Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Steve Pinker, my new favorite Jew. I first found out about him through anadder. How I found that blog, I can't remember. I had some ideas in my head that Steve Pinker has confirmed through scientific investigation. Like the decrease in violence, the lower ratio of deaths in WWII in comparison with other wars, and the most recent, a bare bones moral objectivity.

When I first decided to work on the "Morality Project" I didn't realize how little had been done on the scientific end. Religion had the copyright for thousands of years and the non-religious philosophy decided to take a pick at it over the past couple hundred years. It seems only in very recent years have biologists, anthropologists, and psychologists made any headway.

However, the work that I hoped to accomplish has already been done, far better then I ever could have hoped for, by Steve Pinker. He wrote an article that was featured in the NY Times this past January. You can read it here. I hope to digest and discuss that article over the next couple of weeks.