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We can make fun of hockey fans, but someone who enjoys Homer is indulging the same kind of vicarious bloodlust.

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
Fun
Enjoy
Bloodlust
Someone
Indulging
Kind
Vicarious
Make
Homer
Enjoys
Hockey
Fans

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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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Babies are born with the instinct to speak, the way spiders are born with the instinct to spin webs. You don't need to train babies to speak they just do. But reading is different.
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I think a lot of moral debates are not over what is the basis of justice, but who gets a ticket to play in the game.
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In the past two decades anthropologists have gathered data on life and death in pre-state societies rather than accepting the warm and fuzzy stereotypes. What did they find? In a nutshell: Hobbes was right, Rousseau was wrong.
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In a high tech world the cure for the tragic shortcomings and perilous fallacies of human intuition is education, but education in economics, evolutionary biology, probability and statistics - unfortunately most High School and College curricula have barely changed since Medieval times!
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I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor.
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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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Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we're exposed to an infectious world.
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All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on.
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Consistent style prevents presentation from getting in the way of content.
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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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The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.
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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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The moral, then, is that familiar categories of behavior - marriage customs, food taboos, folk superstitions, and so on - certainly do vary across cultures and have to be learned, but the deeper mechanisms of mental computation that generate them may be universal and innate.
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In the 1970s, many intellectuals had become political radicals. Marxism was correct, liberalism was for wimps, and Marx had pronounced that 'the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.'
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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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People today sometimes get uncomfortable with empirical claims that seem to clash with their political assumptions, often because they haven't given much thought to the connections.
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The stirrings of morality emerge early in childhood. Toddlers spontaneously offer toys and help to others and try to comfort people they see in distress.
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Everyone's pedigree merges into everyone else's pedigree. So if you go back far enough, everyone is related.
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