Steven Pinker on Rationality, Psychology, Language, & More | Steven Pinker on The Origins Podcast

[Music] hi this is lawrence krauss and welcome to the origins podcast this episode is with my friend the remarkable scientist writer all around good guy stephen pinker stephen is a brilliant scientist and and a really brilliant writer i learned something from him every time i i read read anything he's written and i've enjoyed our friendship and uh what's nice is in this case familiarity has not read contempt quite the opposite the more i get to know stephen the more impressed i am with him and the luckier i feel to know him in in this podcast which uh we've been we've been talking about doing a podcast together for a long time but um this podcast follows on his recent book rationality uh and and we talk about that but we also talk about stephen's background what got him interested in psychology and language and right and his thoughts about writing in general and what he thinks about when he writes books the new book rationality is is a book that really surprised me actually when i read it it wasn't what i expected uh it's uh it's it's about the reasons we are rational the reasons we aren't rational and why we should be rational and what rationality is what what what it corresponds to and it's not it's um it's specific and detailed with lots of good examples and uh really a study of a lot of interesting aspects of of um of logic and reason uh including i was very proud and pleased to see that steven spent a long time talking about bayesian analysis which is something the average person doesn't talk about much which but which is really at the heart of modern science and really that kind of thinking um often leads to results which are quite unexpected and and demonstrates in some sense how how our kind of evolutionary training is not necessarily the best training to be completely rational in any case we talk about all of this in the podcast and and uh i found it fascinating and i hope you do too once again uh if you're watching this on youtube i hope you'll subscribe to our youtube channel and if you want to support the podcast which is provided by the non-profit foundation the origins project foundation you can do so by also subscribing to us through patreon in which case you can see these podcasts ad free no matter how you see this or listen to it i hope you enjoy stephen pinker [Music] well stephen thank you so much for agreeing to uh do this with me it's uh it's been a while since we've been together but i find it's never failing to me that whenever i spend time with you i'm enlightened so thanks thank you lauren it's good to be here good and um you know i wanna there's no it's quite clear that what i wanna do is talk about your new book and that's and that's probably what you're most excited about um but i but it is the origins podcast and i wanna i wanna talk about in some sense how you got there and where you came from and uh and and i want to begin at the beginning you and i have already talked about the fact that we have a variety of kind of parallelisms you're you're you're only four months younger than me it turns out um we both grew up in canada uh to jewish parents and um both moved to boston to graduate school and then move back and forth between mit and harvard although in opposite directions but that's as that's as as as i think about it that's about as much of uh parallel as there is you you you grew up in montreal i grew up in toronto and one thing that i never i never asked you it occurred to me is is the is your interest in language does it stem at all from the from the the fact that you're from english parents in a province that was french and this the need to sort of try and speak two languages did that impact on you at all when you were younger you know it would be a good story but it's not really true i i i didn't know if it was but i just wondered i mean you were really the the closest the only connection might be that in uh mcgill university being in a bilingual city had uh the way that many departments will specialize in areas that are locally relevant they had a pretty strong program in psycholinguistics and um linguistics and psycholinguistics were big at mcgill when i was an undergraduate i think that's the closest especially since my interest in language was not so much from practical problems and the best way to learn a second language and how to are there any advantages to being bilingual but really more deeper questions like what is language how did it evolve how does it work how do kids acquire it and i came to language of just in my autobiography really from uh reading a long-form article in the sunday new york times magazine in i think maybe in 72 on uh this this young upstart of linguistics named noam chomsky who has turned the field upside down was part of the cognitive revolution helping to overthrow behaviorism as the reigning philosophy of psychology this this being the doctrine that uh any reference to mental uh constructs thoughts beliefs rules plans images memories was unscientific because they can't be measured and science is only about things you can measure yes science of behavior so first of all psychology should be a science of behavior not a science of mind because the mind is so uh you know superstition like from leprechauns or fairies you can't you know how can you measure a mind with an instrument yeah therefore you should it should concentrate on relationships between the current stimulus situation of an uh organism which you know you get you can measure with instruments it's history of learning and then you measure the responses so that was kind of what dominated psychology in the middle decades of the 20s and then this article pointed out how chomsky was one of those who overturned that paradigm and the mind was a respectable thing to study scientifically again i think it was that article plus books around the home and exposure to cognitive psychology and college and then university that it just seemed tremendously exciting that you could actually study the human mind scientifically yeah well it is i i i was fascinated when i was younger my there's another difference between your my my life and yours your parents were professional so i i wanted to be a neurosurgeon because i figured that's as close as you could get to the mind i didn't know there was anything else um but your parents your father was a lawyer and your mother yeah so my father was he was trained as a lawyer and um he actually uh stopped practicing pretty early in his uh a career he resumed it in in mid-life and for in our generation the the boomers the uh the yuppies is almost inconceivable that if you had a law degree that you would um go into business instead but my father sold uh he he sold um uh women's clothing he was a traveling salesman he sold tennis dresses and lingerie and then these items that i don't think anyone has heard of these days called house coats and house dresses where in the 60s yeah you know and i i i you know for me like he had a law degree why did he sell house coats and the answer was it was uh you know it was a way to make a living and in his generation children of immigrants the the professional degrees and being a professional just wasn't a thing it was if you were a minch and if you could uh make a living and support your family it didn't really matter what you did in the prestige of you know being a lawyer versus a a salesman just