Steven Pinker on rationality and its limits

um hello everybody and welcome thank you so much for coming um this is the artworkers guild these beautiful surroundings we've never actually had an event in here before but i hope to do many um thanks for finding time in the middle of your working days uh and most of all thank you to you stephen pinker who many of you will know already um he is a psychologist he's a professor at harvard of psychology a best-selling author of multiple modern classics including such things as enlightenment now and the better better angels of our nature he is here to talk about his latest book copies of which will be available afterwards rationality what it is why it seems scarce and why it matters um and i should say if you are joining us online welcome to you too we have quite a few people watching live and we will be posting a edit of this to the youtube channel shortly so welcome to you stephen so i've got to start with a basic question to put us in the picture what is rationality i i defined it as the use of knowledge to attain a goal where knowledge according to the philosopher's standard definition is justified true belief that means that rationality is always relative to a goal and what might seem irrational with respect to one goal might in fact be the rational pursuit of some other goal and the impression i'm sort of summarizing here having just read your book the impression is that where many people say we are fundamentally an irrational species and they like to complain about that although you point out a lot of the foibles and the the pathways we can go in our thinking you fundamentally seem to feel like we are a rational species is that fair well i don't think you can write us off across the board as irrational because if we were incapable of rationality who set the standards for rationality against which we could say most humans don't measure up i mean it wasn't an advanced race of space aliens it wasn't you know god's descended to earth it was other human beings and they uh laid out the uh the rules of logic and probability and statistical decision theory so someone's rational and you know they're human are they unless you think they're a superior breed it's got to be a capability that that we all have and indeed some of the fallacies that famous fallacies in statistical reasoning can uh be made to go away or at least be drastically reduced if you reframe the problem in more mind-friendly terms if you make the instances more visualizable more concrete more familiar from everyday life and then people don't look as stupid as some of the classical experiments uh portrayed the mass and when you think about it we all as a species we have accomplished magnificent feats of rationality we have figured out how to survive in every ecosystem on earth the arctic and in deserts and this is even before there was settled civilization with with writing and formal science and and the like um and our best science has uh discovered dna and the big bang and plate tectonics and gotten to the moon so just saying we're an irrational species just can't explain the full range of of human experience there's got to be more specific explanations for particular kinds of irrationality of which admittedly there are plenty it would probably be uncontroversial to say that rationality is a good thing in certain contexts i guess the the debate becomes whether it's always the right way to approach life or problems do you think of it first of all in that way that at one point you talked about sort of system one and a system two do you do you think of it as two hemispheres or the sort of more irrational versus the intuitive or do you reject that binary altogether uh i don't think it's a it's a binary but it is a useful distinction it's it's uh one of many contributions of daniel kahneman to our understanding of judgment and decision making um system one referring to snap judgments system to thinking twice reasoning reasoning it out now it you know just saying that there's number one there's number two is not a very deep or neurobiologically satisfying explanation but it probably does tap into some distinction right so would you say that the the system two is always the one that we should try to use that should be we should aspire to be rational in all scenarios as much as possible um pretty much yeah i mean there was a uh there was a fad in the early 2000s triggered by malcolm gladwell's book blink to say that people overthink things and that your gut feeling turns out to be right and that turns out to be wrong that is and in fact it's had my my colleagues in the business school say every you know business executive just loved that book it's like oh i i don't have to think uh my i go go with my gut and and and make disastrous decisions as a result so there's there are some cases where we have a kind of pattern recognition certainly if you're trying to recognize a face if you're trying to steer a car then you really have no choice but to go with your your system one if you try to analyze every curve in every contour and say well you know i remember sam his eye arcs 137 degrees you know that's just not the way to do it right but but in general people do better when they think twice yeah so let me try and throw a couple of scenarios at you where this might not work so well so just ordinary real life encounters let's say you're hiring someone for for a job i think a lot of people you know you could either just entirely go on their cv and on the what the kind of rational expectation of how they should perform references and so on and normally that's a big part of it but is there not also a gut feeling there oh there's absolutely a gut feeling and it's foolish to act on it well because that is my experience is that you know in those social encounters where you're trying to get the measure of another human being um actually the the the rational isn't adequate and that there is something more intuitive there is the goal of having people that you like to be in the same office with um you just get along you laugh at the same jokes but there is a fair amount of research on the predictive value of different hiring criteria that is who bombs out of the job who gets versus who gets promoted the answer is that the job interview is pretty close to useless in predicting that and this is a major theme of kahneman's latest book a noise with cass sunstein and olivier siboni that we uh that the kind of thinking that says well i i you know i i know a good employee when i see one turns out to be exactly wrong that is uh the the uh the job interview is when evaluated uh um objectively in terms of whether it filters out the people that it should and the answer is it doesn't that that i i don't expect that most uh universities companies and so on are going to abandon the interview it's just too we just like them too much but objective chemistry then the the idea of human to human chemistry is something we should try to banish i mean i'm not doing you know i love relationships you're not not in falling in love but but in hiring yeah maybe uh at least if you if uh i mean there is that argument and and conor mcknight and sunstein and other people who study employment practices say that we're really misled by by interviews they have little predictive value and of course there's been a lot of talk of bias and prejudice in when we outsource decisions to uh algorithms but you know there's no bias like human bias and interviews are a just an invitation to allow your your your racial your sexual your class biases to rule the day because a lot of things that people ask the interviews like you know what sports did you play in college those can kind of be class markers needless to say and it's one of the reasons why they are less effective than more objective measures or if there is an interview it's best off if it's a structured interview with a standard set of questions that you pose to every candidate and a way of classifying the answers and those circumstances i think interviews can be better than useless okay let me throw another one at you professor um so big life decisions that's also there are some people who prefer to make them with lists and pros and cons and try to be rational about them and there are other people who cannot escape the sense that it's a gut and they just have to go with their gut i wonder this might sound a bit meta but again i'm talking from personal experience here which is probably not very scientific but what i'm pitching here is that couldn't can we rationally accept that there's a sort of advantage of having gone along with your gut instinct that might make the feeling of might change how it would feel afterwards so in other words to to get something wrong that at least you went with your gut feels better than to get something wrong when you tried to overthink it and went against your gut yes so there there's certainly uh the phenomenon of making decisions proactively that you won't regret um the that uh the pain of regret can be so aversive that you take the safe course of action so that nothing can happen that that would make you feel uh you know like a total idiot after the fact um so certain precautions that we take so it's a one example of what uh tversky and kahneman call loss aversion that we a purely rational decision maker would weigh the costs and benefits and choose the option that has the highest expected utility namely the uh costs and benefits weighted by their probabilities and so what could happen with what are the chances that it could happen multiply the chance by how good or how good or bad it is positive or negative add them all up take the option that has the uh the highest value uh karma turkey show that people don't exactly follow that because they give much more weight to the downside than the upside they'll uh you know if there's a a a bet that they would lose a certain amount or gain a certain amount even if on average every time they play they would increase their earnings the pain of losing uh so much offsets the pleasure of winning that people will often avoid gambles that would pay off and it might be so there's there's some of that that that i think is is relevant to your scenario there may also be cases where your affective emotional reaction is itself a criterion such as if uh if there's a particular job that takes place in some you know depressing windowless fetid place and you and uh you have an emotional reaction to that well how happy you are on the job is going to depend a lot on your emotional reaction day to day and your emotional reaction to the thought of taking it might be a good predictor of your emotional reaction when you're actually doing it and there's nothing irrational about factoring in your own emotions right in fact quite the contrary rationality always is in pursuit of some uh some goal and and that goal depends on on what you want and how you feel i definitely want to come back to that in a in a political context but first i thought i'd ask do you think some people are more rational than others and do you think you are unusually rational so i'll answer the uh the first question i can answer both questions so the first question is yes and there are tests of rationality that are not just the same as tests of intelligence so these would be tests of some of the kind of a compendium of many of the fallacies that have been documented in the literature in cognitive psychology and behavioral economics the gambler's fallacy do you think that if a roulette wheel has landed on red ten times in a row with due for a black the sunk cost fallacy if you have uh already watched the first half hour of a movie do you stay to the end because you've already paid for the ticket and you've already uh spent that half hour there's um the do you do that yeah you know i i have stopped doing it now that i'm more aware of the sunk cost fallacy but yes i i did do that and i also did even worse is i would if i start a book i feel i have to finish it um because i've already invested so much in it and that's the sunk cost fallacy i would sometimes avoid starting a book because once i start i'm not allowed to put it down so do you mean that but now i've unlearned that though so are you saying that even professor pinker has non-rational let me finish the first question and i'll get to that question so the first question uh so if you have a set of tests like that are you just measuring you know it's just another iq test the answer is not exactly that is that although it correlates with iq it's an imperfect correlation so there are plenty of smart people in the sense of powerful brains they can recite strings of digits back backwards from memory uh but they uh are are suckers for some of these fallacies uh and conversely there are some people who may not be you know the the you know the sharpest knife in the drawer but they've got enough sense to avoid the fallacies so they're correlated just imperfectly uh so we have reason to believe both the people differ in rationality and that it's not just another way of saying some people are smarter than others uh as to how rational i am i'm probably the last person to ask because one of the deepest kinds of irrationality that is baked into us is that we all think we're perfectly rational and that only the other guy is irrational sometimes called the bias bias namely everyone else is biased i'm not uh i'd like to think i am i aspire to it but i also recognize in myself certain kinds of irrationality there that i find very hard to uh extirpate uh having finished your book i would i get the strong impression that you are a highly rational person but uh i would i i do my best but uh those who know me might uh beg to differ it's just it's interesting if if some people are more rational than others um if one makes a kind of universal law that rationality is always the best way uh are you not sort of prioritizing or preferring some people's way of being over others and it was actually interesting we just discussed the interview did with start the week in the bbc earlier this week the feminist philosopher amir srinivasan from oxford she suggested that actually some of the history of feminism comes out of intuition before rationality which i would certainly never have offered as an argument and it gets close to the kind of a dangerous idea about differences between men and women and whether men are more rational than women but i'll be interested in your thoughts on that what's your response to professor srinivasan on that are we are we sort of teaching a world view that actually only applies to some people no i don't think it applies only to some people and um you know we take a good historian of ideas and historian of social movements to apportion the causes of beneficial social change thank you the extent to which social movements are driven by charisma empathy anger as opposed to being triggered by rational arguments i end the book with a chapter that suggests at least um on a case-by-case basis many movements including feminism began with a highly rational argument that accused contemporaries of acting in ways that were inconsistent with values that they professed to hold and in case of feminism the first english feminist mary ashdale made a highly rational argument she basically appropriated john locke's argument against absolute monarchy and said that why should uh why should my choices be constrained by the whims of some guy just because he happens to be the uh the sovereign the only legitimate way of regulating behavior is by rules principles laws that are justified stated and that people can choose to live by not just what what some guy on the throne arbitrarily wants or likes and mary astell cleverly took almost his exact words and said well if absolute sovereignty doesn't work in a state why should it work in a family and uh if it if it doesn't uh and if it is appropriate in a family why not an estate why does the man of the house get to impose his arbitrary whims on uh women if you have arguments why a king shouldn't do it with your subjects uh likewise mary wollstonecraft a highly cerebral set of arguments of why it was a waste of half of humanity to keep girls unschooled and in the in the kitchen now you know i i don't think that the only um force behind social change is rational arguments because people do you know they take out the pitchforks and the torches and they they have the marches and the folk songs and but the um often i think the first trigger was or at least what convinced enough elites at the very least to make it into a a movement was a a rational argument so the the any kind of sense of agenda issue here that the amio was sort of hinting at i felt you would reject that there's no no sense in which there's a sort of women men oh so in terms of the sex difference now this is one of these uh topsy-turvy situations where what used to be intolerably sexist is now mainstream and vice versa um so the idea that you know that that women are less rational well that was the argument that kept women in the in the kitchen and in church and nursery all those years there if women you know think too much then the blood will go to the brain and it'll be sucked out of the uterus and the ovaries then they'll be infertile and their uterus will shrivel i mean all that 19th century pseudoscience which uh just justified the idea that women were less rational than men i i don't know the data from these rationality tests on whether there are sex differences and i might not repeat the meaning and i did know them but i'll also i'll just give an intuition here that contrary to the you know there is that the sexist stereotype of women is more you know emotional and flighty and if anything if you're going to go by stereotypes it's the the men that are the less rational of the species because most of the classical fallacies of critical thinking are things like appeals to authority the the use of debating tactics like interrupting like a loud low voice like the cold stare they primate dominance tactics of intimidation and uh that that are uh can uh uh lead someone to appear to win an argument not based on their merits but just because they are um so overbearing uh or use dirty tricks like the uh the the appeal to authority well so also has a nobel prize and that's what he thinks right uh we sometimes you know call these pissing contests when there are two men who engage in it or mansplaining when a a man uses tactics of conversational dominance to uh explain to a woman something that she knows much better than him so if anything men are potentially less rational yes it's quite quite conceivable let me use that opportunity to segue into politics because um there's there's one case study of this that seems extremely relevant to this book and this topic which is the 2016 election between hillary clinton and donald trump i actually kind of observed it quite close up and actually this is a good example of the genders being reversed in that sense because the hillary clinton campaign was incredibly rational both what she offered uh as her program it was lots of five-point plans and lots of answer a to question a um and also inside the campaign there was an enormous amount of data they had 160 data scientists in a building in in brooklyn and they were producing incredible detailed reports of exactly what was going to happen in each state um and meanwhile the sort of story goes and sort of the report that you read is that old president clinton bill clinton a more intuitive politician was not so convinced that everything was fine um and he was anxious and and has felt in his gut that despite these 160 phds with their slam dunk proofs that they were going to win by exactly this margin he didn't feel so good about it what's your reflection on that is is that an example of where a certain type of rationality sort of got carried away it's possible that they um deceived themselves as to how rational their planning was and there's a lot a lot of reason to believe that that was true there were things that they didn't factor in whether bill clinton's gut was a reliable indicator of that is kind of hard to tell just on the basis of that um particular story because we don't know all the times when someone's got feeling uh you know flat wrong uh when when it predicted that um that uh one candidate didn't have a chance and they won or or vice versa and i suspect that if you were to aggregate the gut feelings and the uh outcomes that the gut feelings probably wouldn't have that good a track record but again that's that's a speculation i might be wrong it may be that it's the kind of case where malcolm gladwell's blink holds and the fact that my gut feeling tells suggests that the gut feelings don't do well shouldn't be taken as evidence that they don't do well uh to be completely rational um and of course bill clinton we don't know what went whether it really was a gut feeling uh or whether he had um a number of very good reasons for it and he was a highly cerebral president i have met several i you know i have seen him interviewed on subjects other than politics i have uh i know both scientist colleagues at harvard and uh art scholars at harvard who had occasions to talk to him and were just astonished by the the analytic power of his mind uh so he's the kind of person that if he had those gut feeling or at least if he had that reaction i'm not even sure that it was a gut feeling again i'm by the way everything that i'm saying is speculation so i might be wrong and and and i apologize if what i'm saying is wrong but it's uh these are the questions that i would ask upon just hearing that i just wonder whether that kind of intuition that is built on experience and you can't necessarily enumerate you can't spell out the logic in a way that maybe there's a sort of algorithm that's even more clever than the kind of logic we have no i that is that is absolutely possible that is that there are and indeed i discussed this in the chapter on logic the step-by-step deduction by rules of inference from a set of axioms is not the same as rationality it's one tool of rationality that is optimized to attain one goal namely working out the logical implications of a set of propositions but there are other ways of attaining goals other than than that including as you say what we probably call intuition might be the accumulation over experience of many probabilistic cues which we might intuitively add up or aggregate that can lead to a impression that we can't whose logic we can't articulate but that is not based on just you know your literally your gut but we use the word got to what we might refer to is the aggregation of a lot of probabilistic cues and that is after all the the nugget of um behind a lot of contemporary artificial intelligence the so-called deep learning models actually eschewed classic artificial intelligence method sometimes called gophi for good old-fashioned artificial intelligence the client practiced in the 70s and 80s where you'd have an algorithm that would actually have a bunch of factual statements and a bunch of rules of inference and they proved to be kind of brittle they would work in a very circumscribed toy domain literally sometimes literally toys and then didn't do so well in the real world just because the real world there's so many hundreds of things that go into any outcome that uh you you'd be hopeless if you tried to deduce them exactly whereas if you kind of each one pushes you a little bit this way a little bit that way you add them all up sometimes that can give a statistically more useful predictor so that but that's that's quite a big deal um isn't it so it means next time i've got a big decision if i've got a gut feeling that tends one way and i'll be thinking what would professor pinker be telling me i'll remember what you just said now that actually i'm allowed to follow my gut because maybe it's a collection of aggregate experiences that i can't fully enunciate that may be more reliable than the argument i can say out loud they well they might be although in general when human intuition is pitted against a uh real algorithm and and by algorithm here i don't mean an you know all-or-none formula like uh uh a perfect checklist but just adding up a bunch of weighted and waiting a bunch of quantitative predictors a very old and robust literature in psychology came to the conclusion that the formula outperforms the human so just to be concrete is what that that means this is a literature that goes back to the 50s goes under the rubric of actuarial versus clinical decision making actuarial meaning according to a formula clinical meaning according to the wisdom of a an experienced practitioner so just to be concrete you know let's say how do you predict whether a uh criminal suspect will will jump bail if he's uh released or or will he come back uh and show up for his trial well you can ask a you know probation officer a judge someone who's a social worker someone who's worked with these kids all her life for all his life or you could add up a bunch of predictors what's the age what are the record of prior convictions was is he employed or not uh and there's say well a point two times number of years of education minus 0.3 if he's unemployed etc so what actually predicts whether whether the guys will will show up for trial and the answer is the formula every time you know by a lot so now this doesn't necessarily mean that in your case of making say your own life decisions that would be true but at least the cases where we have pitted intuition against formulas the the formula usually wins i promised that we would say go into politics let me deliver on politics okay um you this is a quote from the book there can be no trade-off between rationality and social justice or any other moral or political cause what did you mean by that well that we um in any uh political or moral or social justice cause is based on a certain understanding of the world such as one group of people has been oppressed by another that the cause of their disadvantage is that that oppression oppression whether it's over a covert that it can be rectified by certain measures be it reparations or uh quotas or tearing down statues or renaming buildings but those are all claims about how the world works and they might be true or false and it's rationality that that tells us whether they're true and whether we ought to pursue those remedies because if they don't work why pursue them and just to be concrete it lets that sound too heretical or reactionary or whatever you know there are organizations of white men who say we're the ones who've been oppressed and discriminated against well you know are they right um you have to use reason to to