The Stuff of Thought | Steven Pinker | Talks at Google

…nalyzes the need for ambiguity in a language. I deep-linked into the relevant portion of the presentation although the the entire talk is very enlightening. It's worth rewinding to the beginning to watch the entire talk. The 2nd youtube video2 is the mostly the same material but it's the older one he presented at Google TechTalks. 1 link 2 link to this video…

For more on this topic, I recommend Steven Pinker's 2007 talk at Google. In the second part of it, Pinker tries to answer the question, "Why do people get so upset over certain words?"1 He falsifies some popular hypotheses and finds interesting commonalities across languages. Obviously, the video contains lots of swearing. 1. link to this video

I first encountered this story when Steven Pinker retold it at an Authors@Google talk: link to this video About 40 minutes in, Pinker talks about the psychology, linguistics, and game theory of bribery and talks for a few minutes about the article.

It has well-understood powers to fire off pain circuits in perfectly normal brains. Stephen Pinker gave a talk on the subject at Google a few years ago: link to this video Swear words are swear words because they actually are processed differently in your brain than regular propositional speech is. They're the linguistic counterpart of the emotional signals used by other social animals. The difference is that the sounds associated with our signalling systems are learned as part of language, rather than being hard-coded and instinctual. Hence, there's the possibility for different people to have their brains trained in different ways. So, for some people, the "f-word" may not have any ill effect, but do…

…ivelihoods. I'm not alone in this worry. As the article mentions, Sam Harris has cancelled his Patreon account. He's willing to forgo tens of thousands of dollars per month today rather than let his patronage grow and risk losing more in the future. That's quite the condemnation of Patreon's judgement and of similar policies by other companies. 1. link to this video…

…hy will recognize the use versus mention distinction."2 It's utterly bizarre that so many people today refuse to recognize this distinction. I think this video has only stayed up because nobody has brought it to the attention of the public. Pinker would never be able to give that talk today, and Google would never have uploaded it to YouTube. 1. link to this video 2. link to this video…

This reminds me of Steven Pinker's Tech Talk on taboo words link to this video He didn't say f* , he talked about saying f*