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Author Topic: Steven Pinker appreciation thread.  (Read 493 times)

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Offline Yuri Bezmenov

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Steven Pinker appreciation thread.
« on: March 01, 2015, 11:55:16 AM »
For those of you not familliar with Steven Pinker, he's an experimental psychologist and proponent of evolutionary psychology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker

He also does videos on social psychology and sociology. Interesting stuff.


Offline Walkie

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Re: Steven Pinker appreciation thread.
« Reply #1 on: March 01, 2015, 01:27:02 PM »
I'm always a lttle bit wary of proponents of evolutionary psychology. But that's Dawkin's fault, basically, for being such a pompous ass.  It's an interesting field.

I watched the vid and was surprised and disappointed that it wasn't really about  Evolutionary psychology.

I was curious to notice that when asked about whether we live in "dangerous times" his answer was totally focussed on people directly and deliberately killing each other, as in war, as if that's the only danger humans face.  I instantly thought about environmental disasters such as tsunamis; economic threats such as  danger of homelessness/starvation/hypothermia  due to loss of income  ; danger to health from environmental toxins...

No, I'm not saying that if you assess all these dangers and add  them  together, you'll concude that we do, indeed live in comparatively dangerous times.  It's just curious that his concept of "danger" is so narrow. 

For a lot of people, it's the very rational prospect of those environmental and economic dangers getting worse and worse that leads us to feel that we're living in dangerous times. Plus the incalculable threat of increasing technologogical advances, of course.  Modern man has learned that new advances mean new ways to kill people en mass, and that there's no assessing that particular  danger until somebody , somewhere decides to unleash it.

He mentioned the Cuban missile crisis as an  example of how life was more dangerous in the 20th Century.  Poor example.   I'd say that the Cuban Missile Crisis is part of a chain of historic events that's inevitably led  to modern's man's all-too-rational sense of insecurity.



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« Last Edit: March 01, 2015, 06:19:20 PM by DrunkardsWalk »

Offline odeon

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Re: Steven Pinker appreciation thread.
« Reply #2 on: March 01, 2015, 02:57:44 PM »
Haven't seen any of his videos but I have one of his books.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."

- Albert Einstein

Offline Yuri Bezmenov

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Re: Steven Pinker appreciation thread.
« Reply #3 on: January 30, 2019, 02:31:02 PM »
Haven't seen any of his videos but I have one of his books.

That book obviously isn't The Blank Slate.   :hahaha: