Steven Pinker Meets Richard Dawkins | On Reason and Rationality

[Music] thank you hello and welcome thank you for coming to tonight's how-to Academy event and thank you steps travel for sponsoring shortly joining us on stage are undoubtedly two of the most icono classic and distinguished thinkers of our time Richard Dawkins and Stephen Pinker they'll be speaking about rationality and then moving on to audience questions but for now please join me in giving a very warm welcome to Richard Dawkins and Stephen Pinker [Applause] thank you [Applause] newspapers and magazines produce rant lists of public intellectuals throughout the world Stephen Pinker is always high in such lists and he's my favorite public intellectual he introduces non-specialist readers to his own expert subject while simultaneously contributing to the expert literature of that subject the amazing thing is that his own expert subject turns out to be subjects in the plural he knows so much about so many different things and is a world expert in all of them Linguistics in the language Instinct words and rules the stuff of thought cognitive and evolutionary psychology in how the mind works the interplay between genes and environment in the blank slate history in the better angels of our nature philosophy history of ideas passionate political advocacy in Enlightenment now in the sense of style he even passes on tips and tricks of what makes him such a marvelous writer and today we have rationality I've read it three times and learned something new with each reading and I strongly recommend it but then I strongly recommend all his books seems unfair to single out the latest one if there's any one book you haven't yet read just do it I'd like to add he's a man of intellectual courage when Larry Summers the then president of Harvard was threatened with a no-confidence vote because he had given a lecture which countenanced the possibility of discussing an unfashionable idea Steve was asked whether Summer's talk was within the pale of legitimate academic discourse Steve replied good grief shouldn't everything be within the pale of legitimate academic discourse as long as it present as long as it's presented with some degree of rigor that's the difference between a university and a madrasa our men say aye after all that it seems a bit of an anti-climax to do the usual thing and say something about his biography he's originally Canadian but has taught at Stanford MIT and Harvard you can't do better than that he's now the Johnston professor of psychology at Harvard he loves peanuts and Dilbert cartoons and Jewish jokes Steve um before we get on to rationality I mentioned in connection with how the mind works that you're one of the leaders of evolutionary psychology and it does come into rationality as well I'm continually mystified by the incredible vicious hostility that this subject arouses I was once talking to her otherwise very reasonable and sensible sober philosopher and as soon as he heard the name Pinker he practically hadn't apoplexy and the the reason was purely evolutionary psychology um I'm not sure I understand the hostility but do you I I I do because I it became the subject of one of my books after writing how the mind works where I combined the two big Ideas the computational theory of mind the explanation of how a piece of matter can achieve intelligence with Evolution namely where complex systems such as the human mind originate and I don't even consider myself an evolutionary psychologist so much as thinking that evolution is one of several perspectives that makes for a satisfying explanation and here I I got it better it better but it had better and here I appeal to a system by I believe your Mentor Nico tinbergen yes that to explain any Behavior you have to characterize it at several levels it's neurophysiological basis it's development in the organism it's phylogeny over the course of evolutionary history and its adaptive function just as with any complex object the first question you ask is what is it for what what was it designed to do and and the argument is for and actually I I have to credit you with this argument and the blind watchmaker you uh noted that the what natural selection can explain and nothing else can explain is how signs of design the illusion of engineering can appear in the natural world so that's the extent to which I'm an evolutionary psychologist well I suppose that they feel it's fine to talk about Darwinism for physical structures when it comes to behavior or the mind that's what kind of off limits especially if it's human well it is and it was in part the reaction that uh some of the reactions that I got to how the mind works that led me to realize that these were not just scientific disagreements that there were moral and emotional and political colorings to the very idea of human nature uh in and in particular many people many intellectuals many the critics many writers seem to feel that the idea that we are blank slates that there is no such thing as human nature that Evolution did not shape our um our our motives our emotions our ways of learning that that somehow politically more desirable we should hope that it's true and pretend that it's true so I wanted to answer that you're the very question why now any particular hypothesis about an Adaptive function it could be false let's hope many of them are false because that's what makes it science but many people treat them not as hypotheses that are true or false but hypotheses that are are evil to think and I wanted to know why and I think there are a number of reasons one of them is that if we're blank slates because nothing equals nothing equals nothing it's the ultimate guarantor of equality the men can't be women different from women and and races can't be different ethnic groups can't be different because we're all zero there's nothing there so there can't be any innate differences now I think it's a non-sequitur or at least it's a maybe it's a fallacy of affirming the consequent because even if it's true that if we are identical if we because we have because there's nothing in the brain at Birth that would make it easy to endorse political equality on the other hand it is not the case that if you endorse political equality you have to believe in them in the blank slate I do endorse political equality uh for for All Humans but it doesn't depend on our being blank slates or clones it just depends on the moral commitment that people ought to be treated as individuals and not prejudged by the statistics of their their race or sex or ethnicity that's one of these the other is as I call it the fear of of inequality there's the fear of imperfect stability that is if we're blank slates it holds out the hope that anything that we don't like about human behavior now we can kind of condition out of the species with the right education the right parenting the right media and so we're not doomed to endless strife and conflict and bigotry uh it's just the uh pernicious conditioning of this Society but we can dream of a better Society even a Utopia in which we bring up a generation of kids that don't have these flaws again I think that I I my own response and the blank slate had these reasons why evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics and to some and to some extent uh cognitive and affective Neuroscience all of the biological approaches to to the Mind why they are so uh politically incendiary the fear of of imperfectability is the idea that we are that there's a kind of reactionary politics that Evolution leads you to well you can't change human nature and so why