In-Person Convo with Steven Pinker on Rationality: What it is, Why it Seems Scarce, Why it Matters

welcome to the michael shermer show i'm your host michael shermer today's episode is being brought to you by oregon state university which is inviting you to participate in their upcoming provost lecture series featuring the great neuroscientist david eagleman it's a free virtual event next wednesday october 27th from 6 to 7 30 p.m pacific time so that's next wednesday october 27th at 6 o'clock pacific time you can register for the free event at b e a v dot e s slash provost hyphen lecture that's b e a v they're the beavers oregon state beavers b-e-a-v dot e-s slash provost hyphen lecture if you forget all that just google oregon state university comment david eagleman pops right up i just checked i know david i met him at ted years ago he gave this terrific top talk in which he put this jacket on this neuro jacket thing that was going to convert our applause or any of our response into sensory touch on his torso and it was it was quite the demonstration he is one of the most interesting scientists and writers working today is a neuroscientist at stanford and an internationally best-selling author is he's the founder of two venture-backed companies neo-sensory and brain check and he also directs the center for science and law it's a non-profit institute and he's best known for his work on sensory substitution time perception brain plasticity neural law and synesthesia in which your senses get crossed like people that can uh see colors with their fingertips and uh when i was a kid i had synesthesia of i could see the the days of the week had different colors like monday was red tuesday was brown wednesday was orange and so on i have no idea why that happened but uh but david explains this and uh and you can see some of this in the international bestselling pbs uh series that he hosts the brain with david eagleman and the companion book to it the brain the story of you i've seen his series and and read his books he's terrific in addition to his 120 academic publications he has many popular books his latest one is live wired i want to get him on the show here soon to discuss this it's about brain plasticity which i'm happy to hear about because and now that i'm in my mid 60s it's glad to know i can still learn new things and that the brain is still plastic enough to keep growing and learning which is good anyway check it out uh the oregon state university provost lecture series with the great david eagleman next wednesday october 27th at 6 p.m once again you can register for the free event at beav.es slash provost hyphen lecture or just google oregon state university comma david eagleman and it pops right up all right thanks for listening before i introduce today's guest i want to tell you about our sponsor one dream i u w-o-n-d-r-i-u-m one dream is the former great courses the teaching company they uh courses i've been telling you about for years they're my favorites i've produced two myself and i listen to well i've probably taken at 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visited some of his friends at uc santa barbara who were his colleagues when he had a sabbatical here back in the 90s back when he first wrote the language instinct and how the mind works in his early works his latest book is rationality what it is why it seems scarce and why it matters as if he needs an introduction he doesn't but i'll read one anyway he is the john stone family professor of psychology at harvard university a two-time pulitzer prize finalist and the winner of many awards for his research teaching and books he's been elected to the national academy of sciences and named one of the of time magazine's 100 most influential people and one of foreign policy's 100 leading global thinkers his books include and i'm going to read them in a different context here because that's how we began sitting there at my couch uh i had a pile of his book stacked up next to me as you'll see and i just asked him what's the through line you know given that the hindsight bias and the self-serving bias and the self-justification bias and all the things he writes about in rationality we'll kick in but nevertheless he he had a nice long answer explaining what the through line is for the language instinct his very first book how the mind works the blank slate the better angels of our nature enlightenment now capping off with rationality this is the key to me the latest book to all the others because it's the tools by which we understand how the mind works how language works why we're violence and violent and why it declined and and uh what the enlightenment has done for us understanding history psychology human nature biology physics everything depends on rationality so from there i um tap him for his opinion on a number of big questions what is consciousness what about free will and determinism how does he think about those and um to what extent we're rational or irrational and the debate between daniel kahneman and gert gingarinser and his idea of bounded rationality that is we are rational but in the right contexts and the wrong context were very irrational that is as steve says are we more like homer simpson or mr spock alfred e newman or john von neumann and then we get into what it means to believe in ghosts and gods and angels and demons and conspiracy theories when people say i believe it what do they mean by that i mean do they actually believe it in a literal sense it's empirically true or is it more of a mythological truth that is it represents something else so he and i use slightly different terms for that steve calls them um the reality world in the mythological world i call them empirical truths this versus these mythological truths but whatever you call them the idea is to try and explain these things based on uh what people actually really believe to be true or just they just kind of take it as true in some other sense then we get into some of the tools of rationality and reason and logic and how science works and then we also dab into a little bit about morality what's the basis of morality can we have a drill down and find a scientific basis for deriving an ought from an is and i think we can and as you'll hear steve makes a pretty good case for this as well and then we end by talking about how to talk to irrational people that is at thanksgiving dinner when crazy uncle harry floats the idea of the rigged election or q and on what do you say all right this was a great conversation one of the best i've had steve is such a good guy and one of the smartest people i've ever met and i've met a lot of really smart people so enjoy this conversation if you do support the podcast please through skeptic.com donate that is you go to skeptic.com donate and you can make a tax deductible donation to the skeptic society all right thanks for listening here is steven pinker stephen pinker thanks for coming on the show hey michael thanks for having me yeah in our home studio as it were now it's nice so as you can see next to me i have your new book rationality i would have already given it a proper introduction but before we get into that as you can see i have this massive pile of books here how the mind works the blank slate the better angels of our nature the stuff of thought enlightenment now that's only maybe half of your books so with the the idea of the um hindsight bias and the self-serving bias when you started off 25 30 years ago writing books what was is there a through line through all these works that you thought of ahead of time or or is it kind of a contingent pathway that unfolds as as you develop your ideas one thing leads to another so there is a i mean in in retrospect there's a through path where uh each book contained the seed of the following one and i got into psychology in the first place when i was an undergraduate just because it seemed of all of the uh disciplines in academia it seemed to have the right combination of the interest in deep issues concerning human nature uh but it seemed contractible that is you could answer questions by gathering data about human behavior but it was kind of big issues that that interested me i was a as a undergraduate i read works of noam chomsky who later became my colleague at mit but was featured in a new york times article in the early 1970s and he combined pretty technical analyses of the syntax of english with questions that go back to the age of reason and the enlightenment about what's human nature how does the mind work now you can't get do a phd in how the mind works you can't get a grant to study your human nature uh you gotta be a little more specific yeah so for a lot of my career i did focus on on some areas in cognitive psychology visual imagery visual attention language acquisition in children i wrote two pretty technical books on language acquisition not not sold in stores and then i decided to try my hand at a more a book with a wider audience the language instinct kind of everything you always wanted to know about language partly because i uh realized that everyone's interested in language there were popular books and in other sciences on you know dinosaurs and black holes and yeah medicine but you know but nothing on language and so i i wrote it and to cover a field as sprawling as language everything from the history of languages to who decides what's proper grammar to how the kids acquire it where the words come from i needed a coherent theory and and uh the one that i answered language is a biological adaptation like our other adaptations to share our ideas to communicate and then i stole that idea of course from charles darwin who wrote man has an instinctive tendency to speak as we see in the babble of our young children while no child has an instinctive tendency to bake brew or and that just nailed it and so i called it the language instinct nice my final chapter was a speculation if language is an instinct what are the other instincts and there i drew on my interest in just psychology in general including evolutionary psychology and that led to how the mind works which was uh how does the rest of the mind other than language work memory emotion visual perception concept formation social relations and that book aroused a reaction that i i knew that human nature is and always has been a controversial subject it's one with political implications gets people exercised people attach all kinds of moral meanings to it and a lot of the reaction to how the mind works wasn't so much to my explanation of how stereoscopic vision works but to the very idea that the mind is a product of natural selection that that it's composed of systems that um [Music] kind of wired into the brain to that helped our ancestors survive and it turns out the idea that there is such a thing as human nature that were not blank slates written on by the environment turned out to be i shouldn't say surprisingly contentious but continued to be contentious and i decided that so much of the reaction to how the mind works was not about the content of the book but the larger question of what is is there such a thing as human nature but i decided to address that in a book that was the blank slate yeah the modern denial of human nature was its subtitle where i tried to take on why it's such a politically fraught and emotionally contentious subject the one of the reasons is that traditionally the idea of human nature is has a bit of a conservative odor like you can't change human nature and so your dreams of a progressive utopia are hopelessly romantic and because we've got all these nasty and brutish instincts you're always going to need police and the army and incentives because people aren't perfectly generous you need a market economy that incentivizes them a lot of ideas that just in the landscape tend to kind of lean right but um i noted in the book especially in the chapter called politics there has always been a hereditarian or darwinian left again my my former colleague noam chomsky is an example he's as hard left as you can get and he was the advocate of an innate language faculty um and in in support of the idea that you can be a progressive in the sense of believing in progress we can make things better we're not doomed to the current levels of war and violence that we see around us even if you do believe in human nature i noted that at least in my conception of human nature it's a multi-part system it's it's it's modular or it's complex there are multiple intelligences multiple faculties domain specificity goes by various names so some parts of human nature can tug uh others so even if we do have some you know some kind of ugly instincts like dominance and revenge but you know we also have empathy and self-control and so what happens just depends on the uh the interplay between these different parts of the mind and i threw off almost as an aside you know it can't be a debate as to whether it's possible to change society societies change that's that's what history is and sometimes for the better such as the abolition of slavery and the fall of the soviet empire and um the decline of uh a factoid that i had come across the decline of homicide since the middle ages fallen by a factor of about 30 in europe and i reiterated those observations in a blog contribution that i was asked to to submit on edge.org when every year john brockman poses a question i think you've answered them yeah on occasion and one year is what are you optimistic about so i kind of uh recycled those observations in the blank slate well look you know a lot of things have a lot of ways we're less violent than we were 75 100 1 000 years ago and uh when i when i um posted it and then turned it into an article in the new republic and a ted talk i then was the recipient of emails from scholars in various disciplines who said you know you could have added other examples of historical declines of violence did you know which i did not that since 1945 there's been a huge decline in war that countries don't go to war as much as they used to someone else said did you know that uh violence against women is down that their the rates of rape and sexual assault have fallen someone else said oh you know that parents don't beat at their children as much as they used to and someone else said well it isn't just those data you cite about fall of homicide in england well it's also true of germany and italy and scandinavia and the netherlands so i was kind of sitting on all these data from all of these scholars in different fields that all kind of point to a conclusion that strikes most people as uh incredible yeah you read the news you think violence is as prevalent as ever it turned out it's really been in decline in all these different ways and i thought i'm in a unique situation just fortuitously being the possessor of these different data sets uh they should be put between a single pair of book covers and as a psychologist what a uh what a delicious topic to try to explain how could it be possible that both our ancestors were violent and were less so what what went right and that became the better angels of our nature nice that then um having presented 75 grafts that kind of looked like this the violence going down i became aware that it isn't just violence where our species seems to have done better but in education in longevity in child mortality in leisure time uh in in accident rates i was uh shopping for a new car and so i bought car and driver magazine i just happened to there's an article there with a graph that went like that on um traffic deaths per passenger mile so the by a factor of more than 10 you're way safer driving i i didn't know this um so things good things can happen and then the question is why um how about if we remind people of this fact that they are largely ignorant of and tie it together that led to enlightenment now the um the case for reason science humanism and progress where um putting it together what could have made all these things go kind of in a good direction well probably it doesn't happen by magic uh the universe doesn't try to make us better the universe kind of tries to grind us down um so how could all these things have gotten better well really the only plausible explanation is uh we are a species with these cognitive processes with language we can pool our discoveries we can criticize each other's ideas and out of the the collective i um we can discover ways of making ourselves better of fighting disease and uh famine and and war and crime and it shouldn't be a shock that every once in a while one of these ideas works and if we remember the ones that work and decide not to repeat our mistakes that's how progress happens yeah so uh then finally the um skipping a couple of books on the way yeah but my most recent book on rationality expands the defense of reason which was one part of enlightenment now but also but tries to present the two a lot of the tools of rationality um logic critical thinking correlation causation signal detection theory bayesian reasoning there are kind of benchmarks for what rationality ought to be leading to the psychological question how well do we do as a species and then the inevitable question and this of course brought me not for the first time smack into your territory of uh of weird beliefs but of course we also overlapped in the moral arc which uh uh also addressed some of these forms of improvement over the centuries and millennia you just got a total summary of all stephen pickers books but you still got to read them there's some details in there and i left a couple of books out that's right you left a couple books out well i guess one through line i see is um i think you call this universal realism is that what you call it or something like that yeah it's something i i have came across and named in rationality so the idea is that there's really nothing we should not be able to reason our way or scientifically test any ideas which does go against a lot of even our colleagues who are uh you know in favor of reason and science and they'll say like steve gould noma non-overlapping magisteria we got to leave religion alone science has nothing to say about these ultimate questions of meaning and purpose or david hume's is on fallacy which i think is itself kind of a fallacy but that you know you can't derive an art from it is therefore science has nothing to say about morality there's these kind of barriers that are up there that you've seen i don't know if you've knocked them down deliberately or just gone around them uh and i try to do a little bit of the same but you know i do get pushed back not not really from conservatives and christians but from liberals that say you know you can't do it that's exactly you know and this is one of the manifestations of this division just to take a step back so universal realism determine i gave just realism not in the sense of being you know practical but realism in the philosophical sense of believing that there is a real world that propositions are objectively true or false we can never be certain that they are but you know we we do our best but with a conviction that they really are true or false at the end of the day uh but for a lot of and this again this this is these are themes that that you have uh often written about when it comes to some of these as you call weird beliefs you know the paranormal the conspiracy theories the the medical quackery the question of why do people believe them well part of the answer is it depends what you mean by belief right not to get clinton-esque but um it's not clear how deep these beliefs go in terms of uh conviction that they are true or false in the same sense we have a conviction either there's milk in the fridge or there isn't um [Music] the universal realism is the conviction which i kind of uh date to the enlightenment that all of your beliefs are like you know is there milk in the fridge they're true or false you may not know the answer but you could know the answer if you try hard enough and if you tap into communities like scientists and journalists and record keepers now that is a deeply that itself is kind of a weird belief in the context of human history namely you know you know we believe it but for a lot of people there's this whole zone of beliefs where it's like you know true false it's kind of like the wrong question it's like they're empowering they're uplifting they're entertaining such as the existence of god i know that you have faced pushed back like a number of the uh uh uh atheist authors not from you know bible thumping evangelists which you're familiar with them too but uh our friends journalists and professors and pundits who don't say well actually god does exist here's you know 36 reasons i believe they exist rather it's kind of just you know uncouth or not done to ask the question does god exist it's like it's a good belief okay and what else do you want right and if you realize that that's another mode of belief it's like a good thing to believe it could maybe it's true it's good if everyone believes it's true is it really true you can't find out uh so does god exist as an example yeah i suspect that and again this is this is more more in your area but a lot at least some conspiracy theory belief holders it's not like they're absolutely sure that it's true but it's um you know whether the democrats uh have a a cabal of satan worshipping cannibalistic pedophiles you know it's the kind of thing they could do right you know do they or not i well i'm going to believe it it's mythically true it's mythically true exactly true or it's what we believe about the other side that we don't like something like that exactly now so you take someone like you know jerry coyne has this phrase you know atheists atheism yes so these are atheists who recognize that faith is important to people and they okay we're not gonna we're not gonna take that away from them but you know it's it's really kind of a condescending way to treat people's beliefs because i've tried this on believers like so if i tell you that you know that's your mythic truth your religious truth it's not something you can prove and i'm willing to just let you believe that because i know it makes you feel better that sounds kind of patronizing right like we smart people know that this is but the little people need it the teaming masses yeah the tv masses now granted i mean there are occasions you know if you're a human being you have compassion you know you don't you try to ram every belief in everyone's throats all the time just give an example so the one that we hired to uh clean our house had this uh woman of the life of hardship including on top of all of her hardships was the fact that her sister and her sister's grand grandchildren were killed in a car crash oh god and uh yeah i mean i'm really heart-wrenching and she said well my only consolation is that uh we'll all be reunited in heaven right now i'm not going to say here no well actually there's no there's no evidence that heaven exists i mean that would just be cruel yeah and you know we're not cruel um but when it comes to in the public sphere in arguments that you make where everyone kind of joins the game saying well we're all in it to find out what's what is true what's false what's good to believe what isn't you know that that's where uh you know anything goes or at least anything that is plausible rational in the direction of truth yeah i had stephen meyer in the podcast he has a book called the return of the god hypothesis basically it's kind of the the latest version of intelligent design in various realms physics cosmology biology and so on so i floated the idea you know this faithism you know that's your belief and it's okay that you believe that he found that kind of insulting like no no i believe it because it's actually true here's the arguments here's the evidence come on well you got to give him credit yeah in a way i mean so you know he has these beliefs in the reality zone now again it's not always there is something to be thankful for that some beliefs people kind of park in the mythology zone like you know it used to be that if you were a committed christian and you believe that if you don't accept jesus as your savior you'll spend eternity in hell in eternal torment then you know if you really take that seriously it's kind of rational to try to convert jews at some point you're kind of doing them a favor right and it's kind of a public health measure they shouldn't condemn other people so there's this kind of yeah i mean it's kind of a perverse rationality in at least them taking their beliefs seriously on the other hand it's probably good that nowadays most christians don't it's like yeah they you know if they consider themselves christian they do have to believe that but they don't act as if they really believe in it right thank goodness yes that that's right on the other hand he had somebody like ken miller who we know who was really one of the leading debunkers of intelligent design creationism uh and he wrote that book uh about you know why darwin's god fighting darwin's god and but the last chapter is you know by the way i'm a catholic and i accept jesus as my savior and i believe he was resurrected and so on anyway ken and and and uh richard dawkins and i were all at a conference together i've told this story on the podcast many times so sorry for the repetition uh but um so richard as he's want to do says okay ken let's say we found a piece of the true cross you know and it was and it was real and we found on there some some flesh in the wood we were able to extract the dna from the from the flesh and you know of course