Steven Pinker
@sapinker
Cognitive scientist at Harvard.
Why do people hoard toilet paper at the first sign of an emergency? Why are Super Bowl ads filled with ads for crypto? Why, in American presidential primary voting, do citizens typically select the candidate they believe is preferred by others rather than their favorite? Why…
Can Alan Garber Save Harvard? (We're hoping so!) - The Atlantic theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
Released today: Anyone who is opposed to shutting people up by force is bound to be faced with arguments that suppressing speech isn’t so bad after all. But these arguments were considered and rejected decades ago, and this is a perfect handy guide on how to answer them, by a…
Proudly announcing today's publication of THE WAR ON WORDS by Greg Lukianoff & Nadine Strossen. Buy your copy here: skyhorsepublishing.com/9781949846829/…
Today's AI models, after being pre-trained on pretty much the entirety of the Web, and fine-tuned to give coherent responses to user questions, are subject to Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (somewhere BF Skinner is smiling). The problem is that the binary…
The Demographic and Health Surveys brought crucial data for more than 90 countries — without them, we risk darkness - And in another combination of stupidity and malice, the Trump administration is defunding it. @salonium Our World in Data ourworldindata.org/demographic-he…
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A new kind of psychotherapy: More Our World in Data, less CNN. ourworldindata.org
Homicides - Our World in Data ourworldindata.org/homicides
Carbon intensity: CO₂ emissions per dollar of GDP (not the same as emissions, of course, since GDP increases, but evidence that affluence need not be locked to emissions). ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-in…
Literacy - Our World in Data ourworldindata.org/literacy
Extreme poverty: How far have we come, and how far do we still have to go? - Our World in Data ourworldindata.org/extreme-povert…
Is the State of the World Causing You Pain (Weltschmerz)? I've long noticed how underreporting of quantifiable progress (poverty, longevity, education, many environmental measures) can impair mental health, resulting in fatalism and helplessness. nautil.us/is-the-state-o…
Why people fall for Nazi apologetics and other distortions of history: The Infinite Complexity of History, by @dgardner open.substack.com/pub/dgardner/p…
The Low-Cost Tools & Protocol Saving Mothers from Postpartum hemorrhage: Ideas save lives. gatesfoundation.org/ideas/articles…