bother trying to improve Society we're stuck with all of the um the awful traits that we see again that's a nons I argue in the blank slate in replying to this that it is also a non-sequitur because Human Nature by pretty much any account is complicated there are lots of different parts to it and even if we have some unsavory urges or impulses we also have there are other parts of human nature that can push back against them we have self-control we don't if there's food on the table we don't just immediately stuff our mouths but we wait till the appropriate moment that's why we have these big outsized frontal lobes we have empathy so that we don't just exploit everyone at will we have norms rule asset rules that we feel that respectable people just don't do we have cognitive processes reason where we can set up problems like violence or War try to figure out institutions that can reduce them and try to implement them and we have language that can share them so it the fact that human nature exists doesn't mean that we're locked into a particular social system I think that brings us into jumping ahead into into a fairly late in in rationality um what do you describe I think the most depressing finding in Psychology ever um the the fact that that we are all of us more likely to believe what's politically congenial to us rather than what actually supported by the evidence um I was depressed indeed by the experiment you described where um well you describe it whether they change the labels on this yes so the experiment is you um there's a fake um social science experiment I mean that is it's just it's made up for the purpose of the experiment that um as I recall it shows whether uh gun control is effective in reducing the rate of crime this being more of an American hot button than a than a British one but uh politically inflammatory and the right and the left have staked out opposite sides if and the numbers were jiggered so that the the answer to the question did gun control reduce coin doesn't pop out of the data you have to actually um in fact the uh the um numbers that appear on the page at first glance seem to show that it was effective but then when you scale it by the proportions instead of the absolute numbers because the cities over which it was calculated were different sizes so the fact that there were more murders uh in absolute terms was not informative because there were fewer in relative terms so you just have to do like one more step of mental arithmetic you have to do a little bit of critical thinking in order to spot the mistake exactly yes okay uh and so the so that that was the setup there was a seductive but wrong answer I mean it wasn't rocket science as we say but it did require one extra mental step and the uh comparisons were first of all um did the were the respondents uh numerate or not that is did they show in an independent test that they were uh familiar with with handling numbers were they on the left or the right by self-identification did the results seem to support the efficacy of gun control or not and uh they also had a control where just to make sure it wasn't the complexity of the problem itself instead of does gun control reduce crime it was does this skin cream reduce rashes we're presumably the left and the right don't have strong opinions on whether our fictitious skin cream is effective or not so that was a kind of control well what they found was when it came to the skin cream not surprisingly people who were highly who were familiar with numbers uh we're more likely to draw the correct conclusion that if they scaled the absolute numbers by the by the the base rate uh people who are less numerate uh kind of fell for it and didn't matter whether they were on the left or on the right but when you switch it to the efficacy of gun control now the uh and you switch the column headings so the same numbers for half the subject show that it's supported gun control that it showed it was effective for the other half it showed that it was uh if anything it seemed to increase crime now the um the uh innumerate people uh once again were fell for the bigger numbers in all cases the numerous people for the um the difficult case they were able to spot the um the effect but for the easy case they or the sorry I said that wrong when it's supported if they were on the left and they were highly numerate they correctly spotted the um seductive wrong answer if it went against the favored liberal position namely if it showed that gun control worked they were not seduced by the misleading numbers if it showed that gun control did not work they were no better than the uh the innumerate people conversely for people on the right if the correct interpretation of the data was that gun control was effective it went over their heads even though they were mathematically competent to pick it out if on the other hand it pointed to the conclusion that they didn't like then their eagle eyes spotted it so the bottom line was that when people even though in general High Intelligence high numeracy high critical thinking skills inoculate us against common fallacies against going with uh superficial impression if it goes against people's politics then all of that numerical skill goes out the window they just zoom in on what they believe to be true or what they wanted to be true according to the ideology of their political Coalition it's deeply depressing indeed um do do we all suffer from that so it is I I sadly the answer is more or less yes I don't want to say every last one of us but um is a very it's one of the perhaps the most robust of the 200 or so fallacies that cognitive psychologists and behavioral economists have documented this is according to an excellent book by Keith stanovich called the bias that divides Us in which he showed that it's equally powerful among left-wingers and right-wingers and uh High Intelligence is no protection unlike most of the other fallacies like um arguing by uh from from anecdote to some cost fallacy where if you're smarter you tend to be less susceptible to them but for the my side bias as the gun control study showed being smart doesn't help you I must say I feel guilty of this I mean I I empathize when you said somewhere in the book who Among Us doesn't prefer to read editorial that we agree with and one that we don't agree with and it feels great the point of reading the Daily Telegraph every day just enough to counteract that yeah um but anyway it is just deeply depressing um I think we both admire Stephen Fry very much and I was puzzled to read one of his books or somewhere he said that he's an empiricist but not a rationalist I thought they were the same thing I must confess they're obviously very ignorant but can you explain the difference so this it goes back to the uh Age of Reason and the Enlightenment and this is a kind of introductory philosophy dichotomy or at least a way of organizing the philosophers it has a slightly different meaning in my own field of cognitive science and cognitive psychology and Linguistics there if you're an empiricist you believe in the blank slate if you're a rationalist you believe the mind comes equipped with lots of uh innate capabilities but I think in the philosophical sense it referred to philosophers who wanted to root an understanding of reality in in reason and logic and first principles what we might pejoratively call from the armchair and uh in empiricist would mean that you have to go out into the world and look so you uh uh Francis Bacon John Locke David Hume um David Hartley Bishop Barkley were all called empiricists uh the classic uh rationalists