ken could see where this was going he's like richard richard you know does he have a full complement of dna or is it gets born of a of a virgin and god is the father so the dna can't be you know does he have a diploid genius yes exactly yeah yes so ken's like richard richard richard i'm not claiming this is true in some kind of biological sense or scientific sense this is why i'm a catholic it's what i believe it's my faith i mean that's a great exactly i've not heard that story before but it's a great example of how belief uh does not necessarily mean your conviction that something is uh true or provably true it's things that are empowering to give your life meaning uh and you know a lot of these weird beliefs i suspect are in that zone they're not all i mean they were you know among the q and on people there were those who you know stormed the capital um believing that the election had been stolen by this democrats who were capable of anything there was the comet uh ping pong pizza redeemer pizzeria redeemer who burst in with his guns blazing to save the children yeah uh and then you know i found there was no basement there were no children being raped in the basement right and he actually recanted i believe he did he went to jail and then recanted but he took his beliefs literally whereas probably i don't know what the percentage is but some portion of q anon believers it's like well the democrats are capable of it whether or not they did it what difference does it make this is what always bothers me about the self-report data and surveys you know it's 33 percent of americans tick the box that ufos are real or ghosts are real or whatever do they really think it through or they're just kind of like i don't know it seems plausible i think i heard something on the uh the the history channel or the yeah yeah exactly so i mean if you sat down ted cruz and said do you really think that there's a secret satanic pedophile ring at this pizzeria he's got to say well no of course not yeah he's not a dummy so try to squirm out of halfway yeah that's a question yeah don't comment yes or or like trump you know i'm not a historian they like me and i like that you know something like that yeah so it's one counter i use to the arguments like you know no these things are actually true like here's the six best arguments for the resurrection of jesus you know the women went there at the tomb and they saw the the the entryway had been rolled away and there was a missing body and then thomas saw him and then the division of the 500 saw jesus they go through all these arguments so and so to which i say okay before we go into each of these one by one if the arguments you're making are like a scientific argument like here's the six reasons that we know global warming is real and human caused and if you look at the data you'd agree with me right so if you presented this to jews why don't they accept jesus as the savior they believe in the same god as you say book at least the old testament you know and they even believe that there's going to be a messiah they just don't think it was the carpenter yeshua right because the old testament prophets apparently said it would not be a meek and mild messiah like jesus was it would be more like a warrior and so the jews are still waiting so if these arguments are so good how come these rabbis don't go oh yeah this you can't say about rabbis they just don't get the arguments if they understood the arguments they change their mind you can't say that about them so why don't they convert and was there an answer the only answer i guess well i don't know you know the the jews are different and okay how about the muslims and you have some emotions you know it is interesting to see the pressure of secular morality on religious belief when it works well that you know the the the developed christians that i know there are there most of them are pretty philosomic they you know they saw what happened in the holocaust and the kind of ugly history of uh christian anti-semitism they want no part of it right but i'm faced with you know kind of a contradiction like how can it both be true that you have to accept jesus your messiah and all these people who don't and you know they're okay after all yes uh and there are various you know twists and turns well they're different god had different ways of revealing himself to different peoples and you know more than one of those is okay and uh so you don't have the jesus option is one that christians are obliged to accept but if you're jewish you find your other way accepting it through the torah and the the talmud so they do you know twist themselves to accommodate this rather uncomfortable tension right again it's you know how much they really believe it yeah in a way some of this mythological belief this benign hypocrisy is something to be thankful for yes because people can you know and you know people like ken miller and francisco you know they're they're good decent people right and you know they struggled to make these beliefs co-exist and they found a way and you know okay yeah so the question here i think you're getting at with your search for universal reality is that there are tools to get at it the question is how far can we go so you and i are willing to go as far as we could go so so if we but if we bump up against things so we could say like slavery is really wrong as lincoln said if slavery is not wrong nothing's wrong you know the principle of interchangeable perspectives as i would not want to be a slave i shall not be a master lincoln said and so those are sort of the low-hanging fruit you know we've kind of gotten past those in torture and civil rights women's rights gay rights you know but but what if you bump up against something like abortion what's the right answer yeah no and there is in cases where there are conflicting values there there's a sense there there is no right answer some of it probably in practice is determined by the consequences of different policies and that people when there's a conflict people kind of assess the costs and benefits of coming down too hard on one side or another and if you really consistently believe that a fertilized ovum is a a person yeah deserving of all the rights and let's say but you also believe in the death penalty should we execute women who use an intrauterine device that prevents implantation of a fertilized egg most people aren't willing to live with that implication right and so it kind of pushes them you're toward the the charitable treatment of women who for one reason or another should choose not to carry a fertilized ovum to term right and as you show i think we've been shifting ever forward to bending the moral arc expanding the moral sphere uh based on certain principles based on what based on that there's a universal human nature if i see you suffering or and i see the signs in your face that you probably feel the way i feel when i express those emotions so i know you suffer like i can suffer therefore i should treat you equally something like that is not natural that you know that took centuries really to come about but now we've kind of gotten there but that's not just cultural relativism that's not just some kind of crazy western way of thinking and i think that you know it's a kind of way of reasoning toward a kind of truth that there is a human nature people don't want to suffer so how can we do things have policies that lead to more than that and there's nothing special about the pronoun i as opposed to you so that anything you claim for yourself you can't withhold from someone else and expect them to agree anyway it's okay for me to exploit you and you know let your children drown and uh but it's not okay if you exploit me and you let my children down well that you know you can say that but no one else has to go along with you they're not going to go along with you plus the the the kind of game theoretic analysis that a world in which we refrain from hurting each other which imposes uh inflicts a high cost with a much smaller benefit on the uh harmer um that there are many many opportunities where we can boost the well-being of someone else at a really small cost to ourself so if we sign on to a kind of universalist morality of universal benevolence and non-harm non-violence everyone's better off now granted i could be better off still if i was the exploiter and if i knew i was always going to be the exploiter but given that you know i really do i'm not that powerful no one's that powerful i do depend my well-being depends on what you do i'm going to agree to a universal moral code in which neither of us gets to harm the other one it's better than uh in the long run than me being being a psychopath who can do whatever i want to you how do you respond to the typical pushback i get like well what if you found a society where people love slavery even the slaves said yeah this is pretty good or somebody says i like suffering what you know why should your concern about my suffering be a moral value this is i'm different than you like i think it was uh george bernard schwang said you shouldn't do unto others as they uh what have you do under them they may have different tastes yeah right right well i mean there is you know it's quite a counter factual that people would enjoy being slaves and if they were to um the difference if they were to enter a contract in which they got certain perks and they perform certain services you know that's fine that's kind of what employment is the difference is you can't have the state enforce that with the contract if it included they're being unable to get out of it so ultimately when we're talking about what people choose in terms of their own pleasure their own well-being it all starts with well yeah but you got to choose and the thing with slavery is you don't get to juice and so a difference between a uh kind of a benevolent uh you know a patriarch or paternalistic figure who provides for you and you serve at his behest is okay as long as it doesn't go to the point where you're locked into it if you change your mind you can't get out and the government enforces the uh your your owner's right to keep you that way is it enough to say that you have to start a moral argument somewhere so we're going to start with human flourishing is our goal i'm not going to make any claims that that's absolutely true i'm just starting there and i'm going to build from there and then everything you just said would fall from there but can we do better than that can we say actually human flourishing is based on our our nature this is what we want to do because as you said the second law of thermodynamics is always pushing against us and living forms want to live this is you know i mean with the exceptions of severe depression so people commit suicide or whatever but but just by nature you know we want to survive why maybe that's one thought too many why why this is what we do yeah that's what living organisms do they live well and it does get back to the um hume's argument that you alluded to earlier in a conversation that you can't get an ought from an is and that is technically on very narrow grounds true in the same sense that another thing that that hume claimed in that discussion that there's you uh can't rationally there's no rational argument why anyone should choose their own happiness and comfort and well-being to uh you know pain and and suffering well again that's technically true too uh however it is a fact about us that we prefer to be uh comfortable and well-fed and happy uh it's a fact about all of us and uh once you concede that non-logical fact uh other things follow yeah such as the indeed i could be as assumed put it in this example i could be indifferent between a um say accepting a scratch on my little finger if it were to prevent a a huge genocide you know logically there's nothing that compels you to say okay scratch my finger and we'll save 100 million people right but generally because you know with that kind of situation you could be one of those hundred million right uh you'd certainly like it if someone else accepted the scratch on your finger and so to be consistent you would have to um you know make that that moral commitment that moral sacrifice and that's how even though you know you shouldn't argue against hume he was a really smart guy and he wasn't technically accurate but it only goes so far and i think philosophers call those thin arguments right it's a thin argument versus yeah something like that so like in reading better angels of our nature on the decline of war for example here's another way to to to phrase the the question if we know the causes of the decline of war it the way it is you know democracy trade membership and international organizations all cause uh international conflict to decline if we know that's the way it