Steven Pinker
@sapinker • 858,745 subscribers
Cognitive scientist at Harvard.
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The French Revolution was a disaster: killed 2 million people, led to the rise of Napoleon--perhaps the world's first totalitarian fascist dictator, who began wars of conquest that killed an additional 4 million people, led to the restoration of slavery, to the restoration of the monarchy, and a delay of democracy in France by perhaps a century. Russian Revolution killed several million, led to the Russian Civil War--which killed another 9 million--led to the rise of Stalin, who killed 20 million. There's an old cliché: you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. Well, it ignores the fact that people aren't eggs, and that generally does not result in an omelette. Again, the Chinese Revolution, perhaps the most disastrous event in history, led to the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, killed perhaps 30 to 40 million people altogether. Clip from the Institute of Art and Ideas
Steven Pinker3,085,828 次观看 • 9 个月前
Like an appreciation of progress, reading and literacy are among the things that are good but cognitively unnatural. That is, they go against our evolved nature. We didn’t evolve with print; it was a recent invention. Reading, for many of us, has become so second nature that we just assume it’s the most natural way of getting information. But what we’ve seen, especially in the last 10 years, when video has become so cheap because of the cloud computing revolution and the broadband revolution, is that a lot of people, unlike us, much prefer to listen and watch than to read. You just see this: when I go to Google and ask a basic question about how to unstick my printer or solve a problem, I get like five videos. And I just want a paragraph that would solve it. I don’t want to see Seth saying, “Hi, welcome to my show. If you like it, subscribe and give it a like.” So just help me solve the problem. But clearly there’s something unusual about me, because people are going for the video. And the massive availability of video—of TikTok, of YouTube—means that people may not be getting the practice or putting in the effort into literacy, which we have reason to believe was one of the drivers of the Flynn effect and of cognitive sophistication in general. Human Progress
Steven Pinker546,215 次观看 • 2 个月前
I spoke with Pooja Arora about Marxism: One is: What’s remarkable is that Marxism has been tried. Now, of course, defenders of Marxism say it hasn’t really been tried anywhere, but certainly the people who implemented it claimed they were implementing Marxism. And this is a massive experiment—a global experiment—with a very clear outcome. Namely, the Soviet Union was a disaster. The imposition of communism on Eastern Europe was a disaster. The imposition of communism in Venezuela was a disaster. The imposition of communism in Maoist China was a disaster. Disaster in terms of both poverty and oppression and genocide and stupid wars. So the world has told us what happens under communism, and it’s a sign of how out of touch intellectuals can be that there are still people who defend it despite the entire world giving a very clear-cut answer. One more is: would you rather live in North Korea or South Korea? Would you rather live in the old East Germany or West Germany? We have an experimental group and a matched control group in terms of culture, language, and geography, and the answer is crystal clear. So this is a sign of, I think, the pathology of intellectual life—that Marxism can persist. The other is, you did call attention to one of the appeals of Marxism, though, and more generally of heavy, strong influence of government guided by intellectuals, which is that there are certain kinds of reforms that you can state as principles. You can articulate them verbally as propositions—like equality, human rights, democracy—but there’s other kinds of progress that take place in massive distributed networks of millions of people, none of whom implements some policy. But collectively, there is an order, an organization that’s beneficial. So that can happen organically through, for example, the development of a language. No one designed the English language. It’s just hundreds of millions of English speakers. They coin new words. They forget old words. They try to make themselves clear. And we get the English language and the other 5,000 languages spoken on earth. Likewise, a market economy is something where knowledge is distributed. You don’t have a central planner deciding how many shoes of size 8 will be needed in a particular city, but rather information is conveyed by prices, which are adjusted according to supply and demand. And you’ve got a distributed network of exchange of information that can result in an emergent benefit. Now, intellectuals tend to hate that. They like rules of language—of correct grammar. They like top-down economic planning. They like cultural change that satisfies particular ideals described by intellectuals. And so rival sources of organization, like commerce, like culture—traditional culture—tend to be downplayed by intellectuals. And this can be magnified by the fact that many dictatorships give a privileged role to intellectuals, which may be why, over the course of the 20th century, and probably continuing to the present, there has not been a dictator that has not had fans among intellectuals—including the mullahs and ayatollahs of Iran, but also the communist dictators: Mao and Castro, even Stalin in his day. And every other dictator has had, actually, often fawning praise from Western intellectuals.