were Spinoza Descartes and uh leibniz but we should all be both we should all be both yes we just mentioned Hume um obviously you're a huge admirer of you we've quote him a lot in in the book did you know that there's a movement in Edinburgh it has been succeeded I think too rename the David Hume Tower human being canceled in other words that that is that is depressing and I I forget the infraction but did they turn up some oh I don't think he actually own slaves but he probably own stock in a company yes yeah well what's what's depressing is that it is a a particular uh failure of rationality which is that um in other times another historical periods uh uh all Mortal humans at least in part go with the prevailing Norms that uh it wasn't that only that bad people kept slaves around stocks and companies that traded slaves kind of everyone did it and it would take some kind of super uh human Angelic moral sense to actually defy everything you know everyone you know uh and that it's we we should ought to judge people by what they uh believed and held relative to the um the prevailing Norms of the day not that we should make the moral judgments themselves uh because slavery was immoral whether it was questioned or not uh we don't have to be moral relativists but in judging individuals in terms of their moral fiber uh in a more moral character one has to look at the society in which they they were born and and uh traded ideas particularly since this is a high much more moral stance it's not amoral in giving a pass to evil people in the past on the contrary it is a prod to us to take a look at what beliefs that we have that we might consider completely unexceptionable that our descendants might find uh horrific and only if we realize that that human beings aren't divided into good people and bad people but often are absorbed without even questioning them some of the practices of the day which they which ought to be challenged doesn't mean that everyone who hasn't yet challenged them is a bad person do you have a nominee in 100 years time will Pinker and Dawkins be canceled retrospectively for only so for watches well we might are we going to go out for chicken after after uh after this for dinner are we going to go out for a nice steak or a piece of chicken or a filet of fish well it's the obvious candidate that's not that's one candidate and there are others and it is a kind of Illuminating exercise to think about uh what practices we often don't even question perhaps the degree of criminal punishment that we it might exceed what is effective as a deterrent and if the goal of criminal punishment is to reduce the uh amount of crime by setting up incentives that will inhibit people from committing them we may uh punish people above and beyond or in different ways than than uh than what would reduce the the amount of wrongdoing uh nuclear weapons the the fact that we possess nuclear weapons we've just been reminded by Putin's threats that they aren't just hypothetical uh devices that kept it kept in storage but uh if they're there they could be used the fact that they exist could be that cause any any revision of the better aims of our Nature by the way um well it's the the it does show that um it is a reversal of the process called the called The Long piece the fact that for 77 years after World War II there was a well there's an absence of Interstate war in Europe there was a reduction in Interstate War across the globe and reduction in the number of deaths in in war so far it hasn't um reversed it in the sense of sending the curves back up to where they used to be say in the 1960s when the war in Vietnam was raging but it was certainly a shattering of a precedent and the most people most nations are appalled and there's a good reason that they're appalled and and I would have and to be honest I would have uh if I had entered a prediction Market if I was forced to make a bet as to what is the probability that um uh that Russia would actually invade and try to Annex or or conquer territory I uh I would have lost my shirt um Neil deGrasse Tyson is among those who have advocating a virtual country called rationalia and um the rule about rationalia is there's only a one-line constitution all policies shall be based on the weight of evidence which sounds great to me but he reports in his book that we that um he got an awful lot of stick for this and a lot of people said what a horrible idea that scientists should have any say in the matter of that kind of thing I mean are you going to sign up for Neil's rationalia well I I think it's incomplete I mean he is by the way his um the basic idea has does have some currency among policy analysts and public servants in the demand for evidence-based policy and there's an organization that um that I support called apolitical that tries to exchange empirically vetted best practices among policy analysts and public service servants across the globe so it's a step in the in the direction the reason it's incomplete the two reasons that it's incomplete one of them is that uh rationality is always in service of a goal in fact I early on in the book where I have no choice but to try to Define rationality I say it's the the use of knowledge to attain a goal and going back to David Hume he pointed out that uh the that rationality itself can't tell you what that goal must be so if you apply rational means to a um a destructive end you're behaving in one sense rationally but it may not be commendable it may not be admirable and so the you can't have government you can't simply say government should base policy on evidence and now we know how to govern because what are the uh the ends what are the goals and and there are differences among people in what those goals are and say Vladimir Putin the goal is to assert the glory and the preeminence of Russian civilization someone else the goal might be human life and uh and safety there each could pursue a rational means to those conflicting goals now as it happens I don't I think Hume can be taken too far I do think we can discuss the advisability of different goals in terms of how consistent they are with other goals that we have and in particular goals that we claim for ourselves like presumably Putin would rather be alive and dead and that that means that it you can say that it is irrational or at least inconsistent if you were to deny that very right to others which he claims for himself I would surely agree with you that what we're looking for is self-consistency but I thought he was simply saying you can't simply assume a a moral premise I think Sam Harris the only person I know who does say that that you actually can derive morals from purely scientific reasoning but I don't think Hume actually would deny that he surely he's the leading exponent of the idea that you want to look at self-consistency in in this thing that you apply after your moral premise yes and if you um if you marry that to the unexceptionable goal that people have to be alive and healthy and happy and well fed and then that does and it is true that on narrow logical grounds you don't have to prefer being healthy to sick and in fact Hume actually draws this point out he says there's nothing rational about wanting to be healthy or or as opposed to sick or Rich than or even comfortably well off rather than impoverished that those aren't logical truths they're just goals that presumably ones that for intelligible reasons natural selection installed in us once you um make the leap and say yeah call me crazy but I really would rather be alive than dead and well-fed and starving I can't justify it logically but that's just the way I am then a lot follows out of logical consistency the book is very filled with Bayesian reasoning obviously or a great um devotee of Bayesian reasoning can you explain that without algebra yes uh there are this is the rule discovered by the Reverend Thomas bays in the 18th century on how to calibrate your degree of credence in a hypothesis according to the strength of evidence and it the basic conceptual leap that Bayes gave us is that you can as long as you don't either believe something or reject it but you have degrees of confidence degrees of con of uh Credence in an idea you can conceive of those degrees of confidence as probabilities between zero you're positive that it's false one you're positive that it's true 0.5 you could go either way and so on now as soon as you take that leap that you translate your degree of belief of a hypothesis into a number then the mathematics of probability apply and he's spelled out one way in which just the definition of conditional probability can be applied to how we are to calibrate our degree of belief according to the evidence and and you can put it into words the reason that it's worth thinking it's only it's actually got only three terms in it um and just a little bit of a refutech but many Advocates of rationality including members of the self-designated rationality community believe that uh Bayes rule is probably the cognitive tool that would go the farthest in making all of us more rational than we naturally would be and and uh for those of you are familiar with the ideas of Daniel Kahneman the author of thinking fast and slow winner of a Nobel Prize and the co-discoverer with amosversky of many many human fallacies Kahneman and tersky identified a failure of Bayesian reasoning as one of the most common human fallacies in particular the neglect of the first term in base theorem and here's here's how it works what base theorem gives you what the the deliverable the uh the goal the term on the left hand side of the equation is your degree of belief in a hypothesis contingent on the evidence uh to get that we all want that should I do I have a disease um is uh did so and so commit the crime any hypothesis where there's some still some uncertainty to get that you start off with the priors and that is an element from base theorem that's actually escaped from probability Theory and has now become part of every every day's vocabulary I think it probably just happened in the last decade or so that uh well my priors are are different from your priors or my priors are that he probably did it that simply comes from the first term in base theorem namely how much Credence do you have in the idea before you've even looked at the evidence just how plausible it is based on everything you know coming today you mentioned the problem with that it sounds like Prejudice I mean well it's yes indeed right and it could it ideally it shouldn't just be any old belief that you have confidence in but something where there is there are there is a base rate that grounds that prior so in the case of um concrete example it's often raised is given that you have the positive test result for a disease do you actually have the disease we all want to know that when we get tested for prostate cancer or cervical cancer or or covid and um one way of calibrating That Base rate that first term without it just being a gut feeling in which case you could use base theorem to prove anything you want uh is the base rate of the population that is what percentage of people walking around um say what percentage of men have prostate cancer in a certain age range and that's that's you prior before you even look at the test result that's how that's where you start uh then you multiply that by the likelihood and likelihood in this context doesn't just mean probability but specifically means if the hypothesis were true then would you observe the evidence that you're observing so if you had the disease would you get a positive test result or if it's not a test but rather a set of symptoms would it show those those symptoms in in the jargon of medical testing that's called the sensitivity of the test that is the probability of the data given the hypothesis that says nothing about whether it's true or not it just says if it were true would you see that that evidence and if that's true then it jacks up your your estimate then you take those two terms you multiply them together then you just divide it by how common is the evidence across the board sometimes called the marginal and that's based that's base theorem now how does it work out the reason that even though there's circumstances in which it is unintuitive and first game Kahneman gave many famous examples uh it can be made intuitive and it we actually have versions of it in our Collective folklore in for example uh Carl Sagan's motto extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence itself a pithy uh distillation of a point made by Hume namely when someone the hume's example is if someone reports having witnessed a miracle um should you believe it now that that would be a high second term in base theorem namely if a miracle occurred or you can't miss it that doesn't tell you whether a miracle occurred you'd have to calibrate that by um what is more likely in these the priors that all of the laws of physics as we've established as we understand them are are false or some guy got something wrong you know he was strong he had a memory failure well given that the laws of physics there's lots of reasons to believe it even before whether or not someone reports a miracle if you do hear a miracle even if the guy seems like he's telling the truth chances are it's more likely that he was wrong than that the loss of physics are wrong so that's that's an example of Bayesian reasoning another one is the advice given to medical students again a uh pushing back at the base rate neglect economy documented economy and trisky if you hear hoof beats outside a window don't expect to see a zebra and this is pushing back against the bad habit of medical students having read about all these exotic diseases to reason from the symptom to the disease forgetting about the base rate I think the medical examples are particularly important and convincing because time and again you hear of people who get a diagnosis or or and they get it wrong because they forget about the base rate and as do doctors it's not just it's not just patience I can give an exact concrete example yes um this is It's been uh you've all probably heard that there are some findings in Psychology that have failed to replicate this is one that is highly replicable going back 50 years and it even has a name it's called the medical diagnosis problem so um suppose that the probability that a woman has breast cancer is one percent there is a test for breast cancer and if a woman does have the disease then the test results is positive ninety percent of the time but like many medical tests there are some false positives and there is a the false positive rate is 0.9 uh a woman tests positive what are the chances that she has the disease okay so there's a uh 0.01 chance that uh any randomly selected woman has that has the disease a 0.9 chance that if she does have the disease the test herself comes out positive a 0.09 chance that if she doesn't have the disease the test comes out positive she tests positive what are the chances that she has the the cancer you can part of that for a minute the most popular answer is 90 including among a sample of doctors the correct answer according to Bay's theorem is nine percent that's a big difference it's a difference between that's a very important difference that's a very important difference you probably have it or you probably don't have it and the where people go wrong is they forget about that one percent base rate they just think of the image the representative image of someone with cancer they take a test it comes out positive and that dominates their thinking a better exam maybe even a better example despite the fact that this is one of the classics as a a imagine consider Penelope Penelope is um very has a highly refined aesthetic sense she likes to spend her summers in Tuscany she wrote a sonnet for her boyfriend for his birthday what are the what are the chances that her University major is art history what are the chances that her University major is psychology everyone says well it's got to be art history however for every heart history major there are probably a hundred psychology Majors just that much more popular uh the fact that she fits The Stereotype of a art history major uh isn't the only thing that you should consider if across the board regardless of people's tastes and what they give their boyfriends for for their birthday just chances are but are much higher that anyone's going to be a psychology maybe they're that many more of them so that's another example of Base rate neglect signal detection Theory somewhat similar but something I know a little bit more about can you explain about digital detection Theory maybe in the context of Courts of law which you do mention in the book yeah so signal detection theory is a term that is familiar to psychologists it more generally can also be called statistical decision theory that the mathematics are almost identical whenever you hear of a significance test it's significant at probability less than 0.05 statistical decision theory is the body of reasoning that that allows you to say that it's basically the problem that it solves for any tool of rationality there's always a golf I've mentioned it though the reason that we want to know Bay's theorem is it tells us how to calibrate our degree of credence in a hypothesis signal detection Theory takes the next next step and says given that we're uncertain about almost and everything you know maybe we're 90 certain maybe we're 10 certain uh but we're virtually never 100 certain or zero percent certain what do you do about it if you have to make a decision so in the case of say a cancer diagnosis do you operate or not and if you're if your degree of of belief in the in the diagnosis is say 0.8 or 0.7 well what do you do what do you do if you're a doctor what do you do if you do if you're a patient uh now signal detection theory is a way of answering that question now you might say well how can you answer it if you're uncertain I mean only God knows for sure but what it does is it advises you on what cutoff of probability you should use as your threshold for deciding one way or another depending on the costs and benefits of the different kinds of error get guilty Beyond Reasonable Doubt say for example well the the or even more to the point in the case of say um medical decision decision where there's the uncertainty what you'd have to think of is how bad would it be if you if you were wrong in in having a miss that is there is a cancer but you don't operate how bad would it be if there was a false alarm namely there's no cancer but you do operate and then in the case of say a radical mastectomy the costs are are substantial they're not they're not that trivial now in the courtroom the oh and by the way so just just to cap off that story signal detection Theory basically advises having a a low cutoff being kind of trigger happy acting even uh when you're highly uncertain if the costs of a Miss are high in the cost of a false alarm are low if it's the other way around then you want to be gun shy you want to have a very high burden of proof before you actually act on something now whether and then there's some there's some mathematics behind it not not that complicated but where it does where it already is recognized is in the legal Arena not quantitatively where when we say better one guilty uh man be sorry better ten of the guilty be acquitted than one innocent be convicted blackstone's ratio that is an example of setting a Criterion a threshold a decision cut off based on not on your degree of uh Credence in the in the um in the guilt this is what you do after you have a degree of belief how you act on it and this crucially depends on your values in the case of say a cancer diagnosis it's uh how much would it suck if you fail to detect a cancer how much would it suck if you had unnecessary surgery that's a subjective it's value based in the case of a court of law there's the moral valuation of how horrific would it be to send a innocent man to jail or to the to the countries that have capital punishment to the electric chair versus how bad would to be if you had a murderer walking Among Us and the tradition has been at this 10 to 1 ratio there's no that is not where you get the values and this gets back to human is not itself a matter of rationality it's not in any simple way it's a matter of what we what we value in this case morally Beyond Reasonable Doubt I've always worried about that because you feel if it really was beyond Reasonable Doubt um when the jury come out and there's a great tension in the court there shouldn't be any attention in the court if it's beyond Reasonable Doubt everybody in the court should know whether it's whether it's because or not another way to put that would be if you imagine having two juries independently listening to the same evidence and then disappearing into their own jewelry rooms then coming back how many times would you bet they'd come back with the same verdict we probably don't want to know the answer yeah because it's it's it is it is depressingly uh low so the Beyond a reasonable doubt you know this actually and and these are like many of the issues surrounding the applicability of rational tools This is highly consequential the United States there has been a raging debate over a a memo issued by the Obama Administration called the dear colleague letter uh pertaining to accusations of of sexual assault on campus overturning the Beyond A Reasonable Doubt standard to preponderance of evidence sometimes called 50 plus a feather now uh the and I think the it wasn't Obama himself but the bureaucrats of the administration who changed that rule um did not think through the signal detection analysis or statistical decision analysis all they thought of was damn it we've got to punish more people who are guilty of sexual assault what didn't seem to occur to them is if all you do is you change the standard of proof you will punish more uh guilty men you'll also punish more innocent men that is unavoidable it's just a fact of mathematics and that the failure to Think Through the moral value of a false acquittal and a false conviction led to the prematurely the the glib change of standard then a number of investigative journalists turned up all of these cases of patently innocent men being convicted um kicked out of uh out of University their lives ruined and and then it's been revoked by the Trump Administration then might be reinstituted by the Biden Administration but whether or not it's advisable is should hinge on an overt discussion of how bad is it to convict a an innocent person how bad is it to acquaint a guilty one if you don't have that in mind then the decision should it be Beyond A Reasonable Doubt or preponderance of evidence is not being done rationally one of the quotes I picked up from the book is we evolved as intuitive lawyers not as intuitive scientists um I think I see what that means yes this was um I think it was uh the the uh cognitive Anthropologist Dan spare bear but and Phil Phillip tetlock another cognitive psychologist um uh said it in slightly different words we're also intuitive theologians uh so a lawyer tries to press her case as using whatever trick works that that's a responsibility the idea is that if they're in an adversarial system the lawyer on the other side will push back and the truth will emerge from both Advocates making their strongest possible argument and it's actually an interesting question whether that really does lead to correct verdicts from that adversarial process now that also happens in science it shouldn't but it does there are scientific debates where the disagreeing scientists act like lawyers they pull out every trick they can think of but it's an aspiration to science that you don't do that and the question as we are human and we humans are so set on making our truth the truth this goes back to the my side bias it's uh the more General rubric is motivated reasoning that is instead of following the evidence and logic to where it leads you start off with the conclusion that you want to be true and you and spin doctor and Julie Rigg the evidence to take you there uh the uh the the idea that we are intuitive lawyers is that that we don't necessarily follow the trail of evidence to the most defensible conclusion but we all of us want the certain things to be true and we're ingenious at um arguing for them now that is a kind of rationality in the sense that again rationality is always in pursuit of the goal ideally the goal should be disinterested truth but for any given person at any given time it might be to show how smart you are how wise you are to argue for a conclusion that that favors you why you should get the contract and not someone else why should go to the restaurant that is near your house not the the the other person's house all of these are examples of motivated reasoning which make us very good lawyers and and not such good scientists into as part of the darwinian point that we're evolved to to best our Rivals at that argument yes and in fact that it is a um it's another profound point my my late colleague Jerry foder a philosopher who was at MIT and then at Rutgers uh one of his objections to evolutionary explanations of cognition is he said there's there's nothing to discuss the only selection pressure uh if if you don't even go there is is truth is is objective truth um sad to say that isn't true uh that there is an advantage to being in touch with reality as opposed to being deluded but in arenas where you can't establish the fact of the matter with certainty there's also can be an advantage to being to being to winning an argument even if you aren't objectively correct namely you get your way uh or you or you enhance your status your reputation for expertise and knowledge and so I think Jerry was a little too charitable to the rationality of our species although I agree with him that it's also false to say that we can't be rational because the only thing that we evolved to do was to run away from Lions going back to the uh my side bias again it's being suggested that um there is a darwinian advantage in sucking up to your own side because what really matters because it's where social animals is is to be successful in our social group whether or not what we believe is true if we if we can increase our prestige in the social group to which we belong that could have a Darwin in benefit that's another very pessimistic thought actually it is and and there's got to be a lot of Truth to that given that empirical evidence that the my side bias is as powerful as it is the most powerful bias but it does lead to a more optimistic conclusion namely given you know humans are what you are you can't just ask someone and expect them to to know the truth even if they're smart because they might just use their intelligence to come up with a self-serving conclusion but there are institutions where we can use the uh our argumentative abilities to their advantage uh to try to a allow the truth to emerge from disputation that is the logic behind the adversarial system in a courtroom that yeah you've got a lawyer he's going to or she's going to pull out every every trick that that she can on the other hand there's a lawyer on the other side and there's a jury and they listen to them and the best argument will come out from their disputation or in science where we have peer review and a demand for empirical validation in governance where we have checks and balances separation of powers open debate in Parliament the idea is that you deploy people's ability to poke holes in the other side and even if they're not so good at poking holes in their own side as long as you have freedom of speech freedom of the press then you can deploy people's critical faculties to uh to debunk or disprove false ideas and the idea left standing would be the true one uh and so this is one of the conclusions in in um rationality both an answer to the question how can uh a species that is so saddled with biases and fallacies uh managed to discover DNA and the theory of evolution and get to the moon and and the smartphones and vaccines and so on part of the answer is it isn't any one of us that did that it's communities of thinkers who get to expose fallacies in one another and that the whole society or institution can be more rational than any of its members conversely what allows uh nonsense to proliferate it's precisely the Arenas in which there isn't a evaluation of ideas in dictatorships which suppress freedom of speech then you can have the autocrats with lunatic ideas like like Putin like like now perhaps like even Xi Jinping in today's China if you insulate yourself from criticism you've disabled the social mechanism that can make us more rational despite how our self-serving biases unfortunately we're running out of time um I think we better stop and ask for questions this is not the first time Steve and I have appeared on stage together by the way in in London a few years ago we did and um it went pretty well and uh the BBC got wind of it afterwards and they rang up and said would we like to reprise our encounter on News 9 that evening so we said yes and then I got a phone call from the producer and she said tell me what exactly is the nature of your disagreement that Dr Pinker and I said um I don't think we really have much of a disagreement and she said no disagreement and the interview was promptly canceled that's right well and that was it was it is science killing the soul I think that was the resolution I forget what it was but it but anyway um I haven't been pushing back and because I do agree with you about everything um questions can we have the lights up thank you so I to take your last point I mean just to where their Societies in which free exchange views are not permitted I mean therefore that can lead you to policy not that everything should come back to the American political system but but we're sir it seems like we're in a stage I mean as to where half maybe even more than half of sort of the American electorate has turned their back on the idea of rationality I mean the idea that not just scientific evidence I mean this is it but but really I mean just uh that if you look at sort of January 6 I mean just uh the you know what you see I mean it's still that is is somehow not true so what is you can can argue that in a society where sir it's you know authoritarian I mean that might change and you might sort of have a path back to a more rational Society what happens when a society that has Freeman of the press I mean is to has elections I mean just but turns its back on rationality anyway I mean is what's the way forward yeah the way and it is it is indeed worrying that the my side bias is uh so um overwhelming that it can lead people to um almost hallucinate the things that didn't happen with with uh significant consequences this isn't just a idle belief in but but led to violence and and um could lead to uh insurrection uh now the way I think of it is that it's not as if there was a a golden age which we are all rational and we're um the southern pernicious threat I think it's easier to think that at least in the political Arena the default is that we that we're all victims to the my side bias we ought to support the disinterested institutions like perhaps the rationalia or uh uh open debates empirical evaluation that would pull us away from our our self-serving bias and but they're they're fragile they we always are in danger of backsliding into conspiracy theories into demonization of the other side and we really have to safeguard the institutions of rationality such as a responsible and Free Press such as Government record-keeping such as science but it is always there's always something sisyphean about it in that human nature always um progresses to them to the my side bias another question thank you so much for such an [Music] um it seems that as a society we often fall into the habits of being in Echo Chambers and just wanted to ask on your opinion about how can we combat this in order to exchange videos and not fall victims of our own biases yes and I'm sorry for not making eye contact but I actually don't know where the question came from up in the balcony okay um yeah it is a profound question and there is um I think there's probably a premature conclusion that social media sucked people into the so-called filter bubbles if you don't mind the mixed metaphor um especially the recommendation algorithms would lead people down extremist rabbit holes it turns out that the studies of what people are exposed to on the internet so that's probably not generally the case that's not why the main way but the people get radicalized that in fact on the internet you're more likely to be exposed to both mainstream and opposing viewpoints than in the old days when a a hunk of paper was delivered to your doorstep and you could subscribe either to the telegraph or to the guardian and never see the other one now either one is a click away and in fact empirically it turns out people are exposed to they actually are exposed to a diversity of opinion it's not enough to get them to adopt the mindset of rationalia of let's see where the evidence goes the my side bias still keeps people wedded to Bear convictions so there has to be something Beyond just exposure there has to be and when people ask me what is the how do we make people more National I mean not not that I have a a cure or a solution but I have some suggestions and there are suggestions made by others certainly one of them is to safeguard The credibility of the truth establishing the institutions given that uh all of us being human none of us is going to be capable of being perfectly rational so the um the news agencies themselves the government agencies the public health officials the universities the scientific societies ought to be prepared to show their work to show why they come to the conclusions conclusions they do so there's at least some chance that others can replicate their rationality to the extent that it is rational they should avoid gratuitous politicization and I think it is quite pernicious that a lot of our scientific academic and journalistic Outlets are just branding themselves as mouthpieces of the left because what it will mean is the right will blow them off and when it comes to some sciences that both of us care deeply about Evolution and and anthropogenic climate change it we know that this is pernicious because denial of the scientific consensus in on illusion or climate change has nothing to do with scientific literacy despite your best efforts and my best efforts and the best efforts of many to enhance the understanding of science the Emeritus chair of the of the for the public understanding of Science and at Oxford something that is highly desirable but public understanding of Silence won't sadly get more people to believe in evolution or anthropogenic climate change because tests of public understanding of science so that the deniers know as much science as the acceptors the people who accept evolution have only the vaguest idea how it really works Andrew strollman has shown that there that people who affirm uh what you and I would agree is the is the correct belief have all kinds of and any ideas about how Evolution Works conversely for uh or I mean similarly I should say for climate change you ask a typical advocate of a Believer what causes climate change you won't get a coherent nation of the greenhouse effect all the time you might get well this has something to do with and is it the ozone hole or plastic straws in the ocean I mean people have kind of a sense of green versus pollution and conversely the deniers often are kind of skilled litigators who know every loophole in the science what predicts your degree of belief in climate change is how far are you to the left or to the right farther you are to the right the more denial now that's a sad fact about our species again it's the my side bias tragic fact a tragic fact but what it means is how do we get people to accept a scientific consensus and that is stop branding it as left-wing talking point get people on the right who endorse it or establish the political neutrality the political Bona fides of the scientific societies the public health agencies and I think that's not only have we not met that challenge but we're careening in the wrong direction a next question about when you were talking about empiricism and rationalism the empiricism I understand is is when you have a blank state in the cognitive science sense of empiricism rationalism probably not the philosopher sense what I'm thinking is um a child I imagine is a blank state at what point does does that does it start differentiating at what point do does a child become rational or non-rational or has there been any studies done I mean how does it relate to education how all the other discussions about the new side you know left and right and you know all these ideas tool two children what point do these things get fixed in in some in the child's mind we've got the fighting yes so I think um certainly many of my colleagues in in developmental cognitive science would dispute the claim that babies are blank slates and my colleague Elizabeth skelke has a brilliant scientist using ingenious methods has shown that babies from as young as you can test them in some cases newborns probably have uh ways of organizing the world like the concept of object the concept of causation newborns lock onto faces they have already um acquired the sound pattern of their language so I wouldn't go so far as to say the children children are blank slates it's certainly true that they don't know particular policies to say nothing of empirical beliefs like as human activity warming the planet So that obviously has to be acquired and it is schooling matters ambient culture matters what you just what you hear in you know in in pubs and bars and coffee houses what you see on on television or on the Internet