Steven Pinker

Why Our Longing to Matter Drives and Divides Us | Amanpour and Company youtu.be/LTkNwAFtb9w?si… via @YouTube

Brian Keating (@DrBrianKeating) and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (@platobooktour) discuss "The Law of Physics Behind Depression." Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: The thing that suicidally depressed people feel is that they don’t matter; others do, they don’t. Nothing they can do will ever make them matter. It’s a terrible, terrible feeling. And what this means is they cannot abide their own presence. Brian Keating: What if there is a law of physics that explains why depression feels the way it does? Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: When I first learned about the second law of thermodynamics, it seemed—I couldn’t quite conceptualize it. We are subject to the second law of thermodynamics, which, you know, has a tragic dimension. In fact, when I was a graduate student, it occurred to me, oh my gosh, biological systems are really just organized to resist the second law of thermodynamics. In some sense, biology is a response to this supreme law that tells us that, in closed systems, energy never increases; entropy never decreases. Entropy never decreases, and if there’s any way for it to increase, it will. Entropy is the measure of the disorder of a system. The more disorder, the higher the entropy, and the less efficient the work you can get out at the end of the system. And in fact, Rudolf Clausius, the physicist, said that the universe itself will go to thermal equilibrium—what we call the heat death—and so there will be no more energy to be gotten out of it at the end of the system. Rudolf Clausius, the 19th-century physicist who formulated the concept of entropy, which means literally “transformation from within”—there’s poignancy in that. This transformation from within is going to the end of the system. And he said that the universe itself will go to thermal equilibrium, to what we call the heat death, and so there will be no more energy to be gotten out of it. Brian Keating: So let’s start with that story you tell first about Ludwig Boltzmann, who solved one of the great paradoxes of physics, the irreversibility paradox. Talk about that. And then why, in your mind, was he so traumatized, perhaps, or so full of dread of his equation that he took his own life? So talk about that. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: So there was this great paradox, which is that most—probably most—of the processes that we observe are irreversible. If you film them—and tell me if I’m being too elementary, because I’m going to be very—you know, if you film them, like let’s say I crack open an egg and I stir it up and then I fry it, and somebody filmed this and then reversed the film, anybody who sees the reverse of that film is going to know it was reversed. That cannot happen in nature: that the egg is going to uncook itself, unscramble; the yolk is going to separate from the albumen and jump into the shell and seal up. Impossible, right? So almost everything that we see is irreversible. Brian Keating: Yes. I saw that line, Rebecca. It made me think, because you mentioned it in the context of his daughter, Elsa, finding her father’s dead body. And it wasn’t like he showed any sign. I mean, we can’t go into the minds of someone who dies by suicide, right? Yes. But at the same time, you’d think, well, this would be a more common thing. And so, is depression sort of a—you know, they used to think of miasmas and things in the air, you write about that in the book—is depression, at heart, an entropic collapsing process? Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: I have spoken to a lot of people who suffer from clinical depression. And I want to say, first of all, that the U.S. hotline for suicide prevention is samhsa.gov/resource/988/y…. The thing that suicidally depressed people feel is that they don’t matter. Others do. They don’t. Nothing they can do will ever make them matter. It’s a terrible, terrible feeling. And what this means is they cannot—they can’t abide their own presence. I really think it shows how strong this mattering instinct is in us. If you can’t somehow appease it, you can’t abide your own presence. And so, what the people I’ve spoken to—and one is a very, very good philosopher who has suffered from depression—have told me is that, phenomenologically, this is exactly what it feels like. It feels like psychic disintegration. So, in some sense, yes—happiness is a very ordered state. And I would go even further: everything worth living for is an ordered state. I think knowledge—knowledge, knowledge, knowledge—is better than ignorance. Clarity is better than confusion. Flourishing is better than suffering. Love is better than hatred. Beauty is better than ugliness. These are truisms; these are what we all accept. Look at the thing that’s better: it’s an ordered state. And its negation is a disordered state. So I think—I would argue—this is a very kind of Spinozist argument, trying to get out of the laws of nature some ethical enlightenment, some ethical guidance, because that’s what we want. We want ethical guidance. So we know we want to matter. We know we do all sorts of things to matter. Some people do very bad things in order to matter. Some of the people I’ve spoken to… they do. They want power over others. They want dominance. They want to make other people’s lives miserable. These are bad things, right? They cause an increase in entropy. This is how I judge people now: are you increasing entropy, or are you decreasing it? -- Full video in link below.