didn't register with them yeah and i think you know then in our generation the thing was you got to get you know your mba or your doctorate or whatever mine was doctor a lawyer my mba or doctor was just too accurate it was my brother a lawyer me a doctor that's what my mother won oh that is saying yes same with me but the um so then then i think when my father got into his 50s he was sick of slapping around the province of quebec with sample bags full of clothing and he did uh he reopened he then he he uh uh got his renewed his law license and then opened to practice uh late in life even then it was a kind of thing he did on the side but he was more again in that generation kind of entrepreneurial business oriented not particularly impressed by professionals he was mainly a kind of a landlord he had some rental properties and um so i i consider my background not so professional more small business and and i had another uncle who had a law degree who again instead of practicing he went into his father-in-law's auto parts business my other uncle um got a a an engineering degree but he went into his father's business making neckties wow this is just this was the i think the the values of that uh the the first native board generation of jewish immigrants yeah it was you know can you can you make a living can you support your family that was it that was yeah that's exactly right and for and and for me i guess they wanted the next generation to be professional so they thought it might make a better living at least my mother thought that it's interesting my father showed shoes so we're closer than oh no i think we are i think we're actually we're very close and indeed my mother said early on she said why would you go into psychology go into psychiatry and then you know you don't have to be at the mercy of the academic job market you know you can you can do everything that a psychologist does but more and besides isn't psychology isn't that just cats and rats which it actually was in her kind of in her generation because she was a student during the behaviorist train she said you don't want to go into psychology as cats and rats well she but she had gone she had a college degree she was eventually a college vice principal what was her degree what was her background in um she um she she had a a degree she then went became in in the 50s she did what everyone did she had children moved to the suburbs um did not did not work when i was a child and again like that generation uh when uh got restless when her kids started to be teenagers when the feminist revolution happened and so she then got a uh went back to school got a master's degree in counseling became a high school guidance counselor and then the vice principal of a high school and for many generation in fact it's funny just yet she has many generations of her students are people i meet in all walks of life last night i gave a guest lecture at a course in harvard the instructor said well your mother probably doesn't remember me [Laughter] oh that's great well i bet but what she said to you is i mean you know i remember when i got my first job at harvard my mother called my wife at the time and said he can still go to medical school what does he want to get shocked in his hands for for for me with the idea of physics was somehow sitting at a blackboard and getting your chalk on your hands so yeah so we're actually uh yeah we're really from very similar backgrounds okay well maybe one of the reasons that we relate at least i i certainly enjoy you so much but who which one of in terms of did either of them encourage you um you know you had interest early on in psychology i guess in terms of sort of being a quote-unquote scientist did either of them have a stronger influence on you or they just let you go in whatever direction you wanted i probably had more my mother had more of an interest more more of an influence on me she herself when she was a um a master's student in counseling i at the same time was an undergraduate in psychology we actually wrote mcgill at the same time we would sometimes commute in together and she and we would often read uh both of us read in psychology and psa and cognitive behavior therapy so our interests overlapped of the two of my parents both very smart but my mother was more of a reader more of a more intellectual of the two and so i had much more kind of intellectually in common and in fact to this day she's 87 and i dedicated rationality to her wonder and she she commented on a draft as she uh does uh with with most most of my books largely because i kind of think of my reader as some as as similar to someone who's not very smart but not an academic intellectually curious and my uh you know i suspect this is true of you as well i treat my readers as um kind of equals but people who just don't know what i happen to know show them things that they can see with their own eyes granting them the respect of being curious and willing to put a little bit of mental work in and my part of the bargain is that if my readers are willing to put a little bit of mental effort in then i will uh reward them with a a real understanding they shouldn't be puzzled after putting some thought into it i you know i try not to leave stuff out or to make assumptions or or appeal to authority or uh appeal to authority yeah so it's uh exactly so it's you know for something like bayesian reasoning the theorem of the reverend thomas base which we'll get to it's which is fascinating change signs sometimes that may seem intimidating oh my god a theorem yeah it's got you know three terms in it so it's not that you know that not that you do really have to give a little bit of thought to it but my i felt that um it is something that any intelligent person who's willing to think a little bit can grasp and in fact one of the arguments i make in the book is that that in some domains we already are bayesian even though we don't think in terms of the the the algebraic formula of the theorem but our intuition is bayesian in certain ways and there's certain ways as you also point out it's bayesian but not bayesian because the priors are often things we want to be true rather than uh then then are true but and we'll get to bayesian well baze has changed in my own field of physics it changed everything and i even even though i've used it i still have to always go back and kind of remember its basis every time i think about it it's and and that's why i was so pleased that you you actually did that i i you know my late friend stephen weinberg um used to say in his first book you may remember the first three minutes he said he his his reader he thought of as a lawyer and a cunning lawyer someone who didn't have a background in science but was going to question the arguments and and and put work in and and and i think that's the idea if you and if you can uh if people are willing to work through it um then then they should i mean they may not have a mastery but at least an understanding i find that to be a wonderful characteristic of your book so i think that's that you know that's uh that's the the best you can do and um uh yeah is it it's a it's a it's a shame that um it's interesting to me uh well i wasn't gonna go in this direction but we've both written a lot of books and i'm always amazed that somehow uh um maybe psychology is less intimidating than physics probably because because i think that's an understatement well for me it's it's funny because for me i i think i did as i will talk about do physics because it's easier than neuroscience but but uh but the notion that you should be willing to puzzle through in something like physics is something that you know reviewers and major magazines they that's not you know they're willing to puzzle through in psychology or maybe history economics but in physics they'd just rather say it blew my mind and and and it's and and so i think in psychology it's important to present those those puzzles be and you do actually begin the book with puzzles which is a wonderful thing i have to say the book was quite different than i expected but i'm not quite there yet i want to talk about how you got there and i promise within the next seven minutes we're going to get to the book because because i know we have so much to talk about in so little time i wish i had three times the time to talk to you now one thing i did there's some puzzles about you though that still surprised me first your phd was an experimental psychology in vision right is that right okay first of all visual cognition 3d versus mental imagery yeah and one thing i was going to ask is since chomsky had changed well one thing that occurred to me when you're talking since chomsky had been in some sense kindled your imagination about the psychology and the innate cognition instead of instead of uh behaviorism you chose to go to harvard rather than mit was that um and trump's using mit was that uh well he's also in a different department he's not he's he's a linguist yeah so i i absolutely wanted to be a psychologist it's it's a different field methods different questions different theories i did apply to mit's department of psychology at the time and i i kind of agonized went back and forth i'm not even sure i made the right decision but uh they they were very as mit was uh and still is it's kind of like they asked me well do you think you'll be able to raise your own money to support yourself that's just that's the mit way yeah yeah yeah yeah whereas at harvard it was we'll you know we'll pay you full fare all the way and i'd have to think about that when i went back to mit as an assistant professor uh you know i had to raise half my salary from grants that's the mit style the mit way okay when i yeah i i didn't have that dilemma because i applied to both harvard and mit but only got into mit and um and uh happily you know they offered me money in physics it's more physics is a richer field so they tend to pay your way but then of course it turned out i came i came with money from canada and they immediately deducted that amount from what they were offering me same here but you made the transition from visual cognition to language well i actually studied them both in grad school oh okay i didn't know that my thesis was on uh the representation of three dimensional space and mental images when we imagine a scene that isn't physically present like if our eyes are closed uh do we imagine it from a particular vantage point a particular perspective or is it in an object-centered coordinate system where there's no viewpoint and i argue that they're actually always is a viewpoint so that visual sp mental 3d space is actually more like what david mark called two and a half dimensional space i was going to say i read about two and a half dimensional and i was intrigued by that what the hell does that mean is that this is a kind of a matrix or a graphic representation where the horizontal and vertical dimensions are represented by you know basically by by different cells different entries uh but depth is represented by a quantity so it's not like we have uh three-dimensional voxels like a kind of mental sandbox but rather we have what we see is always a set of surfaces and we are aware of how far away they are and what orientation um but it is not like a um like like molding clay uh anyway that was the thesis but at the same time i wrote a theoretical paper when i was in grad school on language acquisition where i kind of uh kind of worked my way into a conclusion similar to trump's piece but coming from a very different direction you i mean you know chomsky well you've interviewed him a number of shows yeah uh the figures for you know he's a totally brilliant seminal thinker but he you know he tends to be uh treated as a kind of a guru he is you know almost almost a cult figure he's got his a theory that's kind of you know idiosyncratic and personal and it's his vision and um i was never part of that cult but i did kind of fa to my surprise kind of wandered into a similar conclusion just by looking at ai and mathematical models of language acquisition that is uh so studying how kids learn language was a thing at harvard when i was a grad student but i always thought it was very all the discussion was very squishy it was just like they wrote down baby talk and it's an active process a passive process and i wanted a little more rigor so i dove into algorithms or uh for learning language that is imagine a and this this is a very chomsky conception he called it lad language acquisition device the input to this box is sentences drawn from any of the world's six thousand languages uh and that would correspond to what you hear your parents and and siblings say when you're a little baby the output is a uh call it a grammar but we can think of it as an algorithm for understanding and producing and so the question is what's in that box uh how do you go from uh several hun a few million sentences that you hear from your parents to a uh a generative algorithm for speaking and hearing for the rest of your life and looking at those the the models around at the time the ai models they the ones that actually worked had to have something built in uh as to an overall expectation as to how language works what are the basic what's the basic computational architecture what are the basic units obviously you couldn't build in you know english or japanese but the ones that tried to do it just as a blank slate were hopeless and the ones that at least had some a pre some priors you could even put in priors were much more successful so i realized oh that's kind of a roundabout way to coming to you know innateness yeah that is they are priors in a learning algorithm so they're hardwired priors instead of instead of software i guess and and and but you you um and and so this innateness i think is relevant to this the reason i bring it up is i think it's relevant to the rationality issue that that that i as i say that i was fascinated by in your book and have i had i have 60 questions which i which i've paired down to 8 or 10 or 12 and we'll see but but this innateness is interesting to me because where i see i mean i'm not an expert of course but the difference having spent time with chomsky and listening to you is that both agreed that there's some innate innate uh capability for language which is an essential part of being human but chomsky surprised me when i when when i first heard him say this is that his argument is that lang language was more useful for thinking not than communicating and from what i gather as you you're you're more of the viewpoint which seemed rational to me in advance that language was developed for an evolutionary basis for communication could you comment on that distinction between those two for me just yeah i've actually never understood that claim it just seems patently false based on some of the basic design features of language