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Steven Pinker: Academic freedom prevents us from getting trapped in circles of delusion

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- Pluralistic ignorance is a phenomenon in which a large groups of people publicly pretend to believe something is true, even if they privately believe it to be false, out of fear that their true opinions will be punished. Steven Pinker refers to this as a collective delusion.

- "The ability to express an idea can puncture a bubble of collective, false knowledge and is one of the reasons that we have to cherish that freedom," says Pinker.

- Free speech and freedom of inquiry must be protected in all arenas, but especially at universities because they are labs for testing ideas and furthering human knowledge. Without academic freedom, do universities deserve the esteem of society and the funding perks that keep them running?

Read more at BigThink.com: https://bigthink.com/videos/academic-freedom-from-delusion

Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard. Currently Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has won numerous prizes for his research, his teaching, and his nine 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: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

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