answer that question so do you feel then that in some of the movements we've seen in the past couple of years that rationality is not being duly observed and that there's a sense that you know even i guess on both sides of the political aisle we would have to say yeah but um i mean rationality is being denigrated where it shouldn't be yeah i think that that'll be an understatement yeah um one blatant example is that um the the habit of punishing people for their opinions is a way of disabling uh our most powerful means of of implementing rationality in the world pretty much our only one given that humans as rational as they are really do have biases and flaws and that is you try out a hypothesis you see if it withstands scrutiny criticism evaluation if you're not allowed to broach a hypothesis in the first place then are possible solutions that you could never discover because it's even considering it might be criminalized so cancel culture uh abrogations of academic freedom and free speech are irrational because they disable mechanisms of rationality the the assumption that every difference between groups must be attributed to bigotry as a kind of irrationality and that it rules out a whole set of alternatives uh rather than testing them and that among the people who uh use racism as the explanation for all uh ethnic outcomes or or sexism there is a a rather um explicit um disavowal of the possibility these these ought to be treated as empirical questions it's you know your data can go to hell uh this is not it's not about data but of course it is uh ultimately in that there if there's a factual uh assumption then it ought to be supported and they've even come after you is that that's fair isn't it i mean there's have been sort of cancellation attempts on you for various supposed transgressions so you have firsthand experience of this that's right although you know this is a kind of a you know deadly cancellation attempt it was uh removing a perk that barely figured in anyone's life to begin with the uh this is a petition that i be delisted from a set of media consultants in the linguistic society of america which no one ever consulted in the first place and that i and that the my distinguished um fellow uh designation be removed which you know again so you know one less line in my cv it's not the end of the world for me the pro the the what made it what i thought made it uh uh truly regrettable deplorable was the signal that it sent to people to other scholars who don't have my prerequisites who don't have tenure at a fancy schmancy university who are put on notice you [Music] breach any of the contemporary orthodoxies and forget about your career in my case so for example one of the articles of faith is that our society is irredeemably racist and that it's gotten worse now if you look at data on racism you could look at literally overt racism of a kind that really was dominant in certainly an american culture until recently like should black and white kids go to separate schools if a black family moved in next door would you move out uh do you think that the reason that that um blacks are less successful is because they don't work as hard all of those statements of overt racism have gone you know down down down and are kind of in the range of now of crank opinion you get the same number of people say yes to questions like that and say yes to the question do you think that a race of lizard people are secretly ruling the earth and you might say well of course the only all that shows is that uh people know that it's uncool to be racist deep in their hearts they're as racist as ever but they just know not to confess that to a pollster but if you look at implicit measures of of racism such as do people how often do people search for racist jokes on google or if you look at measures like the implicit association test that my colleagues uh masuan banaji and tessa charlsworth have looked at they have data going back several decades uh for these unconscious measures of implicit bias found that that that's been going straight down and it's not just opinions do you think that um it's okay for a black person to marry a white person but more white people are marrying more black people so every by every measure racism has decreased that doesn't mean it's disappeared a decrease isn't the same as a disappearance but that is anathema to a kind of woke ideology and that was one of the uh kind of accusations or articles of one of the thought crimes uh for which this rather meaningless designation was going to be stripped from me do you think there's been progress on that uh when we last spoke it was over zoom in the middle of the summer of last year yeah and this had just happened to you since then there was been you were a signatory to this harper's letter there's been a lot of new kind of media outlets that have been cropping up and sub stacks and do you feel like the atmosphere around the free speech issue is improving and that there's some momentum in in the right direction there there's a counterweight and one of the organizations is called counterweight there's uh there is some concession to uh heterodox viewpoints in some of the major outlets like the new york times uh hired john mcwhorter as a columnist the brilliant linguist and um independent-minded heterodox um i think something that would be hard to imagine them doing a year ago nonetheless they sacked the editor of the common pages a few months previously well exactly so so it is a dubious uh uh uh overall advance so i'm not sure that there has been i mean there are kind of green shoots uh in the form of these organizations but there's still an awful lot of punishing and cancellation attempts just a couple of days ago there was a a professor of cinematography who was suspended because he showed the lawrence olivier version of othello in which he wore uh dark makeup to play othello and that was considered blackface and that was considered a firing offense um so it's still going on it's still going on and um at least in the last year for which there are data the foundation for individual rights in education in the united states which is a legal body that defends students and professors whose rights to free speech have been illegally abrogated say that at least the last full year for which they had data which would have been um 2020 there was a record number of uh violations uh so we so the question is really so the answer is no in terms of has there been progress are the mechanisms in place that might turn the corner at least there's some we'll see if we do turn the corner so what you've just said we'll we'll put you on the wrong side of a certain strand of opinion on the