i've been trying to figure out what's the underlying unity in the thought and writing of stephen pinker, from irregular verbs to world peace. So i see you was very often trying to stake out a midway position. You're trying to create some kind of intermediate position where there's room for reason to operate, but within laws of nature. And that's what i took away from the whole corpuse of stephen hinker. But tell me, what does your take on that? I think that'sa, no, not too far from the way i would see myself,. Not so much in taking intermediate positions, justin find the goldilock zone. Like all the truth
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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