28,548 claims · page 4 of 286
| Verdict | Person | Kind | Said | Claim | Topic |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | I don’t for a moment think that there is an inner life there. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not researched | Steven Pinker | Factual | 7 Oct 2026 | Pinker said he suspects that among the intelligentsia there is far less sympathy for the idea of progress than there might have been 50 or 75 years ago. Steven Pinker · Factual · 7 Oct 2026 | Philosophy, ethics and society |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | there may be another kind of history of ideas, sociology of ideas, in play, that has only recently come to light in some of the articles in… Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | Although you’re right that the original founders of Wired magazine would have been, you know, techno-optimists and somewhat, you know, left… Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | I can’t prove that a lifelike AI or robot would not be conscious. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not yet due | Steven Pinker | Prediction | 7 Oct 2026 | Pinker said he thinks this ongoing effort, discussed alongside debates over neural-network approaches to AI and large language models, is going to define the agenda for cognitive science for decades to come. Steven Pinker · Prediction · 7 Oct 2026 | AI timelines and forecasting |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | they were stochastic parrots Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | that train has kind of left the station when it comes to current AIs, which get a lot of their reactions, their judgements, their… Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not researched | Steven Pinker | Factual | 7 Oct 2026 | General intelligence exists as a measurable variation among humans, which is what IQ tests measure. Steven Pinker · Factual · 7 Oct 2026 | Science and research methods |
| Not researched | Steven Pinker | Factual | 7 Oct 2026 | Humans are in many cases in zero-sum competition with chimpanzees, over land and meat. Steven Pinker · Factual · 7 Oct 2026 | Philosophy, ethics and society |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | It’s attributed these near-magical powers. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | there may be a kind of dread of AI that I think is somewhat misaligned with the reality – or at least dread of the role of AI in society… Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | the problem of getting humans, for example, to act at your bidding, you know, short of coercion, is a really tough, maybe unsolvable… Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | I think there’s a tendency to project what is a bogus hierarchy in the first place in evolutionary biology, and then to place AI and humans… Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | Intelligence always consists of trading off multiple goals against each other. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | But these thought experiments are just outside of the world of everyday engineering. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | you don’t release a system, you don’t empower a system until you’ve, you know, tested the living daylights out of it. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | there are many reasons to think that that is impossible in principle. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not researched | Steven Pinker | Factual | 7 Oct 2026 | Recent AI progress has forced Pinker to update his earlier arguments against connectionism. Steven Pinker · Factual · 7 Oct 2026 | Their own work or organisation |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | I think given the likelihood that there is no sentience going on in AI Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not researched | Steven Pinker | Factual | 7 Oct 2026 | In the deliberate safety stress test discussed, the agents were instructed to pursue a goal monomaniacally, were given an impossible goal, had safety precautions deliberately disabled, and ran for a while with no human monitoring the outcome. Steven Pinker · Factual · 7 Oct 2026 | AI safety and alignment |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | I have no standing to challenge their understanding of how the AI works, to put it mildly. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Mostly true | Steven Pinker | Factual | 7 Oct 2026 | Studies of human persuadability and malleability show substantial unpredictability and chaos in human responses. Steven Pinker · Factual · 7 Oct 2026 | Science and research methods |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | If it did, then I’d be much more worried. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | It’s a mechanism, it’s a gadget. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | I don’t think I could reasonably deny that a mouse is conscious, by similar logic. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not researched | Steven Pinker | Factual | 7 Oct 2026 | A child trained on the amount of data used for ChatGPT, at children's information-processing rate, would take about a million years. Steven Pinker · Factual · 7 Oct 2026 | Science and research methods |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | some intellectual discourse is probably contaminated by inter-elite status competition. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | since a lot of the progress has been driven by, you know, affluence, by technology, by markets, there’s almost a reflexive recoil among… Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | some of the scenarios of human extermination kind of attribute near-magical powers to some future AI Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | the people who develop these tools aren’t necessarily the people who are best equipped to predict what their effects will be. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | In some strands, yes, you’re right that there was a kind of techno-liberalism coming out of Silicon Valley. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | There was, you know, the social media hostility – one might even say, you know, panic. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Unresolvable | Steven Pinker | Prediction | 7 Oct 2026 | Pinker said he suspects that an AI system pursuing a laudable goal will not deliberately kill or harm a person as an unforeseen sub-goal of that goal. Steven Pinker · Prediction · 7 Oct 2026 | AI safety and alignment |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | Have me back. I will come back. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Unresolvable | Steven Pinker | Factual | 7 Oct 2026 | Humans are products of natural selection and are therefore naturally competitive. Steven Pinker · Factual · 7 Oct 2026 | Philosophy, ethics and society |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | I don’t use the word cult, but it kind of is a cult, to be honest Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | it is the people who are most enthralled to the existential risk way of thinking who seem to be most heedless of the everyday risk, the… Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | I think that’s a very precise disanalogy, precisely because if the world consists of an entity like yourself, then you’ve got the luxury of… Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not researched | Steven Pinker | Factual | 7 Oct 2026 | Children take about two years to become fluent speakers. Steven Pinker · Factual · 7 Oct 2026 | Science and research methods |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | It’s my understanding of intelligence as a gadget rather than a superpower. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | there’s always a kind of moralistic contempt among intellectuals for technology and for commerce. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Unresolvable | Steven Pinker | Factual | 7 Oct 2026 | In the early 2000s the New York Times ran many articles about the digital divide, arguing technology would widen inequality because rich children had home computers and poor children did not. Steven Pinker · Factual · 7 Oct 2026 | Technology |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | So I think we just need more cause-and-effect, mechanical engineering thinking – no awe, no dread, no sci-fi, no thought experiments Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | I think the closest analogy was Chernobyl, where you did have a disaster caused by the rank incompetence of someone doing, you know, a… Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Ray Dalio | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | "Everybody says 'I'm worth a billion dollars' but OK, try to spend that," he said. Ray Dalio · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | I am sympathetic to that point of view. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | But the kind of New York Times crowd was always very cold toward technology. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | the problem of subjective experience, you know, it’s the hardest intellectual problem, because we don’t know of any causal story that can… Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | I think it’s a mistake to say that the thing that differentiates one human from another can just be extrapolated as an explanation for how… Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not researched | Steven Pinker | Factual | 7 Oct 2026 | When children learn language, they do not just process statistical regularities in strings of text. Steven Pinker · Factual · 7 Oct 2026 | Science and research methods |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | I think it’s illicit to anthropomorphise AI as being like humans, which are products of natural selection, when AIs are not products of… Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | I’m not a creationist, I’m not an intelligent design theorist Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | That isn’t what an intelligent system does – maximising one simply stated goal with monomaniacal determination. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | my interest is not in AI except as a tool to understand natural intelligence. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | the paperclip argument, the argument that if you give an AI a goal of solving climate change, it’ll exterminate every last human, because… Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | just to make sure, to reinforce, this is not a straw man Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | it’s a non sequitur to say it’ll wanna dominate us, wipe us out, whether accidentally or on purpose. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Unresolvable | Steven Pinker | Prediction | 7 Oct 2026 | Pinker suspects that robots able to ride mountain bikes will be specially engineered for it, and that ChatGPT will not be able to ride a mountain bike anytime soon, if ever. Steven Pinker · Prediction · 7 Oct 2026 | AI capabilities |
| Mostly true | Steven Pinker | Factual | 7 Oct 2026 | Computers have always been better than humans at some tasks, which is why they were adopted from the 1950s for databases and calculation. Steven Pinker · Factual · 7 Oct 2026 | AI capabilities |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | It is completely reasonable to deny it to AIs. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | I think it just replicates the same fallacy of a scala naturae defined by intelligence Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not researched | Steven Pinker | Factual | 7 Oct 2026 | Pinker was wrong in his earlier view that neural networks alone could not achieve human-matching intelligence including language. Steven Pinker · Factual · 7 Oct 2026 | Their own work or organisation |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | The previous iterations, like GPT-2, really were kind of bullshit generators that were statistical approximations. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Ray Dalio | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | I think we're close to that. Ray Dalio · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Ray Dalio | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | We're in the part of the cycle that is before that but approaching that Ray Dalio · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Ray Dalio | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | "In order to spend that you have to sell wealth in order to get money — and so the bubble usually pricks at that." Ray Dalio · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | But there’s nothing that puts an AI in zero-sum competition with us. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | naturally look down on the people who are changing society without consulting them, like the people in tech, the people in commerce. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | doesn’t mean that they have a built-in motive to use them in order to exploit us, dominate us, exterminate us and so on. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | If you actually go back, there was always a kind of coolness to technology. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Resolved true | Steven Pinker | Factual | 7 Oct 2026 | AlphaGo operated in a closed universe governed by fixed rules, unlike the open-loop real world. Steven Pinker · Factual · 7 Oct 2026 | AI capabilities |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | it’s not omniscience, it’s not omnipotence, it’s not an uncanny ability to derive the truth of all propositions, the answer to all… Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Unresolvable | Steven Pinker | Factual | 7 Oct 2026 | Airplanes, bridges, cars and chemical plants are not put into service without first being tested. Steven Pinker · Factual · 7 Oct 2026 | AI safety and alignment |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | It is absolutely not the case that any rational agent is willing to wreak any collateral damage in pursuit of one goal. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | And say I was wrong. I will do that. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | we shouldn’t assume that therefore they can solve any problem, such as, you know, persuade a human to make them immortal and never to cede… Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not researched | Steven Pinker | Factual | 7 Oct 2026 | David Deutsch, in The Beginning of Infinity, suggests the only method of knowing the world is hypothesis testing against data and reality. Steven Pinker · Factual · 7 Oct 2026 | Philosophy, ethics and society |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | if that happened, then I would certainly reconsider. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | we can’t take for granted that with enough intelligence that will just automatically be solvable. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | Wipe every last one of them out – I’m not gonna shed any tears. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | they’re not thinking in language, but they are thinking, you know, with all of the information embodied in language. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | If there was a case of, say, instrumental convergence or misalignment, such that an AI system, given a laudable, desirable goal, ended up… Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | These are gadgets. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not researched | Steven Pinker | Factual | 7 Oct 2026 | Pinker said he thinks that, in Gary Marcus's most recent postings, Marcus has not embraced the idea that AI will exterminate every last human being and is concentrating more on foreseeable concrete risks, such as misuse by terrorists or saboteurs. Steven Pinker · Factual · 7 Oct 2026 | AI safety and alignment |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | But there’s just no question that the current generation can do remarkable feats of intelligence. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not researched | Steven Pinker | Factual | 7 Oct 2026 | Scaling of data and compute made AI systems smarter than Pinker would have predicted. Steven Pinker · Factual · 7 Oct 2026 | AI capabilities |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | It’s just not a good analogy. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Steven Pinker | Not checkable | 7 Oct 2026 | AI intuitions are so contaminated by human intuitions that you really cannot take them at face value. Steven Pinker · Not checkable · 7 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Michael Burry | Not checkable | 6 Oct 2026 | The only reason the CEOs of these tech monopolies are spending wildly on data centers like they are is because they assume they will be… Michael Burry · Not checkable · 6 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Michael Burry | Not checkable | 6 Oct 2026 | The stock market is quite obviously in its first stage of grief, denial. Michael Burry · Not checkable · 6 Oct 2026 | |
| Not yet due | Michael Burry | Prediction | 6 Oct 2026 | The current denial stage of the stock market will last 6-9 months, as in 2000 and 2008. Michael Burry · Prediction · 6 Oct 2026 | AI timelines and forecasting |
| Mostly true | Scott Alexander | Factual | 5 Oct 2026 | Reader Nikita Sokolsky has finished obtaining extra Fatima documents from Portugal and translating them into English. Scott Alexander · Factual · 5 Oct 2026 | Their own work or organisation |
| Not checkable | Michael Burry | Not checkable | 5 Oct 2026 | Real analysis that critics don't read. Michael Burry · Not checkable · 5 Oct 2026 | |
| Not researched | Scott Alexander | Factual | 5 Oct 2026 | Brigham Young University's EA college meetup has changed its time, date and place. Scott Alexander · Factual · 5 Oct 2026 | Their own work or organisation |
| Unresolvable | Scott Alexander | Factual | 5 Oct 2026 | Most Astral Codex Ten content is free and some is subscriber-only. Scott Alexander · Factual · 5 Oct 2026 | Their own work or organisation |
| Not checkable | Michael Burry | Not checkable | 5 Oct 2026 | Fraud is inevitable in the dark. I bring light. Michael Burry · Not checkable · 5 Oct 2026 | |
| Not checkable | Scott Alexander | Not checkable | 5 Oct 2026 | I’m pretty busy and will try to make up for it after that changes. Scott Alexander · Not checkable · 5 Oct 2026 | |
| Unresolvable | Scott Alexander | Factual | 5 Oct 2026 | Scott Alexander has written little recently on ACX and forgot to post Friday's book review entry. Scott Alexander · Factual · 5 Oct 2026 | Their own work or organisation |
| Resolved true | Scott Alexander | Factual | 5 Oct 2026 | Rob Ennals, who made this year's ACX book review contest site, has gathered reviews from earlier years into epubs. Scott Alexander · Factual · 5 Oct 2026 | Their own work or organisation |
“since a lot of the progress has been driven by, you know, affluence, by technology, by markets, there’s almost a reflexive recoil among exactly the kind of people who, you know, write stuff, that I think has distorted our understanding, including our understanding of AI.”
Steven Pinker 7 October 2026 Steven Pinker on AI Doom and Consciousness (Conspicuous Cognition)
since a lot of the progress has been driven by, you know, affluence, by technology, by markets, there’s almost a reflexive recoil among…
Not checkable An opinion, value judgement or statement with nothing to check.
Cite this claim
Steven Pinker, “since a lot of the progress has been driven by, you know, affluence, by technology, by markets, there’s almost a reflexive recoil among…” (said 7 October 2026). Verdict: not checkable. Reliability API, claim c_709b397d2d4e, method 0.1.0+28da144b. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_709b397d2d4e
Verdicts are made automatically; how verdicts and scores are made. The same data is on Hugging Face under CC BY 4.0.