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" Societies that empower women are less violent in every way. "
Steven Pinker
Way
Women
Women Are
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" The decline of violence isn't a steady inclined plane from an original state of maximal and universal bloodshed. Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with. "
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" Evolution is an indispensable component of any satisfying explanation of our psychology. "
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" The reason the United States is not so likely to invade Iran is precisely because of the lessons learned from Iraq. And conversely, the Iranian push towards nuclear capability is calculated to deter invasions like the kind deposing Saddam Husain. "
Steven Pinker
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" 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.' "
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" Everyone's pedigree merges into everyone else's pedigree. So if you go back far enough, everyone is related. "
Steven Pinker
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" Students do everything on laptops these days, so I definitely think electronic books are a trend that's going to expand. "
Steven Pinker
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" 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. "
Steven Pinker
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Music
" 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. "
Steven Pinker
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Life
" 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. "
Steven Pinker
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" One of my favourite kinds of movie is the American picaresque, in which the characters make their way across the country, learning about life against the gorgeous backdrops of that vast land. "
Steven Pinker
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" 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. "
Steven Pinker
Good
Children
Mean
" Personality and socialization aren't the same thing. "
Steven Pinker
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Same Thing
Thing
" 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. "
Steven Pinker
Brain
Research
Depend
" 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. "
Steven Pinker
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Me
" Like the early days of the Internet, the dawn of personal genomics promises benefits and pitfalls that no one can foresee. "
Steven Pinker
Like
Internet
Promises
" We can make fun of hockey fans, but someone who enjoys Homer is indulging the same kind of vicarious bloodlust. "
Steven Pinker
Same
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Someone
" In societies no less than individuals, acknowledging our limitations may ultimately be more humane than denying them. "
Steven Pinker
Our
Less
Than
" 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? "
Steven Pinker
People
Believe
Dangerous
" You can't hear a word and just hear it as raw sound; it always evokes an associated meaning and emotion in the brain. "
Steven Pinker
Sound
Meaning
Brain
" I learned to focus my energy on high-quality, long-term projects rather than lower-quality projects with quicker payoffs. "
Steven Pinker
Rather
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Focus
" 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. "
Steven Pinker
Science
Control
Freedom
" 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. "
Steven Pinker
Way
Choice
Community
" I've never argued that humans are massively hot-wired. What I was trying to point out was that you can't understand how we learn unless you identify the learning mechanisms. And these have some genetic basis. "
Steven Pinker
Learning
Understand
You
" The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer. "
Steven Pinker
Art
Attention
Directing
" You have to remember that not every creature that was evolving left behind its skull or its tools for our convenience tens of thousands of years later. Most bones or most tools rot or get buried and are never found again. "
Steven Pinker
You
Tools
Skull
" The actual organization of behavior goes on the level of the individual nerve cells and their connections, and we have a hundred billion nerve cells, probably a hundred trillion connections. It's just mind-boggling to think of all the different ways in which they're arranged in a baby's head. "
Steven Pinker
Baby
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Connections
" No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you're still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be. "
Steven Pinker
Cruel
You
Matter
" 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. "
Steven Pinker
Men
Battle
Death
" The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon. You can see it over millennia, over centuries, over decades and over years. "
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Years
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" It's misleading to essentialize an entire society as if it were a single mind. "
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Were
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Misleading