is then we ought to do that we ought to do more of that so that is deriving or not from an is yes you know again always relative to the goal we want we think war is a bad thing because war is not healthy for children and other living things right uh you know war what is it good for absolutely nothing right if we are committed to that yeah then indeed we should learn as much as we can from history qualitative quantitative political science international relations and try to do more of whatever it is that we think drove war down in the first place but it is a um you know that kind of humanism of war is not healthy for children and other living things is itself a 20th century phenomenon because in fact a is a post-world war one phenomenon because before world war one you know john mueller has uncovered uh dozens of quotes by philosophers and artists and statesmen and poets saying war is great war is the best thing that there ever was it's manly and heroic and holy and spiritual and thrilling and peace oh my god there's nothing worse than peace it's consumerist and effeminate and selfish and cowardly this strikes us as barking man today yeah but uh but it was probably a consensus opinion until then world war one happened it was like whoops you know 15 million dead and you know young men machine gunned down as they emerged from trenches uh poison gas like well maybe we should rethink this war as early as spiritual and thrilling uh business even you know one of my heroes william james in his the namesake of the building that i work in had a a beautiful essay called the moral equivalent of war and jimmy carter cited it and then they they uh called it the the meow speech moral equivalent of war and ow that's funny but think about james who is you know himself was a thoroughly humane man you might think the war moral equivalent of war uh would refer to something that's as bad as war but james in the context of the time this is around 1910 or so it was something that would be as good as war that's what he had to deal with because that was the consensus around him at the time that war was a good thing it was self-sacrifice it was heroism it was submerging yourself in a higher cause and james's argument was well let's see if we can get all the advantages of war without the disadvantages like you know hundreds of thousands of people getting killed so he said we should send off our young men and women to fishing boats and coal mines and farms and factories where they would get the childishness beaten out of them so they developed the heroism the toughness the self-sacrifice the stoicism without them actually having to kill people right so that was the more it was kind of a predecessor of the peace corps and teach for america and um but you know what we had to realize in in the historical context that by moral equivalent of war he wanted to come up with something that was in the eyes of the people of his era as good as war right interesting yes well so the question is have we discovered something about reality in our current values that we hold about why the decline of war is good civil rights women's rights gay rights and so on and so forth or could this all turn around in centuries from now and then philosophers would say well that was just a temporary western culture way of thinking pendulum swings they didn't they didn't discover anything about human nature and truth in reality that was just a western way of thinking in the 20th and 21st century yeah you know it's possible you know the the hemlines go up and hemlines go down and you know men's ties get wider and skinnier and you know slavery comes in slavery goes out it looks like history doesn't work that way yeah i mean bad things can reappear after the uh the french abolished slavery after the french revolution napoleon reintroduced it so you know bad things cannot un unquestionably come back but still overall again this is a theme that of course you you explored in the moral arc but you you do seem some directionality that some things once abolished kind of stay abolished yeah uh human sacrifice might be the prototypical case where every civilization practiced it civilization you throw the virgin into the volcano you you cut the the heart a beating heart out of a living victim to propitiate the gods to kind of slake their thirst for blood you know better him than me maybe god will be satisfied and he'll leave us alone and you know countries don't do that anymore for all the horrible things that countries do they don't do that or you know another example of maybe a little more trivial but taking out the family for uh sunday afternoon entertainment of laughing at the insane and insane right at their antics i mean that was just a family fun in the 19th century you've seen those pictures of the like 1910s of the um uh of a lynching i got a sunday afternoon and the people are all dressed up and they're sunday go to bed or an execution a more orderly execution last one i think was in kansas in the 1930s right so they they probably aren't coming back now yeah we could be proven right or wrong but you know a lot of things do kind of stay abolished suggesting that it isn't isn't like the hemlines but uh but what i'm getting is something like how we say well darwin discovered natural selection as the driving force of evolution that's not going to happen again it's been found it's been discovered einstein discovered you know the relativity and so on that can't be discovered again that's reality could we say something like human flourishing we discovered that this is a better way not just a more practical way to live but an actual truth about human truths yeah so philosophers call it moral realism yeah and again realism not in the sense of you know kind of sensible pragmatic but realism is real that is moral truths as you say just like relativity and natural selection uh that people who uh didn't believe them were incorrect and the people who believe them were correct uh as it turns out it's a harder thing to show but there has been an argument i don't know i don't think it's philosopher proof uh although it was advanced by a philosopher that the the directionality of history that uh that we're talking about or the apparent directionality uh you know again that both of us have written about is a kind of at least an indirect argument from moral realism namely just as in science once some things are discovered they tend to stay discovered you know it's probably probably go back to thinking that hereditary material isn't protein as opposed to dna that the fact that they're some barbaric pro practices are one society abolishes them then the whole world does and it doesn't go backward is a kind of roundabout way of saying well maybe these really are true now some other philosophers attack that you know the soundness of that argument but it is one kind of uh way to defend this um another would be to look at the inherent nature of the argument itself for uh say universal rights in terms of the logical uh irrelevance the distinction between me and you but it's a hard thing to it's hard to get proof and with it among moral philosophers some of them are moral realists and and many not so are not so much i mean i'd like to be able to say we discovered in the 21st century that gays like to be married as much as straits yeah we discovered that same-sex marriage is perfectly okay i mean we did could you make an argument maybe not philosophically but scientifically in this sense of yeah that's because they have the same nature as everybody else they want to be they want to have love and commitment and so on they want the public recognition that straits want for marriage we should they should have that because we've discovered that about them there's a whole other set of arguments we kind of glanced off them earlier in the conversation of since some moral arguments or a lot of moral arguments hinge on the totality of benefits and harms which are empirical questions you know what will happen if you institute a certain policy then when you do implement a policy or you compare societies that have different policies and you say well what happens that kind of empirical data can feed back on the idea that something is immoral because it will inevitably lead to such and such it'll be a slippery slope yeah so abortion is an example where you before roe v wade um you know you and i remember when there were arguments that if you legalize abortion soon you'll legalize infanticide right and or you'll devalue the interests of children children will be seen as commodities inconveniences burdens and you'll have more and more callous treatment of children so we can say okay well it's been you know almost 40 years since roe v wade what's happened has any state tried to legalize infanticide the answer is no uh has our society become more callous toward children well no we're in the uh era of helicopter parenting and hyper parenting and yeah uh so it's a kind of even though it's not a direct moral argument in so far as part of the moral argument was what it would lead to we can say well the data are in and we know the answer is no in the case of gay marriage again this is you know more recent 2015 but there were arguments at the time and you don't have to be as old as us to remember them that if you legalize gay marriage the next thing people will be able to marry their pets they'll be able to have polygamy right uh you know the married farm animals uh and you know these were serious arguments at the time yeah i mean maybe i can't believe it you know we're still gathering data it's been six years and yeah you know probably not it's probably not no yeah and then let's see how far we can go with this so let's say what's the right tax rate income tax or tariffs or whatever or what's the right immigration policy now it'd be easy to say well there isn't science has nothing to say about that but on the other hand sagan points us out at the end of of um the demon hotter world that like say in the united states we have 50 different states and they all have different constitutions they all have gun control different gun control laws and tax rates and so forth and those are like many experiments and we can kind of see what the outcome is you know you nudge this one up and then this goes down or this goes up whatever it is you're trying to measure and then so like enlightenment now you showed that pretty much all european countries in the united states and canada have about 20 of their gdp allocated for social services and and whatnot and despite the crew and cry on both sides it's not enough it's too much it's always pretty much the same and that's kind of unfolded over the last century or so you know bismarck's uh you know german state was kind of the first to implement a welfare system and so on it's kind of spread and i'm wondering is that because we're discovering that you know the society has to have some kind of safety net because we can't all live you know a decent life with homeless people right outside our doors or whatever so you know we have not just a moral obligation that we're discovering something about the proper structure of a of a society so therefore you have to have some kind of tax rate to pay for it and therefore we can at least reason our way to an answer to like what's the right tax rate income tax rate as opposed to being just completely relative or willy-nilly no it's an interesting argument and it's it's not i think it's not played out as much as it should be you know you and i both have friends in the libertarian movement are sympathetic to some libertarian ideas people are not hard carrying libertarians but the you know one limitation of libertarianism is that um the ideal libertarian state you know doesn't exist never existed that is a affluent democracy with no social safety and no regulation now liberty some libertarians would say well it's just you know we've been too cowardly to try out and if we any country did they'd be so much more desirable than anyone that exists that we'd all slap ourselves in the form and say why didn't we try that earlier well maybe but that's what marxists say well that's what mark should say that's true that there hasn't been a true you know never been a true marxist society there are true libertarians maybe but we could as you say kind of look at history look at comparisons among uh states as a kind of laboratory and the fact that every western democracy has seen fit to introduce a welfare state uh ending up in a fairly narrow band i mean you know france does much more social spending in the united states yeah um but only a few percent well i think between twenty and thirty i think this is gonna mess the window so i mean you know there's a little bit there um but you can also then you know if you're good enough econometrician say holding all the compounds