Cosmos Minutes
Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology, Harvard University
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Steven Pinker is a Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time and The Atlantic, and is the author of ten books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Stuff of Thought, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and most recently, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
Credits: MIT Media Lab
http://macro.media.mit.edu/
Source
Object credit giver.
pinker, the frontal lobes are of very little value in defining human behavior and you certainly know this…
My god, Pinker is superb
We have evolved into a species that will fight other groups when they attempt to destroy us or our environment and are prepared to cooperate in order to do so, far from being idealistic, these groups are fighting for their survival.
Deaths from wars are fewer, but those deaths now involve vastly more non combatants than ever before. Technology will allow more selfish groups to dominate and eventually destroy the entire species.
I'm 7 minutes into this and already up my eyeballs in weird statements from Pinker. I'll have to watch this later when I've better prepared myself to deal with monotone word salad.
This interview is clearly several years old. (before Pinker wrote "A Sense of Style"). Why is there no reference to the original recording date?
Thank you both for your humanness.
In order to think you’ll have to think like a (human )an not like a (person mindset ) thinking like a human is thinking out of the box ? of believes ??because if you think with what you were educated you’ll be a puppet of a narcissist system in where there is no room for the real you ?????
Good talk.
Mr Pinker you have misraken views and are propagating this under the cover of " scientific knowledge".
You are utterly wrong about "violence", you switches from human development to "good luck" etc. This is absurd. You have made a career out of misguided psychology.
Can't believe these bozos are still stuck on some ridiculously absurd theory like evolution. Like we all just crawled out of the slime?
You have to be insane to believe this.
Cut the volume up please
Works at Harvard, so probably a disinfo agent. This world is a flat, motionless plane, water always finds it's level when contained, there is no curvature found anywhere, there is no motion, the sun is not 93 million miles away. This guy is pushing evolution. Bullshit agent.
When the interviewer says Pinker will "share some of his nuggets" (0:32) I thought, "Shit, now he's going to dig out some nuggets, too." WTF I'M LMAO
Today, in the same region and from similar ethnic groups as the fairy-tale character, 'Jesus' you mention, people burn babies alive, and imprison children, while other groups behead people who disagree with them… and one ethnic group is imprisoned in two gigantic open-air concentration camps and is regularly used by another ethnic group for target practice, when they're not being regularly massacred on a larger scale… viciously dominated and violently suppressed by a (smaller but more violent) ethnic group.
You say that 'violence is declining', but it isn't really… It's not so long ago that (how many? 60?) millions of people were killed during WWII? And how many were killed in WWI less than two decades prior to that? And IF (and it IS a BIG 'if'!) it's true that we have fewer wars today, it's also true that they're often on a much greater scale and likely to kill far, far greater numbers of people… with ever more horrific weapons.
And the next global war will most likely be a nuclear conflagration which has the potential to completely exterminate the species… I really HOPE you're right that 'violence' is declining'… but tbh, I really DON'T think it is… and I long ago gave up believing in such fairy-tales as 'angels'. I think the notion that 'violence is declining' is just so much 'wishful thinking'.
The interviewer's accent leads me to believe that English is not his native language. If that's true, his command of the English language is impressive.
Why the volune problems . Pinkers mic must have been the problem. Really annoying.
Pinker on what is special about his species. Contains many silly assumptions of other species he wouldn't have made if he spent some time studying biology or just watching animals. His narcissism prevents him from being objective as far as his own psychotic species is concerned.
One wishes for objectivity from those who call themselves philosophers. Alas Pinker fails.
The title is misleading. I had thought he might be talking about the how of thinking, but he doesn't even get close. Our base thijnking isn't done with language but experiences; images, moving images, sound, memories. If we think of going to the car, we don't ';think' 'I'll go to the car', we think an image of the car, we see the car and us getting into it. Language is for thinking more deeply about issues rather than everyday activities, and for communicating with other hominids. It's obvious to observers that animals communicate, and much of it isn't by sound, body posture, or gesture, it's telepathic; like my sleeping dog wakes instantly when I think of going for a walk without my making the slightest move to do so. Pinker clearly hasn't even begun to train himself to observe himself thinking in real time, it takes a degree of objective disengagement.