Steven Pinker1,026,410 次观看 • 4 个月前
From my appearance on 60 Minutes: Me: Research works. If you want to freeze society where it is, then cripple the research enterprise. Bill Whitaker of 60 Minutes: Is that whole idea being lost in the harsh rhetoric by the administration? Me: The attack on universities is a tragic blunder. For all the foibles of universities, and there are many, and I pointed them out, universities' research makes life better, massively so. Why would you want to cripple it? It's something that the United States does really, really well.
Steven Pinker944,123 次观看 • 6 个月前
Brian Keating (Prof. Brian Keating) and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (Rebecca Newberger Goldstein) discuss "The Physics of Mattering: Do AI Agents Have a Soul" Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: God forbid if these AI agents begin to have a longing to matter, we have our non-carbon-based humans. We’re going to have to think about their rights. Brian Keating: She is a philosopher who trained in physics, and she just told me that AI might deserve human rights. Here is her argument. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: The other obsession with this verb “matter,” that we are creatures of matter who long to matter — you can only say that in English. But I’m so glad you could say that in English because it’s, again, incredibly poignant. We’re creatures of matter who are subject to the laws of physics, the second law of thermodynamics, but we long to matter. And so much of the book is trying to explain that, how that transformation within us, within our species, happens. That’s a normative transformation, an ethical transformation, and it’s really what distinguishes us: that we, in some sense, want to justify the fact that we matter so much to ourselves, that we pay so much attention to ourselves. We actually can pinpoint the place in human history where this emerged, during the period when all the religions emerged that are still extant, which is so interesting. Also, Western philosophy emerged during the period of history that’s called the Axial Age. Brian Keating: I do think things have changed for the better, as far as, you know, paternity leave. I’ve taken advantage of that. But I guess the ultimate expression — and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it — I mean, I think that women sacrifice a lot more. I think also we have a crisis with men and boys and so forth, and now you have grandsons, and you can appreciate it. You probably appreciated this even before you had daughters. But the book is full of these things ranging, as you said, from Aristotle to the Chinese one-child policy that you talk about at the end of the book. It’s heart-wrenching, Rebecca. But I guess, as we come in for a landing, the fear that a lot of people have nowadays is about artificial intelligence replacing what we derive our sense of mattering from. And you quote Freud in the book. Freud said all of life is work and love. And if AI can replace the work of knowledge workers like you and me, and it can replace the love because of things like Character AI and all these artificial relationships that don’t require me to go out and ask a woman on a date — or nowadays, for men — I want to ask you the question: can AI have a mattering instinct, or is it encoded in this wet supercomputer that we carry on our shoulders? Is it possible that AI is making everyone feel that redundancy is threatening to us? Will AI rob us of our mattering? Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Yeah, so there are two different questions there. One is really, I think, already upon us, maybe already here: that some of the most creative ways of appeasing our mattering instinct will be superseded by what AI can do. It can prove math theorems faster, make discoveries in science, write novels, write music, paint pictures. Some of the most creative things that have led to flourishing and led to great achievements that we can all take pride in. I take great pride in our species producing Bach and Shakespeare and Michael Jordan — I’m a big basketball fan. I mean, we mere mortals, and look what we can do. But they’ll be able to do it better. I think this is going to be a real problem. Here’s one thing I would say: heroic strivers — what I call heroic strivers — it’s really going to threaten them. I think the socializers are going to look to AI to some extent, maybe for romantic partners. But mothers are not going to have little AI agents acting like their babies. I don’t think that’s going to happen. But I think heroic strivers are going to be severely threatened. Well, one thing I can say is that one of the ways to be a heroic striver is ethically. And that will still remain to us: these ethical projects of trying to minister to others, to other creatures, to the planet itself. AI will not be able to do that. They can write our novels or our poetry or our music or improve our math theorems, but they’re not going to be able to do that for us. Wouldn’t that be a wonderful turn of events if somehow there were an incredible ethical transformation and that’s how we got our status — from how much good we’re actually doing in the world, how much counter-entropic good we’re doing in the world? This is a big thing that’s upon us, is all I can say. I can’t think of anything else — not the Industrial Revolution, not the Enlightenment — that has the possibility of so changing what we are and what we see our lives as being about as AI. Brian Keating: Even the very name of our species — Homo habilis meant “toolmaker” or “handyman.” Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Yeah. Brian Keating: And Homo sapiens means “man who knows,” right? Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Exactly, exactly. We’re not the only things that know. And your other question: God forbid if these AI agents begin to have a longing to matter, wanting to justify their own existence — it would take self-reflection of the sort that we have, being able to step outside themselves and say, “Oh my God, I pay so much attention to myself. Am I worth it? Do I deserve this?” If they do this, then what we have are non-carbon-based humans. These will be humans. And that means we’re going to have to think about their rights, and we’re going to have to have a whole new way of thinking about ethics, because we will have created humans in a new way. So this is big. This is so big. I’ll tell you something: I think this is the moment for philosophers, because these are philosophical problems. Philosophers have been at it for over 2,000 years since the ancient Greeks. So show us what you’ve got, philosophers. You’ve been thinking about this for 2,000 years. Show us what you’ve got. Brian Keating: It’s amazing. You take some matter and shoot some electrons through it, and suddenly you start wondering: is it okay to turn it off? Can I turn off my chat companion? Is it okay to have it answer questions on ethics for my children? Rebecca, this has been such a wonderful conversation. This book is incredible. It reminds me of a famous quote by John Archibald Wheeler. Wheeler said, “Matter tells space-time how to curve, and space-time tells matter how to move.” And this book, The Mattering Instinct, was one of the most moving books to me.
Steven Pinker40,899 次观看 • 10 天前
Brian Keating (Prof. Brian Keating) and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (Rebecca Newberger Goldstein) discuss "The Law of Physics Behind Depression." Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: The thing that suicidally depressed people feel is that they don’t matter; others do, they don’t. Nothing they can do will ever make them matter. It’s a terrible, terrible feeling. And what this means is they cannot abide their own presence. Brian Keating: What if there is a law of physics that explains why depression feels the way it does? Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: When I first learned about the second law of thermodynamics, it seemed—I couldn’t quite conceptualize it. We are subject to the second law of thermodynamics, which, you know, has a tragic dimension. In fact, when I was a graduate student, it occurred to me, oh my gosh, biological systems are really just organized to resist the second law of thermodynamics. In some sense, biology is a response to this supreme law that tells us that, in closed systems, energy never increases; entropy never decreases. Entropy never decreases, and if there’s any way for it to increase, it will. Entropy is the measure of the disorder of a system. The more disorder, the higher the entropy, and the less efficient the work you can get out at the end of the system. And in fact, Rudolf Clausius, the physicist, said that the universe itself will go to thermal equilibrium—what we call the heat death—and so there will be no more energy to be gotten out of it at the end of the system. Rudolf Clausius, the 19th-century physicist who formulated the concept of entropy, which means literally “transformation from within”—there’s poignancy in that. This transformation from within is going to the end of the system. And he said that the universe itself will go to thermal equilibrium, to what we call the heat death, and so there will be no more energy to be gotten out of it. Brian Keating: So let’s start with that story you tell first about Ludwig Boltzmann, who solved one of the great paradoxes of physics, the irreversibility paradox. Talk about that. And then why, in your mind, was he so traumatized, perhaps, or so full of dread of his equation that he took his own life? So talk about that. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: So there was this great paradox, which is that most—probably most—of the processes that we observe are irreversible. If you film them—and tell me if I’m being too elementary, because I’m going to be very—you know, if you film them, like let’s say I crack open an egg and I stir it up and then I fry it, and somebody filmed this and then reversed the film, anybody who sees the reverse of that film is going to know it was reversed. That cannot happen in nature: that the egg is going to uncook itself, unscramble; the yolk is going to separate from the albumen and jump into the shell and seal up. Impossible, right? So almost everything that we see is irreversible. Brian Keating: Yes. I saw that line, Rebecca. It made me think, because you mentioned it in the context of his daughter, Elsa, finding her father’s dead body. And it wasn’t like he showed any sign. I mean, we can’t go into the minds of someone who dies by suicide, right? Yes. But at the same time, you’d think, well, this would be a more common thing. And so, is depression sort of a—you know, they used to think of miasmas and things in the air, you write about that in the book—is depression, at heart, an entropic collapsing process? Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: I have spoken to a lot of people who suffer from clinical depression. And I want to say, first of all, that the U.S. hotline for suicide prevention is The thing that suicidally depressed people feel is that they don’t matter. Others do. They don’t. Nothing they can do will ever make them matter. It’s a terrible, terrible feeling. And what this means is they cannot—they can’t abide their own presence. I really think it shows how strong this mattering instinct is in us. If you can’t somehow appease it, you can’t abide your own presence. And so, what the people I’ve spoken to—and one is a very, very good philosopher who has suffered from depression—have told me is that, phenomenologically, this is exactly what it feels like. It feels like psychic disintegration. So, in some sense, yes—happiness is a very ordered state. And I would go even further: everything worth living for is an ordered state. I think knowledge—knowledge, knowledge, knowledge—is better than ignorance. Clarity is better than confusion. Flourishing is better than suffering. Love is better than hatred. Beauty is better than ugliness. These are truisms; these are what we all accept. Look at the thing that’s better: it’s an ordered state. And its negation is a disordered state. So I think—I would argue—this is a very kind of Spinozist argument, trying to get out of the laws of nature some ethical enlightenment, some ethical guidance, because that’s what we want. We want ethical guidance. So we know we want to matter. We know we do all sorts of things to matter. Some people do very bad things in order to matter. Some of the people I’ve spoken to… they do. They want power over others. They want dominance. They want to make other people’s lives miserable. These are bad things, right? They cause an increase in entropy. This is how I judge people now: are you increasing entropy, or are you decreasing it? -- Full video in link below.
Steven Pinker151,126 次观看 • 1 个月前
They got the same DNA. Genes are the same. Same mother, same father, same older siblings, same younger siblings, same number of books in the house, same number of TVs in the house, same teachers, same everything. So they should be absolutely indistinguishable. They should be, you know, clones. Well, if you know a pair of identical twins, you know they’re not indistinguishable. They have separate personalities. I know this intimately, having two identical twin uncles, Barry and Mark, who are more similar than people picked off the street at random, but no one in the family had any doubt which was which. They each had their own personality, and that’s true of all individuals. Well, that leads to a real puzzle that I think psychologists have not really thought through enough, which is: how can they be different? It’s not their genes. It’s not their environment—at least not anything stable about the environment, like who your mother is or what neighborhood you live in. Thinkable
Steven Pinker362,892 次观看 • 5 个月前
I explain why the accusation that Israel is committing "genocide" is blood libel. Me: The application of the word genocide to refer to tens of thousands of war deaths is, I mean, I think it is a kind of blood libel. It's trying to import the moral opprobrium that we associate with genocide to a designated enemy, in this case, Israel. I think because I alluded to my side bias, the sides in this case being the sides that a lot of hard left critical theory has defined, namely white oppressors against everyone else's victims. Moynihan: It's pretty strong to say this is like a blood libel. Me: Well, it is a blood libel in the sense that it is an accusation of deliberate murder, ill-founded in that the, and one could disagree with Israel's campaign against Gaza, one could say that this is not justifiable, it's not a just war. It's still different from deliberately murdering as many people as possible, as in, and we know there have been genocides. I think it really is a terrible blood libel, and it's a sign of how people's moralizing in the service of demonizing and dichotomizing, dividing the world into good and evil can just flatten their ability to analyze and to think clearly.