such as there are words now why would you have to learn uh for every concept a word with a pronunciation if it was all in your head well i think he argued that that that that that the ability to create an infinite number of sentences expanded your ability to be conscious in a sense no yes no i'm i'm all for that that that would be a explanation for why thought is combinatorial okay we're talking about language why do you need stretches of sound for every concept why do you need the whole component of language called phonology namely the mapping of of sentences onto articulatory commands when you speak and acoustic signals when you hear uh if it was all going on in one in the head you wouldn't need that uh so you would need that would not be an essential part of language you'd be an internal uh medium of communication like a programming language and you you don't have to pronounce you you don't have to um machine code in a computer uh is not pronounceable it doesn't have to be a waste to convert it to and from um acoustic signals also you wouldn't need the rules of phonology a whole component of grammar which chomsky himself helped to define back in the 1960s namely all of the little adjustments that we make when we speak that go into an accent the um the the slurring of adjacent sounds now these obviously aid articulation but the fact that you are taking it would be a massive coincidence if an inherent part of language was getting it out of the head uh in an acoustic symbol that other people just happen to be able to hear if language wasn't uh designed for communication now of course i i agree that there is what you part of it might depend on what you call language and meaning that is thompson might call it logical form uh that is the content of sentences the gist the the actual uh uh you know what synonyms have in common that obviously is what we think in and uh but but as long as you distinguish that from say you know japanese or yiddish or swedish or yoruba uh that it seems to me that the common sense for you what anyone would say when you say well gee you know so-and-so on the street why do we have language well to communicate yeah they're right of course you have it to communicate yeah it certainly helps yeah um but it but you know i i've often wondered i mean i think it it's it's hard to know what whether you can think without language i guess is the key question oh you can definitely think without language you do do when you think you don't you don't internalize words well you have snatches you use stretches of sound as short-term memory um representations but you don't think in complete sentences thought would be way slower if you did also writing would be uh would not be a a slog it would just be output yeah and struggling for what how what words actually express my thought uh we've got you know uh going back to my thesis we've got imagery we think in we mentally rotate a uh you know a cube or a a a a stick figure uh we're not describing it in words the whole time kids have to acquire language in the first place and if they couldn't think uh without language how could they learn language so we know that from studies of non-human animals that animals can solve problems they can recognize things they can absolutely feel technology which makes you know exponentiates the power of thought not only because it allows us to share thoughts with other people and to think thoughts that would never occur to us on our own but we can also use it the auditory and articulatory images of stretches of sound as a kind of scratch pad to hold ideas while we're working through them okay well look okay that's fascinating and uh i'm gonna i'm gonna i want to spend the last half of this on rash on the on more more directed to the book in a sense but i have to ask you one last question jesse the curiosity when i was in harvard my favorite guy in the society fellows was david he won the nobel prize for figuring out how cats see um was he in psychology i'm trying to remember his last name now um yeah david trubell he's also canadian he was also he's also from montreal david hubel he's a yeah he's in the medical school oh he's the medical did you interact with him at all when you were when you were doing your cognitive your vision vision aspect i i i didn't meet him when i was a grad student okay every every psychology student uh learns about the work of david hubel and torsten and weasel yeah yeah just absolutely fundamental basically it was and to this day i show my intro psych class his original film in which he made the discovery of the basically the line detectors sure visual brain of the cat yeah it's an amazing little video at least i think it's amazing the students you know i think they're amused that i find it so gripping i've seen it like 50 times it's fascinating every time that's great well as long as you convey your enthusiasm to me that's a large part of teaching so yeah because if they don't understand why you're interested why would they be interested um okay but this rules the fact that they're rules for language and um you know i was thinking about your movement and writing from writing about language to eventually writing about enlightenment the better better angels of our nature and then enlightenment now was a move in some sense to try and ultimately come to what you know what what i would say is rationality which was what surprised me about your book i picked it up and i thought okay this is going to be another steve pinker book explaining why why um rationality is necessary but also why historically the world's getting better and what and and social and instead what i'm to my great pleasure in a sense because i would have bought into that but but but instead it's a discussion or other detailed discussions of rationality and cognition and the rules by which rationality is acquired or abused in humans and and and in that sense it was such a unexpected pleasure to read and and and and and learning experience so let me just say that for those who may wonder what this is it's quite um i mean it's much more psychological than than um than than you know i would think i tend to think of the better of enlightenment now in better rations of every nature as as trying to promote a a worldview that that that that may go against the grain but is important but but this is an exploration of an of a of something that that is is interesting to define and and i want to begin with your definition which well you have a variety of them and i want to come back to it because it seems to me there's a circle in the book where you sort of begin and end but what surprised me was in some sense you say that rationality is what allows you to get things you want or and and and i and that's not what i would have i mean there's a there's a wonderful definition of at the end of the book that we'll get to maybe if we get to it um but you know that's fascinating i wonder if you can elaborate because because it seems to me sometimes irrationality also gets you what you want and um emotion sometimes get to what you want well and it's the way i put is irrationality you know i don't think you actually does get you what you want although what you want could be irrational yeah yeah i mean that's that's the key point in fact a large part of the latter part of your book is saying we are rational beings but what we're but we're we're not ultimately we're using rationality in a local sense and it doesn't get us what