Contrary to a popular narrative, each generation earns more than the previous one (though Millennials enjoyed the advantage later in life, because they stayed in school longer). @Noahpinion open.substack.com/pub/noahpinion…

When a self-proclaimed civil rights organization puts Ayaan Hirsi Ali, of all people, on a "hate watch" list, you know it has been twisted into a grotesque hate group itself. But this was only a sample of its perversions. Ayaan: The SPLC Targeted Me. Now Its Reckoning Has Come. thefp.com/p/ayaan-hirsi-…

Reading Orwell in the Age of AI by Matt Johnson @mattjj89 quillette.com/2026/05/04/rea…

If the world would end tomorrow, what would you want as your last meal? Tom Nash asks people that question, and then cooks it for them (without hands). This video in his Last Meal series features My Dinner with Tom.

Opinion | What is truth, anyway? @michaelshermer explains, based on his new book. bostonglobe.com/2026/04/29/opi… via @BostonGlobe

I am targeted by several publishing scams a week, promoting book clubs, reading groups, influencers, publicity campaigns, list placers... all using AI-generated bullet points flattering my books. Yesterday it was "Terry Gross" (with a gmail, not npr.org email address) offering to interview me on "Fresh Air" -- for a fee. It's Nigerian finance ministers' widows for 21st-century authors.

In my experience the desire of many parents of autistic children to believe that their inner lives are normal but they are locked in by an inability to communicate is so intense as to overwhelm critical faculties. I've watched a dad pathetically jiggle an iPad under his son's stationary hand and insist the young man was communicating with me. This opens the door for charlatans to mislead and exploit these people with "Facilitated Communication" and related techniques, repeatedly shown to be worthless. nytimes.com/2026/05/01/opi…

Though phone calls are more effective at influencing legislators than email (see nytimes.com/2016/11/22/us/…), if you can't call it's unbelievably easy to send them a message - just Google "Contact Senator [So-and-so]" and you'll be taken to a webpage with a captcha, some ID fields, and a text box.

It may be unrealistic to expect the world to become vegetarian (at least not until synthetic meat is produced at scale), but that doesn't mean we must treat farm animals with vicious cruelty. Small protections can reduce massive harm at tolerable costs. Tell your senator to vote NO on the Farm Bill if it includes the "#SaveOurBacon Act."

How the Weak Prevail, by evolutionary anthropologist Scott Atran: People in the throes of sacred values don't capitulate, even when they sustain tremendous damage. A psychological insight that war planners should understand. quillette.com/2026/05/02/how…

We’re living through a massive crisis of mattering, where everyone is fighting to be seen, yet we’ve never felt more invisible. In this salon, @platobooktour and @MamanLunettes look at how this deep, biological hunger to feel significant is actually what’s tearing our culture apart. It’s a wild look at how our will to matter creates the very fault lines of power and identity we’re currently crashing into. If you’ve been feeling the weight of the endless competition for status and belonging lately, you really need to watch this.

The Physics of Mattering: Do AI Agents Have a Soul? Rebecca Goldstein | @platobooktour

Why Do Humans Have Eyebrows? An Evolutionary Biologist Explains via @forbes forbes.com/sites/scotttra…

Congratulations to Dr. Dylan Tweed, who brilliantly defended his PhD dissertation “Collective Outrage as Deterrence”’ in the Department of Psychology at Harvard earlier today.

"Ask Me Anything": I answer a variety of questions on language, cognition, progress, and political centrism (plus some personal questions, like how tall I am in real life) on the subreddit DeepStateCentrism. youtu.be/0FYbI2koLG8?si… via @YouTube

On the Nonzero podcast, Robert Wright chats with Rebecca Newberger Goldstein about mattering and The Mattering Instinct. youtu.be/LPjE5BPJYe0?si… via @YouTube

We should oppose the Trump administration's abuse of the law to intimidate and cripple private advocacy organizations they don't like. But what they say about the Southern Poverty Law Center (which I used to donate to) is, unfortunately, correct: It “long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine.” Among the targets in its McCarthyite "Hate Watch" list are ordinary academic behavioral geneticists whose research challenges the blank slate. nytimes.com/2026/04/22/us/…