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The Latest Breaking News from Steven Pinker

Quote of the day by influential Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker: 'We will never have a perfect world, but...'-Life lessons on progress, optimism, reason, resilience, and building a better future

Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker argues against pervasive pessimism, asserting that humanity has made significant progress despite ongoing challenges. His core message, 'We will never have a perfect world, but it’s not overly romantic or naïve to work towards a better one,' emphasizes incremental improvements through reason and innovation. Pinker's work,…

The Economic Times

OPINION - Steven Pinker: Civilisation has been built on the exploration of cancellable ideas

Why are we so horrified by difficult topics, asks Steven Pinker

Evening Standard

How does ‘common knowledge’ shape our individual lives and our societies? Steven Pinker has some ideas

I don’t know about you, but ever since I can remember – from my early teens – I have been bemused about the endless rituals we humans perform; and even more so about what can and can’t be said about these rituals, especially when the rituals involve obvious hypocrisies or…

The Conversation

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OPINION - The real, sinister reason academics keep cancelling each other

Scarcely a week goes by without lecturers being cancelled, says Toby Young. Why?

Evening Standard

When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows by Steven Pinker review – communication, broken down

The Harvard psychologist on unwritten rules, social contracts, shared logic – and what happens when they fall apart

The Guardian - UK

Steven Rose obituary

Neuroscientist, author, political activist and advocate for social responsibility in science

The Guardian - UK

Harvard author Steven Pinker appears on podcast linked to scientific racism

Psychologist and writer’s appearance on Aporia condemned for helping to normalise ‘dangerous, discredited ideas’

The Guardian - US

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Steven Pinker: Can Harvard Be Saved?

The Harvard psychologist discusses recent gains for free speech at Harvard, growing political and ideological threats to academic freedom, and the importance of shared knowledge in sustaining truth and progress.

Reason

The Trump-Harvard showdown is the latest front in a long conservative war against academia

President’s attack on universities echoes efforts by Reagan and McCarthy – but experts say ‘we’re seeing much worse’

The Guardian - US

Why does music make us feel things?

Imagine a scene from the movie Jaws, with the great white shark closing in on another helpless victim. The iconic semi-tone pattern builds and your heartbeat rises with it; the suspense pulls you further to the edge of your seat.

The Conversation

In the age of AI, everybody could lose the right to anonymity

As AI’s capabilities grow, organizations must shift toward encryption-based methods to protect sensitive datasets.

TechRadar

Does history have lessons for the future? Roman Krznaric looks to the past to discover the rules for radical hope

Answers to the question about the lessons of history generally oscillate between two extremes. One is summed up in the 1905 aphorism of the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The other is the famous opening to the English novelist L.P.…

The Conversation

Steven Pinker: What Went Wrong at Harvard

The psychologist and bestselling author argues that Harvard's free speech policy was so "selectively prosecuted that it became a national joke."

Reason

Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie review – an optimist’s guide to the climate crisis

This book is full of pragmatic, hopeful solutions to environmental challenges. But is there something missing?

The Guardian - UK

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France 24

'Why Men': A criticism of the inevitability of male dominance

Our Perspective guests are two anthropologists who are challenging established critical thinking that violence, oppression and inequality are the natural order of things. They criticise the well-established work of professors like Steven Pinker, Jared Diamond, Yuval Noah Harari and Jordan Peterson – claiming that their views on male dominance being…

Evening Standard

Our fight for free speech: At first it was political correctness but now it’s the new McCarthyism

Standard launches major inquiry into silencing of debate and growing threat from cancel culture

Fortune

Bari Weiss, Joe Lonsdale, and Niall Ferguson have dreams of building a free speech school in Texas. Emails from a regulator reveal they aren’t authorized to call it a ‘college’

Aggressive timelines and initial missteps could throw a wrench in plans for the University of Austin.

Reason

'Now Is Better,' Says Legendary Designer Stefan Sagmeister

His bold new exhibition draws on the work of Steven Pinker, Our World in Data, and Human Progress to document how much life has improved since the good old days.

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news in one place.

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Salon

Sam Bankman-Fried and "longtermism"

I'm not surprised that longtermism led to fraud, corruption and disaster. I'm mostly surprised it wasn't worse

The Conversation

Doomsday bunkers, Mars and 'The Mindset': the tech bros trying to outsmart the end of the world

Douglas Rushkoff’s newest book, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, grew out of a brilliant 2018 Medium article of the same name, which went viral and had people (aka his US editor) clamouring for a full-length treatment.

The Guardian - UK

Despite climate, war and Covid, is everything actually … getting better?

The psychologist Steven Pinker has long believed we should be more optimistic – and even current crises do not dissuade him

The Guardian - US

Google engineer says AI bot wants to ‘serve humanity’ but experts dismissive

Blake Lemoine claims of sentience for artificial intelligence bot described as ‘ball of confusion’ by Steven Pinker

The Guardian - UK

‘I’m certainly open to criticism’: David Wengrow and the trouble with rewriting human history

Wengrow and his late co-author David Graeber caused a sensation with their revisionist view of humankind’s development. But then came the attacks…

Reason

Book Review: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

Early cities' concentrated populations and burgeoning scale didn't spontaneously summon pharaonic god-kings or bureaucrats.

Reason

Faisal Saeed Al Mutar, Melissa Chen: Bringing Enlightenment Values to the Middle East

The co-founders of Ideas Beyond Borders talk about bringing Steven Pinker and John Stuart Mill to an audience dying for them.

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