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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Steven Pinker

Minds

Our

Scale

" Anything that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else increases your moral consideration for that other person. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Though as a psychologist I like to think that nothing human is foreign to me, I admit to having been repeatedly flabbergasted by the insouciance, and sometimes relish, with which our ancestors carried out and witnessed unspeakable cruelties. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture. "

" 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. "

" I don't consider myself to be that radical a thinker. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero. "

" In any dispute, each side thinks it's in the right and the other side is demons. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Steven Pinker

Memory

Statistics

" '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 way to understand how different species evolved is to think about the niches that they fill in an ecosystem - basically, how they make a living. "

" 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. "

" I'm very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world. "

" Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence, accident, or disease. "

" 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. "

" You can't hear a word and just hear it as raw sound; it always evokes an associated meaning and emotion in the brain. "

" 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. "

" Evolution is an indispensable component of any satisfying explanation of our psychology. "

" 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. "

" 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. "