Pinker and Ma both have an understanding of the importance of the sciences and feel as though improvements must be made in order to understand fully the world around us. In Steven Pinker’s article Science is Not your Enemy he states “To understand the world, we must cultivate work-arounds for our cognitive limitations, including skepticisms, open debate, formal precision, and empirical tests, often requiring feats of ingenuity.” When Pinker talks about the sciences he talks about the importance of them and how we have grown over years, evolving our thoughts. This relates to Yo Yo Ma’s article Necessary Edges as he explains the evolution of science in an art aspect. Both authors talk about sciences in different ways, but equally express the importance of expanding the way we view and continue to learn sciences. The quote taken from Pinker’s article explains the need to expand and understand our cognitive limitations, thus is similar to Ma’s article when he states “Only when science and the arts, critical and empathetic reasoning, are linked to the mainstream will we find a sustainable balance in society.” Ma goes on to talk about the importance of art being integrated into the sciences. As science evolves and we learn more and more about the sciences we must look at these ideas in different ways. Both Ma and Pinker see that we must go about new topics and ideas with a new mind set in order to see new discoveries.

In Pinker’s article he talks about fate, karma, answered prayers and more, when doing this he explains that they are untrue, yet we still believe in them. Pinker does this by stating “There is no such thing as fate, providence, karma, spells, curses, augury, divine retribution, or answered prayers-though the discrepancy between the laws of probability and the workings of cognition may explain why people believe there are.” I feel as though this is important because many people including myself believe in different aspects included in this, for example religion. Since I was young I was told to say a prayer, or if you do something bad karma will come bite me in the butt. And overall I would not change my outlook, I feel as though these assumptions even if untrue have shaped who I am and many other people. Overall I feel like my morals have been impacted as I believe if I am mean or do something I should not karma will come and something bad will happen to me, even in a subtle way. Overall I agree and understand Pinker’s claim but I would not change my thoughts on these topics even if scientifically they are not true.