constant are there better outcome measures for countries that we distribute more there's one economist that tried to do it um when uh leandro prado deus gosura who claimed that there actually there is a u-shaped relationship between amount of redistribution and measures of social well-being the united states according to this analysis spends too little france probably spins too much the data are too noisy for it to be definitive but i can see that as a probably a better way of establishing some of these debates than the one that we have now of just dueling plausibilities pertaining to the idea of whether we can look at trends in history and cross jurisdiction comparisons to answer some political questions like is a more or less social spending good uh there are trends over time such as the expansion of the welfare state in every western democracy through the uh most of them after the 1930s um you can look at the rationale like maybelline even if you believe that the free market is a good way of generating wealth there's some things that even in theory the free market doesn't do so well like providing for people who have nothing to sell in the marketplace like you know kids like old people like sick people and and others and you know we're no longer satisfied to let the little nash grow freeze to death or or you know the joan's burying grandpa by the side of route 66 uh we've just decided we're not gonna we can't put up with that and even some what i think might be a new version of this experiment is a little paradox that popped up uh two years ago when in latin america chile which by many measures is a highly successful latin american society you know they're more affluent than their neighbors and their democracy has lasted now for about 40 years but then the the young people started you know torching subway stations you know why there instead of you know bolivia or venezuela uh you know what are they so peeved about they're living in a by latin american standards a pretty pretty good country and one of the reasons is that as countries develop they become more kind of munificent in their social safety net and chile is lagged behind they uh they've got richer they have not expanded social benefits as much as their their oecd peers and people get pissed off and they start to tour subway stations if they don't feel that they're enough uh the surplus is kind of redistributed to them now whether or not they have a right to do that or not but you know people are people and there may be some wisdom in uh you know throwing enough of a sop to people in redistribution and pensions and student bursaries so that they don't uh they don't burn cars well in another one of these areas where we're bumping up against an epistemological wall i think may be conflicting rights so we're seeing this with uh trans rights versus women's rights you know does it tran a male to female trans have a right to compete in sports in the female division or going to the female locker room or bathroom or whatever you know everybody's going crazy over this issue you can barely speak about it without people losing their minds but it's just to me just a kind of an old-fashioned rights conflicts that you know we have conflicting rights and you can't have everything right as thomas holt famously said you know there are no solutions they're just trade-offs you want more of this you're going to get less of that you know so i uh i did some gun control debates with john lott remember john lott the guy yes more guns less crime right he's pretty hardcore on this okay and he's got his ducks all lined up in his arguments and i got it as a libertarian i was a youthful libertarian i was about gun control people should have whatever they want then i started looking at the data and it's like this is bad this is like as many people are dying by guns as by automobiles and we do something about automobile deaths as you noted uh why shouldn't we do something about this so i mean you know we we restrict our freedoms all the time i'm not free to drive on any side of the road i want we have agreed that i'm taking i'm giving up my freedom to drive on either side of the road for your safety and my safety and we do this all the time right so but in some of the audiences i noticed it really didn't matter how many people died it's like this is my second amendment right so i said what if it wasn't 35 000 a year what if it was 350 000 people died a year would would you be concerned about that he goes no this audience was kind of no no no it's this right trumps the consequences so it's almost like a a deontological versus consequentialism it absolutely is yes and some um i'm just blanking on the name of the political philosopher who made the argument that libertarianism some combines both uh deontological and consequentialist arguments usually deontological in the sense that there's certain rights to certain liberties that you just may not infringe on although often mixed in there's the consequentialist argument that well we'd all be uh more prosperous if we adopted these policies yeah and that within libertarianism there's a tension between those two rationales yes and i find conservatives republicans are very inconsistent about this because if it was 35 000 people died a year of terrorist attacks oh my god no great no-brainer homeland security tripled the budget canceled the constitution completely except for the second amendment that's it and uh and you know it's like okay so they're just two different problems people are dying because of this or they're dying because of that where's the consistency yeah you're right there are some trade-offs that are not kind of objectively resolvable um partly they they hinge on uh some principles that people might consider sacred uh you just can't you may not trade them off uh regardless of the cost and it sounds like that was the case with with a lot i think sauna it's also think about that with george lakoff's book on moral politics where he kind of made the metaphor of the family as a strict father family or a nurturing mother family yeah except that he um you know being a good berkeley leftist you couldn't call it a nurturing mother it was a nurturing parent oh nurturing oh you don't want to imply that she's they're parenting is gendered even though you know as a you know brilliant linguist which he is uh and and with the the the methodology the insight of what does language tell us about human nature which again he has pursued brilliantly you would see in the language that parenting really is gendered including the word nurture which comes from the same root as nurse which is the difference between you think of the difference between to mother a child and to father a child they are not interchangeable right so baked into our language there is the assumption that parenting is something that moms tend to be more involved with dance but of course they had to go out the window if you let your politics trump your your linguistics yes well here you know i'm thinking conservatives will say well i'm in we're in favor of small government and uh you know keep the government out of people's private lives okay what about the military well except the military and the jails and the court system we need a massive build a wall immigration policy what about freedom of women to make their own oh well except for the women you know all of a sudden well and that is by the way and that is potentially a way to find common ground namely uh if you yeah people who are dead set in their opinions will go to their graves believing what they believe but for people who are more on the fringes of the the movement who are may not be true believers that's the kind of argument that you know peels them off a few at a time or that prevents you know the new babies who are being born every minute from necessarily getting sucked into an ideology at least it's an answer to a to a frequently asked question of uh how do you persuade people to change their minds if they have these convictions the answer is well some you can't but with some you point out as you said uh the cont inherent contradictions in their belief system if if such to be found yeah with the abortion issue i try on talking to pro-lifers what's our goal here the goal is to reduce unwanted pregnancies the problem is not abortions it's unwanted pregnancies okay why are women getting pregnant when they don't want to okay here's the reasons and you know education access to birth control health care economic empowerment you know pregnancy unwanted pregnancy rates go down and therefore abortion should go down why aren't you concerned about that but that's your ultimate goal rather than moralizing about it and punishing after the fact as opposed to preventing it in the first place right yeah exactly yeah uh you know so or at worst if it's a conservative christian i'm talking to who's a pro-lifer i'll say where's your christian charity and love and empathy for these women that are poor yeah i mean yeah right exactly well they would say well where's your empathy for that you know the poor embryo or the poor fetus well that's true yes if you push though you know and i do think something that that you know many of our peers don't appreciate is that the moral argument against abortion is not it's not trivial right no no because it is a continuum well okay first trimester well you know why not second trimester why not right before birth want it right after birth because it is a continuum right and so the people who say that you can't uh that are casually a aborted child in the first trimester you know i i disagree with them but it's not a trifling argument you do need reasons and then they're not clear-cut like if if it's not if it's okay on one day is it okay the next day and if not what about the next day after that the day after the day after that and then you do get to infanticide so how do you draw the line and if it's something like um you know viability well why is that so morally relevant doesn't it depend on your technology keeping kid's life ultimately this is an argument it's kind of a i think arguments a lot of people don't swallow explicitly but i think it's in practice what we do that is there is no sharp dividing line you know biology just didn't give us one right right and so we have to set a boundary somewhere um in terms of protection of a person qua person such that killing it is murder uh and there is nature doesn't give us that dividing line this is me arguing now um the the first trimester is you know it's a pretty good one it hasn't it has not slipped toward infanticide uh bringing it back to conception would mean that we would jail women who use an iud so you know that's not going to work and pragmatically it seems to be a line that we can we can all live with yeah right but even there where you draw the line it's not completely arbitrary there's kind of a logic and some empirical evidence behind it and we use arguments by not just viability but when the you know consciousness comes online the fetus can feel pain you know we use arguments now that is morally significant although sometimes a line is just um uh significant because everyone can see it and it has to be drawn somewhere let's draw it where everyone uh kind of agreed that there is a line to be drawn like the supreme court voted that you can't the death penalty can't be applied to people 18 or under because their their brains are not fully developed they don't have the prefrontal cortex to control their urges so they they didn't have the kind of freedom that an adult would have therefore they're morally culpable so we should not hold them the same level that's based on neuroscience right so there's kind of informed maybe informed by science well it informed except if it was really informed by neuroscience we would put every uh convicted murderer into an eye machine and see how what their frontal lobe connectivity is and you know we don't do that no we do draw a line though that is arbitrary like you know it's not like on your 18th birthday suddenly your brain changes right but we got to put it somewhere right and you know 18 has kind of become a focal point because we use it for voting and for some other things going to war but not drinking but not drinking you know not driving right and not marrying and i mean so we we're kind of we are kind of all over the map there yeah but lines have to be drawn and often if there's one even it's somewhat arbitrary it could be the viability is is arbitrary but you know hey it's aligned we can all see it and uh it's as good as any other line is a starting point actually uh adrian reigns scanned the brains of serial killers remember that in his book anatomy events but that was not used as evidence in court no no it's just just his argument that uh you know these guys just have lack of self-control the the