Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence | Conversations with Tyler
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 1 พ.ย. 2016
- 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).
Transcript and links: conversationswithtyler.com/ep...
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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 am happy to see Tyler Cowen so willing to be refuted. I think Pinker positions are incredibly sensible. Very good conversation.
Eh yea but he thinks dreams are screen fever. Atheists never seem to have that good of an imagination
If i only had 25 seconds to show someone why Pinker is so awesome (20'20" - 20'45") would sum it up perfectly 😃
20:20 - 20:45
It's great hearing Pinker meet Cowen halfway by calling Chomsky a kind of cult leader
Wow...two of my favorite persons talking together...wow.
Exactly what I was thinking.
love the throwback to the 18th century with the "beethoven" hairdo
DivineBanana Steven is a cool cat. 🐱
That constant, subtle background noise is Stephen's luscious hair rubbing on the microphone stem.
And what about the eating sound??Jesus so annoying.
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.
Yeah that's why he's _suspicious_
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.
Easy to do then? 🤔
can you imagine a child wanting you to read better angels of our nature as a bedtime story lol
44:02 to 44:59 This is typically true about causing general effects on systems. Antisocial or destructive actions which go against the functionality of mechanical objects, systems of objects, groups of people, and individual's rights and wellbeing can be most easily accomplished by removing or altering any fundamentally entwined part of that system... It is much easier to throw a wrench into a set of gears than to design, machine, and set up a collection of interacting gears. The same is true for political maneuvering; it is often more politically effective to destabilize opponents by deriding their positions and public persona than to focus on building support for one's own functioning political stance on issues. I think this leads into the question of 'to what extent are people willing to protect others' rights and wellbeing and how do unusual cases of oppressive forces arise?' Meddling with other entities doings in unscrupulous ways can successfully allow for the prioritization of one's own goals if done so tacitly. These tacit kind of tactics bring into scope the limited amount of intelligence and understanding that frequently exists with the people inhabiting these socially dishonest and conniving roles within society who are intelligent enough to receive social attention but not intelligent enough to do so carefully and constructively.
Perhaps humans will more commonly reach plateaus of rationality and progress with how our technological landscapes develop. Just think about something like...TH-cam comments. Nobody intelligent ever reads or writes those meaningless rants.
Imagine a world exclusively populated with people of Pinker's intelligence and temperament.
:)
Oh I did - having a smoke now.
This is my sexual fantasy
I think Pinker is a genius and explains things so a normal person can understand.
which is what makes him dangerous. hes a cancer
King Chris just remember that is only your opinion..
just remember you would be of the same opinion if you read his book and reviewed his claims from a scientific standpoint. Pinker's entire argument is that world is experiencing a period of "long peace" due to structural change in the level of belligerence of humanity. Pinker is clearly not very versed in heavy-tailed distribution. There is a big difference between probability and expectation (drop in observed volatility/fluctualtion ≠ drop in risk) Pinker fails to understand this
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?
Dreaming is a big mystery but I'm guessing you have a very simplistic reductionist view like pinker. No imagination with atheists
The $10k bomb idea at 40:00 is a brainless question to pose. Pinker is excellent of course. His favorite tie, btw. :-)
I get what Tyler is getting at but we already have $10k bombs. They may not be nukes but they are damn powerful and they don't seem to go off very often.
"Enlightenment now" - so minutes 23 to 25 was where Pinker got the title for his future book from ?! Or Cowen that prescient? - Anyway, what an AMAZING conversation!
I am also intrigued by irregular verbs, but I didn't really hear any answer as to how "go" became "went" in the past....
SelfReflective As opposed to all the other irregular verbs that you have researched? It was the past form of the verb 'to wend' which meant 'to turn'. Google 'suppletion'.
I think Pinker is smarter than Chompsky, and he's a better speaker
John Morris You should edit that to avoid the irony.
Well, that is very subjective. I would go for Noam because of his entirely new window to looking at language.
nonsense. you have no clue what you're talking about.
He means the fictional detective dog, Chompsky.
Steven Pinker builds upon Noam Chomsky's foundational work.
anybody here who thinks Pinker is Rob Lowe with a wig?
Well Rob Lowe always has a wig according to The Interview
I clicked like but I don't see it
*Someone please* - have Steven Listen to *_"Cosmic Gypsies"_*
or anything else by artists like Jehst & Baintax/Taskforce, etc.
