Cognitive Makeup. Our Bodies Are Extraordinarily Improbable Arrangements Of Matter, With Many Ways For Things To Go Wrong And Only A Few Ways For Things To Go Right. We Are Certain To Die, And Smart Enough To Know It. Our Minds Are Adapted To A World That No Longer Exists, Prone To Misunderstandings Correctable Only By Arduous Education, And Condemned To Perplexity About The Deepest Questions We Can Ascertain.

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.

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

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.

If We Are Not To Abandon Values Such As Peace And Equality, Or Our Commitments To Science And Truth, Then We Must Pry These Values Away From Claims About Our Psychological Makeup That Are Vulnerable To Being Proven False.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

Photography Is A Kind Of Virtual Reality, And It Helps If You Can Create The Illusion Of Being In An Interesting World.

As Women Are Empowered, Violence Can Come Down, For A Number Of Reasons. By All Measures, Men Are The More Violent Gender.

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.

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.

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 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.

My Laptop Has Freed Me To Travel.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.'

America Had, For One Thing, Lived In Anarchy For - Until Much More Recently Than Europe. We Had The Wild West, Where The Cliche Of The Cowboy Movies Was The Nearest Sheriff Is 90 Miles Away, And So You Had To Pack A Gun And Defend Yourself.

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

The Mind Is A Neural Computer

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.

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.

It's Natural To Think That Living Things Must Be The Handiwork Of A Designer. But It Was Also Natural To Think That The Sun Went Around The Earth. Overcoming Naive Impressions To Figure Out How Things Really Work Is One Of Humanity's Highest Callings.

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.

It's Likely That Taboo Words Are Stored In The Right Hemisphere Of The Brain. Massive Left Hemisphere Strokes Or The Entire Surgical Removal Of The Left Hemisphere Can Leave People With No Articulate Speech Other Than The Ability To Swear, Spout Cliches And Song Lyrics.

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.

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.

There Has To Be Innate Circuitry That Does The Learning, That Creates The Culture, That Acquires The Culture, And That Responds To Socialization.

The Rights Revolutions Too Have Given Us Ideals That Educated People Today Take For Granted But That Are Virtually Unprecedented In Human History, Such As That People Of All Races And Creeds Have Equal Rights, That Women Should Be Free From All Forms Of Coercion, That Children Should Never, Ever Be Spanked, That Students Should Be Protected From Bullying, And That There’s Nothing Wrong With Being Gay. I Don’t Find It At All Implausible That These Are Gifts, In Part, Of A Refined And Widening Application Of Reason.

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.

For Example, Parents Who Talk A Lot To Their Children Have Kids With Better Language Skills, Parents Who Spank Have Children Who Grow Up To Be Violent, Parents Who Are Neither Too Authoritarian Or Too Lenient Have Children Who Are Well-adjusted, And So On.

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Robert Bringhurst

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