Steven Pinker392,059 次观看 • 7 个月前
If thought were independent of language, we wouldn’t have any use for language, because the whole point of language is to convey ideas. So it’s not independent, but it’s not the same thing as language. We know it’s not the same thing for many reasons. One of them is: how would children learn language to begin with if they were incapable of thinking until they had language? The way that language acquisition has to work is that children have some understanding of the world, of the objects around them, of the intentions of the people that they interact with, and they map them onto the sequences of sounds and gestures that they perceive. Also, we know that there are many forms of thought that are not linguistic, such as visual imagery, spatial cognition, and mental maps, all of which are specialties of Professor Tversky, who I’m sure will enlighten us about those. Even when it comes to the content of language, what we take away after the words have faded is the gist of language, not the words themselves. Within a few seconds after I stop speaking, or a few minutes after you’ve read something, you probably could not reproduce a single sentence verbatim, but hopefully you would come away with the content, the meaning, the gist. And one of the most robust findings in our field, cognitive psychology, is that long-term memory for gist is far more robust than memory for text itself. We know from studies of the brain that there are networks of language in the brain that are not the same as the parts of the brain that light up when people are thinking visually, thinking spatially, or thinking in terms of motion. Again, to go back to one of Professor Tversky’s specializations, we can imagine tying a shoe; we can imagine diving off a board. We have auditory imagery—a song can run through our head—and there are probably other forms of thought that we don’t even have names for. We also know that we sometimes struggle to put our thoughts into words. We write down a sentence, and we realize, no, that’s not what I meant, and rewrite it until the sentence comes out right. Full Institute of Art and Ideas video:
Steven Pinker110,160 次观看 • 2 个月前
![On Trump flouting norms and why this is a negative development: "[One of the] remarkable things about Donald Trump—and uniquely among American politicians—is that he has violated norms that have been in place, such as: you don’t boast, you don’t blatantly lie. I mean, all politicians lie because all human beings lie. But they lied under the cover of claiming to be honest. With Trump, it’s patent that he just doesn’t care about factual accuracy. He’ll say things that are in his interest and that demonize his opponents, with little regard for factual accuracy. Insulting a woman’s appearance, insulting war heroes, insulting patriots, insulting his predecessor in office, flattering enemy leaders, insulting allies—all of these things—there’s never been a law against them, but they just seemed to be things that a decent leader would not do. By doing them and not suffering consequences, the danger is that he is actually destroying norms that were a pretty good idea. For example, whether he was trolling or semi-serious about, say, annexing Greenland—let alone Canada, my own country—there has been a norm since World War II that nation-states are immortal, borders are grandfathered in, aggressive conquest is taboo. Now, of course, like any norm, it can be floated. Russia is obviously floating it now. But even to talk about floating it, even casually as Trump is doing, I think is a negative development." Clip from an interview with UnHerd.](https://image.24vids.com/tw-1978138989539311981/amplify_video_thumb/1978138311500697600/img/VMskyTLUUb5Bdo8I.jpg)
On Trump flouting norms and why this is a negative development: "[One of the] remarkable things about Donald Trump—and uniquely among American politicians—is that he has violated norms that have been in place, such as: you don’t boast, you don’t blatantly lie. I mean, all politicians lie because all human beings lie. But they lied under the cover of claiming to be honest. With Trump, it’s patent that he just doesn’t care about factual accuracy. He’ll say things that are in his interest and that demonize his opponents, with little regard for factual accuracy. Insulting a woman’s appearance, insulting war heroes, insulting patriots, insulting his predecessor in office, flattering enemy leaders, insulting allies—all of these things—there’s never been a law against them, but they just seemed to be things that a decent leader would not do. By doing them and not suffering consequences, the danger is that he is actually destroying norms that were a pretty good idea. For example, whether he was trolling or semi-serious about, say, annexing Greenland—let alone Canada, my own country—there has been a norm since World War II that nation-states are immortal, borders are grandfathered in, aggressive conquest is taboo. Now, of course, like any norm, it can be floated. Russia is obviously floating it now. But even to talk about floating it, even casually as Trump is doing, I think is a negative development." Clip from an interview with UnHerd.
Steven Pinker275,039 次观看 • 7 个月前
And I’m often called an optimist, although I tend to move away from that label because what I see my message is, is not so much we should look on the bright side, but rather just be aware of facts, such as that life expectancy has more than doubled, extreme poverty has been reduced from 90% of humanity to 10% of humanity, and deaths in wars are down. The fact that things have gotten better, though not perfect, does lead to some optimism—namely, if our ancestors did it and it kind of worked, sort of, better than not, then it’s not romantic, it’s not foolish, it’s not utopian to try to make things better still. (From Sing for Science with José González. Link below.)
