L ast month, Steven Pinker published Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. The book represents yet another milestone in the author’s slide from world-renowned linguist ...

Mr Pinker, a professor at Harvard, has a lot to get off his chest. His previous book, “Enlightenment Now”, a paean to reason’s role in history, had a mixed reception in 2018.

The world is getting better, says Steven Pinker. Naivety and optimism are two sides of the same coin in the human mind.

Pinker dismissed extreme doomsday scenarios, such as AI dominating or accidentally wiping out humanity, highlighting that these concerns often stem from anthropomorphizing AI and misconceptions about ...

Steven Pinker on human development, economics, academic freedom Dr. Steven Pinker, Harvard psychologist, discusses driving social, political, and economic progress, promoting academic freedom, and ...

In Pinker’s hands, we do not feel ordered around capriciously, but truly guided by an inspiring teacher. He was interviewed by Gareth Cook, the editor of Scientific American 's Mind Matters.

Pinker was born in 1954 in Montreal, and raised in that bilingual city’s English-speaking Jewish community (his sister, Susan, is also a psychologist, of the clinical rather than research variety).

Pinker argues that science has essentially settled the worldview issue. There is no god, minds are emergent properties of brains, and we humans have no a priori purpose, but must construct what we ...

Despite Pinker’s bombastic declaration in his preface that he “knew of no book that tried to explain them all,” a great deal of “Rationality” repackages (with due credit) the pioneering ...

Pinker blames Karl Marx, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong for most of the 20th century’s catastrophes, ignoring Marx’s use of En­lightenment principles like the critique of religion and the ...

Pinker: I do, too, though I think Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young would disagree with us! Porch: Nathan Heller dinged you in The New Yorker for having what he considered a loose approach to usage ...

In this way, Pinker says, emoji provide a clarity of signal. As anybody who has had a flareup with their partner can attest, texts don't always land in the way intended.