THE VIDEO SHELF · linguistics and cognition
The Stuff of Thought | Steven Pinker | Talks at Google
Steven Pinker presents his book The Stuff of Thought at Google in 2007. He covers language as a window into human nature, including taboo words, swearing and the psychology and game theory of indirect speech like bribery.
Why HN readers recommended it
HN commenters cite it for Pinker's analysis of profanity and of why talking about taboo words differs from using them.
This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.
Video & recommendation details
- Creator / channel
- Talks at Google
- Topic
- linguistics and cognition
- Format
- talk
- Level
- general
- HN recommenders in dataset
- 2
- HN mentions in dataset
- 7
- Recommendation years in dataset
- 2010–2026
These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.
From the original HN conversations
Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.
>, politeness is bolstered by some level of ambiguity. Rather than explicitly state your needs, desires or opinions, you imply them at some level of abstraction, allowing other participants in the conversation to accept or decline more easily. Steven Pinker explores this point in an …
jasode on Hacker News · 2014-08
In An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)For more on this topic, I recommend Steven Pinker's 2007 talk at Google. In the second part of it, Pinker tries to answer the question, "Why do people get so upset over certain words?"[1] He falsifies some popular hypotheses and finds interesting commonalities across languages. …
ggreer on Hacker News · 2015-07
In The Evolution of Profanity
Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.