Steven Pinker89,267 次观看 • 2 个月前
On Friday, Bill Maher asked me if what happened with Biden at the disastrous debate with Trump was the same story as the Emperor's New Clothes. Me: The story of the Emperor's New Clothes is a story about common knowledge, because when the kid blurted it out, he actually wasn't telling anyone anything they didn't already know. They could see the Emperor was naked. But he still changed their knowledge, because by blurting it out with an earshot of the others, now everyone knew that everyone else knew that everyone else knew that everyone else knew. And what that allowed them to do is change their relationship with the Emperor, from obsequious deference to ridicule and scorn. And the thing about common knowledge in the social realm is that it's what props up our social relationships. And so when something is blurted out, then it can change everything. It changes the nature of your relationship with someone. Maher: And we do have sort of a modern version of the Emperor parable, which is Joe Biden. I mean, he was the Emperor who everyone wouldn't say had lost his marbles. I mean, is that not really the same story? Me: It is the same story, because opinion polls showed that after that disastrous debate with Trump, the number of people who thought that he was cognitively impaired didn't go up by that much. It went up by a few percentage points. But before, a majority of people thought that he was cognitively impaired. The difference is, when it's on TV, where you're watching it, you know that the rest of the country is watching it, you know the rest of the country knows the rest of the country, it's no longer private. It's common. And that's when he was challenged. That was the end. Bill Maher Real Time with Bill Maher
Steven Pinker272,948 次观看 • 9 个月前
The fact that the universe doesn’t care about you doesn’t mean that other humans don’t care about you, or that we don’t have to care about other humans. That is, there is a purpose, there is a meaning: that is, to make people as well off as possible, to increase flourishing, to increase knowledge and life and health and freedom and safety. These are really, really meaningful. At least, I think they are. I don’t see anything wrong with them. I don’t think that that should leave you empty. And the fact that we live in a cold universe—that is, the laws of physics, the laws of biology, the behavior of viruses and bacteria and parasites and fungi—they don’t care about you. I’m sorry, they don’t care about you. And the sooner you realize that, the more you’ll be able to attend to the things that really do matter. Human Progress
Steven Pinker70,779 次观看 • 2 个月前
From THE GOD DEBATE: Me: Why should you care for the needy? Why should you donate blood? Why should you refrain from murder and robbery? You can't possibly say that the only reason to do it is because God will punish you in an afterlife. If God's back was turned, does that mean it would be okay to kill and rob or let people drown or starve? I can think of plenty of secular reasons to do it. Namely, I would not want to be left to starve or drown or die of lack of blood. I would not want to be the victim of murder or robbery. There's nothing special about me, and therefore what I demand of everyone else, I have to accept for myself. It is clear that we would all be better off in a world where everyone helped each other and refrained from hurting each other compared to a society where everyone was a rapacious psychopath. That's why we should be moral. God has nothing to do with it. Ross Douthat (Ross Douthat): What happens in Dr. Pinker's argument is that as an heir of Jewish and Christian civilization, he imports, as this kind of commonsensical position, metaphysical propositions about the existence of these human rights that no one has ever seen of or heard of. He cannot show me a human right under a microscope. He cannot prove to me in a mathematical theorem why segregation was wrong, why it was wrong to murder people in the gulag or the concentration camp for the sake of a better tomorrow. He asserts that it's necessary for, again, sort of decency and order and so on, and often it is, but there has to be a stronger reason when you find yourself in a position where what the society says is out of joint with what you think are the fundamental truths about the universe.
Steven Pinker79,826 次观看 • 2 个月前
Why are so many young people single these days? Pooja Arora (Pooja Arora): So my last question: I wanted to talk about why people are single nowadays. I would have asked about human nature, but that’s for another day. I sent you an article—how do you think common knowledge fits into that area? Why do you think so many youngsters are single? Me: Yes, it’s a good question. I’m not sure that common knowledge is an important part of the answer, but some of it is that women no longer depend on the economic contributions of men for their livelihood, as was true, say, in my mother’s era, when women were not professionally trained. To pay the rent, they had to be married. Now, not only are women better educated, but the economy has shifted to favor the kinds of skills that women, as opposed to men, have. And just as women have been rising, men have been sinking because of the decline in blue-collar work. There have also been cultural trends that favor women’s temperaments. Men have been distracted by internet gaming, gambling, and pornography and are less desirable as marriage partners. Women with more economic power are more likely to raise their standards for what they want in a man. In my parents’ generation, it was not uncommon for a woman to marry a man with much less education and, sometimes, less intelligence. This was not unusual among my parents’ friends. The men often had a high school degree and then went immediately into a small business—sometimes a family business, sometimes one he started himself. The criterion was: does he make a living? No one cared about education. That has changed, with the result that there are fewer men who satisfy the criteria women now have. This was mentioned in the article you shared with me. Also, with more sexual freedom, people don’t have to get married simply to have sex, which was again true in my parents’ generation. There’s a process that has been in place since the baby boomers and has accelerated among millennials and Generation Z. For other reasons, I think a generation of men may also be incapable of socially skilled interaction, partly because they’ve grown up with screens instead of face-to-face contact. There is some fear that a sexual encounter could result in an accusation of rape or sexual harassment. There is so much pornography that, for an increasing number of men, it serves as an outlet for what in the past would have required actual human contact. There are many factors. The article from The Economist lists them, I think, quite skillfully. It’s not clear how to reverse the trend. Increasing the economic prospects of men and creating an educational system that is less feminized and more encouraging of male achievement might help. Another could be changing norms—and here common knowledge comes in. Among women, is it a sign of low status to be with a man who has less education than you? Men, from time immemorial, have been happy to marry women with less education than themselves. Women don't. That immediately reduces the marriage pool. Maybe that’s a norm that could change. Go back to the norm in my parents’ generation? Pooja Arora: No, let’s not do that. Me: Okay, let's not do that. Pooja Arora: We’re happy to marry men who are not as educated as us. It’s fine. They just have to be nice and kind at this point in time. Me: Well, yes—exactly. Nice and kind.
