Is There a Prophecy in Dreams?

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No one's going to be giving up spanish or hindior russian or chinesen any time soon. The language doesn't change in terms of its y does change, but not quickly and usually not by deliberate engineering. In terms of the rest of our psychology, i don't think it's true that language determines your attitudes and beliefs, although it can push against them.

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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