Steven Pinker

There is a lovely technical term for a word that appears once in a body of text: a hapax legomenon (plural: hapax legomena), Greek for “once said.” The term comes from philology, the study of old texts.

A memorized chunk is sometimes called a listeme, that is, an item that has to be memorized as part of a list; one can argue that this book ought to have been called Listemes and Rules.

The flip side of failing to recall an irregular form is tripping a false alarm for one when the verb is in fact regular. Word lookup is not instantaneous, and as it proceeds a few irregular verbs in memory might crudely match a regular probe. That could temporarily slow down the rule until the last jots and tittles of the word are properly matched and the false matches have petered out; only then will the rule be allowed to proceed unhindered.

They are more sympathetic to immigration, free markets, and free trade, and less sympathetic to protectionism, make-work policies, and government intervention in business.

Dean Simonton has developed several historiometric measures that are reliable and valid (in the psychometrician's technical sense) and politically nonpartisan.

Morality […] is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games.

Richard Wrangham has noted that the domestication of animals usually tames them by slowing down components of the developmental timetable to retain juvenile traits into adulthood, a process called pedomorphy or neoteny.

But if the natural carnivory of other species counts for something, why not the natural carnivory of Homo sapiens […] ?

The Marine Corps has instituted a martial-arts program in which leathernecks are indoctrinated in a new code of honor, the Ethical Marine Warrior.

Southerners do not outkill northerners in homicides carried out during robberies, they found, only in those sparked by quarrels.

The periaqueductal gray contains circuits that control the sensorimotor components of rage.

This flowchart suggested by the neuroanatomy corresponds fairly well with what psychologists see in the clinic and lab.

The Origin of Species was published in 1859, long after romantic struggleism had become a popular philosophy, and Darwin himself was a thoroughgoing liberal humanist.

Language is not a protocol legislated by an authority but rather a wiki that pools the contributions of millions of writers and speakers, who ceaselessly bend the language to their needs and who inexorably age, die, and get replaced by their children, who adapt the language in their turn.

It was ironic I forgot my textbook on human memory.

People have long given thought to the causes of danger and how they might be forfended.

By the way, the nonmonotonicity of social data provides an easy formula for news outlets to accentuate the negative.

Far from being better informed, heavy newswatchers can become miscalibrated.

The dataphobic mindset (“It's not like that in Burkina Faso”) can lead to real tragedy.

The political philosopher John Gray, an avowed progressophobe, has described the contemporary societies of Western Europe as “terrains of violent conflict” in which “peace and war [are] fatally blurred.

Should we worry about a world of stodgy multicentenarians who will resist the innovations of ninety-something upstarts and perhaps ban the begetting of pesky children altogether?

Cancer therapies can be narrowcasted to the unique genetic signature of a tumor instead of poisoning every dividing cell in the body.

Another is the rise of technophilanthropists. Instead of just writing checks for the naming rights to concert halls, they apply their ingenuity, connections, and demand for results to the solution of global problems.

Some tyrannophiles were Marxists, working on the time-honored principle "He may be an SOB, but he's our SOB."

Though the programs will surely get better, there are no signs of foom.