Steven Pinker89,015 次观看 • 3 个月前
I spoke with Prof. Arora (Pooja Arora) about how the postwar norm against aggressive war drove decades of declining violence—and how today’s “might makes right” politics, embraced by leaders like Putin and Trump, now threaten that hard-won peace. Me: The norm that countries do not go to war except in self-defense and with authorization of the UN Security Council has been rejected both by Putin and Trump. Of course, there were often violations of that in the past, including the United States invading Iraq, for example. So it’s not as if that norm was always followed. But still, it was a change from hundreds—maybe thousands—of years of history, and that norm, I think, does deserve credit for the decline of interstate and great-power war since World War II. In my books The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now, I’ve plotted the rate of battle deaths since 1946. I don’t know if my image is reversed or not—whether it goes left to right from your point of view—but it goes down. It has ups and downs, and in the last couple of years, because of the wars you pointed to—Ukraine, Gaza, and even more so East Africa, in Sudan and Ethiopia—there has been an uptick. Still, that uptick has not wiped out all the progress we’ve made. We are still at a more peaceful time than in the 50s, 60s, 70s, or 80s. We’re back to around the late 1990s level. But it has gotten somewhat worse, and it could get worse still if that norm is permanently shattered. It is certainly being threatened. We don’t know whether it will reassert itself—given that Ukraine has been very costly to Russia, and given that Donald Trump says a lot of things he doesn’t do. I still think it’s unlikely the United States will apply military force in Greenland. But there’s no question the norm is being threatened, and I do think it’s a serious risk to world peace. Pooja Arora: It just appears that realism is back with a bang, and that “might makes right” may win. Me: Well, it is back, certainly. And the Trump administration is very explicit about that. They have basically said “might is right.” The question is, will that prevail? It might. On the other hand, there were good reasons to have the liberal international order—namely, that it prevented war. And wars, as the bumper sticker from my childhood said, are not healthy for children or other living things. There are huge disadvantages to war. Countries get tired of them. People revolt against governments that engage in them. We’re seeing that in Iran right now. One grievance is that the ayatollahs have wasted national resources on proxy wars across the Middle East at the expense of their people. There could very well be a backlash in the United States if it gets involved in wars and American soldiers start losing their lives. So yes, there is a definite movement toward what’s called realism. I think it’s a bad term, because I don’t think it’s particularly realistic. It’s actually quite realistic to believe that avoiding stupid wars is a much better path to prosperity and well-being. Still, cynical, zero-sum competition is being embraced by major world leaders. The question is whether the disadvantages will ultimately bring the liberal international order back. The European Union is still committed to it, as is much of the rest of the world, East Asia. So it’s not dead—but it is certainly threatened.
