Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
belief 9evaluation 4recommendation 2prediction 2commitment 1uncertainty 1observation 1preference 1
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
The useful parts, with receipts.
21 published records
“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.”
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- Conversations with Tyler
“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.”
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- Conversations with Tyler
“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.”
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- Conversations with Tyler
“Then there’s abidden, and then there’s the noun, abidance, and I won’t go near any of those.”
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- Conversations with Tyler
“Our understanding of physics, I think, is good enough to rule out the possibility that dreams can be prophetic.”
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- Conversations with Tyler
“I think of you as believing more strongly in the powers of human reason than I do.”
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- Conversations with Tyler
“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.”
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- Conversations with Tyler
“Most academics I think secretly watch TV as a guilty pleasure and then deny it. I’m the other way around.”
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- Conversations with Tyler
“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.”
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- Conversations with Tyler
“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.”
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- Conversations with Tyler
“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.”
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- Conversations with Tyler
“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.”
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- Conversations with Tyler
“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.”
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- Conversations with Tyler
“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.”
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- Conversations with Tyler
“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.”
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- Conversations with Tyler
“We developed language because we had ideas that existed prior to our being able to articulate them, for which we coined words.”
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- Conversations with Tyler
“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.”
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- Conversations with Tyler
“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.”
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- Conversations with Tyler
“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.”
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- Conversations with Tyler
“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.”
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- Conversations with Tyler
“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.”
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- Conversations with Tyler