Stephen Pinker - Is There a Book on Your Shelf?

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Stephen pinker: I am obsessed about the difference in weight, in grams, between various kinds of derailer anda water bottle cage. Do you think that we are on track for more linguistic homageneity? We almost certainly are. i don't think it will result in everyone speaking english. Under the most dire predictions say 90 % of languages go extinct. That leaves 600.

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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