left now let's see if we can put you on the wrong side of the right as well um your final chapters are in in this are punchy i would say and and clearly mainly directed towards a certain type of conspiratorial trump adjacent thing way of thinking um and you describe this idea that this the blossoming of conspiratorial thinking and the kind of post-truth atmosphere that um you think donald trump was in part responsible for fostering um is a dangerous thing um and you think it belongs to the realm of mythology rather than reality could you explain that for us so it is a mystery how people can believe obviously you know barking mad conspiracy theories such as that there is a cabal of satan worshipping cannibalistic pedophiles in hollywood and washington uh that donald trump was on the verge of exposing uh the q and q theory or that code vaccines are really a subterfuge by bill gates to implant microchips in our bodies so that he could track us all now these are uh you know say there's no evidence behind it would be kind of an understatement and these are wacky beliefs but the people who believe them are not psychotic uh and you're one probably most of them hold jobs maybe not all of them but they you know they keep gas in the car and the car breaks down they can fix it and they you know their kids are clothed and fed and got gotten sent off to school on time so i thought they're irrational across the board but there is a zone of irrational belief that probably we're all capable of of holding for me an epiphany was a report by hugo mercier a cognitive psychologist that the pizzagate predecessor of qnon where all this was happening in washington area pizza one of the pizzeria one of the adherents to this theory acted on it by reading a one star review on google for the restaurant saying uh the the dough was incredibly under baked and there were some men who were looking suspiciously my five-year-old son now if he really thought that children were being raped in the basement you think he might do something other than leave a one-star review like call the police and the exception that proves the rule is the guy i think his name is edward welch who really didn't burst into the pizzeria with his guns blazing to rescue the children and he was kind of crushed to find there was no basement there were no children so he but he was the exception who actually acted on it in a way that was commensurate with the uh the heinousness of the of the the conspiracy so the question is people who believe in the conspiracy in what since they really believe it is it that they believe in the same sense that they believe that there's milk in the fridge or there isn't or is it the kind of thing that um it's well whether or not the democrats are doing it it's the kind of thing that they would be capable of doing that's how evil they are and so yeah i think they're they're doing it you know who's to say they aren't it's almost a way of saying you know boo liberals but stated as a factual belief so it's interesting and as a cognitive psychologist this opened up the possibility and i wasn't the first to have this idea that we only have two kinds of beliefs there's beliefs that we have about the uh our immediate experience the cause and effect around us and we need that otherwise we we couldn't keep food in the fridge because the laws of causality and the laws of logic are are kind of uh they're mandatory you can't not believe in them um i think philip the philip k dick the science fiction writer said reality is that which um when you stop believing in it doesn't go away on the other hand there are these domains of of speculation and thought where until recently you just couldn't find out like what's the cause of fortune and misfortune that kind of philosophical question what was the origin of the universe what really happens in the white house and 10 downing street in buckingham palace and the kremlin and corporate boardrooms and it at davos uh you know you can't know and um so any beliefs aren't things that are evaluated in terms of their veracity they're evaluated in terms of uh how uplifting they are how empowering how inspiring whether they're good rallying cries that keep the coalition together propaganda points that demonize the uh the other side entertaining stories and there are a bunch of domains of belief that i think fall into that style of belief probably because until recently there were no ways of verifying them anyway and they include uh religious beliefs you know or the origin myths of religion beliefs about deities that are almost uh explicitly not verifiable or falsifiable you know god works in mysterious ways uh national founding myths the the the the heroic saints and and uh uh super men who uh liberated our country or founded our country where it can be very annoying when some real historian goes into the archives and exposes their their feet of clay we'd rather believe it in the myth historical fiction like the crown where a number of uh historians pointed out well you know we actually had no reason to think that prince charles ever said that uh but the reaction to most people is oh don't be so pedantic maybe he said it maybe he didn't say it i mean it's good television uh but they say they sound great some of these myths don't they i mean they do yeah exactly that's the problem and the the insistence that you shouldn't believe them unless they're true doesn't can feel kind of pedantic on the other hand that's probably a better policy uh i quote bertrand russell who said that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there are no grounds whatsoever for supposing that it is true and if you think that that is trite banal obvious then you really are a child of the enlightenment and a kind of unusual hyper-rationalist when it comes to the humanity as a whole for most people what he said is kind of a radical manifesto people believe all kinds of things independent of whether they're true or false and i think a lot of the one explanation for how otherwise rational people could believe such outlandish things especially in the realm of fake news and conspiracy theories is that it's believed in a very different sense it's believed in the sense that well prince charles could have said it um it's believed in the sense that my enemies whether or not they did it it's the kind of thing they could have done so that that's good enough for me so what's i mean what's the alternative though if is the is the stephen pink a dream world one in which there is no mythology realm in which these whether they're religions or conspiracy theories people just think about them less and less and they cease to exist entirely doesn't that feel like an