Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
15 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 / 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.”
03 / belief
“I think that’s interesting because, as you say, it doesn’t result in war, and war would be much worse.”
04 / belief
“I think a somewhat different case, other than an utter lie, would be a genteel, benign hypocrisy, where you have a common pretense.”
05 / belief
“I think the most basic answer is that liberal enlightenment is not particularly intuitive.”
06 / belief
“Not stirring enough. I think we do have such thinkers. Oh, Derek Thompson, Maarten Boudry, Cathy Young.”
07 / belief
“We agree that the criteria are reasonable. We agree on everything that went on in both movies.”
08 / 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.”
09 / 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.”
10 / 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.”
11 / belief
“Our understanding of physics, I think, is good enough to rule out the possibility that dreams can be prophetic.”
12 / 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.”
13 / belief
“Most academics I think secretly watch TV as a guilty pleasure and then deny it. I’m the other way around.”
14 / 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.”
15 / 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.”