A positive-sum game is a scenario in which agents have…

Forcing modern speakers of English to not - whoops, not to split an infinitive because it isn't done in Latin makes about as much…

— Steven Pinker

Consistent style prevents presentation from getting in the way of content.

— Steven Pinker

The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by…

— Steven Pinker

I've never argued that humans are massively hot-wired. What I was trying to point out was that you can't understand how we learn unless…

— Steven Pinker

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

— Steven Pinker

Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are less likely…

— Steven Pinker

When it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power to shock.…

— Steven Pinker

Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives…

— Steven Pinker

“The biblical story of the binding of Isaac shows that human sacrifice was far from unthinkable in the 1st millennium BCE. The Israelites boasted…

— Steven Pinker

Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence,…

— Steven Pinker

In fact, without a specification of a creature's goals, the very idea of intelligence is meaningless. A toadstool could be given a genius award…

— Steven Pinker

“The obvious cure for the tragic shortcomings of human intuition in a high-tech world is education. And this offers priorities for educational policy: to…

— Steven Pinker

If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or warfare or…

— Steven Pinker

“In some eras, self-control defines the paragon of a decent person: a grown-up, a person of dignity, a lady or a gentleman, a mensch.…

— Steven Pinker

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…

— Steven Pinker