_You should check it, too_.
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.
I dont think anyone enjoyed this dialogue as much as I did
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-
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 really enjoy listening to Stephen Pinker and find agreement with much of what he says. Then you have statements at 18:19 that are just patently false. The certainty with which these opinions are presented is just not there even though he and Daniel Dennett would have you take their word for it.
It’s more a matter of personality at the end of the day as to what type of person chooses to see the world this way vs that way, no one can be correct about everything so it’s not really a knock against him. Just a shame to dismiss out of hand an entire genre of questions and problems that…to be frank…arguably more intelligent people have done and continue to take seriously.
We will likely move away from the mind as originating in biology, instead as emerging with quantum events. But we are not there yet.
Warning: do not watch while baked
These two are studs hands down. I hold polymaths in very high regard.
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.
I believe it's Stephen's luscious hair rubbing on the microphone stem.
I don't like a word that only seemed to find new life when covid hit, and that word is: COHORT. In my day, that was a deragatory term and I don't appreciate my grandchildren's peer group being called a cohort. We seem to eager today to catergorize people.
What does it say about Pinker that he gets so stumped by seemingly innocuous questions?
what a dumb question, nuclear weapons are not easy to blow up are they*?but the desires would be there
I agree. The question struck me as uncharacteristic of the usually thoughtful Cowen. Why choose a nuclear weapon? Imagine it's the year 1,000 AD, and I tell you that some day essentially anyone in the world will, with little difficulty, be able to obtain a handheld device no bigger than a sword or battleaxe but capable of instantly killing anyone within eyesight...how is that any different from Cowen's premise? Of course, I'm describing guns. Yet as Pinker has shown, the world is vastly more peaceful than it was in 1,000 AD. This despite the fact that any young college-age kid who spends their free-time enjoying virtual murder in video games can buy a gun cheaply more or less anywhere in the USA.... We've already seen the results of Cowen's thought experiment: the rates of violent crime in the US, as bad as it often seems, are absolutely utopian compared to the distant past. Cowen's insistence on the cost of destructive technology implies an absurd lack of awareness of this reality.
Totally agree, and 3/4 of the murders in the US are due to a dysfunctional, gang, sub culture. Society at large, I think, simply values life more. We no longer grow up seeing a large % of our childhood friends passing away from disease. It's no longer normal to lose our parents when they are 40. It happens but it isn't expected & we view it as tragic. I just went to my 20 year HS reunion. We had a graduating class of +/- 900 and we only lost 5 class members in 20 years.
The point I am getting at is it's now normal, and reasonable, to expect to live a full life of 70+ years. I think that's a big factor in society at large valuing life more & that increased value on life reduces index crime.
Underrated, overrated: 33:07
The illusion of welfarism live in the Netherlands, you are completely deluded about the other side of the spectrum. People starving to death.
Hmm, punted on the "biggest mistake" question. Tyler had him stumped. Not a good look for Pinker, especially the lame attempt to justify the punt. What, too much ammunition for your critics waiting in the shadows?
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.
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.
"There is telepathy. There is precognition.' Prove it. I think you are confusing it with intuition.
Oh look! It's the guy that made a career out of riding Chomsky's coat tails, how cute!
Yeah, like all those physicists riding the coat tails of Einstein and Planck. Why don't they come up with something original?
skuggi
I was referring to the interview where he says "My disagreement with Chomsky is..." and then he goes on to repeat Chomsky's linguistic theory verbatim.
A little hockey.
Got a link to that?
skuggi
Unfortunately no, it was a You Tube interview. He seems like a perfectly nice guy, but he was explaining his theory on linguistics, explaining that it was different from Chomsky's because.... then he went on to express word for word Chomsky's concept of an instinctive mental capacity which enables an infant to acquire and produce language...
I'll see if I can find it, it was a while back.
His recent work on "The Better Angels of Our Nature" seemed his attempt to wade into political theory. He expressed how puzzled he was at Chomsky's political ideas regarding "libertarian socialism", laughing at the fact that this was a "contradiction in terms"... which basically revealed Pinker didn't have the slightest idea of the topic he happened to be expounding about. Minimal research, even a basic google search could have cleared that up for him.
Hence confirming my opinion that although he seem like a perfectly nice guy, he does have quite a goofy, silly, sloppy thinking streak to him
sku