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As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.

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
Writers
Politics
Clones
Political
Empirical
Many
Pointed
People
Claim
Equality
Claims
Commitment

More quotes by Steven Pinker

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Something about the topic of consciousness makes people, like the White Queen in Through The Looking Glass, believe six impossible things before breakfast.
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Much of what is today called social criticism consists of members of the upper classes denouncing the tastes of the lower classes (bawdy entertainment, fast food, plentiful consumer goods) while considering themselves egalitarians.
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Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality - the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world.
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I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.
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A successful learner, . . . must be constrained to draw some conclusions from the input and not others.
Steven Pinker
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As individual people, embedded in our daily lives, of course we're interested in what makes one person different from another. We've got to hire one person and not another, marry one person and not another.
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As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children. It was published in a major journal.
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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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We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives.
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However much we might deplore the profit motive, or consumerist values, if everyone just wants i-Pods we would probably be better off than if they wanted class revolution.
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If crime is going down, you shouldn't be increasing resources for crime prevention. Or you should be taking note of what has worked and concentrate the crime-prevention methods on policies that have a track record of success.
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Astrology had an important role in the ancient world. You can't understand many things unless you know something about astrology - the plays of Shakespeare and so on.
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If the myth of pure evil is that evil is committed with the intention of causing harm and an absence of moral considerations, then it applies to very few acts of so-called 'pure evil' because most evildoers believe what they are doing is forgivable or justifiable.
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In any dispute, each side thinks it's in the right and the other side is demons.
Steven Pinker
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We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other that laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view.
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Today we take it for granted that war happens in smaller, poorer and more backward countries.
Steven Pinker
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Knowledge is a continuous fabric, in which ideas are connected to other ideas. Reason-free zones, in which people can assert arbitrary beliefs safe from ordinary standards of evaluation, can only corrupt this fabric, just as a contradiction can corrupt a system of logic, allowing falsehoods to proliferate through it.
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Societies that empower women are less violent in every way.
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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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We will never have a perfect world, but it's not romantic or naive to work toward a better one.
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