I think Steven Pinker wants to kill me

Steven Pinker

Otherwise, no refrigerator would be full, no car would be full of gas, no child would be dressed and at school on time. So our species is still capable of rationality, by which I mean the use of logic while taking probabilities into account to achieve a goal.

Bertrand Russell

The conscience, however, can easily be seen to depend mostly upon education, as for example common Irishmen do not consider lying wrong, which fact alone seems to me quite sufficient to disprove the divine value of conscience. And since, as I believe, conscience is merely the combined product of evolution and education, then obviously it is an absurdity to follow that rather than reason

Karl Popper, Durant (to a lesser extent),

There is an archetype of High Status Science Explainers who seem uncanny to me. This is how they speak, and yes "what about other context?" nevermind the other context, it's all the same way

Every word is sedate and measured, but you can tell they're seething misanthropes every time they talk. They're like RATs but, you know, actually intelligent and socially adept.

being brought up in education institutions makes them eternal educators. They can't think beyond the logic of the page assignment submission experiment etc and externalize this very very isolated ecosystem's logic to encompass the whole world. It's how they understand the whole world.

When they talk about humanity, justice, and "higher concepts" It's always tinged with the university, I don't believe they believe it, except as proxy for formal logic.

Perfect example was a movie I can't remember the title, where a layman walks around an abandoned city and asks secular scientist foid "what humanity should do" about x, y, z, and she'd reply these matter-of-fact insipid, rational answers and, to "why don't we do that", a wry, knowing nod to the fallibility of man, as if she were above it.

"If only you'd listen to us! Why don't you?

Why don't you?"

Because there's something sinister at the bottom, this hidden misanthropy that they don't see in themselves. Some will say it's simply Ivory Tower alienation but I disagree - yes, we're alien to them, but that's not the end

a lot of them, not all, but a lot, a lot of them want to see you and me dead