The Bigger Picture
Note (2023/5/9): I've changed my mind a lot since I wrote this, I believe I was naive regarding the statistics and the real mechanics behind social change. I will write about this in a future piece. Hello everyone, The world seems to be falling apart. At...
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Nothing prevents the amoral process of natural selection from evolving a brain with genuine big-hearted emotions.Steven Pinker
The Evidence for Goodness
Hello everyone, I hope you have all been doing well. That's the goal of this enterprise of life, after all, a world in which all of us are doing well. What more is there to achieve than this? An attitude that many of us hold that never ceases...
Insert Label Here
“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” When we are born, we are given a name. We walk through life with a strong attachment to it, as if something about those syllables revealed who we really are. We pick up many more names on the way. I...
The Tragedy of Ignorance
Hello everyone, I hope you are all doing very well. It strikes me that this is a formal way of me say I want you to be happy. If you remember last week's email, I talked about a lot of the stories we frame our existence around and...
On Communication and Politics
Hello everyone, How are you doing? Think about that question carefully, what you tell yourself in response is important. I have been taking steps to improve my craft as a writer recently. A chance to practice writing to an audience regularly has also been a pleasant side-effect of being able...
The Tragic and Utopian Visions of Human Nature
The Blank Slate is a book about the question of whether we are nature or nurture. Are we born like blank slates to be written on by our life experience or do we have an innate nature that remains consistent through our lives?...
Book Recommendation
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Engagement with politics is like sports fandom in another way: people seek and consume news to enhance the fan experience, not to make their opinions more accurate.Steven Pinker
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It is the very nature of argument to stake a claim to being right.Steven Pinker
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In many surveys it turns out that every student, questioned privately, thinks that binge drinking is a terrible idea, but each is convinced that his peers think it's cool.Steven Pinker
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Humans can thrive on a modern vegetarian diet and animals' interests in a life free of pain and premature death surely outweigh the marginal increase in pleasure we get from eating their flesh.Steven Pinker
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Pain and humiliation distract children from pondering what they did wrong.Steven Pinker
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In 1987 only half of Americans thought it was always wrong for a man to strike his wife with a belt or stick.Steven Pinker
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The evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane, when asked whether he would lay down his life for his brother, replied, 'No, but for two brothers or eight cousins.'Steven Pinker
Book Recommendation
Book Recommendation
How far we have come
There are two biases that seem to be affecting all of us for the worse, that I would like to bring to your attention. 1. The Availability Bias[1] We judge the likelihood of events and the state of affairs based on how easily we can recall the data. Think...