Rationality during an epidemic of unreason - Steven Pinker

hello and welcome to ways to change the world i'm christian gary murphy and this is the podcast in which we talk to extraordinary people about the big ideas in their lives and the events that have helped shape them my guest this week is stephen pinker an experimental cognitive scientist and professor of psychology at harvard he has been named by time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world today he's the author of many books and the winner of many prizes and he's here today with his new book which is called rationality what it is why it seems scarce why it matters and this is billed as a user's guide to rationality during an epidemic of unreasoned stephen welcome thank you are we in an epidemic of unreason we've always been an epidemic of unreasoned although we all apply rationality to our everyday lives that's how we hold a job that's how we keep food in the refrigerator and get the kids off to school but when it comes to larger issues like how is the world being run what is the origin of misfortune and fortune we tend to comfort ourselves with uplifting myths rather than seeking evidence for our beliefs the book is an argument for why we should learn the tools of rationality and and perhaps govern ourselves according to them i mean do you feel the is that because you feel reason is slipping away in the way that we're living uh it's always been fragile it's always been tenuous but we have developed tools of rationality that augment the cognitive capabilities we were born with tools like logic and probability and uh statistical decision theory that i think every educated literate person should should command they just they make us smarter so let's define our terms what is rationality for you i define it as as the use of knowledge to attain a goal rationality is more or less a synonym of reason the dictionaries tend to define each one in terms of the other and they both come from the same latin root logic is one of the tools of reason but it is not the same as reasoned and the reason is that logic helps us attain the goal of deducing true propositions from other true propositions but a lot of knowledge has to consist of weighing many probabilistic considerations each one of which tugs your confidence up or down a bit that's not the same as logic which is uh given the premises the conclusion must be true all women are mortals xanthe is a woman therefore xanthe is mortal that is a useful thing to be able to do but it's not the entirety of rationality so can something be logical but not rational it can because you can logic requires that you ignore everything you know other than what is stated in the premises a useful thing to to be able to do that's how we design computers they are logic machines but uh often we do want to apply everything we know just to give an example if i take the syllogism all plant products are healthy tobacco is a plant product therefore tobacco is healthy now that is a valid syllogism it doesn't happen to be true because one of the premises is a bit dubious but we would have to bring in our knowledge of how the world works of the exceptions to a generalization in order to evaluate the truth of that proposition in the world in logic you've got to forget everything you know except what was stated in the premises so for rationalism to be useful do we have to agree on our values our goals or does does rationality exist on its own i think rationality exists on it on its own it is in service of a goal so you can use rational means to attain a goal that we would not agree is a rational goal for example uh the goal of gaining power the goal of uh showing off how smart you are or how noble you are or how smart or noble your team your side your party your coalition is in fact a lot of rationality is deployed to that goal which is why we have so much politically motivated belief it can be narrowly rational within your community say to deny human-made climate change if that's what gains you prestige within your social clique to deny the efficacy of vaccines if you're in a community that's hostile to vaccines by the lights of our best science these are irrational in if the goal is our best understanding of objective reality but if the goal is to be a hero within your your team your side it is rational in the pursuit of that goal so in that case is it helpful for us to think of rationality as something we should all seek to answer it is given that we've all got different goals it isn't that we can we can in turn interrogate our goals and say well do you really want to advance an idea that might just be popular in your group but is false and for some people that is irrational if it was it it is in the in the larger scheme of things it would be very hard for someone to say yes this is false but i'm going but i believe it anyway most people are a little squeamish about making that concession and so if you can get them to a place in which they realize that that's what they're committed to at least some people will back off now there are some people who are their ego is so invested in their beliefs whether it's their own wisdom and the morality of their tribe that they'll go to their grave believing false things that they just can't be budged but there are always people who are less viscerally committed who are more on the fringe of degree of belief who can be peeled off by rational argument if you say well is that something that the evidence really supports or is it just a popular idea in your social clique what you do in the book is you go through some of these different things like you're beginning with logic but you show how easy it is to make mistakes i mean just explain the one that you you begin with yes because these these tools of rationality had to be invented precisely because we don't intuitively wield them at least not across the board most of them have their core in some intuition that we we do share we all have a sense of of probability that some things probably will happen but not necessarily we all have a sense of logic but what we don't have is a formula that we can use for any subject matter no matter how unfamiliar so an exam one of the examples i begin the book with is a classic problem from cognitive psychology called the selection task imagine you have a deck of cards where there's a letter on one side and a number on the other and the i ask you to test whether the following rule is in effect if there's a d on one side there's a three on the other and i lay out four cards a d a three an f and a seven and i say what are the fewest cards you have to turn over to test whether the rule if d then three is satisfied is being obeyed the uh vast majority of people say well you've got to turn over the d or the you have to turn over the d and the three now the correct answer is you have to turn over the d and the seven why well think about it of course you have to turn over the d if you turn it over there's no three the rule's false you don't have to turn over the three because the rule says if d then three not if three then d the idea that you have to turn over the three is the classic fallacy of uh affirming the consequent confusing p implies q with king class p but you do have to turn over the seven because if you did turn it over and there was a d on the other side that would falsify the rule if d then three most people don't get it although when it's explained to them they slap themselves on the forehead and they say oh yes of course why didn't i think of that that that's a classic example of how people don't deploy strictly logical rules at least with any subject matter but there are interesting twists such as imagine you are a bouncer in a bar and you're enforcing the rule if someone is consuming alcohol they must be over 21 and you have four people you've got someone who is drinking beer someone is drinking coke someone who's clearly under 21 someone is clearly over 21. do you have to ask for the idea id of the person drinking beer the person drinking coke do you have to look inside the cup to see what the under 21 is drinking the over 21 is drinking now everyone turns into a logician everyone says well you've got to card the person drinking beer and you've got to check to see what the person under 21 is drinking now that is logically identical to if d then three and people get the equivalent of the d and the seven card so content matters and it shows that people are not illogical across the board but a lot of our logic is baked together with subject matter knowledge in this case it is a social contract a social rule if you have a privilege you must meet a requirement and when it's coached in those terms then the logic is intuitive and what the tools of logic that i try to explain in the middle chapters of the book are for is so that we can abstract it away from areas in which we're familiar and have a formula that we can use apply to new things that might be totally unfamiliar to us and as you say you do this with all the different tools whether it's probability or or other things but i mean just just looking through it i felt so well isn't the problem here that a lot of people are just going to say i can't get this you know and it takes you back to school where some people just go i don't understand this i can't do it i'm never going to get it so i'm going to drop physics or whatever it might be i hope not and i wrote the i wrote the book for them i think they can be presented and ought to be presented in school in a way that they can be mastered a lot of them take a little kernel of common sense and generalize it as a tool that you can apply anywhere as in the logic case where you may not know the fallacy of affirming the consequent or the law of contraposition when stated in those terms but you do have an intuitive sense which you apply say in the bar bouncer case but take a debate like climate change and you raised this in the book as well you know we're right now in the middle of a massive debate all over the world about how we should change our own behavior and people are quite understandably saying well why should i spend thousands of pounds converting my house or switching to an electric car or why should i always get the bus instead of driving when china's building coal-fired power stations is it rational to try and take the steps to solve climate change well indeed and that is a conundrum a puzzle a paradox for which one of the tools of rationality is applicable and explains what's going on namely game theory which is what is the rational thing to do when the outcome depends on someone else who's trying to figure out what's the rational thing to do often the answers surprise us because it's the rules of the game are different when you're when you're not dealing with the inanimate world but we're dealing with another rational agent and in the case of climate change indeed i undergo a sacrifice i wait for the bus but if everyone else is uh driving their