Steven Pinker: Danger of moral panic over “fake news”

i mean i i agree that that's a danger and that there is something of a moral panic fake news in particular uh probably had a trivial role in the 2016 election hello and welcome to offscript my name is stephen edgington do we live in an era of fake news and conspiracy theories is the world progressing or regressing to answer these questions i'm joined by the internationally best-selling author and psychologist stephen pinker whose recent book on rationality is already making shock waves in the academic world what is rationality and is it a popular concept today i define it as the use of knowledge to attain a goal and so the particular variety of rationality that you might talk about depends on on the goal if it's to deduce true propositions from other two propositions we call it logic if it's to assess the propensity of an event to take place we call it probability there are other goals such as calibrating degree of belief in a hypothesis according to evidence that would be bayesian reasoning so there are a number of tools of rationality but each of which is designed to attain a particular kind of goal it has a um it has a bit of a reputation problem i'm often asked if you extol rationality does that mean that i can't appreciate beauty i can't fall in love i can't dance i can't have fun and so there is an idea probably going back to the romantic movement that being committed to rationality involves some kind of dour joyless kind of uh existence which is uh which does not follow rationality is a way of attaining a goal and there's nothing to say that that goal can't be taking advantage of all the pleasures that are available to a human being so you're trying to make rationality sexy again i i don't know if i'm the person to do that but it would be good if someone did are human beings rational the we we have a we must have a capacity for rationality otherwise we couldn't establish the benchmarks against which we can compare humans and even ask the question uh are humans rational are humans what well it's we humans who can stipulate with or at least try to characterize what's rational and in um in our day-to-day lives in all cultures people deploy rationality that's what makes humans human i start off the book with a uh some vignettes about the sun people of the kalahari desert one of the world's oldest cultures they're hunter-gatherers and they depend on a lot of rationality to to make it through the day and and to stay alive they uh engage in persistence hunting which involves tracking an animal from the bits of evidence that leaves behind and they uh give all evidence of many kinds of rationality they uh have a sense of probability including a sense of conditional probability that is if it's if the ground is soft and if it was this kind of animal then it would leave behind this kind of hoof print they engage in critical thinking so they learn to distrust their first impressions they don't accept arguments from authority if a tribal elder has a hypothesis about what animal left behind a track and a young upstart wants to challenge him that that's okay they'll give him give him a floor uh so in in many ways rationality is our birthright and i emphasize that so we don't have the excuse of uh forgiving our own outbursts of irrationality by saying oh well what can you expect we descended from hunter-gatherers who had to always be on the lookout for a lion hiding in the grass in the savanna we are we do have the capacity for for uh reason we don't always deploy it in pursuit of the goal of objective truth or best policies you follow on from rationality progress is that accurate uh well certainly the other way around is accurate namely uh observing the facts of progress as i have tried to do in previous books enlightenment now and the better angels of our nature it and raises the question where did that progress come from how did we manage to reduce famine and infant mortality and extreme poverty they didn't decline by themselves uh it was only the application of rationality with the goal of bettering humanity in one way or another reducing disease reducing war reducing hunger that that we were able to push back against forces of nature that have no particular benevolent regard for our well-being is rationality subjective to each individual and you know something that's rational to me might seem completely irrational to you and you've got to make a decision as to whether that is correct or not and for example you know some people many people believed in america that donald trump and vladimir putin were working together to somehow corrupt the 2016 campaign that turned out to be a conspiracy theory not right it was proven that there was no collusion as it were those people were being irrational in retrospect but they thought they were being rational at the time and they believed in this conspiracy theory that was pumped out in the media in a huge way so do accept that rationality is subjective to each individual's purposes no claims of rationality are subjective but rationality virtually by definition is not subjective so the fact that someone claims to be rational doesn't mean that they were they they could be mistaken in that claim and in fact most people who who claim to be rational are mistaken because none of us can really aspire to perfect rationality i mean we can aspire to it but we can't attain it as perhaps what i should say so plenty of people and even the mistaken belief that there was collusion between trump and putin i don't think the word rationality appeared in all of those uh those op-eds there was an implicit we all have an implicit uh commitment to rationality when we whenever we argue for anything