Steven Pinker

There are books on it. Just quick search found sources. Believe to narrow down what is meant by violence , it is all violent deaths, by war or murder. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/history-and-the-decline-of-… https://stevenpinker.com/publications/better-angels-our-nature https://fivebooks.com/best-books/decline-violence-steven-pinker/

> Graeber’s last book, The Dawn of Everything, does a great job of dispelling a lot of these “brutal and short” notions as mostly ideological myths Anyone casting this as settled science immediately attracts scrutiny. Our data from the epoch are spotty. But there is evidence it was very violent on a per-capita basis [1]. [1] https://stevenpinker.com/reviews-better-angels-our-nature

I love this list. An additional resource I would add to it is Steven Pinker's "Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century"[0]. Pinker's book advocates for the same classical style as Williams and Thomas & Turner. But Pinker also offers a deep dive into grammar, linguistics, and word choice (Pinker is a member of the American Heritage Dictionary's Usage Panel[1]) One other note: Joseph Williams's "Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace" is available in roughly infinite editions under similar titles. PDFs of some of those titles are available for free online. [0]: <https://stevenpinker.com/publications/sense-style-thinking-persons-gui… [1]: <https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/usagepanel.html>

I really wanted to follow this class taught by Steven Pinker [1] recently, but the audio becomes so bad after the first lecture that it's almost impossible to follow. It made me also think that there could probably be some interesting post-processing applied, to improve the quality. [1] https://stevenpinker.com/classes/psychological-science-science-living-…

Coursera is great but you're going to miss a lot of opportunities by limiting yourself to just that platform. For instance, it hasn't been widely advertised, but you can essentially take Steven Pinker's 2020 course at Harvard on Rationale: https://stevenpinker.com/classes/rationality-gened-1066 There's upwards of 20 hours of video on this course alone. You don't get that kind of depth from most Coursera MOOCs. Further, the syllabus helps narrow down a vast subject to a few months of effort and there is no better design for learning it. Critical reasoning skills are essential! Why not learn from one of the great thinkers on the subject? This course has the potential of ascending to the upper echelon of MOOCs. I really hope that the content doesn't get taken down. It doesn't seem downloadable..

Pinker has explicitly said that is a misinterpretation of his book: > The upshot is that each of the following two assertions can be true: (1) the chances of war are lower than they were before, and (2) the damage caused by the most severe imaginable war is greater than it was before. That makes it meaningless—an issue of semantics—to speculate about whether the world is “safer” overall; in one sense it may be safer, in another sense, less safe. That is exactly why Better Angels does not claim, contra Taleb, that the world is “safer” across the board. https://stevenpinker.com/files/comments_on_taleb_by_s_pinker.pdf

Pinker's comments on Taleb's critique are worth a read, available here: http://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/comments_on_taleb_by_s_pink…

https://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/pinker_comments_on_lead_re… Steven pinker makes some good points in this short essay why there should be more skepticism towards this hypothesis: “ Also, the parallelism in curves for lead and time-shifted crime seem too good to be true, since the lead hypothesis assumes that the effects of lead exposure are greatest in childhood. But 23 years after the first lower-lead cohort, only a small fraction of the crime-prone cohort should be lead-free; there are still all those lead-laden young adults who have many years of crime ahead of them. Only gradually should the crime-prone demographic sector be increasingly populated by lead-free kids. The time-shifted curve for crime should be an attenuated, smeared version of the curve for lead, not a perfect copy of it. Also, the effects of age on crime are not sharply peaked, with a spike around the 23rd birthday, and a sharp falloff—it’s a very gentle bulge spread out over the 15-30 age range. So you would not expect such a perfect time-shifted overlap as you might, for example, for first-grade reading performance, where the measurement is so restricted in time.” I’m also not convinced on your point about crime in California. The police have essentially ceased prosecuting many of those petty crimes. It makes sense that they would go up with no deterrence.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned anything about "Black Swans" yet. There's an alternative view point on why this optimism may be misplaced. Basically, just because small effects (average levels of violence) are being smoothed out and minimized, does not imply that tail-end effects -- such as nuclear wars, large genocides, etc -- will not occur. Some people argue that the former may even raise the odds of the latter through artificial constriction until tensions reach a boiling point. A big proponent of this type of thinking is Nassim Taleb, most notably in his book Antifragile. > Cirillo and Taleb also found no evidence that wars cluster together, as earthquakes and episodes of financial volatility are known to do. Rather, big wars follow no trend and simply occur with equal likelihood through time. Doing the statistics right, they argue, shows that the recent peaceful past is almost certainly causing us to seriously underestimate how much violent conflict we're likely see in the future. [1] There's an interesting back-and-forth between Taleb and Pinker on this topic, here are some links: http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf http://stevenpinker.com/files/comments_on_taleb_by_s_pinker.pdf [1] - http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-05-18/is-the-world-getting-…

