Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
37 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“There could be a direct link between a public conspicuous signal and the desire to coordinate. I think you’re right.”
02 / uncertainty
“I don’t know whether it’s that linguists themselves have not made themselves useful enough, have not been part of the conversation, or the cynical view is linguistics has just been on the wrong track and it has nothing to contribute.”
03 / belief
“I think part of the understanding of the story is that children, being naive and innocent about certain conventions and norms that govern adult life, often do blurt out truths; they don’t have the same internal payoff structure that adults do.”
04 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if you could talk about the prior probability of a preference, but when it comes to just the brute force gut feeling, look, I just don’t like chocolate, that would be a case where it isn’t irrational to not share those priors.”
05 / belief
“I think that’s interesting because, as you say, it doesn’t result in war, and war would be much worse.”
06 / belief
“I think a somewhat different case, other than an utter lie, would be a genteel, benign hypocrisy, where you have a common pretense.”
07 / belief
“I think the most basic answer is that liberal enlightenment is not particularly intuitive.”
08 / commitment
“I won’t. I’m one of those freaks who just does not enjoy the taste of chocolate.”
09 / belief
“Not stirring enough. I think we do have such thinkers. Oh, Derek Thompson, Maarten Boudry, Cathy Young.”
10 / belief
“We agree that the criteria are reasonable. We agree on everything that went on in both movies.”
11 / commitment
“” I just know that that’s not true because I have records from performance on my multiple-choice test in my intro psych course, which I’ve taught for more than 20 years.”
12 / prediction
“I don’t know if it was Aumann himself, it may have been, I think, Geanakoplos, who pointed out the corollary of Aumann’s theorem, which sounds totally counterintuitive, even crazy, is that rational agents should not engage in speculative trade.”
13 / prediction
“The reason, of course, being that it would be considered an affront, a challenge to China’s sense of authority, prestige, standing, preeminence, because it stakes a claim to all of historic China, which, if it was explicitly breached by formally recognizing Taiwan, it would be a challenge to China’s authority.”
14 / evaluation
“I think there’s a lot of interplay in human life between this recursive mentalizing, that is, thinking about other people thinking about other people, and the intuitive sense that something is out there, and therefore people do know that other people know it, even if you don’t have to consciously work that through.”
15 / evaluation
“In general, something that finds the truth, it’s got that going for it, and universalism, namely that if liberal enlightenment depends on universal human rights, the maximization of human interests, the fact that we’re ultimately birds of a feather, we all want to be alive rather than dead, that there is something logically incoherent in saying, “I deserve rights because I’m me and you don’t because you’re not me.”
16 / prediction
“” If there’s some point in the landscape that commends itself as something that is salient enough, obvious enough, recommends itself, like in Schelling’s example, he guessed that the couple would meet at the clock in the middle of Grand Central Station at noon, even if it wasn’t where they would have been separated, simply because if you have to pick some place, what place are you going to pick?”
17 / evaluation
“As Schelling notes, because he noted this is very fragile, he said this is the point when it comes to actually choosing what we now call a Schelling point, common salience, this is where game theory, rational analysis, logic, leave off, and human whimsy, caprice, even poetry, take over.”
18 / evaluation
“I think a lot of the shaming mobs, a lot of the trolling, a lot of the degradation of discourse in social media comes because of that anonymity.”
19 / belief
“I’m writing a book whose tentative title is The New Enlightenment: A Manifesto for Science, Reason, Humanism, and Progress, where I argue that the enlightenment philosophers got a lot of stuff right, that a lot of their dreams are starting to come true, that a lot of dimensions of human well-being, when quantified as I tried to do in The Better Angels of Our Nature, turn out to be going in a good direction — that a lot of aspects of human life are improving.”
20 / belief
“If you Google “false allure of group selection” or “Pinker group selection,” you’ll see that I have pretty strong opinions on that. I think that the idea of group selection is a big blunder.”
21 / belief
“One distinction that is vanishing that I think is sad is the three-way distinction in verbs like sink, sank, sunk; stink, stank, stunk; shrink, shrank, shrunk; where the shrank and the stank are giving way to their participle forms shrunk and stunk.”
22 / belief
“Our understanding of physics, I think, is good enough to rule out the possibility that dreams can be prophetic.”
23 / belief
“How we could set up the rules so that despite all of the quirks of human nature — such as intellectual tribalism — are overcome in our collective arena of discourses is, I think, an absolutely vital question, and I just don’t know the answer because we’re seeing at the same time — there was the hope 20 years ago that the Internet would break down the institutional barriers to the best ideas emerging.”
24 / belief
“Most academics I think secretly watch TV as a guilty pleasure and then deny it. I’m the other way around.”
25 / belief
“People can be made more rational, I think he would say, and I would say — by the act of what we’re doing now, that is, exploring implications of ideas; by science, that is, by taking your beliefs and allowing reality to refute them or not; and historically, even though it’s true that people do all kinds of crazy things, subject to all kinds of irrational prejudices, passions, and so on.”
26 / belief
“Indeed, the idea that the worst aspects of this particular primate — namely, we evolved in such a way that we are too quick to anger, too quick to defend our dominance — that that’s the only way for intelligence to evolve I think is parochial.”
27 / uncertainty
“I don’t know. My optimism doesn’t consist of prophecy in that sense. That is, my optimism consists of looking at what has happened and noting that, first of all, the pessimistic view is factually incorrect.”
28 / recommendation
“Admittedly it would have been hard to have a movie called Honey, I Shrank the Kids instead of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. In my style manual, The Sense of Style, I recommend hanging on to them.”
29 / evaluation
“In fact, as I point out in The Sense of Style, the two most famous style guides in the English language, namely Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, both accidentally use the passive in the very sentence in which they say “don’t use the passive.”
30 / recommendation
“It can be studied scientifically the way other phenomena are studied. That it’s good to understand human nature because then we can discount, when necessary, illusions that are quirks of our own makeup.”
31 / observation
“Politically motivated campaigns to change language can have an effect, as we see in what I call the euphemism treadmill — that is, the fact that we don’t use the word negro anymore, even though it was a perfectly respectful and unexceptionable term through the 1970s.”
32 / prediction
“We developed language because we had ideas that existed prior to our being able to articulate them, for which we coined words.”
33 / prediction
“The philosophical problem of sentience or qualia or (sometimes called) the hard problem of consciousness I think might ultimately be a quirk of our own way of analyzing the world — that is, the mind reflecting on itself is naturally going to be puzzled by some aspects of itself.”
34 / evaluation
“Linguistics is an eccentric field in some ways partly because it was so polarized by a charismatic figure [Noam Chomsky] and his opponents that it didn’t proceed in the ordinary direction of making the theory more precise, more testable.”
35 / evaluation
“There are ugly attitudes, and there always will be: there is a benevolent hypocrisy and taboo where there are certain things that you just don’t say in public because that does legitimate them.”
36 / preference
“I love linguistic detail for its own sake, but I chose that topic because I thought it shed light on bigger issues of cognitive organization.”
37 / evaluation
“I’m rooted enough in what we know about behavioral genetics to think that these science-fiction scenarios are not particularly productive. It’s probably a scenario that we’re not going to have to worry about just because it’s too complicated, especially since every time you monkey with a gene you are taking some chance that something will go wrong.”