suvs then i'm kind of a sucker i'm not preventing climate change but i am suffering the consequences the problem being if everyone thinks that then everyone is worse off and we know from game theory that can happen if every individual focuses on his or her self-interest everyone acts against their self-interest simultaneously but then in turn there are ways out of it namely how do you change the rules of the game so what each individual decides does work to their uh collective advantage such as and that's one of the arguments for carbon pricing namely if it is more expensive to drive a big inefficient car as opposed to say an electric vehicle then people just to conserve their own household budget will do something that when everyone does it will save the climate or through technological innovation if clean energy is cheaper than dirty energy then you don't have to appeal to anyone's self-sacrifice just in going for the cheapest option they will save the planet but that works at a national level but it doesn't work at an international level does it because carbon pricing for individuals is not going to be something the whole world agrees on indeed unless you are right unless it is an international regime perhaps with some adjustments to level of economic development so that the countries catching up don't aren't penalized by the ones who've already gotten rich from from emitting carbon although technological innovation does not require international agreement that is since a technology once invented uh can't be uninvented then if there were abundant carbon-free energy it'll be in everyone's interest to adopt it it's just the cheapest way to get energy doesn't it seem that a lot of the systems by which we live whether it's capitalism or the global rules are based really on the idea that it is not rational to think that you can uplift everybody again game theory tells us there can be positive some games everybody wins uh getting to yes where if you change the structure of the environment what gets rewarded such as by inventing say clean affordable energy technologies then everyone can get ahead simultaneously you're no longer in a situation where one person sacrifices another person's gain so how do we train ourselves to be better at this i mean what what you talk about and you quote some other people's work is this question of you know the quick mistake versus the long thought that you know it's very easy to look at some of these problems and jump to an answer and it turns out to be the wrong one spend a little bit longer and you might get there so how do we train ourselves not to make the quick mistake i think that there are a number of components one of them is that our educational system should promote tools of rationality probability theory or logic i think a little bit of game theory these are all tools that are so widely applicable to understanding the world we should see them as kin to reading and writing that is tools that are necessary to get the rest of your education it should be part of our ordinary conversation conventional wisdom that we're all vulnerable to fallacies like arguing from anecdotes or misinterpreting chants but perhaps most important they should be written into our institutions our schools and parliaments and court systems and journalism they already are to some extent that's one of the reasons why we have standards such as editing and fact checking in journalism so that the first idea that occurs to a reporter doesn't get printed why we have freedom of speech and open debate and the right to criticize in universities so that one person's folly can be pointed out by someone else or one person's honest mistake while we have an adversarial system in the courts it's institutions that make us collectively more rational than any of us could hope to be individually i mean i suppose the rationalist has had to contend with two different types of opponent over time one is the is is the person of faith you know the person who just believes things and doesn't care about reason but there are also more recently what you're dealing with is people who also believe that they are rationalists so how do you how do you take on both of these sort of enemies if you like yes and i'll deal with a second first sometimes i hear the criticism of rationality well so-and-so said he was rational and now we know that he was you know full of baloney and that can happen saying irrational is not a uh giving grounds for your belief it's a kind of irrationality to just claim it without being able to show it and the power of rationality is it is it can always look on instances of it of itself and it can only step back take itself as a object of rational scrutiny and point out flaws in how rationality is being applied at any given time and indeed it's nothing but rationality that allows us to say well that guy claims he's being rational but he's wrong well how do we know he's wrong because we're applying rationality to his failed attempts at rationality and indeed faith does go contrary to to uh to reason almost by definition it's believing something without a good reason to believe that's why we call it faith and it's something that we all are uh tempted by in certain beliefs that are sacred to our our our identity our tribe our coalition but that ought to be examined for all that it may be that if you're on the left there are some beliefs that you just have to have to be a member of the left in good standing and you'll be ostracized and made