we want globally exactly yeah so the the definition is related to the famous statement of david hume that reason must always be a slave to the passions yes which i was going to want to focus on later which is easily misunderstood as saying well we have no choice but to you know to splurge to blow our stack to uh um you know shoot from the hip to to uh do whatever feels good that's not what you meant when he said that i think what he meant is that that uh re reason always is a means to to an end it's a way of getting something but what you what that end is cannot itself be determined by reason and the one way to think about it is if you if you um kind of try to imagine what reason without a goal might be you might say well gee why isn't just you're using logic to deduce [Music] new true propositions of old propositions isn't that rationality well just imagine someone that simply spun out using the rules of logic just spun out a bunch of true statements till the end of time and they were strictly true logically like if one and one equals three then pigs can fly well that is true by the uh they're both false and yeah if then statement is only uh false if the premise is uh true and the conclusion is false um so and you can then say oh yes and if you know if two and two is seven then pigs can fly if two and two is eight then pigs can fly until the end of the time so you're just saying true statements forever and they're you're totally logical well is that rational i mean always some say no whatever rationality is not just saying true things yeah we call it i think we call it rational when there is is uh some goal that we accomplish i use the the wonderful um passage from william james the uh philosopher and psychologist and namesake of the building that i work in at harvard william james hall where he said um we tried to contrast a rational entity from a uh a not rational entity he said romeo and juliet uh romeo wants juliet as the filings want the magnet and if no obstacles intervene he approaches her by as straight a path as they but romeo and juliet if a wall is built between them don't press their faces against the opposite sides you know idiotically like the filings of magnet with a card romeo finds a way of getting over the wall or around the wall the difference is that with a purely physical process a non-rational process the trajectory is fixed and whether it reaches an end just depends on how on accidents on whether things are arranged right with a rational agent the end is fixed and the actual trajectories can be varied uh indefinitely so that i i think it's a good characterization of intuitively what we mean by rationality but you're right that it opens the door to using rational means to some indefensible ends and i think a lot of public rationality that concerns us so much today why is there so much you know fake news and conspiracy theories uh is that people can want certain goals like uh fortifying their side in a great you know in the culture war and making the other side look foolish and their side look wise and noble that's a goal it's a dubious goal but it is a goal and people can be perfectly uh rational in attaining that goal or the goal could be uh achieve status as a fearless warrior for your side in the great culture war and so people will say yeah you know go steve he's really he really stuck it to the uh to the conservatives or stuck into the liberals that that's a goal if everyone pursues that goal we're all worse off but people can be unfortunately you're pretty clever in attaining those goals yeah no and well that is a central premise the last part of the book which i which i do want to get to actually your distinction actually in in the preface of your book you make that distinction between logic and rationality which was fascinating to me when i when i first made it and you exactly that that something can be logical but not rational and in fact the beginning of your book you talk about classical logic just so we can be clear on what classical logic is because classical logic can be a component of rationality but it's not the equal of rationality and i mean if you're illogical it's hard um to be rational uh and i think that so the converse is is the way of proving the the uh in fact as you might have said in one of your chapters the law of position right yeah yeah but yes well the reason that logic is can be irrational is that when you apply logic you may only appeal to what is stated in the premises yeah and the goal is to deduce conclusions that are true if the premises are true but you've got to forget everything you know uh in order to do that and in everyday life even in science it's never rational to set aside everything you know well actually sometimes it is sometimes not in everyday life yeah an example is you know all um all plant product plant products are healthful uh tobacco is a plant product therefore tobacco is helpful yeah yeah so you know that's uh that that is a a sound inference uh it's not valid because in fact not all plans uh and we know what tobacco is so we know to reject it but if you were a logician you'd have to say yes that is a a valid inference and and it does follow but let me connect i'm jumping around because i know we're never going to get into logical order where do i want to get but um it's interesting you say that because in some sense that's true but then bayesian conditional probability which is so important as as you point out that that that uh later after describing bayesian cysts very well point out that people are bayesian but but as i said earlier they take a prior which is not doesn't correspond to reality it's corresponds to the reality they want isn't that very similar in some sense to to an abusive logic in some sense the conditional probability is really you're being irrational in the same sense you're being while being logical you're being irrational because your prior is wrong which is really what what in some sense what's the problem with the statement about plants and tobacco exactly yeah i think that that is exactly right it's just the probabilistic equivalent of what we were just saying about logic and no in fact they're gone no no yes in fact a lot of you know probability is related to logic and that in that a lot of uh uh inferences in logic have a counterpart in probability if you switch from things are just true or false to the kind of bayesian conception that you have degrees of credence in a hypothesis so for example the fallacy of affirming the consequent in logic namely p implies q q therefore p you know we know that's invalid if uh if you're a heroin addict you uh smoke marijuana therefore if you smoke marijuana you'll be a heroin addict yeah uh so that's the fallacy of affirming the consequent in logic the corresponding fallacy is confusing conditional probabilities that is the probability of a given b with the probability of b but the but the conditional probability is a lot like if then better probabilistic version of if then what's the probability of if that then is then then occurs in some sense so instead of being a rigid if then it's kind of a probabilistic if then is that i guess there's a way exactly it's almost like it's not not exactly the same as what they call fuzzy logic yeah but you know it's it's it's related yeah um before we get on to there i'm going to skip a lot but you did mention hume and and and you know i kept for the last third of your book but you know your book