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The Stuff of Thought | Steven Pinker | Talks at Google

Talks at Google · 419K views · 2007-10-05 · 1:15:05

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

HN commenters cite it for Pinker's analysis of profanity and of why talking about taboo words differs from using them.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2010–2026

Topics

Language & linguisticsPsychology & human behavior
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steven pinkerprofanitypsycholinguisticstaboo wordsindirect speech

What people said

ggreer · 2015-07 · Recommendation

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. Obviously, the video contains lots of swearing. 1. [VIDEO]

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jasode · 2014-08 · Recommendation

>, 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 entertaining presentation[1] for RSA. He also covers other language topics such as spacetime encoding, and profanity but the last part analyzes the need for ambiguity in a language. I deep-linked into the relevant portion of the presentation although the the entire talk is very enlightening. It's worth rewinding to the beginning to watch the entire talk. The 2nd youtube video[2] is the mostly the same material but it's the older one he presented at Google TechTalks. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]

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0xWTF · 2026-05 · Reference

This reminds me of Steven Pinker's Tech Talk on taboo words [VIDEO] He didn't say f* , he talked about saying f*

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Sources

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