impoverished world well not if it's not if it's consumed as fiction it knows not if we maintain the the the uh the distinction between fact and fiction uh if it's uh i don't care whether it's fact or fiction i if if uh you want to think that it actually happened that's fine with me then i think that is bad i mean i think we should use science rather than mythology to ground our understanding in why people get sick why people get well um what's going to happen to the climate uh i think that we should look at historians and uh responsible journalists to tell us what actually uh how political decisions do get made that that uh if there isn't a cabal of uh financiers and jews that run the world economy we should really know that there isn't we should and if historians uh say there's no basis for that other than um anti-semitism then [Music] even if it's a satisfying myth to some people we shouldn't believe it so you wouldn't have any time for the idea then that some of these myths are true in a different sense so you know the religion is an easy example that people might not literally believe all of the tenets but they feel that as a myth aesthetically somehow it gets at the kind of a deeper truth that they can't really enunciate rationally and that's why they choose to suspend their more rational faculty for that as you call it background mythology and probably that parallel does work for politics to some extent is would you allow that for those people maybe it's true in a in a different way and therefore it should be allowed well it should be allowed in the sense that things that i disapprove of should be allowed that even if i was even if i you did have the power to outlaw them i i shouldn't uh because of another principle of you know diversity freedom of opinion and so on um certainly in the realm of art in the realm of myth consumed as art and myth and of course the uh you know the the richer the more imaginative the the better uh but we shouldn't confuse fact with fiction including religious fiction because uh a lot of the mythologically grounded religious beliefs are not so innocuous like god uh commanded that we that that homosexuality is is a capital crime and that gay people should be executed that could be part of your founding mythology but that's not a good reason to hold it stephen i want to bring in some questions from the audience we have been going on for quite a while um we've covered a lot of ground um i'm going to begin with tom chivers who is the unheard science editor and therefore gets uh first priority thank you very much you've talked about malcolm gladwell and blink and uh this is the idea that you know we shouldn't in some sense be rational and i kind of feel that all those movements to do that those ideas of doing that you know whether we should people be happier if we believe irrational things all of them appeal to this record to reflect on a deeper rationality they say you know well i'm saying we'll make better decisions by uh using our our intuition but he's doing that by looking at studies that show that these are wrong studies and i suppose i feel that do you think that's just cheating you know they're sort of they're always they're always they we we can show you that irrationality is good but only if we use rationality to do it you feel there's a sort of sneakiness about women just like if it's in service of denying that we should ever be rational and then you you you lay down the arguments that is a uh always the reason why we should doubt arguments against rationality namely either they're made rationally in which case they concede that rationality is the ultimate criterion by which we should meet uh believe things or if they say they're not irrational well we can just dismiss them why should i say why should i believe something for which there's no good no good reasons so yes if it is if it is framed as an argument against rationality it always loses and i and i do make that argument uh in the second chapter in the book on uh uh rationality and irrationality it's an argument that's been made by a number of philosophers that you really it's really incoherent to argue against rationality to argue against objectivity to argue that everything is relative because if you make that argument i could just dismiss and say well is that statement relative and if the person making says no no it's really true that everything is relative well if you just said that that's really true and that isn't relative you just contradicted the claim that everything is relative or that everything is subjective or that uh that irrationality is a legitimate way of deciding things so yes in general if it if instead it's that often human attempts at being rational in terms of step-by-step think slow thinking are outperformed by gut feelings uh that narrower hypothesis could be true or false that's an it's an empirical claim thank you um let's let's get i think this is eric kaufman really enjoyed the talk and i i just want to well the question is really is religion rational i just want to sort of lay out a couple of someone who might make that argument might say okay well there are studies that show that people who are practicing religious believers who live longer and are happier is there not a sort of evolutionary and rational advantage to being religious yes so the um whether there's an evolutionary rationale in the sense of having more babies uh would be by the criterion of evolutionary success namely predominating over over time and that may not be the same as the criterion of what is the way to live that would maximize values that we care more about namely happiness prosperity uh peace safety and so on what what maximizes number of surviving babies and what leads to the healthiest happiest society maybe different things uh whether but there are some data that suggests that the religious people are uh happier and and um healthier uh the questions that that in turn raises are one of correlation versus causation namely do happier people embrace religion or does religion make people happier and unfortunately without a kind of randomized controlled trial where you have one large group of people and you somehow make them religious and another you let love you see what happens after a few years sadly we can't do that study uh there are some data that suggests that the advantages of religion accrue not to the theological beliefs but rather to the uh the the sense of community that religion and religion religions have to be unbundled and that there are a lot of practices that kind of cluster together in religion one of them is belief say in scriptures and another is you get together with other people every sunday and you