The Power of Common Knowledge: Steven Pinker on Language, Norms, and Punishment

You're listening to The Michael Shermer Show. All right, hey everybody, it's Michael Shermer. It's time for another episode of The Michael Shermer Show. We have a legendary returning champion to the show, Steven Pinker. We all know him, but I'm going to give him a proper introduction anyway.

He is the John Stone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He's an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, and one of Time's 100 most influential people in the world today. He's won many prizes for his teaching, his research on language, cognition, and social relations, and his 12 books, which include, here we go, uh, how the mind works. I'm gonna I have him right here from my shelf, and just so you can see we are all aging properly, The Language Instinct, The Blank Slate, one of my favorites of yours, Steve. Uh, the stuff of thought.

Here I have most of these are first editions actually. This one's a first edition signed, The Better Angels of Our Nature. Okay, I'm piling up here. Uh, Enlightenment Now, okay, and A Sense of Style. If you want to learn how to be a good writer like Pinker, read his book on how to do it.

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