![]() ![]() His twelfth book, published in 2021, is called Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Humanist of the Year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates, and one of Foreign Policy’s “World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” He was Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and writes frequently for the New York Times, the Guardian, and other publications. He has won numerous prizes for his research, his teaching, and his books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Sense of Style, and Enlightenment Now. Currently Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard. Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology, Harvard University It leads to better choices in our lives and in the public sphere, and is the ultimate driver of social justice and moral progress. Collective rationality depends on norms that are designed to promote objectivity and truth. ![]() Also, the rational pursuit of self-interest, sectarian solidarity, and uplifting mythology by individuals can add up to crippling irrationality in a society. Instead, we think in ways that are sensible in the low-tech contexts in which we spend most of our lives, but fail to take advantage of the powerful tools of reasoning our best thinkers have discovered over the millennia: logic, critical thinking, probability, correlation and causation, and optimal ways to update beliefs and commit to choices individually and with others. Even with permission, students may only use such recordings for personal use no posting or further distribution or use is permitted. The course is open to Stanford students, and undergraduates can receive WIM credit by taking it as Stats 155 for a letter grade, graduate students take it as Stats 256, Bios 221. Recording Lectures Except with permission from the Office of Accessible Education or the instructor in question, students may not audio- or video-record lectures. This is a three unit class which requires 9 hours of work a week (more if you miss a class). After all, we discovered the laws of nature, lengthened and enriched our lives, and discovered the benchmarks for rationality itself. This graduate course is an introduction to Applied Statistics for Biology. Why do we find ourselves flooded with fake news, medical quackery, conspiracy theorizing, and “post-truth” rhetoric? It can’t be that humans are just an irrational species - cavemen out of time saddled with biases, fallacies, and illusions. Today, humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding-and at the same time appears to be losing its mind. ![]()
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