being true but i it wasn't as if the uh people who had that mistake and beliefs actually said we're being rational he's not that i remember the reason i'm bringing up is because i think it's one of those many conspiracy theories that have sprouted in recent years and perhaps been driven by the rise of social media and you touch on this in your recent book has social media made people more rational or less rational well it's um there's a lot of let's say diversity in in rationality that social media have contributed to some people use it as a uh a source of uh information and access to articles they might not otherwise come across i mean that's the way i try to use it on the other hand if it isn't used just as a link to properly vetted and high quality sources if it's used as a repository of information in itself then because it is not fact checked it's not vetted it's not um you know sat on while it's it's it's uh uh sources are double checked then it can proliferate an awful lot of nonsense very quickly and linking in with that the rise of the internet as a concept not just social media that's more of a recent thing but the internet itself it's enabled access to almost unlimited information to almost all human beings on the earth if you've got access to a phone then you've got access to the internet and you've got access to an immense amount of information that wasn't available 20 30 years ago are you surprised that that hasn't led to human beings becoming more rational and becoming almost perfectly rational when they've got access to all this information yeah i i i am surprised and uh i had thought that just as the dissemination of affordable books had a role in the and and the pamphlets had a role in the enlightenment that uh the uh easy access to information would lead to uh kind of a a new enlightenment and i think what i underestimated was the uh necessity of gatekeepers of uh quality control uh fact-checking the fact that that uh our accomplishments of rationality really depend on this infrastructure of norms and institutions that make us collectively rational in a way that no individual is likely to be that when it comes to individuals who are quite often quite happy with comforting stories with emboldening myths with um rumors that underscore how perfidious our enemies are and how glorious and noble and wise our own coalition is and social media make that all too easy that there's that truth and uh um or at least our best claims to truth are kind of a rare and precious accomplishment that can only come about through communities that adhere to criteria that allow us to winnow out all of the many many false ideas that occur to us and zero in on the true ones social media itself may simply be a reflection of human nature in that sense in that sense it's not that surprising that on social media when on the internet when people have access to unlimited information almost they choose the information that suits their own biases and their own beliefs already and i know that you talk about uh rational decision-making um it's more like um kind of confirming your own views and rather than looking at the evidence objectively you want to find the evidence that supports your own analysis exactly and in fact that that's exactly the way i would put it and it's not an observation that you see in a lot of the condemnations of social media where it's blamed on the nefarious chase after profits by you know mark zuckerberg and and um and all the rest and uh well we kind of got what we wished for and we were reminded of some of the darker sides of human nature especially when it comes to uh epistemic beliefs and and that or beliefs i should just say namely that the commitment to factual veracity uh is pretty compartmentalized when it comes to uh whether where there's enough gas in the car to get us to the city we want you know people are pretty rational they're pretty they they don't engage in wishful thinking or propaganda or fake news they really gotta know but when it comes to the public sphere where an individual person's opinion in most cases is uh has a trifling impact i mean who cares what i think about about climate change it's not going to change the climate and so my belief is kind of a i have the luxury of of endorsing beliefs that will increase my status within my my clique my coalition my tribe that will help demonize those in the others and if i'm in fact a steadfast warrior for the cause i could rise in status regardless of the veracity of the belief uh and when it comes to um not political but still largely on beliefs that were in untestable for most of human history why do bad things happen to good people what's the origin of misfortune like plagues and earthquakes and famines what was the origin of the universe these cosmic questions i don't think we naturally think of as matters that can be true or false because our mind evolved in a world where you couldn't test them and so all we had were were good stories they were people believed them because they were entertaining because they expressed their who they wanted to be because they uh allowed the tribe to coalesce around some founding myths since the enlightenment we have the at least historically rather eccentric notion that all our beliefs should be grounded in reality bertrand russell said it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there are no grounds whatsoever for believing it to be true and that might strike us as banal or trite or obvious but in fact it was a revolutionary manifesto and most people have not signed on to it so if you believe that that hillary clinton ran a pedophilia ring out of the basement of a pizzeria whether she really did or not is not the reason you hold the belief you hold the belief as a way of saying boo hillary or saying that's the kind of thing that she would be capable of whether or not she didn't that's she is so decadent and and corrupt and perfidious that i wouldn't put a pastor to do that so i'm going to say that you did it and now those of us who say well well no you really that shouldn't really be the basis of beliefs you only believe things that are true not things that ratify some conviction in your your coalition well there's a sense in which we're the weird ones uh in the context of human history and i think we're right i think it really i think bertrand russell was right it is undesirable to believe a proposition and there are no grounds for supposing that it's true uh but that is a lesson that has to be uh pushed and and reinforced and inculcated do you think there really is an epidemic of fake news and conspiracy theories you've mentioned one there or is social media are simply sort of exaggerating it because we can see it in front of our eyes whereas perhaps these ideas and these this human nature towards uh confirmation bias and towards believing things that logically aren't true but we want to believe in because they confirm our own opinions that's been around for the entirety of human existence so this idea that there's a pandemic or fake news or conspiracy theories perhaps it's simply exaggerated by a tiny minority of very loud people on twitter and facebook and everything else uh indeed now it's not a tiny minority uh that uh probably nine out of ten americans believe in some conspiracy theory not necessarily q anon uh popular in the right but there are left-wing conspiracy theories and many uh people who believe that hiv was a engineered virus dispersed by the cia to control the black population uh the um you call white supremacy something of a conspiracy theory that all racial disparities are the result of people who want there to be racial disparities uh so uh and throughout history there have been conspiracy theories some of them quite destructive like the protocols of the elders of zion like the illuminati many uh pogroms and ethnic riots were triggered by some viral rumor uh about uh that members of that group killing uh an innocent of the the majority group likewise fake news it's probably the again when it comes not when it comes to people's everyday lives where we we have to know what's true or what's false because reality is as philip k dick said it doesn't go away when you stop believing in it but when it comes to things that are outside your own of uh concrete physical experience fake news might be closer to the uh the the the rule rather than the exception and it takes it took journalism a lot of self scrutiny a lot of reform a lot of adoption of codes of ethics and journalism schools and best practices for journalism not to be a convert of fake news 19th century papers were full of nonsense of sightings of sea monsters and civilizations on mars uh so it's uh and and measures people who have tried to use apply a constant yardstick to conspiracy theorizing through the ages have not found a recent uptick i think there's a danger that there is a moral panic here and i think that um there could be serious consequences to that for example i'll give you two consequences the first censorship that's the obvious one social media companies big tech companies during the last presidential election censored a story for example about hunter biden's laptop now we don't know whether the laptop was was verifiable or whatever the story was out there you can make you can make your own mind up about that it was on the new york post one of the oldest i think the oldest newspaper in america this was a mainstream organization publishing this and twitter completely removed it from the internet facebook likewise did the same thing for a temporarily and then put it back up the second consequence is viewing your political opponents as stupid and idiots and in the united kingdom after the brexit referendum you saw people on the other side of that referendum saying well brexit is they didn't know what they were voting for they were told lies by politicians these people were stupid thick northerners voters who who voted for this and therefore we should uh reverse the result or have enough of have another referendum which you know lots of people were saying this is completely anti-democratic and and how could you possibly say that how can you be so patronizing so by spreading this idea that we live in an age of fake news or we live in an age of of conspiracy theories you may be furthering censorship and i think you are demeaning or you there is a possibility that you start demeaning your political opponents as thick and stupid when they're not necessarily i mean i agree that that's a danger that there is something of a moral panic fake news in particular uh probably had a trivial role in the 2016 election it mainly went to uh partisans and it mainly titillated them with uh with claims of that could reinforce their in their uh conception of the worst of their opponents probably changed very few minds it was a tiny fraction of of internet uh traffic there is a danger that the social media companies will do the expedient thing and just shut down various kinds of controversial positions uh under pressure from from both sides because of course uh with the removal of trump from from uh twitter uh the social media became a bet noir of the american right and tried to regulate it in case of of trump on twitter uh there is it is slightly different in that just as in traditional free speech jurisprudence there often is an exception carved out for um incitement to imminent lawless activity or exhortation of uh violence particularly violence against the democratic process and so i think their twitter could have had a um a line that they could have i think justifiably said that that trump crossed that they you may not use our platform to tell people to be violent in particular to be to violently disrupt the democratic process um but it but it is also true that some of the other kinds of suppression uh maybe a response to a moral panic twitter is of course a private company but it has immense power in the public debate in public discourse likewise facebook some people would argue these are oligopolies there are it's very difficult to start competition to these companies they did actually try that on the right with the company called parlor it was pulled completely from the app store the apple app store google because of the same same accusations that um there were people there spreading fake news and disinformation uh well of course on facebook there are people spreading fake news and disinformation all the time but these that company is allowed to stay up on the app store and everything else so the idea that this is simply just a private company may be maybe limited in the fact that it may be a a monopoly or an oligopoly i also want to talk about this and you can comment on that but just also um on conspiracy theories themselves why they spread and the history of conspiracy theories there are some conspiracy theories that turn out to be completely true you know you can think of mk ultra or operation paperclip or all these other things and you could say actually they're a they might be true and b there might be a grain of truth within them so this causes other problems doesn't it because the truth isn't an obvious thing there is not you know there isn't just a simple line this is true and this is not true sometimes it's more murky than that and information isn't clear and sometimes there are vested interests who are hiding some information the government may not be completely honest obviously the government isn't completely honest about everything yeah so this creates huge problems doesn't it when you're trying to arbitrate social media platforms and other areas of public discourse including going to universities and speaking and things like that where there's no clear line here and there are subjective um analysis of what for example what donald trump said well there are a number of issues so we being mortal humans we will off uh always in fact be uncertain about the the the objective truth it still doesn't absolve us of having to come down and make decisions in particular cases you know as the telegraph does and deciding what news items uh to publish or not uh depending on their degree of confidence in the in its veracity now social media platforms uh notoriously are uh different from um uh from journalistic outlets in that they have operated closer to the the telephone company or the post office than to um a uh a journalistic outlet and have been u.s law held not liable for user posted content controversially so we haven't yet i think settled on a uh what is a defensible policy for social media are they and as you know there are debates on all of the issues that you brought up like are they really an unassailable monopoly that has has taken such advantage of network effects that they're in effect dislodgeable or is facebook now as perhaps vulnerable as myspace was 15 years ago in fact the popularity of facebook is declining and and could the market including the marketplace of of ideas punish companies that are too restrictive and could upstarts uh make inroads as they have in the past and with other other so-called monopolies anyway that's a whole whole discussion a whole set of issues on what really is a monopoly and how unassailable a monopoly is particularly in this in this zone uh but then there are um just just to repeat i think if there are any carve outs to speech at all where exactly the boundary is whether a particular instance will fall on one side or another is inevitably will involve some decision making under uncertainty that is you can't be certain nonetheless you do have to make it just make a decision i do have a chapter in the book on statistical decision theory namely given that we have uncertainty which we always have because we are we are mortals given that there are consequences to errors in both directions to uh false positives and false negatives where should a cutoff be placed to give us the best outcome given the costs of errors in both directions now of course ideally we should minimize both kinds of error by making our signal of reality as noise-free as possible that is in the case of the courtroom better forensics in the case of journalism digging deeper verifying sources in case of science more accurate instruments and better scrutiny against possible sources of error that reduces all uh errors but inevitably they'll be they'll have to be judgment calls it's not exactly or they're not necessarily subjective in the sense it's just a matter of taste although it may be uncertain in that there we don't know what the maybe a matter of interpretation it may and maybe a matter of interpretation but it i think it could be viable that i don't that the the policy that social media uh companies are obligated to dissem allow anything to be disseminated um or else they become uh kind of clumsy sensors of anything that might be a bit contentious and they become so litigation shy that if it's controversial they err on the side of shutting it down they're you know i think that there could be a middle ground uh kind of maybe taking a leaf out of uh free speech jurisprudence where there can be some legitimate uh kinds of speech that may be policed obviously there must be or there could not be a crime of bribery or extortion or blackmail because those by their very definition involves speech so if we if blackmail is a crime we've got to have be able to punish speech and so uh carveouts for particular categories such as uh inciting a uh a an ethnic riot or a a pogrom or a genocide you know like i can see that facebook might say well we allow a lot of stuff on our platform but but not that and then there has always there will have to be judgment calls uh because there could be gray areas but that doesn't absolve them of the requirement of making those judgment calls and perhaps sometimes controversially let's talk about one of those gray areas and you talk about anti-vaxxers now that isn't in itself a gray area in my opinion but i think that science itself as people have come to describe it uh isn't necessarily as clear-cut as i think that politicians and other immediate commentators are making it out to be so i'll give you an example in the uk uh matt hancock old health secretary he will talk about it's it's right that we follow the science he says that we need science on our side when tackling the coronavirus pandemic now scientists massively disagree uh in some areas of the coronavirus pandemic so some say lockdowns don't work some say they do there's a huge debate here and there isn't you know saying the science is is a very um far too direct and allows for no nuance there is an issue here isn't there that people are using this term the science and using science in a way that is not accurate science is more isn't as clear-cut as people are trying to make it out to be what do you make of the idea that science is being used to censor people i don't know science has been used to censor people but science is being uh i guess invoked to as a justification for censoring people uh so i think there is that that uh danger absolutely because to portray scientists as uh kind of uh priests or oracles uh who ought to be trusted because they have a direct access to the truth uh is a mischaracterization of what science is and it ultimately does science harm because it's just built into the process of science that there will be mistakes one scientist said the whole point of science is to make mistakes as rapidly as possible so we could see what the mistakes are karl popper to bring him up again characterized science as a process of conjecture and refutation namely you want to broach hypotheses that could be falsified and then some of them will be and that that's the way we approach the truth and the fact that scientists change their mind indeed should not be taken as an indictment of science which it is if you portray science as just another uh source of authority as a as a kind of secular priesthood then when they're wrong it's like well let's find yet another set of priests the point of science is to try is to allow necessarily fallible humans to grope their way toward toward the truth uh and i do think that both scientists and the public health officials who allude to the science should both be more open in the reasoning that led lead to their recommendations and more open perhaps openness in the right word because perhaps hasn't occurred to them in the first place that all decisions involve trade-offs of costs and benefits to justify it in terms of cost-benefit analysis given the uncertainty this goes back to the to the chapter on statistical decision theory in rationality that given the say in the early stage of the pandemic that no one knew whether that lockdowns would work or not and and i agree it's essential to concede that that we did not know it would be would have been legitimate to say we don't yet know whether they work or not if we impose them and we're wrong that they were unnecessary we would have had some economic costs but perhaps save lives if we were wrong that that that uh not having lockdowns would lead to to an explosion of the pandemic that would be a much worse cost so we are going to uh recommend the policy of being over cautious because the cost of being wrong is worse in the other direction they were not honest in that way perhaps because they themselves did not think in those terms and they rather had the bureaucrats mindset of when in doubt ban it cover your anatomy better that it not be blamed on you i think i have another explanation to that that links back to your book i think that public officials and government officials believe that human beings are irrational and that to tell them a white lie that lockdowns are fantastic and definitely work we must do it and that this is the science and we must follow it was a simple way of of saying to people you need to comply and if we were honest with them and said we don't know yeah they probably suspected that people wouldn't make a rational decision to comply with the lockdown and to understand that there is actually a debate around these things i think i think you're right i mean i think there is a an underestimation of people's capacity for rationality and hence a kind of paternalistic condescension we're going to pretend that we are infallible priests because if we admitted our own fallibility then uh then that people wouldn't trust us at all whereas that may be the exact opposite of of of the reality uh and that the greater transparency would have been more effective in the long run i suspect you're right when it comes to these murky these kind of murky areas of truth for example lockdowns or the other subjects that we've touched upon where social media has been regulating and censoring people where it's not so clear cut i mean you talk about terrorism and people inciting terrorism or violence i think that's pretty obvious for facebook to ban but when it