fun of and cancelled if you uh suggest them or if you doubt the orthodoxy and so on on the right it is a secular equivalent of faith and our left-wing and right-wing coalitions have become uh kind of quasi religions and that's a bad thing it's better if we do have reasons for our beliefs well when it comes to faith though i mean is it is it necessarily irrational to believe in god i'd say it is irrationally that there is no reason to believe in the existence of god and that any difference that god would make to the world we can take a look and we don't see that happening such as bad people being punished such as miracles happening such as the origin of the universe being only explicable by a divine creator but that's the big one isn't it because you know when people say well if you can't explain how all this happened there must be something else to it therefore it's perfectly rational for me to believe in a higher power uh sometimes called the god of the gaps argument and indeed there could be uh things that happen that would persuade me that god exists uh if there was a someone announced that they were a messenger of god and made predictions about the future that came true that performed miracles that healed the sick uh without without modern medicine uh you know i i'd be convinced but that that doesn't happen but that's why the stories of the miracles were so important wasn't it because they were evidence they fall into a zone that i think is it's a mode of thinking that we all have and maybe faith is a good word for it things where we may not have evidence that it's true but we psychologically don't feel we ought to need evidence that they're true they're just things to believe because they're uplifting inspiring and it's just somehow uncouth or gauche to ask for reasons and and belief in in god is one of them the prominent new atheists like richard dawkins and christopher hitchens were often attacked not because not by people who said well you're wrong here are uh four reasons to a rational person should believe god exists but rather it's just kind of not done to even make the put the question of god's existence on the table as a matter of something that is factually true or false and indeed psychologically they're correct there are beliefs that we uh uh hold not because there's evidence for them but because we think it's they're sacred they're it's it's it's empowering it's uplifting it's entertaining so were you always an atheist i think there's a period in my life where you know if you ask me i say well yeah i guess i believe in god doesn't everyone but i think as soon as i started to think things through and i had a definite opinion then then i was a skeptic yeah so on the other side the sort of the people who also say that they are rational isn't the big problem now fake facts it is a problem now and it's always been a problem i think social media make it easier to proliferate fake news but we've had them in supermarket tabloids we've had them in urban legends what are the stories from scripture but kind of original fake news rumors conspiracy theories have always been with us it's salient now because we have means of of doing better we have fact-checked journalism we have historical archives uh you know even there all of those are fallible too uh but and with social media making it so much easier to proliferate fake news they've uh uh play a larger role in our awareness well do uh is fake news a bigger thing now i mean i get that it's always been there in some form but you know i suppose the question underlining all of this conversation is is it getting worse one of the fallacies that i often have to point out is the fact that something bad is happening now does not imply that it's getting worse this is a fallacy that i've had to deal with in two of my previous books one on the decline of violence the better angels of our nature the other one on progress enlightenment now where people say well how can you say that uh war has declined there's a war raging in syria well there is a war raging in syria but 30 years ago there were wars raging all over the world uh as bad as syria similarly the fact that there's fake news now that their conspiracy theories that there's medical quackery does not by itself imply that it's gotten worse it just implies there's a lot of it and we notice it a lot has it gotten worse conspiracy theories as best we can tell from people who try to look with a constant yardstick probably have not gotten worse that that their conspiracy theories the illuminati the freemasons the protocols of the elders of zion have been a constant through human history certainly fake news has fake news probably has a trifling effect on actual elections because most of it goes to people who are already partisans and it doesn't change their mind it really more titillates them more than persuades them the um certainly medical quackery goes way back it's been actually the the the rule rather than the exception for most of human existence including in medicine itself until relatively recently there's an awful lot of uh false belief simply because until recently we haven't had the scientific and the historical tools to verify all our beliefs but so how do we verify on a practical basis when somebody sits there in the pub saying no but haven't you seen you know this research that says that the vaccine gives you a third leg and four eyes that's right you know i read it and i've seen it for myself and you've got to read this stuff