“The obvious cure for the tragic shortcomings of human intuition in a high-tech world is education. And this offers priorities for educational policy: to provide students with the cognitive tools that are most important for grasping the modern world and that are most unlike the cognitive tools they are born with. The perilous fallacies we have seen in this chapter, for example, would give high priority to economics, evolutionary biology, and probability and statistics in any high school or college curriculum. Unfortunately, most curricula have barely changed since medieval times, and are barely changeable because no one wants to be the philistine who seems to be saying that it is unimportant to learn a foreign language, or English literature, or trigonometry, or the classics. But no matter how valuable a subject may be, there are only twenty-four hours in a day, and a decision to teach one subject is also a decision not to teach another one. The question is not whether trigonometry is important, but whether it is more important than statistics; not whether an educated person should know the classics, but whether it is more important for an educated person to know the classics than to know elementary economics. In a world whose complexities are constantly challenging our intuitions, these trade-offs cannot responsibly be avoided.”

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About Steven Pinker

Canadian cognitive psychologist and public intellectual

Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is known for his work on the mind, language, and human nature, and for presenting those subjects to a wide general audience. Pinker supports evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. He is the Johnstone Family professor of psychology at Harvard University, and his writing often returns to questions about how people think, speak, and understand the world.

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Books by Steven Pinker

The Language Instinct

2007

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The Blank Slate

2002

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How the Mind Works

1999

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Enlightenment now

2018

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Rationality

2021

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