prefrontal cortex is pretty quiet and so they're succumbing to the urges bubbling up from within but of course i don't have those urges bubbling up like oh if i didn't know my prefollow cortex i'd be murdering people right and left it just never occurs to me to do that so there's obviously something else going on but that gets us to this question of free will which you've hinted at in your books but you've never like done a head-on i'm a compatibilist or i'm a determinist or i'm a or this maybe it's because it's an irresolvable issue maybe it's a problem with our concepts of what you mean by abolition and determinism or whatever how do you think about that yeah it does depend on what you mean and uh i guess i am a kind of compatibilist in the sense that you know i i think that there's nothing other than bringing neurophysiology in determining our choices uh uh you know i don't think that every time we make a decision a miracle occurs in the brain it's just it's neural firings right um on the other hand those neurofirings are really really complex there's probably some random elements in them because neurons are stochastic devices there's probably some chaos in the technical sense that arbitrarily small initial conditions can lead to divergent outcomes the the butterfly causing the the hurricane so there's no determinism in the strict mathematical sense of given all the inputs you can predict the output so that's not true of the brain now random unpredictability is not the same as free will although it is a denial of determinism when we talk about free will often what we're talking about is holding people responsible and i i get a fair amount of of uh email and tortured young people who say oh i listened to sam harris and he told is over yes why would i get up in the morning there's no free will does that mean you know we don't have to be we can't punish you know rapists and murderers and like what am i supposed to believe right now you can actually have a coherent policy on moral responsibility that does not hinge on um some kind of miraculous freedom from causation which is kind of a naive view of free will maybe just think of it in terms of incentives and deterrability namely even if the brain is deterministic in the sense that you know it responds to its prior state uh if you have a society where we say if you murder someone will put you in jail will the brains of people factor that into their decision making and lower the probability that they'll kill someone yeah and you know the answer is clearly yes and it's a reason to at least act as if there is a free will as long as it's not free will in the sense of utter arbitrariness right but rather uh responsiveness to socially announced contingencies of praise blame responsibility culpability reward punishment and there are a lot of that a lot of the answers a lot of the questions the the conundrums uh work out kind of the same way whether you believe that it's this is strange and called frequent or not such as do you punish children uh you might say well kids don't really have free will i mean you could say that but you could also say if you punish children the same number of kids would commit wrongdoing as if you didn't so it's it's has nothing but uh cruelty in it it doesn't satisfy your goal of reducing wrongdoing so on with the insanity defense and with your holding animals legally culpable which which a lot of countries used to do yes uh it's considered humane not to do it anymore not because animals have free will or don't have free will but just because that very policy is not going to be an effective incentive for those agents those animals in and result in reducing the frequency of the harmful acts i like dan dennett's degrees of freedom argument well and what i just said is partly adapted from dentistry like in the middle ages is that story about you know the guy killed somebody with an axe and he got put to death and the axe was punished we don't do that anymore because it won't it won't affect what axes do right i think and again i give dan uh credit i mean he he formulated this originally in his book elbow room right and the degree the kinds of freedom you want yeah elbow room that was it yeah well but another way to think that i think of it is of course we live in a determined universe but i'm part of the causal net of the universe i'm changing it as it goes as the you know the kind of unfolding of time from past to future i'm in that and i can tweak the variables here and there and nudge it this way or even just nudge myself so the example i use is you know i know that i like chocolate chip cookies between like four o'clock and seven o'clock and so i make a point not to be near where they are you know i'm not going to drive by the mrs fields chocolate chip cookie store at that time who is someone who's called the odyssey himself yes so but who but who is who's doing the odyssey and selecting i am well who who am i uh you can't just say well that the self is an illusion well maybe but it's a good illusion i feel like i'm a person and i'm affecting the future so in other words not predeterminism there's no i don't think the universe is predetermined like i knew you were going to sit down here today at 2 30 and and we knew this was going to happen at the big bang you know not just random you know stochastic or heisenberg uncertainty principle too many damn butterflies yeah yeah uh right so so but the other hard question in that is could you have done otherwise yeah right you know the putt or you know the you hit somebody or whatever and with example i used you know let's say somebody's faithfully married and happily but on the road they make a mistake and screw up and they have an affair the wife finds out say it's that direction because that's usually how it goes in those stories and you know she and then he says well honey i'm sorry but i had no control i mean this was all predetermined the big bang and you know it makes the kind of arguments that sam makes you know i don't have the control the kind of control you think i have it could he even finish the thought before you better not do it again you could have done different than what and and a partner who behaves in that way uh um publicly uh might result in a spouse who is less likely to have strayed in the first place and that's perfectly determined perfectly not deterministic in the sense of probability equals one but it shifts the the odds according to the way that the physical processes affect other physical processes yeah and saying uh you know i i will you'll raise hell i'll lead you i'll be i'll put you to shame uh those are themselves causes of behavior at least the obviously not after the fact but if that's what you can anticipate that someone would do then it is before the fact and it can affect behavior and that's why responsibility exists even if we are in some sense determined so in the new book chapter one how rational and animal i'm going to read the the initial paragraph here and then give my response to that homo sapiens means wise hominin and in many ways we have earned the specific epithet of our linnaean binomial our species has dated the origin of the universe plumbed the nature of matter and energy decoded the secrets of life unraveled the circuitry of consciousness and chronicled our history and diversity we've applied this knowledge to enhance our own flourishing blunting the scourges that immiserated our ancestors for most of our existence we have postponed our expected date with death from 30 years of age to more than 70 80 in developed countries reduced extreme poverty from 90 percent of humanity to less than nine slash the rates of death for more 20 fold and from famine 100 fold even when the ancient bane of pestilence rose up anew in the 21st century we identified the cause within days sequence this genome within weeks and administered vaccines within a year keeping the death toll to a fraction of these historic pandemics and then the punchline from you the cognitive wherewithal to understand the world and bend it to our advantage is not a trophy of western civilization it's the patrimony of our species first of all that's beautiful writing but second of all okay then how do you explain aliens among us flat earthers roswell uh you know jfk scientology cults ponzi schemes you know where i sit we're totally irrational yeah well that that absolutely was the the uh the the paradox the the tension that drove the book and indeed when i was when i first told people i was teaching a course in rationality and then a book the question i would get is oh i'm so glad you explained how your base rule works it was well how do you explain q anon and chemtrails right right why is humanity losing its mind right so needless to say that's a it's a uh you know puzzle that has led both of us to to write books and papers yeah yeah um and you know and i do i i um [Music] do my best to to uh answer with the benefit of of uh work by you and other people beforehand trying to solve this puzzle because it won't do to just say we're an irrational species that's the part that won't do because first of all uh how can we say that we're irrational if we didn't have some kind of benchmark of rationality against which we could say that people fall short you know how do we know the q anon isn't true well we kind of we were rational enough i mean you and i and probably most listeners to know that it isn't true well you know that's kind of rationality uh if we weren't if we couldn't rationally say q anon is false that we couldn't call the q non-believers irrational plus the various accomplishments that you read in that paragraph so there is a paradox part of it um one one part of the resolution was the distinction between uh beliefs in a kind of mythology zone in a reality zone that when it comes to um feeding the kids and keeping gas in the car you know people are pretty rational including i think probably a lot of jfk conspiracy theorists yeah they're you know they're normal people otherwise all people are living their lives they probably hold children they're really smart i mean if you if you talk to them they come up with you know 50 arguments and what about this and that you can see their reasoning quite well yeah do the research they say do their research yes so um so part of the part of it is there are some beliefs that people don't need rational reasons for if they're uplifting and empowering and inspiring and entertaining you know that's kind of good enough the idea is well no no you can't believe them if they're if you don't care whether they're true or false that's not the way people work it's you can't find out so you know why should i care whether true or false right so that's one part of the answer the other part is that the massive phenomenon of motivated reasoning namely we often have uh skin in the game we're interested parties we want some truth to come about and so we steer our reasoning taking advantage of the inevitable ambiguities and unknowns to lead to a conclusion that we want to be true in the first place sometimes because it serves our interests i like to quote up in sinclair it's hard to get a man to understand something when his livelihood depends on is not understanding it sometimes just to flaunt just to sheer um uh your dominance you want to be the alpha primate and you say something and it's challenged you've got to show that you're you know you're right and they're wrong and then but another and then a third big component is uh is trust in in certain truth-seeking institutions so a lot of uh the the scientific understanding of most of us doesn't come from real scientific understanding it's well what the people in the white coat say right and i trust them good i trust them it's good enough for me they've got a good track record uh and it's the people who don't trust anyone at a university or a government agency uh who will be able to indulge their skepticism and pursue a mass evidence for you know unconventional evidence toward a different conclusion and they can't be disabused the way you and i form our beliefs namely while it's the scientific consensus could all of those scientists really be wrong and some of the believers and weird and weird stuff say yeah i think they are all wrong in this i would put it past them to be wrong and they're all you know corrupt part of the establishment and taking money from the drug companies and part of the deep state and uh and so on the and just to throw one more idea into the mix going back to motivated reasoning another motive in addition to maybe you have a financial stake in the answer you know you have a some kind of snake oil and it's in your financial interests to believe and to convince other people that it works as opposed to you know being useless but then there's also the my side bias where the motive isn't your own