understanding Quotes

The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero.

Climate change could produce a lot of misery and waste without necessarily leading to large-scale armed conflict, which depends more on ideology and bad governance than on resource scarcity.

You can't hear a word and just hear it as raw sound; it always evokes an associated meaning and emotion in the brain.

People today sometimes get uncomfortable with empirical claims that seem to clash with their political assumptions, often because they haven't given much thought to the connections.

I think the reason that swearing is both so offensive and so attractive is that it is a way to push people's emotional buttons, and especially their negative emotional buttons. Because words soak up emotional connotations and are processed involuntarily by the listener, you can't will yourself not to treat the word in terms of what it means.

I have never been a fan of science fiction. For me, fiction has to explore the combinatorial possibilities of people interacting under the constraints imposed by our biology and history. When an author is free to suspend the constraints, it's tennis without a net.

The human capacity for compassion is not a reflex that is triggered automatically by the presence of another living thing.

Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?

The way to understand how different species evolved is to think about the niches that they fill in an ecosystem - basically, how they make a living.

Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual.