Quote

Conventions are unstated agreements within a community to abide by a single way of doing things - not because there is any inherent advantage to the choice, but because there is an advantage to everyone making the same choice.

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
Making
Agreement
Way
Advantage
Things
Choice
Single
Unstated
Choices
Agreements
Within
Abide
Community
Conventions
Everyone
Inherent

More quotes by Steven Pinker

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The world has far too much morality.
Steven Pinker
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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.
Steven Pinker
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Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.
Steven Pinker
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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.
Steven Pinker
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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.
Steven Pinker
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It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher.
Steven Pinker
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Jews are known for many things, but strength, swiftness, and agility are not among them. There is one trait, as controversial as it is familiar, for which Jews are above all known, and that is shrewdness in business.
Steven Pinker
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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.
Steven Pinker
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Evolution is an indispensable component of any satisfying explanation of our psychology.
Steven Pinker
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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.
Steven Pinker
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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.
Steven Pinker
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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.
Steven Pinker
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As an experimental psychologist, I have been trained not to believe anything unless it can be demonstrated in the laboratory on rats or sophomores.
Steven Pinker
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As long as your ideology identifies the main source of the world's ills as a definable group, it opens the world up to genocide.
Steven Pinker
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But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don't depend on information coming in from the senses.
Steven Pinker
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Words let us say the things we want to say and also things we would be better off not having said. They let us know the things we need to know, and also things we wish we didn't.
Steven Pinker
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We can shape events in each other's brains with exquisite precision.
Steven Pinker
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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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Though knowledge itself increasingly ignores boundaries between fields, professors are apt to organize their pedagogy around the methods and history of their academic subculture rather than some coherent topic in the world.
Steven Pinker
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Gossip is certainly one of the things that language is useful for, because it's always handy to know who needs a favor, who can offer a favor, who's available, who's under the protection of a jealous spouse. And being the first to get a piece of gossip is like engaging in insider trading: You can capitalize on an opportunity before anyone else can.
Steven Pinker