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sapinker's profile
Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker
Verified account
@sapinker

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Steven PinkerVerified account

@sapinker

Cognitive scientist at Harvard.

Boston, MA
pinker.wjh.harvard.edu
Joined January 2010

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    Steven Pinker‏Verified account @sapinker Jan 18

    This was the first source of my emphasis on innate mental organization (before Chomsky, evolutionary psychology, or behavioral genetics): Blank slates don't do anything (including learn).

    8:04 PM - 18 Jan 2018
    • 69 Retweets
    • 366 Likes
    • Pearl Watson Feral Ban Winning Emergence 💀👻 Spooky Gabriel 👻💀 Emily Jones Jeremy Mitchell Jesse Anttila-Hughes Spooky Scary Gurevich
    10 replies 69 retweets 366 likes
      1. Dr Gavin Weeks‏ @WeeksGav Jan 19
        Replying to @sapinker

        This is the strawiest of straw men. You well know that blank slate meant equipped for learning. Skinner was an evolutionist after all.

        0 replies 0 retweets 8 likes
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      1. Logical Meme‏ @Logicalmeme Jan 18
        Replying to @sapinker @Steve_Sailer

        “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.” – Immanuel Kant

        0 replies 0 retweets 3 likes
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      1. Timothy Duignan‏ @TimothyDuignan Jan 18
        Replying to @sapinker

        One of my main take away from "how the mind works" was: wow artificial intelligence is going to be hard. So much that needs to be built by hand.

        0 replies 0 retweets 2 likes
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      1. Organic  ♋‏ @PeterRichardso Jan 18
        Replying to @sapinker

        It’s called an analogy. It is very useful for illustration. But you can’t argue by analogy.

        0 replies 0 retweets 2 likes
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      1. Paul Cassidy‏ @paulhcassidy53 Jan 19
        Replying to @sapinker

        The best blank slate hypothesis would be: innate mechanisms sufficient for efficient general learning. Not just blank. (Still wrong, I realize.)

        0 replies 0 retweets 1 like
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      1. Brendon J. Brewer‏ @brendonbrewer Jan 19
        Replying to @sapinker

        Yep. You get the same phenomenon in statistics too. Ed Jaynes has a great discussion in his book where he shows that a "poorly-informed robot" cannot learn generalisations that are obvious to humans.

        0 replies 0 retweets 1 like
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      1. Dan✯Nolan‏ @Zoggykins Jan 19
        Replying to @sapinker

        Wrong They sometimes fall off the rooves of houses and hit people 😁 (Which funnily enough- happened during a storm when in college. School placed in lockdown, was locked in, decided to pick a random book off a shelf- and that was the first of many books of yours I've read 😊)

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      1. OrangeHalcyon‏ @OrangeHalcyon Jan 19
        Replying to @sapinker

        Steven Pinker, what do you think about the new transgender madness ?

        0 replies 0 retweets 0 likes
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      1. Tim‏ @Tea_I_Am Jan 19
        Replying to @sapinker

        Lesson of AI programming: Sitting in a room “normally,” not staring in a corner, is instinctual. After reading this in HTMW, I saw a comedian whose joke was a guy gets in an elevator and stands inches from the back wall like people do at the door.

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