Steven Pinker89,098 次观看 • 3 个月前
I spoke with Pooja Arora about why people are drawn to pessimism despite historic progress, and how cognitive biases and media dynamics distort our perception of modern life. Pooja Arora (Pooja Arora) Now, the human mind seems to be attracted to pessimism and cynicism a lot nowadays. And even though in your books, Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now, you show how human progress has evolved over centuries—we have moved from a tribal era to living in luxuries that monarchs of the Middle Ages couldn’t even imagine—when you try to explain this to somebody, it’s extremely difficult. The world is bad for different reasons for different groups of people. Why is that happening, and how do you convince somebody that it’s a good era to live in? I don’t want to be born in the 1930s Me: No, no—or before. I mean, as I like to say, would you prefer your surgery with or without anesthesia, for example? Would you like dentistry in the 21st century or the 19th century? So yes, one part of the explanation is there’s a widespread pattern in polling that people are much more optimistic about their own lives than about the country as a whole. Reliably, if you ask people about the quality of schools, they’ll say the quality of schools in the country is terrible. What about your kid’s school? Oh, it’s actually pretty good. If you ask them, is the country safe? They’ll say, no, there’s crime everywhere—muggings and knifings and shootings. You say, what about your neighborhood? Do you feel safe? They say, well, yeah, I feel pretty safe. So partly there’s a dissociation between people’s vision of the whole country and their own lives. That is driven in part by what cognitive psychologists call the availability bias—heuristic—namely, people judge probability and risk and danger by salient examples, by narratives, by images. And that’s what the news delivers. The news is selectively biased toward the negative—not necessarily because editors prefer negative stories, although they do—but, on top of that overt bias, the mere fact that they report newsworthy events means there’s a built-in bias toward the negative. And that’s because anything that happens suddenly is much more likely to be bad than good. A shooting, a terrorist attack, a natural disaster, a man-made disaster—those are news. Things that are improvements, such as the decline in extreme poverty—which has been one of the most important events in the history of humanity—that extreme poverty has gone from 90% of humanity to less than 9%—the decline in crime, the decline in war, the gradual rise of human rights—those tend not to be reported in the news because they are not discrete events that happened on a Thursday morning in October. They creep up a few percentage points a year, and so they’re never reported. In fact, sometimes the reporting can convey the exact opposite impression. Imagine that you’ve got a curve that goes up, with occasional setbacks, and then up with a setback, and then up with a setback—and the only thing that gets reported is the setback, because it’s news. This year, for the first time in 10 years, life expectancy got shorter instead of longer. Well, if every time that happens there’s a new story, but there isn’t a new story about the nine years out of 10 in which life expectancy goes up—because it isn’t news, it’s the same as last year—then people get a systematically wrong impression about global trends. Finally, I mentioned that there is, on top of that, a negativity bias among journalists—but there’s a negativity bias in everyone, in that overall bad emotions are felt more strongly than good emotions. There’s a greater number of negative emotions than positive emotions. We remember the things that went wrong recently better than the things that went right. So human psychology is already tilted toward the negative. The very possibility of progress is a very recent development in human history. For thousands of years, there was imperceptible progress. People didn’t invent things. Things didn’t change. But over very short periods of time, the idea of a country getting better or the world getting better within the span of a human lifetime is something that only began to happen pretty much after the Industrial Revolution, itself following the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. So I don’t think our intuitions were prepared by evolution for the very concept of global long-term progress.
Steven Pinker74,903 次观看 • 3 个月前
"But what is a mental image? Not for the last time, I got caught up, when I was in graduate school, in a raging controversy called the imagery debate. And this was a debate over the format of mental imagery. Now, everyone reports the experience of a mental picture, and that’s the way we describe it in English. But, of course, there isn’t a real picture in the brain. It isn’t as if there’s a little man sitting in a theater who’s looking at a screen. The behaviorists were right about this. How do we make sense of what’s going on in people’s heads when they say they have a mental picture? The easiest way to make sense of it is to use the concept from computer science of an image file—basically, an array of pixels, as we would now call them. And my graduate advisor, Stephen Kosslyn, came up with what at the time was a revolutionary theory: that images were like image files in a computer." I'll be saying more about the workings of the human mind in February 2026 in Australia and New Zealand. Thinkable
Steven Pinker113,593 次观看 • 6 个月前
Me: I try to look at data and trends rather than headlines, because headlines can give you a misleading picture of the state of the world. Something goes wrong every day — that’s guaranteed — and if you just look at something goes wrong and say, oh, things are getting worse, you might be forgetting all the things that went wrong in the past. Andrew Marr: And what we call the news is a long litany of all the things that are getting worse or going wrong. Me: Well, yes, it’s much easier for something bad to happen suddenly than for something good to happen. Good things either creep up on you a few percentage points a year, and sometimes can compound. So the fact that, for example, extreme poverty in the world has been declining and a billion people have escaped extreme poverty over the last 30 years — but not on Thursday — so it was never an event from the news. One of the biggest events in human history is something that most people have never even heard of. Andrew Marr LBC
Steven Pinker100,848 次观看 • 6 个月前