is structured into sort of the here are the components of rationality let me understand them and then the last part of the book is kind of what i thought that you know you had to address as you say this is the part you've been waiting for and so you think this is what people are going to look for is why are we not rational and sort of the more uh sociological perspective of how this is implemented in the real world or abused and i and i and for that part of the book i kept coming up with reason as the slave of the passions the reason ultimately the reason we appear to be irrational and you're the eternal optimist i guess in a way saying it's not that we're inherently irrational it's just that we're rational at the but rational by being enslaved to a passion which may not produce a global rationality but rather a local rationality is the way i think global as societal or what what's ultimately best for everyone or what ultimately is even best for you you don't get because you're think you're still thinking kind of myopically right the it's um you know i i call the tragedy of the rationality comments comments exactly related and there is a chapter in the book on game theory one of the classic results from game theory is that there are situations in which a number of rational agents each doing what is in their own self-interest can end up worse off uh that than if they um made some some uh sacrifice of their their interests well that i'm going to interrupt you there i'm going to try not to interrupt too much because i know people say i do but i bet we have a limited time otherwise i wouldn't but but that's an incredibly important point and i want to i want to go there for two reasons because i want to address something that's clear clearly relevant now to the time we're talking and also as it turns out relevant to the last book i wrote on climate change this tragedy of the of the rational commons in some sense that makes when you when i read your book i i i you know i have good i've optimistic days and pessimistic days but the notion but climate change is a clear example of that dichotomy between what may be good for you apparently and what's good for you ultimately maybe yes why don't you talk about that a little bit yeah it's the tragedy of the carbon commons yeah just just to uh um get straight on what the tragedy of the original tragedy of commons was sure this is the the hypothetical case in which uh there's a town commons and for every shepherd it makes sense to bring his sheep out to graze on the town commons because he gets you know does his sheep get get fattened if everyone does it they can denude the commons faster than the grass can grow back and then everyone is worse off uh compared to if they in fact each one has an incentive to allow his sheep to graze as many of his sheep as possible to graze as much as possible but that makes everyone worse off so we talked about the an analog of that in the case of rationality namely everyone might pursue the goal of achieving um hero status within their own tribe um with the result that that public the public sphere is just a a war between different tribes over uh each one plugging their version of the truth and each member of the tribe getting brownie points for how well they can advance the the fight and we're all worse off if we end up with just the the belief of the strongest coalition as opposed to the true belief that's if we all kind of cooperated to collectively pursue the truth which is what you know science at least in theory ought to do now the carbon commons is yet another analog analogy with the the sheep on the uh on the town commons namely uh it's every individual within a society has the incentive to enjoy all the benefits of fossil fuels you get to you know drive in an air-conditioned car and you're toasty in the winter and cool in the summer but uh and if you stint on that if you uh kind of uh get wet during a rainstorm and uh waiting for the bus um you're not you're not saving the planet uh you yourself unless everyone else does so it makes sense to take your car instead of waiting for the bus the problem is if everyone makes that decision then everyone is worse off with a unstable dangerous planet and which is also true of course of countries that each country would be best off if all the other countries conserved and they used uh uh abundant portable energy and fossil fuels to power economic development um if everyone does it then we're all worse off and that's why you know there have to be these global agreements or within a country um you know carbon pricing or other regulations to shift the incentives so that people when people and countries opt for what is uh most advantageous to them everyone will do what's most advantageous to the planet yeah in fact and you know it plays into the game theory argument that you're when you're doing a game you're trying you're trying to decide in some sense whether um what your opponent will do and if if um if if if if playing by a certain set of rules uh and if both of you do it it's good for both of you but you realize if they don't then then they're going to win and so it's and each country says well i can i can start um you know conserving or or or having or you know restricting my gdp um with you know using fewer cheap fossil fuels but what if you know china or what is some other competitor doesn't then i better do it quickly because if they do it all you know and it's and it's that it's that game it's that and that's why you know in games you need rules to to and and you often crave them as you as i think somewhere in the book you say you know hey i really give me a rule that stops me from doing what i would do naturally anyway in some sense it's like it's like rousseau right we're born free but we live forever and change if you agree to be part of a society you're saying give me the rules so that i know in the long run that there'll be peace and security and i'll be happier even though i can't go out and steal money today if i need it and that sort of thing yeah the the social contract the social contractor so yeah proposed namely i will sacrifice some of my liberty as long as everyone else does as well since we're better off if we aren't all preying on each other and exploiting each other i forgot my all the advantages of exploiting you on the other hand i'm better off if i can get everyone all of you to forego your prerogative to exploit me so we're all better off that way exactly you know there's so much i want to talk about it's literally so little time but this notion which which i guess i i hadn't occurred to me until after reading your book which now makes things clear of what i what i would call local rationality versus global the notion that what may be good for you is not good for everyone and ultimately not good for you it talking about rules that we need rules but in fact in some sense it's science science is a set of rules that in principle allow us to go from the local to the global yeah recognizing that people are biased and and and science is a set of rules that eventually leads to the rational public good of of understanding but it requires it but what i was going to ask what you thought about you know jonathan roush's notion that it and and you sort of said in the book it's a science requires a social it's a social discipline by by necessity because each player in science is not a is not a purely rational uh operator namely you need other people to check your rationality then the rules the rules provide that method of checking so that you know ultimately what comes out is a collective good oh exactly and in fact i uh come to a similar conclusion to jonathan roush's and then uh his book came out after rationality went to press but uh i would have i cited an essay that he um uh that previewed his book and and the idea that both he and i push is that collective rationality comes from submitting to certain rules within certain institutions that um filter out the vast amount of false belief that we all propose for the rare correct beliefs and um and that allow the ambitions of one person to counteract the ambitions of another now psychologically the the key the engine to this is that even though we're all subject to biases and fallacies and blind spots we're much better at pointing out other people's fallacies and biases and blind spots and so you can harness that ability that we're you know we're since we are all arguers kind of more intuitive lawyers than intuitive scientists yeah but you can put that to work if you have people criticizing each other's ideas uh checking each other's and ambitions and science is an example of how that can work at least when it works well there should not be authority arguments from authority in science there should not be um you know repression and censorship of hypotheses in science there should not be if only if only if only right but and the same is true of liberal democracy where you have checks and balances built into the government system and the american framers were told they didn't have the language of game theory but they they analyzed it in exactly the same way they said yeah human beings are flawed we all want to be right we all want power so the key is you have one guy's power checking another guy's power that's our only hope yeah that was a game theory it's a definitely a game theory picture actually with roush by the way i wasn't thinking of his new book i was seeing the old one kindly inquisitors i think uh well the notion of liberal science that science itself was a liberal well it liberal in the same sense as democracy this notion that it's based it requires that you only get to rationality by having a group being able to question each other that really you can't expect an individual you know you can't any individual was is ultimately for the reasons we talk about it ultimately going to be led to local rationality and not global rationing something they want some an idea that's too sacred to them to give up et cetera et cetera et cetera and all of those things are discussed in your book um i i i won't i'll avoid hume but i want to i want to get i want to get back to the this this um this notion of coll sort of coordinated games and the fact that that that the tragedy of the commons which we which you discussed very well for climate which makes me wonder since really the tragedy of climate commons is as as you kind of allude is both personal and governmental each individual has rash motivations for violating the collective rationality and each country does as well and it makes one when you think about that you wonder whether it certainly makes one maybe not pessimistic but it's um it's going to be a challenge to to work uh that way but you know in in your i have to say because i i want to get to it at least twice in your book concepts from physics came to my mind oh yeah yeah yeah because it's if you think of a large physical system it gets stuck in what you call a local minima rather than the global minima right and and the reason it gets stuck in that global minimum is just each atom can or each component of that system can't go from one the minimum to change the minimum say from uh from a system where there's a twist to a system where there's no twist you can't locally do that you have to globally do that and therefore the system each atom is never is never being pushed in the direction to do to get to that global minimum and so this it's exactly and seems to me to increase the tragic commons and so so when we get stuck locally at a global minimum it's it's exactly the same as a system which really could be better off and have more free energy and all the rest if it ever made the transition and it won't the the other the other area of physics that i wanted to see if you thought was too much of a stretch um uh was you you spent a lot of time on another key aspect of of sort of rationality or rationality which is risk assessment and humans are pretty bad at that innately um although one of the things that is that you do point out which i think is really important is that people may say they believe something but when it comes down to the evidence of their senses they generally common sense often reigns so they with an abstract thing they may be they may be wrong but when they you know when when george bush may have said well maybe we should have teach both both uh uh creationism and intelligent design and in schools but when but when the avian flu first came out which is which was the sort of pandemic at the time potential epidemic of time he said you know we've got to look for mutations because ultimately you know when it when the danger happens you go to the science but um but when you point out when people are thinking about risk avoiding loss is is is something that they're more willing to take a risk for than than gain right and again but but i'm wondering if that if that if that's not it seems to me that's eminently rational for a physics reason and the physics reason is that is entropy yeah the fact that the fact that it's much harder to do good than bad in some sense is the fact that the world you know the natural tendency is to is to move away from that plateau to the to the to disorder and so people in their lives see that it's much much easier for a system to to to to go away from the the plateau and therefore that experience tells them i better it's much more important for me to avoid loss than it is to seek gain what do you think of that yeah no i think that's exactly right and i think it's it's not far from what uh amos tvski and daniel kahneman had in mind as the explanation for loss aversion name loss aversion being the the the fact that people uh that losses are more uh painful than gains are pleasurable and people will do uh go out of their way to uh avoid a loss ultimately the you know the ultimate loss is is the loss of life uh it is death and there are a lot of ways that can happen because we're very improbable collections of matter we have locally fought against entropy by taking in uh you know energy and our metabolism and developmental processes allow our bodies to you know hang together for a few decades despite all of the ravages of uh disorder they're just incalculably more ways for something to go wrong than to go right and so we ought to be cautious about more cautious about the downside and amos himself although i don't know if he actually appealed to uh the the second law of thermodynamics but he once said to me i actually and i reproduced this in the book uh how much better off can you be imagine being than you are now uh how much worse off can you imagine being um how many really good things can you imagine happening today how many really bad things can you imagine happening together in each case there's a massive asymmetry in fact the second one is bottomless well it was exactly reading that analogy of his that you did that made me think