Steven Pinker, a Harvard cognitive psychologist, hosts his papers, book pages, FAQs and lecture material on language, violence, rationality and writing.
HN links it for his writing-style book, his Harvard rationality course and lectures, and his work on the decline of violence, which commenters sometimes question.
In reply, I say bravo for trying to become a better writer. And if English is not your native language, don't become discouraged too soon if your progress seems slow at first. I've been very impressed by the English writing here of some people who plainly grew up speaking some other language in a non-English-speaking country. Keep practicing, and you will become better.
For specific writing advice, I recommend the new book The Sense of Style[1] by Steven Pinker, which is about not just fussy rules of English but also about THINKING in a way that helps improve writing. I will have to practice with the ideas in that book for a long time.
For specific advice on improving English, I have some tips I've shared before here on Hacker News that other readers have liked. As I learned Mandarin Chinese up to the level that I was able to support my family for several years as a Chinese-English translator and interpreter, I had to tackle several problems for which there is not yet a one-stop-shopping software solution. For ANY pair of languages, even closely cognate pairs of West Germanic languages like English and Dutch, or Wu Chinese dialects like those of Shanghai and Suzhou, the two languages differ in sound system, so that what is a phoneme in one language is not a phoneme in the other language.
http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPhoneme.htm
But a speaker of one language who is past the age of puberty will simply not perceive many of the phonemic…
https://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/pinker_comments_on_lead_removal_and_declining_crime_0.pdf Steven pinker makes some good points in this short essay why there should be more skepticism towards this hypothesis:
“ Also, the parallelism in curves for lead and time-shifted crime seem too good to be true, since the lead hypothesis assumes that the effects of lead exposure are greatest in childhood. But 23 years after the first lower-lead cohort, only a small fraction of the crime-prone cohort should be lead-free; there are still all those lead-laden young adults who have many years of crime ahead of them. Only gradually should the crime-prone demographic sector be increasingly populated by lead-free kids. The time-shifted curve for crime should be an attenuated, smeared version of the curve for lead, not a perfect copy of it. Also, the effects of age on crime are not sharply peaked, with a spike around the 23rd birthday, and a sharp falloff—it’s a very gentle bulge spread out over the 15-30 age range. So you would not expect such a perfect time-shifted overlap as you might, for example, for first-grade reading performance, where the measurement is so restricted in time.”
I’m also not convinced on your point about crime in California. The police have essentially ceased prosecuting many of those petty crimes. It makes sense that they would go up with no deterrence.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned anything about "Black Swans" yet. There's an alternative view point on why this optimism may be misplaced.
Basically, just because small effects (average levels of violence) are being smoothed out and minimized, does not imply that tail-end effects -- such as nuclear wars, large genocides, etc -- will not occur. Some people argue that the former may even raise the odds of the latter through artificial constriction until tensions reach a boiling point.
A big proponent of this type of thinking is Nassim Taleb, most notably in his book Antifragile.
> Cirillo and Taleb also found no evidence that wars cluster together, as earthquakes and episodes of financial volatility are known to do. Rather, big wars follow no trend and simply occur with equal likelihood through time. Doing the statistics right, they argue, shows that the recent peaceful past is almost certainly causing us to seriously underestimate how much violent conflict we're likely see in the future. [1]
There's an interesting back-and-forth between Taleb and Pinker on this topic, here are some links:
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf
http://stevenpinker.com/files/comments_on_taleb_by_s_pinker.pdf
[1] - http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-05-18/is-the-world-getting-safer-maybe-not
Coursera is great but you're going to miss a lot of opportunities by limiting yourself to just that platform.
For instance, it hasn't been widely advertised, but you can essentially take Steven Pinker's 2020 course at Harvard on Rationale: https://stevenpinker.com/classes/rationality-gened-1066
There's upwards of 20 hours of video on this course alone. You don't get that kind of depth from most Coursera MOOCs. Further, the syllabus helps narrow down a vast subject to a few months of effort and there is no better design for learning it.
Critical reasoning skills are essential! Why not learn from one of the great thinkers on the subject?
This course has the potential of ascending to the upper echelon of MOOCs. I really hope that the content doesn't get taken down. It doesn't seem downloadable..
I love this list.
An additional resource I would add to it is Steven Pinker's "Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century"[0].
Pinker's book advocates for the same classical style as Williams and Thomas & Turner. But Pinker also offers a deep dive into grammar, linguistics, and word choice (Pinker is a member of the American Heritage Dictionary's Usage Panel[1])
One other note: Joseph Williams's "Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace" is available in roughly infinite editions under similar titles. PDFs of some of those titles are available for free online.
[0]: <https://stevenpinker.com/publications/sense-style-thinking-persons-guide-writing-21st-century>
[1]: <https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/usagepanel.html>
The findings in this article seem to contradict findings from other reputable sources, e.g.:
* https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace#the-share-of-battle-deaths-is-declining-even-faster
* https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace#war-and-peace-after-1945
* https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace#counting-world-conflict-deaths-why-do-sources-differ
* https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/08/ourworldindata_percentage-of-years-in-which-the-great-powers-fought-one-another-1500%E2%80%932000.png
Also:
* https://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/has_the_decline_of_violence_reversed_since_the_better_angels_of_our_nature_was_written_2017.pdf