enrichment but it's the glory and power and influence of your tribe you're trying to be interpreted liberally to include sect political party etc so this gets to this ongoing debate about why we evolved the ability to reason and use rationality at all and as you know some people argue well we evolved to be um to win arguments for our side you know hugo mercier's you know and dan berber's book on reason as opposed to well we evolved to understand reality and you know there's kind of a veritable perception that we really understand the physical world we're looking at and you go to the extreme version of that like uh donald huffman's um interface theory of perception you know that it's it's all an illusion really you know but to me that goes too far because i play the competition principle to myself that i'm not special so if i'm seeing what to me looks like red and you say yeah that looks like red to me chances are pretty good it's probably we're seeing the same thing you know we're not completely deluded so the idea of of rationality is that there's kind of a community of people that are working toward this goal of well we want to understand reality um so and then in your book you play out the kind of debate between daniel kahneman and tversky on one side we're super irrational we have these type one system one rapid cognition it gets us into trouble and then you talk about kirk gingka rinser who i think this is where bounded rationality comes from this idea that that within certain contexts the right context we're pretty rational so talk about that a little bit that debate and where you follow that yeah and um you know the brilliant work of tversky and kahneman um can be taken to imply that we're just a bundle of fallacies of quick and dirty heuristics rules of thumb um maybe a legacy of our hunter-gatherer ancestors and you know what do you expect of cavemen out of time uh and giger answers is more charitable to your typical person noting that uh some of the classic problems that people flood like base rate neglect you if there's a disease that's rare in the population the test has a non-zero false alarm rate what are the chances that someone who guess has a positive result actually has the disease most people including doctors often say 80 90 the answer might be you know eight or nine percent because if the base rate is low to begin with if the false positive rate is not zero a lot of indeed most of the positives are going to be false positive that's just kind of arithmetic right but it's an arithmetic that tends to elude people giganza points out that it doesn't have to elude people if you present it to them in concrete numbers as opposed to abstract probabilities then you can flip from almost everyone getting it wrong to almost everyone getting right so for example for example instead of saying the prevalence of breast cancer the population is 0.01 the sensitivity of the test is 0.9 the false positive rate is 0.09 what is the probability that a woman who tests positive has breast cancer all of these are about this almost philosophical concept of the probability that a woman has breast cancer you can say well what does that even mean either she does or she doesn't what do you mean the probability that she has it you know and he says people are sensitive to that distinction between probability of a single case which is basically assigning a decimal a percentage fraction to your degree of certainty or uncertainty and people he concedes are not down with that conception of probability however there is another conception much more ecologically natural uh namely frequency in the long run you've encountered a certain number of instances a certain proportion fall one way or another and we people do develop an intuitive sense of which way the numbers fall uh any just reframing the medical diagnosis problem instead of 0.01 prevalence in the population you say imagine a thousand women and 10 of them have cancer instead of saying the false positive rate is um 0.09 you say uh of a thousand people that we test then uh 90 of them are without so i've been 999 without breast cancer uh 90 of them are going to test positive even though they are perfectly healthy you frame it that way then you say what how many of those women of those who test positive do have cancer and people tend to get the right answer so it's more the the point being that the question can't be are we rational or irrational but what does our rationality consist of and often it is baked together with our subject matter knowledge we're rational in areas that we are personally involved with that we can see with our own eyes we're good statisticians when it comes to tallying instances that fall one way or another what we don't have is the formal rationality of formulas that you can apply to any subject matter you have a's and b's and p's and q's you can plug anything in that you have to learn in school you have to remind yourself to deploy in the case of another unnatural thing that we now have but we didn't have for most of our evolutionary history is say reliable government data sets uh you know even today one often doubts the how representative the data are and it's right to do so but for most of our history the idea that you could you know go to wikipedia you go to our world and data and look up the correct answer for uh the death rate from auto accidents versus lightning strikes well you just you know you couldn't know until recently right so what you're saying is that our evolved nature to reason uh did not involve probabilities and statistics and large data especially probabilities stated say as as decimal fractions even decimal fractions only came in with the french revolution in the metric system uh it's an unnatural way to think it's a very useful way to think we should teach it but people can be you know kind of forgiven at least our species can be forgiven for not coming naturally and i start the book right after that paragraph where uh uh where i know that uh it's part of the rationale as part of the the legacy the birthright of humankind i then pivot to discussion of the the son hunter-gatherers and how much rationality they depend on to fell the animals that provide them with their protein right mainly they track them from incomplete fragmentary hoofprints they argue they debate they take into account probabilities they use logic they challenge authority uh they distrust their first impressions so and i say if you're worried about human irrationality don't blame the hunter-gatherers they're plenty rational at least in the domain that matters to them right so to the question of what we can do about it so people are capable of reasoning the my side bias the motivated reasoning the confirmation bias the hindsight bias those are all pin pinging away at our rationality so how do we reason with people uh how do you get them i mean to go from here to there to give up the buy side say hey that's your my side bias set that aside and i'll say no that's your which we do it's called the bias bias everyone thinks that the other guy's biased but not them right right right yeah it is i mean that is the key question and you know there's no um algorithm for doing it and it's a again a question that you've grappled with is probably more than me so i mean it's not here are some ideas one of them is it certainly are tools of reasoning these are magnificent accomplishments they don't come naturally to us and they should be taught they're more important than i suspect a lot of stuff that gets taught because they're prerequisite to everything else so if you can't if you don't know what can legitimately distinguish causation from correlation you can't understand any idea in history like you know what led to what uh if you don't have a grasp of probability you're in no condition to make decisions about your own health so this really is fundamental and there should be more probability more critical thinking more media literacy kind of throughout education yeah so that's one part of the answer the other is to at least recognize that there is such a thing as a the my side bias and that it manifests itself in hostility to science when science is considered to be an untrustworthy institution namely one affiliated with the other side and scientists should stop branding themselves as a branch of the political left and i've had this argument with people in the you know the national academy of sciences that if you read their their communications it's like interchangeable with any other awoke pronouncement from any you know english department from any uh left-wing newspaper and i just could not get them to see that this is a problem that if you want to know why people reject the scientific consensus because i think that science is just another bunch of lefties who will just squash anything uh especially with when academia has acquired a somewhat well-deserved reputation for not being a rational forum open to ideas but one a punitive form where if you engage in wrong think then your career is over you get humiliated and shamed well an onlooker looking at that is saying well if if that's the institution that tells us about climate change why should i believe what they say about climate change if you would deny climate change you'd get cancelled so i'm not impressed by your scientific consensus now you know you and i happen to believe that the evidence is pretty good for climate change but since we are no enough scientists to know that they really you know do look at evidence and they and challengers can make their voice heard at least we hope they can we have reasons but people who are suspicious looking at the follies of academia at the could legitimately say well this is untrustworthy we haven't uh yeah so part of the answer is science should um kind of look in the mirror and re-establish its own bona fides as an objective institution and so on with other with causes that say climate change should not be branded a left-wing uh hobby horse right uh find people if they are to be found on the right uh or at least associated with other ideas that are a little more right friendly so that people don't who are on the right don't say well i'm just not going to swallow it so it shouldn't be bundled with say anti-capitalism because then one is it is a separate issue how how to best mitigate climate change but if you say well maybe the solution would be nuclear power or um carbon credits or carbon exactly if some of the solutions are right-friendly now when it comes to solving it we can you know obviously want to do what works best and who knows what will work best but at least if people can unbundle the solution from the problem then they'd be more likely to recognize that there's a problem yeah you point out that climate change getting bundled with al gore with his inconvenient truth film kind of branded it as a liberal it was it was a strategic mistake yeah if it was you know mitt romney or john it was john mccain right right yeah yeah in the same way that i you know i won't give a christian one of richard dawkins books about evolution i'll give him francis collins because he's an evangelical christian he says it's okay to believe in evolution and that that's like your your team this guy and your team yeah and he's really smart he says it's okay oh you know that you know that that may be one of the persuasive techniques ah right finding somebody to go around the my side bias what about de-biasing programs do they work yeah a lot of them don't and uh daniel kahneman himself is pessimistic about them but that was kind of the 1.0 de-biasing um that the thing is they they don't work but then most education doesn't work you know physics classes don't work in the sense that you test people a year out they've forgotten everything they did right as soon as the ink is drying the exam they never think about it again and they uh you test them a year later and it's not a pretty sight right so part of it is and this is an argument that's been made by dan willingham and carrie morwich that uh we should apply what we know about effective pedagogy to de-biasing and critical thinking curricula just like we should apply to anything such as active learning is better than passive lecturing such as there's always a challenge in getting people to transfer from the example they were taught to different examples people are very concrete tend to get rooted in the particular so you've got to present like several diverse examples that people will see the principle that embraces them all uh and and then some of them do where cary moore which has some video based uh training programs that not only work but but last they don't have the usual fade out of most social science interventions i'm amazed looking back at my middle school and high school education you know taking geometry trigonometry geometry algebra trig and pre-calculus i don't use any of it why didn't i have statistics probabilities bayesian reasoning critical thinking i mean this is stuff we every human as you point out in rationality every human uh needs this i i i yeah like trigonometry like you know nothing against trigonometry actually did use trigonometry well that's certainly yeah you know you and i are both cyclists but i got a new bike with a different uh head tube height and the i wanted to get a a stem an angled attachment for the handlebar that would place the handlebar at the same position and they only come in certain angles so given the length of the stem given the angle of the stem given the height of the head tube what what kind of stem should i buy to place the handlebar in the same position it was a trick problem yes by trigonometry finally 50 years later but i don't think i even heard about bayesian reasoning until my 40s yeah that's right and it's it's just it is the optimal way to adjust your credence and hypothesis depending on the evidence and that's something you know we do all the time with everything we believe right finally as you point out in the book i'm starting to hear this in pop culture just people just casual conversations well i'm just in my priors yeah so that's good yeah so you quote uh david hume on this uh and i get this all the time from people and i don't think they read it right reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them you usually get this with you know you're you're being too mr spock you gotta bring emotions into it but what did hume really mean by that yeah it wasn't that we should you know shoot from the hip or we're doomed to shoot for the hip and and you know blow our paycheck and blow our snack and you know and and succumb to the the fatal attraction uh you know blow our diets i don't think that's what he meant and i'm being married to a philosopher rebecca goldstein she uh has tutored me in this what he meant is that rationality reason are always in service of some goal that is there's no such thing as just saying rational things uh you know i could spin out kind of trivial logical variations like if pigs could fly then paris is the capital of france which is a true statement if pigs can fly then moscow is the capital of france that's also a true statement uh i could be perfectly true forever and i would not be particularly rational because none of these truths are relevant to anything that you'd want such as to understand reality to make a prediction so ultimately there's got to be something that you want that reason helps you arrive at and where they come from well they come from the passions passions in the largest sense of emotions and motives and feelings like i'd rather be comfortable and uncomfortable and respected than hated and you know well-fed and hungry and uh you know happy than sad those are all passions and all of our rationality is not just saying two things but in service one of those goals or even i'm curious i have a desire to understand the world that is a passion and and we can deploy rationality for that and here back to where we started uh i mean this is part of our nature to want to prefer to live and die prefer to be satiated than hungry and and each of those goals to which reason can be employed to more adequately achieve themselves are part of who we are not just some random western cultural way of thinking yeah and in fact i'm i was i'm even willing to go out on a limb and say even those features of human nature are not just arbitrary facts about us such as that we have a four-chambered heart or uh you know a contingent fact of our biology but the fact that we are having this conversation raising these questions means that we have survived up to this point that we haven't been degraded by by entropy for that to happen we had to have fought off you know energy depletion and disease and so the fact that we have uh feelings and emotion emotions and drives like keeping my body intact is almost a prerequisite to there being a reasoner as opposed to say some reasoning angel but at least an incarnate reasoner and the fact that i exist which is kind of a prerequisite to you and me having this discussion and vice versa means that i have to be the kind of entity that could persist long enough to exist to hold this conversation and that means that the passions like hunger and sex and safety uh are kind of folded into the fact that that reasoning is possible namely i'm an incarnate being capable of reason for that to have happened i i can't be dead i can't have starved and then you make the analogy of iron filings being attracted to the magnet and romeo and juliet being attracted to each other these are not the same thing why are they not the same thing yes that's a an example that i again stole from william james one of my heroes uh and that that really gets to the heart of rationality uh what's the difference was as james pointed out if he uh put a card between the filings in the magnet the filings still go to the magnet you put a wall between romeo and juliet they don't remain idiotically presenting they're pressing their faces against opposite sides like the filings and magnet with cart romeo finds some other way of scaling the wall going around the wall uh that the with the uh with a purely physical process like a magnet attracting filings the path is fixed the end just depends on how everything was set up on accidents as he put it with an a rational agent it's the end which is fixed and the path can be modified indefinitely so it's goal oriented and the you can have an infinite number of different ways of attaining the goal in a rational process in a non-rational process then the it's a coincidence whether you attain the goal or not i'm going to end this conversation where we began to me this is the tool to do all of that it's kind of you should have started with this but in any case at some point i mean really science reason empiricism rationality whatever you want to call it these are the tools to understand everything else you've written about and everything else in the world back to this universal reality that we assume exists so one final question so you're at thanksgiving dinner and crazy uncle harry says you know the election was rigged and or q and on is real what do you say what do you recommend to people that are facing this well you can try to find you know common ground you can probe them for their reasons and and uh try to see if they're reasonable or not in the spirit of well let's explore this together um you know what why should i believe that and appeal to other kinds of sources of authority that they themselves trust such as the republican denominate dominated the supreme court the 60 other courts largely uh peopled by republican appointees that all rejected these claims uh you kind of look for since all reasoning no reasoning goes back to first principles but it starts from some area of common ground where you believe some things let's see what else is true you can't play that game backwards forever so you search perhaps for some uh common ground from which you can probably shift the direction of the implications um there's no guarantee that you can do it and you know and and uncle uncle harry may go to his grave believing in it and there's nothing you can do about it right but maybe you know uncle henry's you know daughter uh who tends to agree with what her father says but maybe she's got a little wind a little a little window of doubt and you can try to wipe that right i i like to ask what would it take to change your mind or what yes counter your belief yeah the thing is that i mean it's an interesting uh kind of ethic or meta ethic for a lot of people it would be a virtue to say nothing yeah because they carry over the psychology of dominance and bargaining namely the more steadfast person often wins in a battle of wills that can even be praised if it's courage if it's principle i won't back down i'll stand my ground it's kind of the kind of person you want on your side in any in a kind of fight is a mindset that you really have to detach from factual belief if you want to uh have have factual beliefs but it and it is a dimension of personal variation that there are people who will say i uh i consider to be a virtue to hold you onto your beliefs even when the evidence goes against them yeah ah yeah it was like that debate with uh ken ham and bill nye and the moderator asked what would it take to change your mind and bill said oh it's something like uh all danes you know fossil rabbits in the pre-cambrian you know something like that and bill said something like that and ken had was nothing yeah i mean and he got like applause in the church they were at for that like yeah so you know the thing about rationality though i mean that is depressing and it's you know what do you do when when a person carries over the psychology of conflict of zero-sum conflict into intellectual disputation where ultimately the goal is not to win but to find the truth but you know for some people it is to win right but you you know in theory if you had enough time and uh a relaxed enough setting if you were sitting together over beers you could probe that well is it really right to hold on to a belief regardless of the evidence are you infallible you know are you omniscient uh how can you think you're infallible and you know other people on the other side they might think they're infallible don't you think it's better if neither side thinks they're they're fallible you could in theory probe even that because a inherent feature of rationality is it can always look at itself it's recursive in the sense that it can take always take itself as an object of its own analysis and that holds up with the hope in principle that there may be some irreconcilable differences but there probably aren't many given enough time and good will the virtue of changing your mind when the evidence changes that has to be promoted that has to be promoted and it is a distinct value and it's a value that not everyone that many people reject because it means that you're spineless you're wimpy or you're you're a weapon you're a flip-flopper yes like john kerry in 504 i was at a conference this summer that was populated by kind of libertarian conservatives and you know masks mandates and vaccines was all the rage and so this speaker gets up and he starts telling this story i remember i covered this for this newspaper back in 89 when the journal nature published this article that aids can be spread through the air and water and therefore it's dangerous on subways or in swimming pools or whatever and that author of that paper was none other than anthony thaucy everybody's like oh that guy he cheated and then he changed his mind like two weeks later and withdrew that paper it's like that that's good that's what you're supposed to do but to the audience it was like oh that guy he just can't he just keeps changing his mind well that's the problem right i mean there is a quote misattributed to john maynard keynes uh when the facts changed i changed my mind so what do you what what jim what do you do sir right turned out was paul samuelson probably said it but still it's a good it's a good quote the example of quotes that migrate up to the most famous person who ever said i'm exactly right the last paragraph of your beautiful book the power of rationality to guide moral progress is of a piece with its power to guide material progress and wise choices in our lives our ability to eke out increments of well-being of a out of a pitiless cosmos and to be good to others despite our flawed nature depends on grasping impartial principles that transcend our parochial experience we are a species that has been endowed with an elementary faculty of reason and that has discovered formulas and institutions that magnify its scope they awaken us to ideas and exposes to realities that confound our institutions our intuitions but are true for all that what a beautiful passage you're such a great writer i mean you're a long time good friend but i also very much admire your work you're just it's just great and this is your best book yet and most important i think but don't stop writing we got to have another one from you thanks for coming on thanks for having me michael

Channel: Skeptic

Views: 46,945

Keywords: Michael Shermer, Skeptic, belief, cognitive bias, consciousness, conspiracy theories, correlation and causation, COVID-19, critical thinking, empirical truths, fake news, free will, human behavior, irrational belief, is-ought fallacy, logic, logical fallacies, medical quackery, motivated reasoning, rationality, reason, science, Science Salon, subjective/objective truths, The Michael Shermer Show, Steven Pinker

Id: k058_0QkhSM

Length: 108min 57sec (6537 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 19 2021