Steven Pinker
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Steven Pinker Meets Socrates January 17, 2022
PINKER: Socrates! We don’t often see you here in Harvard Yard.*SOCRATES: No indeed, Pinker, for I do not wish to seem unreasonable by trespassing on the precincts of those who, like yourself, are highly reputed for superior knowledge, when I know ver...
Steven Pinker Q&A: “I’m a Serial Series Binger” January 10, 2022
Steven Pinker was born in Montreal in 1954 and is the Johnstone professor of psychology at Harvard University. He conducts research into visual cognition, psycholinguistics and social relations.What’s your earliest memory?It’s highly sensory and from...
Why Modern Bureaucracy Was Not Inevitable January 10, 2022
Chapter four of The Dawn of Everything is titled “Free People, the Origin of Cultures, and the Advent of Private Property (Not necessarily in that order)”. The disorderliness celebrated in the subtitle is typical of this cheeky 700-page survey of wha...
Steven Pinker Meets Socrates January 05, 2022
This is a lightly edited transcript of an encounter I recently witnessed, and which I recorded on my iPhone while pretending to check my inbox. To my surprise, I have since discovered that Pinker’s remarks here also appeared, in exactly or very nearl...
Why Hate Steven Pinker? March 08, 2019
Steven Pinker is pacing the green room. In a few minutes, he'll be seated across from Fareed Zakaria, host of CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS, but for now he is collecting his thoughts and preserving his voice (a mild case of laryngitis is hampering his nor...
Accentuate the Positive February 04, 2019
Is the world getting better or worse? Both, it seems. In January 2018, Time ran a cover story called “The Optimists,” in which the issue's guest editor, Bill Gates, reported that things are on the whole improving. Within the month, The Bulletin of At...
False Dawn: Steven Pinker Against Steven Pinker August 03, 2018
I partly credit Steven Pinker for my realization, around the middle of my time in college, that I wasn't a lefty. Suspicious of the assertion, popular in humanities courses, that the most important features of human life—gender, language, family, sci...
We Need a New Romanticism May 16, 2018
Neuroscience was part of the dinner conversation in my family, often a prerequisite for truth. Want to talk about art? Not without neuroscience. Interested in justice? You can't judge someone's sanity without parsing scans of the brain. But though sc...