because it's real and the media don't tell you about it because they're in on the conspiracy but you know if you go and look at this paper yourself how are you supposed to approach that in a rational way yeah i think it depends on the the believer but you can as well as uh finding common ground things that everyone agrees and seeing what follows and doesn't follow from them you could question the veracity of their their sources have they been right in the past how do they arrive at their uh conclusions which also by the way puts the onus on more respectable institutions such as newspapers and government agencies and scientific bodies to show their work to be more forthcoming on why they believe uh what they believe in order to have a weapon against the other side that also claims authority it shouldn't be a matter of authority when it comes to the ones that we really do and ought to trust uh part of it may just also be appealing to the fact that we do tend to follow respected figures in our uh sphere and to get people who the believers might otherwise revere or be sympathetic to and have them make statements that disavow the crazy beliefs in this case of climate change for example where very few of us know enough atmospheric chemistry to actually retrace the the the evidentiary trail we kind of trust the people with the white coats who claim that it's happening we have good reason to trust them and the people who don't believe in man-made climate change just don't trust that particular priesthood but they shouldn't be a priesthood it shouldn't be my experts versus your experts it should be that my experts can actually show their work and here are the reasons why they're advocating what what they're uh advocating yeah because if you if you take the anti-vaxx movement right now on covid i mean they've got their priests as well you know and men and white coats who say yes i worked in the medical industry in the pharmaceutical industry and you know i got 30 years of experience and i'm telling you this is dangerous uh indeed and and so there may be a combination of tactics some of them might require recruiting champions or advocates who already have the sympathy of those parts of the population in the case of climate change for example it's a tremendous mistake to have nothing but left-wing politicians uh arguing that we have to do something about climate change because then the right one we'll just turn them off and say well that's that's your tribe why should i be why should i believe you what we need are libertarian and right-wing figures to uh make that that uh case likewise in the case of vaccines it can't just be that this is what the experts say it's that while we actually did the study we've taken seriously the possibility of their side effects and we haven't found any and and uh here's the study that shows it yes i mean i i started off talking about values and whether we needed to have shared values i mean it's one of the mistakes that we make um these days is try and try and work out you know a lot of books and arguments these days are framed with how to argue with a racist how to argue with a climate skeptic or a climate denier you know that if you start from a position of this is the right answer you can't follow a rational line indeed i mean that that uh in fact uh is the antithesis of rationality rationality is you start from shared premises or or beliefs and show what follows from them how big a problem then is popular culture now we've you know we've all grown up hearing well go with your gut go with your instinct is that in fact the worst advice you can ever give anybody i think it's bad advice yeah some cases we have no no choice but uh in general it's better to think twice to to reflect to reflect on which of your beliefs might be false to be open to evidence that they might be false to change your mind when the evidence changes so do you have gut instincts oh you know about your life yes who doesn't and do you have to stop yourself from i do and i'm probably not as successful as i ought to be because we're all subject to the bias bias namely each of us thinks that the other guy is biased but we're not and but that's one of the reasons why it's so essential to be part of communities of rationality that is it isn't up to a single person to peer into his or her own soul and confess to your own sins of your rationality none of us is capable of doing that the question is can we belong to groups where if we say something that is wrong someone else has the right to criticize us for it that's why we have free speech that's why we have a free press that's why i have an adversarial process in the courtroom not because any juror any scientist any professor any pundit any journalist is wise enough or rational enough to come up with the truth on their own but rather knowing that anything they say may be criticized anticipating the possible criticisms defending them as best they can other people can spot it community as a whole can be more rational than any of its individual members so we all have to work together with uh you know in order to get to the rights we do we have to surrender some of our own claim to infallibility my own little version as a as an academic as a scientist i subject myself to peer review i hate it it's annoying i often think the reviewers are themselves are full of baloney but you know i submit to it knowing that i can't trust my own judgment uh just to come back to this question of instinct and gut instincts