of entropy is because yeah i know i think that i i think it's exactly right and i think it's probably more than an analogy it might literally be true in that uh death is uh you know there there are very few ways of being alive and there are very very many ways of being dead or as richard dawkins put it not alive exactly well in fact we locally you know life is locally you know like as these poor creationists who don't understand the second law of thermodynamics they think life is a violation of the second law it's only what it's doing is locally you know storing energy eventually you know and at the expense of the environment and right and so and and eventually it goes back to the environment that's the and that's death ashes to ashes yeah that's the best but i'm going to avoid loss because i'm going to lose you in two or three minutes oh yes okay and um i so you know in spite there's just so much i would love to talk to you about and well we'll talk privately but maybe we'll do it again sometime because there's just so it's i mean everything you write is rich but this book is as i say provoke so much thought but i want to go to the end of your book because ultimately there's two there's two quotes i want to read if you'll and which i think will get us to the end um it seems to me near the end you say the ultimate explanation for the paradox of how our species could be both so rational and irrational is not some bug in our cognitive software there's the the stephen pinker optimism there it's not that we're inherently irrational it's rather it lies in the duality of self and other our powers of reason are guarded by our motives and limited by our points of view which is really seems to me the modern which is if i thought of it i think is the thesis in some sense if i had to distill the the the thesis for your book i might say that and i might say another way of saying that would be that reason is a slave of our passions do you think it's a different it's a modern way of expressing that very point um i'm not sure okay well think about it anyway okay i will i will think about it yeah because i mean basically you know i i think the point of the book is that we're not innately irrational and here's all the components rationally and sometimes we abuse them and sometimes we're just we we for various evolutionary reasons rationality may not be a good thing again locally but but but once again it's this competition of what i i guess i i keep thinking of local versus global and that's what i take out of the book is that when human beings are appear to be irrational it's not that there's no reason involved is that the reason may not um may not may be guided by passion or or momentary circumstances rather than what ultimately if if you look far enough ahead would be for your own and society's good yeah it's often you apply uh rational means to an irrational end irrational in the sense that it is incompatible with other goals that you want to attain um now there are some times when you know you just have brain brain freeze when you you really just screw up yeah i mean that can happen it's not it was true by definition you could never be irrational and then that would be kind of you know circular yeah vacuous so you know we do all have moments where we thought oh my god how did i do something so stupid and that you know that happens yeah sure exactly and then the other reason is that of course the the tragedy of the rationality commons that often what is rational for each individual is not rational for everyone acting together okay and let me read the last sentence of your book because i think it's a good way to end this and and and i am aware of your time where species has been endowed with an elementary faculty of reason and that has discovered formulas and institutions that magnify scope they awaken us to ideas and expose us to realities that confound our intuitions but are true for all that that and to me that i mean that's your ultimate optimism and why you're a scientist as well as i'm a scientist the real one you know the end of the book is why you know why is rationality but it's not just to make our society better and happier but but but using those tools appropriately and the fact that we as a human species have developed rules like science allow us to make the to explore the world and discover things we would never know otherwise and for me and i think for you that's really the greatest good i mean the fact that yes yeah and i think and and so i'm agree i found that a really important thing because that's really the greatest goal of rationality it's to allow us to develop something that allows us to discover things that intuitively we would never have understood otherwise and that's one of the wonderful things that you do in your books i try in my own work and it's i don't think one of the reasons for both scientists and one of the reasons i so enjoy discovering new things that may not be intuitive by listening to you so thank you so much stephen thank you so much laurence as always pleasure to talk to you okay you take care have a good day okay bye-bye i hope you enjoyed today's conversation you can continue the discussion with us on social media and gain access to exclusive bonus content by supporting us through patreon this podcast is produced by the origins project foundation a non-profit organization whose goal is to enrich your perspective of your place in the cosmos by providing access to the people who are driving the future of society in the 21st century and to the ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world to learn more please visit origins originsprojectfoundation.org

Channel: The Origins Podcast

Views: 65,242

Keywords: The Origins Podcast, Lawrence Krauss, The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss, The Origins Project, Science, Podcast, Culture, Physicist, Video Podcast, Physics

Id: qWOA9pWeJbQ

Length: 61min 53sec (3713 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 02 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/astoriansound]

I’m sure it’s a decent conversation. I just can’t stand Lawrence Krauss. He’s so full of himself I find it difficult to listen (to anything he says). He’s like the kid that got bullied for being a nerd, and now that he’s “somebody” he’s trying to pay it all back by intellectually flexing on anyone who doesn’t agree with him.

[u/xsat2234]

Submission Statement:

(From video description)

On this episode of The Origins Podcast, experimental psychologist, Steven Pinker shares an excellent conversation with Lawrence Krauss. Steven and Lawrence cover a variety of topics, including rationality, evolutionary psychology, and language.

Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard. Currently Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has won numerous prizes for his research, his teaching, and his books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Sense of Style, and Enlightenment Now. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Humanist of the Year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates, and one of Foreign Policy’s “World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” Steven Pinker was Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and writes frequently for the New York Times, the Guardian, and other publications. His twelfth book, to be published in September 2021, is called Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters.