Steve Pinker's Informed Argument Against Intelligent Extra-Terrestrial Life
The most common line of reasoning about extra-terrestrial life says it has to be there because there's so much universe - however low you calculate the probabilities of intelligent life arising, it's still a virtual certainty. However, this leads to the Fermi Paradox: If the universe must be teeming with intelligent life, Where is everyone?... (read more)
"We are species built on tribe; yet we live increasingly alone in societies so vast and populous our ancestors would not recognize them; we are a species built on religious ritual to appease our existential angst, and yet we now live in a world where every individual has to create her own meaning from scratch."... (read more)
This isn't a thorough survey of this book and its arguments, but it's a good sample. And, critically, I suggest Pinker brings some direly needed evidence-based analysis to our conversation about politics and the human condition - overshadowing even his prior book in telling the most important human story not nearly enough people know.... (read more)
News headline you won't see today: "NUMBER OF PEOPLE IN EXTREME POVERTY FELL BY 137,000 SINCE YESTERDAY." You also didn't see it each day for the last 25 years, on each day of which it was also true. ... (read more)
You find certain writers who when they write, it makes your own brain voice like a tuning fork, and you just resonate with them. And when that happens, reading those writers becomes a source of unbelievable joy. And I sometimes have a hard time understanding how people who don't have that in their lives make it through the day.... (read more)
So I recently had occasion to re-read Steve Pinker's How the Mind Works. It is, I genuinely believe, the most important book of the 20th century.... (read more)
So anyone who knows me well knows that Steven Pinker is one of my intellectual heroes.... (read more)