In reply, I say bravo for trying to become a better writer. And if English is not your native language, don't become discouraged too soon if your progress seems slow at first. I've been very impressed by the English writing here of some people who plainly grew up speaking some other language in a non-English-speaking country. Keep practicing, and you will become better. For specific writing advice, I recommend the new book The Sense of Style[1] by Steven Pinker, which is about not just fussy rules of English but also about THINKING in a way that helps improve writing. I will have to practice with the ideas in that book for a long time. For specific advice on improving English, I have some tips I've shared before here on Hacker News that other readers have liked. As I learned Mandarin Chinese up to the level that I was able to support my family for several years as a Chinese-English translator and interpreter, I had to tackle several problems for which there is not yet a one-stop-shopping software solution. For ANY pair of languages, even closely cognate pairs of West Germanic languages like English and Dutch, or Wu Chinese dialects like those of Shanghai and Suzhou, the two languages differ in sound system, so that what is a phoneme in one language is not a phoneme in the other language. http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPhonem… But a speaker of one language who is past the age of puberty will simply not perceive many of the phonemic…

It's a remnant of the woke era, and I expect and hope it will go the way of Latinx. The (foolish) idea was that the word "blind" has a negative charge, so if we replace it with another word the stigma will go away, and blind people can feel better. But of course, any stigma comes from the blindness itself. Any replacement term will get the same stigma, and will then need to be replaced. Stephen Pinker called it "The Euphemism Treadmill" in 1994, and that term has never been replaced: https://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/1994_04_03_newyorktimes.pd…

Pinker’s Stuff of Thought made a good case against this argument. https://stevenpinker.com/publications/stuff-thought-language-window-hu…

Looked up the Steven Pinker article and it was an interesting read. Written in 1994 but could have been written yesterday. [PDF]https://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/1994_04_03_newyorktimes.pd…

Steven Pinker's PSY, Introduction to Psychological Science is very interesting and entertaining: https://stevenpinker.com/psy-1-introduction-psychological-science-lect…

I liked the approach of Pinker's book "A Sense of Style": https://stevenpinker.com/publications/sense-style-thinking-persons-gui… He gives writing tips based in how the mind works. Instead of a bunch of rigid rules, you can understand it based in cognitive theory.

I personally preferred The Better Angels of our Nature [0] as a deeper look focusing on the assorted statistics. Enlightenment Now recycles a lot of it and summarizes. There's some minor updates as well. [0] https://stevenpinker.com/publications/better-angels-our-nature

The world is generally getting more peaceful. A smaller percentage of people are dying by violence than ever before. https://stevenpinker.com/publications/better-angels-our-nature

The sad thing is that once they find a substitute term it will eventually be considered problematic too. This is the "euphemism treadmill." [1] [1] -https://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/1994_04_03_newyorktimes.pd…

Did you read Pinker's reply to Fodor, the "some guy at MIT"? https://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/so_how_does_the_mind_work.… Seems like a solid retort, however this field is not specialty.

Pinker writes a useful explanation: > A process called nominalization takes a perfectly spry verb and embalms it into a lifeless noun by adding a suffix like –ance, –ment, or –ation. Instead of affirming an idea, you effect its affirmation; rather than postponing something, you implement a postponement. Helen Sword calls them "zombie nouns" because they lumber across the scene without a conscious agent directing their motion.[0] There is a lot more detail in his book "Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century" [0]: https://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/why_academics_stink_at_wri…

Have you read Steven Pinker's Sense of Style? https://stevenpinker.com/publications/sense-style-thinking-persons-gui… I was thinking about reading it but it's hard to find reviews of the book that don't include praise or criticism of Pinker's other work or the author himself.

The word has negative connotations because you're describing a very negative thing. If you suddenly decide to use a new word, it will also inevitably develop negative connotations. Stephen Pinker explains it well: https://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/1994_04_03_newyorktimes.pd…

I get what you're saying and share your idealism. But you've been the beneficiary of many, many guns. And much violence. So while you may sound good, it's not based in reality. Regardless, violence is relatively at a historically all-time low[1]. [1] https://stevenpinker.com/pages/frequently-asked-questions-about-better…

The findings in this article seem to contradict findings from other reputable sources, e.g.: * https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace#the-share-of-battle-deaths-is… * https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace#war-and-peace-after-1945 * https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace#counting-world-conflict-death… * https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/08/ourworldindata_percentage-o… Also: * https://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/has_the_decline_of_violenc…

Well, it would be extraordinarily difficult to argue that he is only, or even primarily, a pop-science writer. If you take a look at his CV you see that he is clearly an expert in his field with plenty of work directed at scientific audience: https://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/cv_steven_pinker_updated_s…

"The bomb? The plague? Trump? Not to worry; things are getting better."[0] Comparing Trump to nuclear bombs and plagues does not seem a good idea to start a conversation about reason, science, humanism, and progress. [0]https://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/kirkus_review_of_elightenm…

There has been lots of contention around this topic. I personally agree with the contrary and Steven Pinkers position. You can see him refute Taleb's claims here: http://stevenpinker.com/files/comments_on_taleb_by_s_pinker.pdf

It's really saddening to see that the idea that humans are not a blank slate[1] is considered a "tedious flamewar topic" while articles such the one that started this thread this are not. Not everything is a product of society and there's a mountain of science to support the fact. It's increasingly politically untenable (at least in the anglosphere) to acknowledge any biological differences between demographic groups, but that's weak reason for shutting down discussion. 1) http://stevenpinker.com/publications/blank-slate

For those interested in the Steven Pinker article, "Why Academics Stink at Writing", and are looking to avoid the paywall, here's the direct link to PDF from his website: http://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/why_academics_stink_at_writ…

... and then read Pinker's reply http://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/comments_on_taleb_by_s_pink… TLDR: The book’s structure was lost on Taleb, who blends the different chapters and then criticizes his own confusion.