so every time you know because we've all heard countless numbers of sort of anecdotes of people saying well i know the logical thing was to do this but i just thought you know i felt something different and i went with it and it worked and it was great what do you think when you hear those stories well you wonder if they also remember all the times that they went with a gut and it didn't work out so well that is is this itself a case of confirmation bias will you remember the uh the successes and forget all the failures so and in practical terms have you lived your life according to this well they understand may not be for me to judge because i uh almost by definition of many of these biases i'd be blind to them i've tried my hardest i mean i you know i think i've you know done okay in life i'd like to attribute at least some of the satisfaction and success to avoiding certain foolish choices that i could have made so how did how did you come to this how did stephen pinker become stephen pinker yeah part of it was beyond my control i inherited the genes that i inherited my i developed in the way that i developed biologically i was fortunate enough to to grow up in a middle-class community in a liberal democracy so i had that in canada in canada in montreal so i had that unearned advantage i went to you know decent schools was had access to encyclopedias and and books so i had all of those advantages i then chose as a thing to study and nothing to do for a living social science with its credo not always observed that we ought to test our beliefs against the best possible evidence in an academic arena that at least when it functions well which it doesn't always means that you are called on to defend your uh assertions that you may be criticized and that's okay and and you may be attacked and that's okay but in turn you have the burden to defend your ideas so i mean you said this needs to be taught in schools i mean practically how do you think that could be done well it's a good question because we know and to my disappointment that simply i having people sit through a critical thinking course doesn't do a whole lot to their critical thinking on the other hand if we're honest we'll believe that we'll acknowledge that exposing people to courses in anything doesn't leave much lasting partly why you wrote this book isn't it it is apparently why you're by the way just explain so partly it's a matter of how you teach you have to have active learning that is people can't just be taking notes from a lecture they can't just be highlighting something in a textbook with a yellow marker but they have to actively solve problems they have to recast it in their own terms students have to be encouraged to generalize from the example they were taught on to dissimilar examples so for example if you know that the availability bias which is the bias to estimate probability and risk by how how quickly you can remember examples so you read about a plane crash and you think that plane travel is dangerous uh car crashes tend not to be covered by the news people are unaware of the fact that it's much more dangerous to take the same trip by car that's an example of the availability bias and you know you teach it to students and they can you know get the answer right on the exam then when it comes to say some other example like uh how dangerous is terrorism then it kind of goes out the window it's oh terrorists uh you know our rampage shooters the uh ability to take a lesson from one example and extend it to other examples doesn't always come naturally and a good course in critical thinking has to have that as one of its goals so there are there aren't just the naming the fallacies and being aware of them but they're also recasting some of these tools of thinking into more mind-friendly terms an example being sounds kind of scary of applying bayes rule the the formula devised by thomas base in the 18th century for how we should calibrate our belief in hypothesis according to the strength of evidence that is you get a medical test you know that there are some false positives what are the chances that you have the disease people are pretty poor at it they even doctors are rather poor because they often forget the prevalence in the population and so if there is a rare disease if there is a test that's less than perfect then a lot of the positives are going to be false positives just because so many more people are healthy than sick it's kind of hard to apply bayes rule and actually plug numbers into a formula on the other hand if you recast it and you say they're a thousand people 10 of them have the disease of the 10 who have the disease 9 of them will test positive for the 990 who don't have the disease uh 89 will test positive and you put it concretely or better still you have a diagram where each square is a person they're shown in different colors and a lot of these things can be made intuitive and i think as educators as teachers as journalists we have a responsibility to try to present important concepts in rationality in a a an intuitive way to take the journalists example do you think we should move away from conflict you know the the the basic tool of tv oh conflict yeah which is which is to have an argument to have a debate oh i think one person on one side one person on the other no i think actually i think debate is good as long as it is not framed as a uh as a sport where the idea is who won who lost debate in the sense of exploring hypotheses and trying