The Bigger Picture
Hello everyone, The world seems to be falling apart. At the risk of sounding completely delusional I must ask — is it really? It was not long ago that the world's gaze was on bushfires ravaging Australia, and without time to recover the coronavirus has run rampant across the globe. We...
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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 to bother...
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“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 how they...
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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Think of it this way: The average American now retires at age 62. One hundred years ago, the average American died at age 51.Steven Pinker
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Human life has become more precious, while glory, honor, preeminence, manliness, heroism, and other symptoms of excess testosterone have been downgraded.Steven Pinker
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The American poverty rate has declined by ninety percent since 1960, from 30 percent of the population to just 3 percent.Steven Pinker
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People see violence as moral, not immoral: across the world and throughout history, more people have been murdered to mete out justice than to greed.Steven Pinker
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A typical person today is smarter than 98 percent of the people in the good old days of 1910.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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Today's conservatives are more liberal than yesterday's liberals.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