Do You Think Public Speech Is Now Evolving to Become Less Polite in America?

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Do you think public speech is now evolving to become less polite in america? It's possible that. A, a, the trumpism has shows that our attitudes have ange - but i kind of hope so. I think tt, there is a benign taboo against a overly racis and msognistic in homophobic language. We saw that with taboo words for sexuality,. starting in the sixties, that words that you just could not say in print or on air waves are now common.

Steven Pinker has spent an entire academic career thinking deeply about language, cognition, and human nature. Driving it all, he says, is an Enlightenment belief that the world is intelligible, science can progress, and through rational inquiry we can better understand ourselves.

He recently joined Tyler for a conversation not only on the power of reason, but also the economics of irrational verbs, whether violence will continue to decline, behavioral economics, existential threats, the merits of aerobic exercise, photography, group selection, Fermi’s paradox, Noam Chomsky, universal grammar, free will, the Ed Sullivan show, and why people underrate the passive (or so it is thought).

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