Category Archives: Steven Pinker

The Latest from Steven Pinker

Posted on 22 March 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

Today, a long interview with Steven Pinker about ‘progress’ despite human nature; about the value of rationality; about looking at data and not headlines to understand the state of the world; about cancel culture; about the perils and inevitability of … Continue reading →

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Steven Pinker: RATIONALITY (2021)

Posted on 12 December 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Pinker, Steven. Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. Viking, 2021 I realize I’ve never written up a book by Steven Pinker on this blog, though I’ve read several and I think Pinker is one of … Continue reading →

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Steven Pinker on Knowledge and Education

Posted on 19 April 2018 by Mark R. Kelly

From Steven Pinker’s ENLIGHTENMENT NOW, chapter 16, Knowledge, p233: The supernova of knowledge continuously redefines what it means to be human. Our understanding of who we are, where we came from, how the world works, and what matters in life … Continue reading →

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Links and Comments: Sports and Trump; Pinker and Gates; Tribal Allegiance and Actual Progress

Posted on 3 February 2018 by Mark R. Kelly

NYT, 3Feb18: Trump’s Blood Sport Politics. The writer recalls “”The Sporting Spirit,” an essay written by George Orwell in 1945 that sought to reckon with the rise of our modern athletic-industrial complex.” For Orwell, the rise of sports was bound … Continue reading →

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Passages from Pinker

Posted on 17 November 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

As a palette cleanser from my last post, here are some thoughts from my ongoing reading of Steven Pinker’s THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE, a history of the world with focus on violence, that summarizes that history through phases: … Continue reading →

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Steven Pinker’s THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE, Chapters 2 and 3.

Posted on 18 October 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

More on Steven Pinker’s magisterial 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined — one of the best books of the 21st century, surely — that takes a long-range view of human history to show that … Continue reading →

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Pinker: Better Angels: Chapter 1: A Foreign Country

Posted on 12 September 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

“If the past is a foreign country, it is a shockingly violent one.” This 30-page chapter is “tour” of the past, from 8000 BCE to the 1970s, an impressionist portrait of how violence was so common in the past, compared … Continue reading →

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Pinker: Better Angels: Passages and Outline from the Preface

Posted on 6 September 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

This is Steven Pinker’s big 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, that takes a long-range view of human history to show that the human condition, over millennia and especially in recent centuries and decades, … Continue reading →

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