to come to agreements which is true and false is essential so are you presenting this ultimately because you're rather more hopeful than a lot of the people saying the world's going to hell well that's that has been a theme of some of two of my other books not so much because of an attitude toward optimism which itself is not particularly rational but rather a um a call to base our beliefs on on evidence and to extricate them from uh from having our heads turned by vivid gory uh anecdotes and examples that being the availability fallacy have deaths in war increased or decreased that shouldn't be a matter of of whether you're optimistic or pessimistic because uh regardless of whether you have a sunny disposition or not what happens in the world happens it should be a matter of getting the best data and looking to see which way the curve goes does it go up or down which you tend to not see in journalism because it is so event-driven uh so if a war is going on there'll be images of the war if there are countries at peace and more of them than there used to be that's not a fact that you can typically get from the news so if you could change the world i suppose the answer is you just make everybody rational yes sir well indeed i mean that that be although that's uh sounds like waving a magic wand and we're we're creatures or species that is rational in some ways tends not to be rational in other ways so it does depend on our on our institutions uh it's not that a question of self-improvement i mean it's partly that but that wouldn't be enough asking everyone well you should be more rational and and having an educational system that tries to make individuals more rational is a start but ultimately it depends on our institutions because none of us can ever be angels none of us is ever going to be infallible or omniscient or or infinitely wise together if we can each point out each other's fallacies we have more of a hope and if we base our understanding on the best facts available so i think if i were to pinpoint one thing one because i've been speaking very generically of course we should all be more rational but that's a that's a bit of a cop-out to your question but one of them would be that i'd say that if journalism were more oriented toward data statistics trends and less toward incidents so that since our view of the world this is the availability bias is driven by memorable events since journalism delivers memorable events journalism by having a non-random sample of what's happening in the world has the capacity to to seriously miseducate people people to think that terrorism is a major threat to life and limb whereas ordinary homicides and say nothing of car crashes and falls off ladders and drownings uh are much greater threats more generally to perhaps even take a leaf out of the pages of the sports section in the business section where data are routinely presented when sometimes when journalists say well we have to present stories because people won't put up with with graphs and trends and numbers and i say well look at your own sports section people read the standings every day in the in the business section i think a uh presenting a crime presenting a terrorist attack uh presenting a climate policy uh ought to be done in the context of has been going up as it were going down how prevalent is it how does it compare to other risks to give a more balanced understanding of the world including an understanding of what has worked one of the reasons that people are so cynical or even nihilistic about our democracy our government is they think it's it's a flaming dumpster it's a disaster because all the failures are highlighted the fact that there actually have been policies that that have kind of more or less worked over the decades pollution controls really do drive pollution down and and uh the welfare state really does alleviate poverty but you never read that and so people feel that everything the government does is a failure and are open to uh radical even nihilistic alternatives and finally what would you say to those people who say yeah but it's a bit boring isn't it you know where there would be no creativity there would be no great art or great music or you know uh great um great creation if everybody was just rational all the time yeah i i know and i do hear that all the time the idea if you're rational you must be you know dour and joyless and serious about everything but there's nothing irrational about enjoying music or enjoying art or falling in love or loving your children or family or laughing over drinks those are our goals that we pursue because we're human rationality is a way of attaining goals and there's nothing irrational about having those goals quite the contrary if we have capacity for pleasure and fulfillment then it's actually rational to to pursue them including having fun and partying you know as long as you don't harm someone else stephen finger thank you very much indeed hey thank you for sharing your ways to change the world i hope you enjoyed that you can watch all of these interviews on the channel 4 news youtube channel our producer is nina hodgson until next time bye-bye you

Channel: Channel 4 News

Views: 98,101

Keywords: Channel 4 News, Steven Pinker, Podcast, Psychology, Game Theory, climate change, Rationality, Canadian Psychologist, Harvard, Language, Freedom of Speech, Misinformation

Id: 8DHHt2sOmzw

Length: 38min 51sec (2331 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 05 2021