# Steven Pinker Harvard cognitive psychologist and best-selling author, known for *The Better Angels of Our Nature* (2011) and *Enlightenment Now* (2018), which argue that violence has declined and that reason and science have made the world better. He is often counted among the figures of the [[Intellectual Dark Web]], and he signed the 2020 *Harper's* letter discussed under [[Cancel Culture]]. ## Why it's on the map Pinker was one of the star names on the advisory board the [[University of Austin]] announced in November 2021, and one of the first to go. He stepped down on November 15, 2021, a week after the launch, "by mutual and amicable agreement," days after the University of Chicago's Robert Zimmer resigned. In 2023 he became a co-president of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, a faculty group that takes the opposite approach to the same complaint: reform the existing university from inside. > [!note] Stub > This is a short entry that hasn't been fully written yet. ## Connections - [[University of Austin]] · [[Bari Weiss]] · [[Jonathan Haidt]] - [[Intellectual Dark Web]] · [[Cancel Culture]]