Quote

The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.

Steven Pinker

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Steven Pinker
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: September 18
Anthropologist
Linguist
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
Psychologist
University Teacher
Montreal
Quebec
Steven Arthur Pinker
Idea
Achievement
Massively
Ideas
Group
Peer
Children
Development
Parental
Groups
Achievements
Parents
Shaped
Parent
Peers
Repositories
Child
Passive
Overstated
Greater
Aspiration
Determinant

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Journalists say that when a dog bites a man, that is not news, but when a man bites a dog, that is news ... Thanks to the mathematics of combinatorics, we will never run out of news.
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No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you're still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be.
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The European wars of religion were more deadly than the First World War, proportionally speaking, and in the range of the Second World War in Europe. The Inquisition, the persecution of heretics and infidels and witches, they racked up pretty high death tolls.
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In any dispute, each side thinks it's in the right and the other side is demons.
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There is no society ever discovered in the remotest corner of the world that has not had something that we would consider the arts. Visual arts - decoration of surfaces and bodies - appears to be a human universal.
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One of the perks of being a psychologist is access to tools that allow you to carry out the injunction to know thyself.
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The 9/11 strikes left an indelible impact on our minds, but in relative terms, the scale of casualties actually wasn't all that high.
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The rules of friendship are tacit, unconscious they are not rational. In business, though, you have to think rationally.
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The human capacity for compassion is not a reflex that is triggered automatically by the presence of another living thing.
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Of course the theory of evolution would be vacuous if it offered a glib explanation for every inexplicable act.
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We will never have a perfect world, but it's not romantic or naive to work toward a better one.
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Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.
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In our society, the best predictor of a man's wealth is his wife's looks, and the best predictor of a woman's looks is her husband's wealth.
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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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Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't believe in reason.
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If the cartoon were completely accurate, though, life would be a cacophany of spoinks.
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You could think of an ecosystem as a bunch of antagonistic arms races, almost: Everything that an animal depends upon for food is the body part of some other animal or plant who would just as soon keep that body part for itself.
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The elegant study... is consistent with the themes of modern cognitive neuroscience . Every aspect of thought and emotion is rooted in brain structure and function, including many psychological disorders and, presumably, genius. The study confirms that the brain is a modular system comprising multiple intelligences, mostly nonverbal.
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