Mercatus Center
Steven Pinker has spent an entire academic career thinking deeply about language, cognition, and human nature. Driving it all, he says, is an Enlightenment belief that the world is intelligible, science can progress, and through rational inquiry we can better understand ourselves.
He recently joined Tyler for a conversation not only on the power of reason, but also the economics of irrational verbs, whether violence will continue to decline, behavioral economics, existential threats, the merits of aerobic exercise, photography, group selection, Fermi’s paradox, Noam Chomsky, universal grammar, free will, the Ed Sullivan show, and why people underrate the passive (or so it is thought).
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I am happy to see Tyler Cowen so willing to be refuted. I think Pinker positions are incredibly sensible. Very good conversation.
what a dumb question, nuclear weapons are not easy to blow up are they*?but the desires would be there
These two are studs hands down. I hold polymaths in very high regard.
love the throwback to the 18th century with the "beethoven" hairdo
Oh look! It's the guy that made a career out of riding Chomsky's coat tails, how cute!
Please find my paper on the origins of language and other papers in linguistics
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sujay_Rao_Mandavilli/contributions
Sujay Rao Mandavilli
Is it just me or is there someone behind the camera with an open mic eating for the course of most of this interview? What is that sound.. sounds like chewing.
can you imagine a child wanting you to read better angels of our nature as a bedtime story lol
I think Pinker is smarter than Chompsky, and he's a better speaker
Imagine a world exclusively populated with people of Pinker's intelligence and temperament.
He said that verbs simplify for all generations thereafter…. I am sure he did not mean that. I know, in colloquial Canadian French, a few counter examples of this. Verbs in -ier like étudier (study) , chier (shit) and marier (marry), which are simple 1st conjugation, started to conjugate, partly, in the working class, like the -ir verbs. 'Ils étudient' becomes 'ils étudissent'. I say partly because `vous étudiez' remains, same applies to imperfect tense. (I have not heard 'vous étudissez') So it is certainly a complication of an otherwise regular verb.
Anyway languages left on their own have to simplify in some ways and complexify in other ways depending on patterns. If this was not true, the cavemen would have spoken the hardest language on ever.
Someone please – have Steven Listen to "Cosmic Gypsies"
or anything else by artists like Jehst & Baintax/Taskforce, etc.
You should check it, too.
Pinker maked nice points, who would've thunk. Actually I'm all for regular verbs. At least they should be accepted alongside irregular ones.
I think Pinker is a genius and explains things so a normal person can understand.
That constant, subtle background noise is Stephen's luscious hair rubbing on the microphone stem.
anybody here who thinks Pinker is Rob Lowe with a wig?
There is a ceiling to the achievement possible for this man as he has handicapped himself by the unsubstantiated and erroneous idea that there is no reality besides the material, he is an atheistic materialist.
There is telepathy, there is precognition, there are other intelligent beings not made of the same material as matter/energy stuff.
Such blind people are useful idiots because they are applying their high intelligence to the chosen area of study providing us with the limits of materialism to explain full reality.
I am also intrigued by irregular verbs, but I didn't really hear any answer as to how "go" became "went" in the past….
That second person in the Q and A, has a chance to ask a question for one of the world's renowned psychologists and he asks about dreaming about Joseph from the bible?
I had to skip past pinker's nuclear weapons ramblings on the discussion of the increased power and reduced cost of technology and its application to the democratization of weaponry. Sadly blind and uninmaginative. Biological weapons? Designer's viruses coded and printed in a cave? AI? Etc etc. He needs to read Bostrom or any technocrat. Slightly disappointed by Pinker here. He clearly doesn't understand the fundamental properties of technology.
Hmmmm, an "apocalyptic cult" that wants destruction for the sake of it? Sounds like most religions to me.
The illusion of welfarism live in the Netherlands, you are completely deluded about the other side of the spectrum. People starving to death.
If i only had 25 seconds to show someone why Pinker is so awesome (20'20" – 20'45") would sum it up perfectly ?
One reason that I find listening to Steve Pinker as useful is that his well spoken words influence how I speak to others. He is calm, precise, and useful with his words – a mastery that is as universally useful as language itself.
Tyler is a great interviewer, especially because he lets the guests speak fully, even when they disagree with him. He doesn't jump in and interrupt with qualifiers about what he originally asked or said. He just lets it be on the table, gives the guest room to speak, and then he gracefully moves onto the next topic. By the way, I have loved Steven Pinker since I read How the Mind Works back when I was 19 in 2006. He's influenced my worldview a lot. Nice vid with two top thinkers.
I dont think anyone enjoyed this dialogue as much as I did
The very last question and answer was one of the most brilliant part of this brilliant interview.
Any intellectually honest person can potentially become an authority on any number of subjects; one must only avoid tribal-group think and persevere in their pursuit of truth and their articulation of it, overcoming any opposition which attempts to deter them.
Horrible interviewer with embarrassing questions.
Warning: do not watch while baked
But “abide” is an expression of the eternal presence as companionship so a past tense wouldn’t make sense at all. So many brilliant academics are unaware of religious culture and its deep and profound influence on word formation-