comes to the more subjective areas isn't a better solution rather than censorship to have more transparency to have more debate and when you get for example an anti-vaxxer you shouldn't they be able to air their views and say well this is what i believe and the truth will eventually win and if you put light on a debate if you put light onto the truth then people will make a rational decision and decide that something like sunlight is the best disinfectant that's a quote from i think it was louis brandeis um yeah i mean in general i uh i agree with that that the solution to speech is more speech one can imagine again in the uh even a you know in america we call it a first amendment um uh advocate but more generally free speech advocate you know i think that we can have discussions of whether there are special limited unusual uh carve outs temporary and just as i'm you know against laws that criminalize holocaust denial even though i think that is it's an evil thing to promulgate but i don't think the government in general should be in the business of policing it but one could even imagine say in the aftermath of world war ii in germany uh a a temporary um restriction that would that had a defined instrumental purpose but that was not allowed to remain in place as an abridgement of speech and one can imagine emergency measures where even agreeing that in the fullness of time we'll get to the bottom of it but there is imminent danger now of spreading what we're almost certain is falsehoods and that could lead to to identifiable harm now not serving as a precedent for suppressing speech indefinitely i can imagine that uh in a private context of a social media company as being a defensible policy that is there is some degree of responsibility where the social media companies might say we just don't want to be we're we're private companies we can do we can do what we want and we don't want to be complicit in that right now again advice defensively if it was limited circumscribed to a particular purpose let's very briefly because we haven't got much time left to talk about universities and i know you mentioned in your book that there are problems within universities of intellectual debate being shut down of the overwhelming majority of faculty being on the left basically and this can create group think and irrational outcomes how significant is this problem in america and in the united kingdom yeah i think it is significant for two reasons one of them is that by uh by having a intellectual monoculture uh the we could cut ourselves up uh cut ourselves off from the universe of ideas maybe maybe many true ideas that are never entertained because there's no one there to entertain them there's the danger that uh if they're if true ideas if potentially true ideas are broached they'll never get to be considered because those making them are punished there's a danger that a whole class of people possibly representing either a significant minority or the majority are cut out of this this which ought to be an incubator of ideas and education and the possibility uh very real possibility that the credibility of the university and of science will be sapped by people correctly sensing that heterodox ideas are punished and therefore having no confidence even when the ideas are justified and i have had people ask me the question well why should we be impressed that there is a scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet if it comes out of universities where everyone knows that if you have a an unorthodox belief you'll be cancelled now i don't happen to believe that that has happened with uh with human-made climate change but uh it it does corrode the credibility uh on which the acceptance of scientific results depends skepticism debate uh challenging orthodoxy uh critical thinking all of these things are surely uh uh lacking at the moment within our intellectual public spaces do you think that wokism or identity politics is itself irrational um well i think it's uh some aspects of it are yeah uh the the fact that certain ideas are are just considered taboo and therefore may not be entertained is a disabling of one of the main mechanisms for for approaching the truth so if certain thoughts can't be thought that that's irrational because it doesn't open the door to correction of mistaken beliefs uh and punishing of of uh heretics then there are also there may be tenets that are factually mistaken i wouldn't call them irrational in that many factual propositions might be rational in the sense that there could be uh evidence for them which then turns out to be um superseded by better evidence in the other direction so i wouldn't equate being mistaken with being irrational so you might think there's a gender pay gap but there are actually 10 other reasons why the gender pay gap exists and it's not just about sexism for example yes so i think that the say the claim that it is due to sexism is not inherently irrational the firing anyone who raises the possibility that it might be something other than sexism that would be irrational on that note stephen i know we've got to end thank you so much for joining us that was absolutely fantastic and interesting thanks very much for having me thanks for the conversation

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Keywords: Telegraph, News, steven pinker rationality, steven pinker, rationality, psychology, jordan peterson, cancel culture, steven pinker interview, steven pinker jordan peterson, professor steven pinker, steven pinker language, steven pinker debate, philosophy, woke, pinker, irrationality, rational, enlightenment

Id: RM-8lYJklgQ

Length: 37min 0sec (2220 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 12 2021