you sing and you share food and you reflect on what's moral or immoral and it may be that that component of religion is uh a worth preserving on rational grounds and be what is responsible for the the better uh lives of religious people the data that suggests that might be true is that the atheist spouses of religious people get all of the benefits of religion suggesting it's not the belief uh but rather the the communal about organizations and is changing your mind assignments rationality so changing your mind when there are reasons to change your mind is absolutely a sign of rationality and conversely the personality trait of steadfastness stubbornness pride uh is a very good way of being irrational and there's a quote attributed to john maynard keynes falsely as it turns out when the when he changes mind on something so the story goes and he said when the facts change i changed my mind what do you do sir now it turns out he didn't say it exactly uh probably paul samuelson did but it is a a wise criterion for rationality and indeed um there's a a kind of a trait almost more of a personality trait than an intellectual trait of sometimes called openness to evidence namely when the facts change do you change your mind uh people vary because there are some people who think that it's a sign of character weakness to change your mind in the 2004 american election notoriously john kerry was uh accused of being a flip-flopper because he changed his mind on the war in iraq iraq and that and it is rational obviously to change your mind have i changed my mind uh yeah um you know but but all kinds of things if i wanted to sort of slight one um it's an emblematic or dramatic case between the time i wrote the blank slate on the uh persistence of human nature and the better angels of our nature on uh decline of violence um i became much more open to um movements for benevolent change for for progress like like peace movements um and further um moving me towards sympathy for [Music] international organizations government regulation what i wrote enlightenment now and saw graph after graph showing benevolent changes in things like deaths in car crashes amount of particulate air pollution deaths from other kinds of accidents i was kind of a skeptic of the nanny state and of safetyism uh and of um uh social transfers and i think i became a little less libertarian uh seeing data on uh the fact that these weren't just a way of featuring the nests of bureaucrats but they really kept people alive who otherwise would have died great um there's a lady on the edge so this question comes from our zoom chat and it's from paul mcdonald and he asks is there a danger that our increased reliance on data and expertise is leading policymakers to adopt an instrumentalist view of citizens that embeds what is in effect an appeal to authority aka trust for science into policy decisions he says it seems that there is a recent authoritarian turn in public policy see code restrictions especially in australia that could be the product of this yeah so um well yes and no yes in the sense that in a well-functioning government policy should be driven by the best data on the state of the country and better still on outcome studies of what works and what what doesn't but no in the sense that trust the science scientists they or or trust the public health officials because they're a kind of a priesthood a kind of oracle uh should be rejected both because the scientists are necessarily fallible uh and if they are treated as infallible oracles then as soon as they make a a wrong recommendation which is inevitable because we start out ignorant of everything and uh then they'll be dismissed uh across the board as an unreliable oracle whereas the only reason we trust scientists and the only extent to which we should trust scientists is that they deploy the methods that will get to the bottom of the truth of something and that puts i think an onus on scientists which they haven't adequately um accepted of showing their work explaining the basis of their recommendations and likewise for public health officials what we have not seen enough of is instead of making paternalistic pronouncements this is what's best for you uh to make uh to to open up the cost-benefit analysis sadly they may sometimes not be a cost-benefit analysis in that they uh especially there's a built-in tendency of bureaucracies to be irrationally risk-averse because they get blamed for the failure but not credited for the success but nonetheless we'd be better off if the if their incentives were more aligned with the benefit of the country and if the basis for their reasoning in terms of trading off costs and benefits were articulated this would be both in terms of the costs and benefits of a policy that is how many lives are we willing to sacrifice to have businesses uh open up sooner and in terms of their own consequences of their own uncertainty namely we might be wrong as to whether masks work or not just to take an example how bad would it be if we recommended masks and they don't work how bad would it be if we didn't recommend masks and they do work that's in the realm of one of the chapters of my book called signal detection theory or statistical decision theory i mean that sounds fancy but it can easily be articulated and that kind of trade-off should be public as well uh and so i think it's a disaster if the motto is trust the scientists it's rather find out what uh the truth is scientists uh are best equipped to do that and here's why here's why here's what they do that should that ought to command your respect because if you were trying to figure it out you would use the same methods that i think is a great note to draw the conversation to close on uh humility from scientists i think everyone would welcome that thank you to our online audience for joining it was great to have you thank you for you in person that was really great that you came but most of all thank you steven p for a wonderful hour thank you [Applause] you

Channel: UnHerd

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Keywords: steven pinker, steven pinker rationality, pinker, rational, freddie sayers, rationality, Professor Steven Pinker, unherd, steven pinker debate, irrationality, steven pinker jordan peterson, psychology, chem trails, lberals, conservative, iq, race, gender, science, trust the science, anthony fauci, cancel culture, woke, wokeness, washington, hillary clinton, donald trump, philosophy, jordan peterson, steven pinker ted talk, steven pinker language, steven pinker interview, Steven pinker writing

Id: N7RYRs9nuXI

Length: 61min 2sec (3662 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 27 2021