ClaimsSteven Pinker

“I give way more A’s than I used to, just so I don’t have an empty lecture hall.”

Steven Pinker, interviewee 24 September 2025 Steven Pinker on Coordination, Common Knowledge, and the Retreat of Liberal Enlightenment (Conversations with Tyler) archived copy

Factual Their own work or organisation

Pinker gives many more A grades than he used to, to avoid an empty lecture hall.

Own records only Only the person's or their organisation's own records speak to it, so it is not scored.

Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?

Reasoning

Whether this is true depends on Pinker's own grading records, which the material does not show to be public.

Cite this claim

Steven Pinker, “Pinker gives many more A grades than he used to, to avoid an empty lecture hall.” (said 24 September 2025). Verdict: own records only. Reliability API, claim c_0f6027b3ea34, method 0.1.0+28da144b, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_0f6027b3ea34

This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.

Reply to this claim

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More factual claims by Steven Pinker

  1. Resolved true Factual 26 September 2026
    “To be sure, my arguments were laid out five years before the release of LLM chatbots, and I would update some of them today.”

    Pinker's arguments on AI risk were laid out five years before the release of LLM chatbots.

  2. Mostly true Factual 2023
    “I’ve got to say that I’m one of the ones who said that’s just not how language works.”

    Pinker was among those who argued that predicting the next word is not how language works.

  3. Resolved true Factual 24 December 2022
    “discovered and edited by me & Harvey Silverglate”

    The lost Carl Sagan lecture 'Science and Civil Liberties' was discovered and edited by Steven Pinker and Harvey Silverglate and appeared in Quillette's 2022 Editors' Choice.

  4. Resolved true Factual 12 March 2020
    “Social and Political Bias: Newest lecture in Gen Ed 1066, Rationality.”

    The newest lecture in Gen Ed 1066, Rationality, is titled Social and Political Bias.

  5. Resolved true Factual 27 December 2019
    “Perhaps recklessly, I took on this assignment from the Financial Times for their end-of-year issue.”

    Pinker took on an assignment from the Financial Times to write about what to expect from the 2020s for its end-of-year issue.

All of them

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