so there are lots of sources of conventional wisdom and I ideally they ought to be deployed in the direction of Greater rationality that is calibrating evidence belief to evidence and that is kind of the aspirate the rationality aspiration and it's a question at the front uh I have a question here in the sorry uh so hello where am I looking Professor Pinker can someone wave here in the corner up uh balcony yeah yeah I said you know so the the bright light is blinding me anyway but but I'll I'll look in that direction yes so uh thank you for today's discussion uh you started by talking about evolutionary psychology and the controversy surrounding this field so I have a question about your field of expertise or one of your fields of expertise evolutionary psychology uh so modern evolutionary psychologists such as you or David Buss or Geoffrey Miller uh believe that our skulls host the Stone Age mind um and uh you look for mental adaptations that was were forged by natural and sexual sexual selection in The evolutionary environment of adaptation or the eea which according to my knowledge is the place to sin do you believe that future evolutionary psychologists will be interested in a different evolutionary environment of adaptation how do you see the future of the field and how how do you know that the current eea that we study is still relevant in 2022 yeah it's a surprisingly pointed question because I have had a friendly disagreement with my friends leader cosmetes and John Toby the two of the co-founders of evolutionary psychology over whether the environment of evolutionary adaptedness um that is the the world of cause and effect that shaped our psychological adaptations that actually determined our reproductive output should be equated with the pleistocene with the with hunter-gatherers with the the the stone agers uh I I that that may be true but I actually think it's somewhat gratuitous because so many of the mismatches that motivate evolutionary explanations for example to take a not so controversial example why we have a sweet tooth why do we consume more salt and fat than is good for us a common answer and it's an evolutionary answer is that in the world in which we evolved there weren't mass quantities of affordable ubiquitous Suites the danger rather was insufficient calories we evolved the Sweet Tooth in our current environment in which sweet foods are abundant we consumed too much of it it used to be the world that limited our supply now the world no longer limits our supply notice that you don't need um the Stone Age you don't need the pleister scene you don't need hunter-gatherers for that explanation because mass production of foods with synthetic sugar is only maybe a hundred years old so even if you count the eea as everything up to I don't know you know whenever candy became cheap and ubiquitous let's say 1950 you could say it's everything up to 1950 and it's still the case that the whatever time weighted um periods had an effect on our sweet tooth we know that it uh it wasn't the present just because they've only been a few Generations in which that has uh where we've had that Innovation likewise for Reliable contraception why do people have sexual Liaisons that might make them unhappy well in say men who are indiscriminate in seeking multiple sexual partners would have had more offspring that is no longer even adaptive in terms of maximizing reproductive output in a world of contraception now um but the fact that some of our sexual desires are not so adaptive can be explained by the mismatch between the world we now live in with adoption and contraception in other way in vitro fertilization and the world in which we evolved now again you actually don't have to go back to the place to see you just have to go back to the invention of the birth control pill in 1962 or whenever it was so and and I think for so many of the mismatch hypothesis the mismatch mismatched environment hypotheses that give evolutionary psychology its explanatory power namely you can't explain human behavior by current rationality often you can explain it by rationality in a world that no longer exists that world doesn't have to be the places in it could be everything up to 100 years ago and that's true for uh widespread literacy very recent in human history but again not so recent as the transition from hunting and Gathering to settle the agriculture um it's it's in many parts of the world it's still happening The Thirst for Revenge as opposed to the availing yourself of a criminal justice system again reliable criminal justice systems and police forces are you can measure them in centuries uh the fact that most people most times and most of the world didn't have them the hunter-gatherer hypothesis is not necessarily false but it's it's a gratuitous I'm afraid we have run out of time um we've been a very serious discussion but I shouldn't let you go away with the idea that it's only serious it is actually a very funny book lots of good jokes um shut up he explained I love that um a list of tall tales that some people believe I laughed out loud at woman's sues Samsung for 1.8 million dollars after cell phone gets stuck in her vagina this is what I like it she's sued at 1.8 million dollars fake news these are examples of real I mean they're real examples of fake news yes okay um and there's no time for the Sydney modern Morgan besser story but too bad um I think we've seen amply seen why Steve Pinker is my favorite public intellectual thank you very very much [Applause] thank you [Applause]

Channel: How To Academy Mindset

Views: 247,953

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Id: T9xapuNvtIQ

Length: 71min 33sec (4293 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 31 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Because with some imagination I could use evo psych to justify any possible behavior, no need for evidence. Some evo psych is pretty evidence based for sure but more often then not its one study you heard from a Joe Rogan podcast or from a friend or wherever taken and made to fit whatever conclusion.

[u/JudgmentPuzzleheaded]

From all we know, evolution must play a role in a satisfactory, whole, picture of human behaviour, but I feel on this reddit and in general on left leaning reddits it has become a subject people almost immediately and smugly dismiss.

I think Pinker here gives a good response on the subject.

[u/Dats_Russia]

The problem with evo psych is they use a lower standard than evolutionary biology. Evolutionary psychology and sociobiology justify existing social hierarchies and reactionary policies.Evolutionary psychologists love conflating "is" and "ought", and to argue against social change (because the way things are now has been evolved and adapted) and against social justice (e.g. the argument that the rich are only rich because they've inherited greater abilities, so programs to raise the standards of the poor are doomed to fail). Their interpretations of empirical data rely heavily on ideological assumptions about race and gender.

Saying women wear lipstick to attract men because [insert bullshit sexist justification] and that this [bullshit sexist justification] is evolutionary is why Evo psych is NOT taken seriously.

Obviously evolution has played some role in our current development but they try to use evolution to explain some really odd things (ie lesbians like dick, I forget the details of this study but they tried to say lesbians aren’t real or some bullshit like that)

[u/Neetoburrito33]

Doesn’t evolutionary psych pretty adequately explain why men tend to prefer younger women?