Search
6 interviews · 18 quotes
Conversations
Today humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding – and appears to be losing its mind. How can a species that doubled its lifespan, sequenced its genome, and developed vaccines for…
Steven Pinker (Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard) is a remarkable thinker. He is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He has won numerous prizes…
What 190 conversations with the world's leading thinkers reveal about the nature of reality
Why did France lose to the Nazis, despite its defenders having more tanks, troops, and guns? How did Ukraine repel Russia’s initial onslaught? How do you know if you can trust an…
In this exclusive series of interviews, we speak to seven experts on conflict and peace building. Four Nobel Peace Prize Winners; Prof. Jody Williams (Chair, Nobel Women's Initiative), Dr. Shirin Ebadi (Human Rights…
In this exclusive interview series, we speak to Nobel Prize Winning Economist, Edmund Phelps (Director of the Columbia University Center on Capitalism & Society and the McVickar Professor of Political Economy at…
From the archive
Our psychology is open-ended: we can plug in variables, and are not just tied to constants. We can expand our circle of sympathy – we can employ the logic of impartiality, and the emotional prompts of human contact and vicarious experience, and expand our fellow-feeling from our family to our clan, our nation, tribe, and from there to all of humanity and even other sentient beings.
— Steven PinkerCognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature
Knowledge isn't always used to make people better off, of course. It can be used to make more lethal weaponry and more effective militia and armies – so we must couple knowledge with humanism, with universal sympathy, for it to be a force for good. Without knowledge, however, all the sympathy in the world would be impotent – they must exist together.
— Steven PinkerCognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature
An appreciation of entropy is necessary to grasp that we are not entitled to wellbeing, progress, comfort, or health. The forces of the universe are- at best, indifferent- at worse, antipathetic- to our interests. Left to their own devices, things get worse.
— Steven PinkerCognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature
Our news outlets could report the fact that 137,000 people escaped from extreme poverty yesterday, every day for the past 30 years – but they never ran that headline, with the result that over a billion people escaped poverty and nobody knows about it.
— Steven PinkerCognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature
The very idea that – say – Make America Great Again – should be our guiding creed captures almost all the counter-enlightenment themes. It idealises the greatness of a nation as the ultimate good, as opposed to making all people healthier, safer, happier, richer and better educated. Rather than looking ahead to the progress that can be made, it looks back to a hypothetical golden-age to which we must return.
— Steven PinkerCognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature
Many of us think that you should only believe things that are true, not just things that rally your coalition, sect, or tribe. That belief is by no means universal, but it is a gift of the enlightenment.
— Steven PinkerCognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature
We have a growing inequality of rationality. At the top, we've never been so rational – we've accomplished technological miracles, sequenced the COVID-19 genome in days and deployed vaccines in under a year. At the same time, we have pizzagate, QAnon, chemtrails and 9/11 truthers.
— Steven PinkerCognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature
The laws of cause and effect which govern our universe don't care about our beliefs – so we'd better find out what those laws are and try and align our beliefs to them to eliminate guesswork. The consequences if we don't? we'll get sick, we'll starve, our machines will break down.
— Steven PinkerCognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature
Truth is an aspiration which none of us can ever know that we have attained. Nobody has a pipeline to the truth; nobody is imbued with divine revelation. We seek truth through institutions like science, journalism, governance, justice systems and record keeping. These are the bodies that make us collectively more suited to attain the truth.
— Steven PinkerCognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature
Rationality applies whether you believe in it or not. One idea follows from another – or it doesn't – and if you want some of your beliefs to lead to other beliefs, you have no choice but to be rational. We're committed to it by the very act of discussing, arguing, debating, persuading and convincing.
— Steven PinkerCognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature
We can expand our circle of sympathy – we can employ the logic of impartiality, and the emotional prompts of human contact and vicarious experience, and expand our fellow-feeling from our family to our clan, our nation, tribe, and from there to all of humanity and even other sentient beings.
— Steven PinkerCognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature
Our capacity to reason is recursive, combinatorial – we can reason about our reason – we can argue, criticise and develop tools that enhance our reason thanks to language and communication. We have the power to build on our reason, to enhance it.
— Steven PinkerCognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature
I cannot argue that my own interests are special simply because I'm me and you're not and expect that you will take me seriously. The nature of logic forces us to cede our own pre-eminence, because there is nothing in the pronoun 'you' or 'he' or 'she' which confers some special status.
— Steven PinkerCognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature
There has never been a time at which Enlightenment values predominated in any culture. They have always faced pushback from forces that are embedded in human nature – tribalism, deference to authority, magical thinking, vulnerability to cognitive illusions and biases.
— Steven PinkerCognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature
We have a growing inequality of rationality. At the top, we've never been so rational – we've accomplished technological miracles… we sequenced the COVID-19 genome in days and deployed vaccines in under a year… we're travelling to space.
— Steven PinkerCognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature
The laws of cause and effect which govern our universe don't care about our beliefs – so we'd better find out what those laws are and try and align our beliefs to them to eliminate guesswork.
— Steven PinkerCognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature
Rationality applies whether you believe in it or not. One idea follows from another – or it doesn't – and if you want some of your beliefs to lead to other beliefs, you have no choice but to be rational.
— Steven PinkerCognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature
Truth is an aspiration which none of us can ever know that we have attained. Nobody has a pipeline to the truth; nobody is imbued with divine revelation. We seek truth through institutions like science, journalism, governance, justice systems and record keeping.
— Steven PinkerCognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature
