Steven Pinker receives prize for controversy from SFU

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so it's now my pleasure to introduce dr. Steven Pinker an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition psycholinguistics and social relations he grew up in Montreal earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard he's currently the Johnson professor of psychology at Harvard and he's also taught at Stanford and MIT he's won numerous prizes for his research his teaching and ten books including the language instinct how the mind works the blank slate the better angels of our nature and the sense of style he's an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist he's been awarded humanists of the year he is the recipient of ten honorary Doctor doctorates including one from Simon Fraser University and he has also been mentioned by Time magazine as one of the most 100 influential people in the world today he was chair of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary he writes frequently for the New York Times The Guardian and other publications while all of dr. Pincus books have been well received some have generated considerable discussion and perhaps none more so than his tenth book published recently titled enlightenment now the case for reason science humanism and progress so I'd like to invite Steven up to formally accept the award so it's my great pleasure now to in to invite Steven to present the 2019 sterling lecture thank you thank you very much this is a tremendous honor one gets a lot of grief and pain and Saurus from being controversial and it is nice to get this recognition to compensate it's especially nice that it comes from Simon Fraser University the University that I considered when I was choosing universities when I was 17 but in Montreal style I decided to stay home and go to McGill University and it was a tremendous honor a few years ago when I was when I got an honorary degree from this University University having forgone the chance to actually attend it to my somewhat to my regret I'd also like to acknowledge a number of friends that I have here at university starting with a professor emeritus Stan kanehara source of lovely and much welcomed support professor charles crawford a pioneer in the application of evolution to psychology and an influence and professor andrew mac who was responsible for a major turn in my career which i will mention again in the course of this lecture oh and that thanks to the sterling family for the foreign dowling this prize for controversy which leads me to my first question who be controversial in many ways I'm an unlikely controversialist perhaps I'm a Canadian controversialist always striving to be polite and and civil you might think someone might think they'd give him that I've recognized the price but controversy I would have some kind of flaming radical political affiliation so let me begin with some of my political affiliations which are admit somewhat controversial starting with this one now I I realize I've given the events of the last week that this is controversial but it's not as if you deserve a medal for being sympathetic to your Prime Minister recently re-elected for a second term here's another one of my political heroes for this I deserve no credit by myself my [Music] can you hear me whoops just with this microphone how we doing yes good the person at the center is my spouse Rebecca Newberger goldstein a novelist and philosopher towered over here by Michelle Obama whoops what do we have try again stand back a little bit is that better okay how's that can you hear me in the back very good so Rebecca Newberger Goldstein was awarded the National Medal of the Humanities in 2015 I was brought along as a trailing spouse but I did have a connection I consulted with President Obama's speech writers on a subject of mutual interest which I will mention later I am not married to the woman on the on the right that is cher who introduced presidential candidate Hillary Clinton at an event in Massachusetts in 2016 at which I attended and and was a supporter and indeed the Harvard Crimson ran an article Harvard faculty donate to Democrats by wide margin revealing that I was one of the three main financial contributors to hill to the Democrats around 15 and 16 and this somewhat slumpy looking men that I'm posing with is the president of Columbia and the winner of the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize and my by far my most famous collaborator at the time that Columbia signed the peace agreement with the FARC guerrillas in 2016 it brought an end to the last war in the Western Hemisphere and the last war that was a remnant of the Cold War and I through our mutual contacts I approached him with the invitation to co-author a piece in The New York Times commemorating this this milestone so the Colombian peace agreement is a number of historical declines that I have celebrated including the historical decline of war extreme poverty autocracy capital punishment violence against women violence against children and racist sexist and homophobic attitudes and laws so I'm documented that progress has been made in combating these barbaric human practices again not particularly controversial the one would be against violence against children and autocracy and poverty I also support a strong action on climate change including carbon pricing which I note has been advocated by a previous Stirling Prize winner and somewhat more controversial nuclear power and even there I would not count myself on the fringe dr. James Hansen who is the scientist may deserve more credit than anyone else to bringing climate change to the modern agenda has said that we cannot solve climate change without nuclear power the largest carbon free scalable source of abundant energy and I've been influenced by him I believe we should take strong action on nuclear weapons including a policies that make it make nuclear weapons less likely to be used such as a declaration of no first use by the world's nuclear powers and the eventual eventual total elimination of all nuclear weapons global zero has it sometimes called now this might seem like a somewhat controversial cause it's the kind of thing you might associate with you know beatnik professors and Peter Paul and Mary and 1960s hippies but in fact it has been advocated more recently by cold war Hawks including Henry Kissinger William Perry and Sam Nunn so again not exactly out on the fringe I've also written of my opposition to authoritarian populism the movement familiar to all of you from the president of the large country next door which I have identified as the main ideological threat to progress so given this background at least in terms of my public political commitments these are hardly what you'd call flamin radical extremist positions on the other hand it is true that I have a reputation for controversy particularly in the last two years I've been called in print increasingly reactionary as advocating positions straight out of Breitbart as being the world's most annoying person and I best-selling author who looks best in his most recent book that he hoped I would die I've been the subject of doctored videos of obscenity laced attacks not by internet trolls but by by professors and grotesque caricatures but the this evening I do not plan to complain or protest against this treatment I have stayed in the kitchen despite the heat and others others including I'm guessing recipients of this prize have suffered far worse and in particular I'm well aware that any woman who expresses a controversial opinion was likely to be the target of horrific internet and social media abuse none of which I have suffered I have not been the platform I've not been protested against so this is I am certainly not here to complain but I thought I would talk about the reputation for controversy some of them are because of traits that I know that I personally have I do have a taste for intellectual debate I am a strong advocate of what I could actually consider moderate positions but there's no question that I advocate them and surely I'm wrong about a lot of things now you might say well if you're wrong about them why do you still hold them and of course I don't know which ones they are but but I know I must be wrong because everyone is wrong about some things and for for reasons that I will mention later on but I also wanted to broaden the discussion beyond me because I do think that there are some more general reasons why some of the positions that I have advocated which again I think are very actually in many ways middle-of-the-road moderate centrist humane positions have been received as so controversial I'm just to preview I think they're due in part of the politicization of academia the culture of intellectuals and the moralization of intellectual issues and that's what I will concentrate on in this talk somebody just start with perhaps confessing that I am a an advocate a polymer system talk about three academic debates that I have been embroiled in in my career that some of you may have heard of maybe most probably not there was from the time I was a graduate student and a an assistant professor a controversy in my field cognitive psychology called the imagery debate largely prosecuted here in Canada there was a professor at the University of Western Ontario named Allan Havey oh and his adversary also in the Department of Psychology at University of Western Ontario named Zen and politian since moved to Rutgers University over the nature of our experience of visualizing things closing our eyes in forming a mental image and the question the subject of the debate was does the brain represent mental images in a kind of graphical format it kind of you can think of it as a JPEG or an image like file that's distinct from language and abstract thought or is all this all thought take place in language or some language like medium well partly under the influence of Allan Havey Oh although also acknowledging the criticisms of Zen and politian and under the influence of my own doctoral adviser Steven kosslyn I argued that mental images are represented in a pictorial like format although it is closely related to a more abstract propositional symbolic underlying long-term memory base so roughly that in when we engage in a visual perception open our eyes look at the world there is a image like representation coming in from the retina and the early layers of visual processing in the brain that when we recognize objects when we parse the world when we understand what we're seeing that gets mapped onto a semantic network more abstract more structured and that when we form a mental image we basically do that process in Reverse and we generate a short-term visual representation from a long-term propositional base I believe that the position that I advocated back then under the influence of pay vo and costliness has been vindicated by neuroimaging studies which actually do show that the visual parts of the brain light up when someone forms a mental image although the controversy ought to be dead is not completely dead and professor position continues to prosecute the case that all all thought is propositional the language wars another controversy within cognitive science our children innately prepared to acquire the words and grammar of a human language a position that was advocated famously by my colleague when I was at MIT Noam Chomsky in my book the language instinct and and in other works I argued with Chomsky that children are innately equipped to learn language but Contour Chomsky that the what they are endowed with is considerably less convoluted less structured than Chomsky's particular version of syntax and grammar I've advocated a simpler version of syntax under the influence of my postdoc advisor John Brennan herself a former student of Chomsky my co-author ray jackendoff also a renegade student of Chomsky's and Geoffrey Pullum and that not only is the are syntactic representations the deep structure and surface structure less elaborate than Chomsky proposed but that many phenomena that the theory was intended to explain our perhaps better explained by semantics our understanding of what words and constructions mean also contour Chomsky I argue that language is an evolutionary adaptation for communication it may sound odd to say that language is innate but that it is not there to help us communicate but that is Chomsky's position on the contrary I was influenced by another big thinker who quite a while before wrote that man has an instinctive tendency to speak as we see in the babble of our young children well no child has an instinctive tendency to bake brew or write that is a quote from Charles Darwin and that was the basis for the title of my own book on innate language faculty the language instinct the past tense debate again familiar to people in cognitive psychology now this may sound like a case of the great academic tradition of knowing more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing but in fact the debate over how the human mind processes not just the past tense but language in general raises the question is the human mind a vast deep learning neural network as it's now called that is a network of connections trained on to associate features with with other features via a massive input from big data or does the human mind also contain rules that manipulate structured symbolic representations of the kind used in logic and classical computer science in my book words and rules and in a number of papers I argued once again that the mind has a hybrid structure that we do have rules that such as add suffix edie to form the past tense for regular creative combinatorial linguistic processes and by extension the cognitive processes that feed them but we also do have an ax so of memory you could think of it as a deep Learning Network for those of you who've kept up with recent trends and artificial intelligence that we use for word look up for irregularity for idioms and for the kind of thinking that is driven by similarity and pattern recognition so there are some academic controversies within cognitive science that I've been embroiled in and I'll also mention some controversies that have escaped the ivory tower and attracted the interest of a wider public one of them in a book that I wrote called how the mind works is that the mind human mind can be understood as a system of organs of computation evolutionarily adapted to the cognitive niche that is that our ancestors became human and did human-like things by a combination of adaptations for social cooperation for technological know-how and for language and this is the body of my work that is that ties into the work of Professor Charles Crawford now a corollary is that even though many features of cognition and and as our psychology I argue our Darwinian evolutionary adaptations not all of them are and that's just true in the evolutionary analysis of anything in the living Kingdom not everything is an adaptation there are also products of random genetic drift and byproducts of evolution I think that there are a number of features of our mental life that may not have increased the number of surviving babies in our ancestors but may have been carried along as byproducts of what we did of all that among them perhaps the most controversial thing I have ever advocated is that music may not be an evolutionary adaptation that is we may have invented music because it gives us pleasure not because somehow ancestors that made music had more babies I have a paper coming out in science next month with a team from Harvard that continues that argument you just know this is probably my most frequently disputed position I expect this will appear in my obituary and you just just never know what's gonna get people riled up did not realize that a few pages on the analysis of music and how the mind works would continue to be controversial almost 25 years after the book was published but as I said you never know what will be controversial one of my most controversial positions now is that I don't think that it is a major priority of humanity today I don't think it's one of our major existential threats that artificial intelligence will turn us all into paperclips but believe it or not there are people who are really really mad at me for saying that another wider controversy was one that I defended in a book called the blank slate the modern denial of human nature and which I argued that the mind is not a blank slate that there are genetic influences on our cognitive biases and illusions on our emotions towards selfishness and altruism on our sexuality including differences between men and women our tendency to violence our aesthetic sense and our personality with a controversial controversial corollary not only has the genetic influence personality been underrated but the influence of parenting has been overrated this was an idea that I acknowledge I got from a independent psychologist named Judith rich Harris passed away earlier this year she would have been an excellent candidate for this prize if she was still alive and argued in a book called the nurture assumption that because all of our most of our understanding most of our belief that parents shaped their parents comes from noticing a correlation between what parents do and how their kids turn out totally confounded by the fact that parents don't just provide an environment in their kids they also provide genes to their kids and unless you actually replicate the studies looking at these correlations in adoptive families which break the confound between parental genes and child genes then you can be systematically misled in fact studies that do look at effects of parenting on their adopted children show that the effects pretty much peter out to zero by the time they're adults which is not to say that kids are not affected by their environments they are affected by their peer group their culture just that they are not affected at least their personality intellects are not affected by their parents needless to say a controversial position but one that I I argue for in the blank slate updated when the book was republished two years ago another controversy again surprisingly fierce came from my style manual the sense of style the thinking person's guide to writing in the 20th 21st century in which I argue together with virtually all linguists that many traditional rules of grammar such as the rule against dangling participles I sorry dangling modifiers use participles split infinitives the misuse of hopefully our superstitions folklore shibboleths and should be tossed out the which is not to say that we should not care about the quality of prose but rather that the main reason that so much prose is so bad not least prose from academics is not because of failure to observe these rules of grammar but because of what psychologists and economists call the curse of knowledge namely when you know something it's extraordinarily difficult to imagine what it is like not to know it and so writers tend to overestimate how much of their private jargon their abbreviations their background assumptions are shared by the readers and don't spell out what they mean in enough concrete visualizable a detail in the better angels of our nature why violence has declined a book whose Genesis came in part from a correspondence that I received from Andrew Mack a dozen years ago based on the work of the human security report project which moved here to Simon Fraser University I argued based on data that of various coins that violence has been in historical decline and this in many kinds of violence over many different times including tribal raiding and feuding assault and homicide barbaric customs such as disemboweling people or burning them at stake or having them pulled apart by horses or slavery or dueling war and this is where professor max come in and genocide also from human security report project and violence against minorities women children and gay people that the historical decline of violence is consistent with human nature because human nature fits us both with what I call inner demons that incline us toward violence including just raw exploitation the drive for dominance our thirst for revenge our ability to cultivate sadism and ideologies that justify violence as a good thing to do rather than a bad thing but on the other hand we there are also the better angels of our nature as Abraham Lincoln called them that that inhibit us from violence and these include self-control empathy moral norms and problem-solving cognitive processes that allow us to see violence as something that we try to figure out how to reduce how much violence there is in a given society in a different time depend on norms and institutions that either empower our better angels or conversely that empower our inner demons well coming across data showing that violence had declined when today an appetite for data on other aspects of human well-being and that culminated in my book enlightenment now which I argue again based a story I tell in graphs based on data that humanity has made progress that not just in violence and autocracy but there have been huge reductions in extreme poverty in disease in famine in literacy even in unis progress is not some mystical force that carries humanity ever upward but rather if he causes an embrace of ideals that were most strongly articulated during the Enlightenment which identify as reason science and humanism humanism being a moral system that prioritizes the universal flourishing of sentient beings as opposed to ideologies or moralities that glorify the tribe or the nation that are based on religious Scripture or that have some mystical struggle toward some kind of utopia so why are these ideas so controversial now of course these are strong opinions and I've argued for them forcefully and there of course always legitimate intellectual reasons for any idea that is not an established beyond a reasonable doubt to be controversial social and cognitive science are really really hard it's really hard to show anything in such a way that you can convince every skeptic and so it is completely legitimate that every clean be contested and as I mentioned many of them are surely wrong but I think there's a little more than that and I'm going to talk about some of the other reasons why seemingly moderate claims have been so flaming ly controversial one of them is that academia has become more and more politicized academia has always been politicized but as Western societies have become politically polarized academia has been perhaps at the forefront of this trend although especially in the United States politics has lodged lurched right word but academia has lurched leftward I often say that academia is at the left pole now just as when you're at the North Pole all directions are self the left pole is the mythical position from which all directions are right and so if you are at the left Pole and anything that is not on the hard left is considered right-wing and reactionary surveys of the political orientation of professors have shown that even though universities have always been somewhat to the left of the population depending on the school this is more true in humanities and arts and a little less true in social science still less true in science less least true of all in business schools engineering schools and schools of of more practical pursuits like Nursing and Business Administration but it has been increasing in fact in many departments there are more Marxists than there are conservatives considering that in the population as a whole there are an awful lot of conservatives anywhere from you know at least 40 percent even in the United States where your conservative now is actually to be quite an extremist but so skewed is the representation in academia that conservatives are truly marginalized and in fact probably the only people I know who would identify themselves as conservative are in their 80s so moderate centrist positions are naturally branded right wing or reactionary that just the view from the left pole there's also a kind of mores of a literary intellectual culture and by culture I mean culture in the ethnographer sense of a set of shared beliefs and values often unremarked upon by the people who hold them this is an idea that goes back to CP snows famous lectures from 1959 and book from 1962 called the two cultures in which he argues that argued at the time based on British society that intellectual life fell into the cultures of science on the one hand and arts humanities literary criticism on the other I think that more than 50 years later that remains true although there are snow called for a third culture what we would now probably call social science but may also include you'd scientifically informed scholars in history and archeology and linguistics and to some extent literature and language and social scientists who try to bridge the biological sciences and the social social sciences but there is still a literary intellectual culture this one cuts across the left-right divide that have a number of tacit I'm argued but deeply held convictions what is that science can solve some mundane problems and give us vaccines clean up the drinking water but must stay out of the territory of the humanities such as politics arts and morality to breach this divide is to be guilty of a sin called scientism that the highest moral value is the creation criticism and consumption of elite art again I'm not this may sound extreme but back in 1962 snows electors were subject to a withering critique by a leading literary scholar of the day fr leavis we said what difference does it make if science can prevent women from dying in childbirth and children of dying of infectious disease and people from starving if they can't appreciate high literature then life is for them is not not worth living and I am really I am not exaggerating and Maddison belief that continues to be heard today and there's a widespread belief again on the right and on the end on the left for different reasons that Western civilization is in terminal decline in fact it's been on the verge of collapse for at least 120 years but any day now Western civilization will collapse as I have cheekily put it intellectuals heat progress and intellectuals who call themselves progressive really hate progress this has enraged many critics who say how dare he say that intellectuals hate progress and number two how dare he say there has been progress in contrast there there is a position that I have advocated in the better angels of our nature and enlightenment now but goes against some of these precepts of intellectually intellectual literary culture by this by the way I do not mean scholars in the humanities who study history and philosophy and legal theory and literature I'm talking really about a culture in the ethnographer sense but I have argued for a position that is quite contrary to it that politics arts and morality must be informed by our best understanding of human nature from science that beliefs about society are empirically testable just like any other beliefs about the world we should be prepared to learn that our cherished beliefs are falsified by data that the highest moral value is the life health safety education and happiness of humans and other sentient creatures that we can use knowledge and institutions to enhance them and the data show that we have gradually and unevenly done so there's a third reason that some issues I would argue are more controversial and they ought to be and that is the moral ization of belief people often mistake empirical hypotheses for moral convictions as a result a lot of intellectual argument is what we now call virtue signaling you make it argument not so much to zero in on the truth as to flaunt one's moral bona fides hetero hetero ducks ideas therefore are not mistakes to be refuted but heresies to be punished and silenced I'm sure many of you are aware this is a growing problem on American campuses I should actually not just American campuses because there have been incidents here such as it Sir Wilfrid Laurier University of the platforming of people who have been invited based on their scholarly contributions who are they disinvited based on their political leanings and in these debates often one gets almost a willful disabling of ordinary critical faculties so the suggestion that X influences Y gets caricatured as X determines y the proposition that X is one cause of Y gets converted into X is the only cause of Y to make it the position easier to to knock down let me give you some examples because many of these are were the subject of the blank slate which is a book not so much of popular science as of attempting to tease apart scientific and moral issues that I argued were all too often conflated so it is often assumed for example that if there are any differences between individuals sexes or ethnic groups then discrimination and oppression will be justified since discrimination and oppression are horrific therefore there cannot be innate differences between individuals sexes or ethnic groups now I argue that this is a fallacy a non sequitur in fact the concept of fairness is not the same as the concept of sameness the idea that everyone deserves equal treatment is not the same as saying that we are all clones that we are genetically identical if we are not clones the principle of equal rights is still valid individuals must be treated by their merits not pre judged by their group membership another conflation of the empirical in the moral I suggest is that if humans have nasty traits like aggression like selfishness like nepotism then social reform would be impossible because you can't change human nature again I have argued that this is a fallacy non sequitur because human nature is not just one thing it's complex with both inner demons as I ever called them and our better angels and some human faculties some parts of human nature language and cognition among them are combinatorial and productive that is they we can combine old ideas to create new ideas take those new ideas combined them with still other new ideas so there really are new things Under the Sun and our species pooling its insights pooling its discoveries can think up new solutions norms and institutions to push back at humans gorgeous 1/3 confusion is that what's natural is good everyone knows that everyone wants to new natural food natural childbirth natural everything so if things that we dislike like nepotism sex differences aggression and revenge may not be innate or evolutionarily adaptive because if they were they would be natural and hence good they are not good therefore they may not they cannot be natural they may not exist although they are accepted and strong for at least two traits in the kind of topsy-turvy politicization of genetics and in anus it is that the politically correct position for homosexuality is exactly the opposite to other traits that is the acceptable position is that homosexuality is genetically determined therefore it is not a choice therefore people who cannot be faulted for it therefore you is futile to try to change it or to prevent children from becoming gay if that is their natural inclination likewise the moral energy behind the attempt to show that music is a Darwinian adaptation comes from the desire to show that music is somehow healthy important ought to be valorized ought to be valued and the idea that well evolutionary adaptations those are good important healthy adaptive things therefore if we value music if we treasure it we must show that as a Darwinian adaptation again I think these are the are mistaken to non sequiturs there it has been recognized for so long that these are fallacies that they actually have memes in the philosophical literature the naturalistic fallacy named I believe by the philosopher GE Moore which is that is implies aught so if humans have a tendency toward aggression then aggression must be good now by the way this is not a straw man a hundred and twenty years ago or so it's actually quite common for theorists to extol war as something that I was healthy for this species because nature is red in tooth and claw if you were ever to trick humans peaceable you would drain all of the artistic and intellectual vitality out of them this sounds sounds barking mad today but it was so common it's such a common assumption before World War one which is what kind of put the kibosh on that idea that one of my heroes William James the great philosopher and psychologist but a famous essay called the moral equivalent of war I don't know if any of you are familiar with it during the Jimmy Carter years carter cited it and it was known by its acronym as yeah moral equivalent of war but James who s himself a pacifist argued that because we have these warlike impulses and because they do call forth noble qualities like heroism self-sacrifice bravery stoicism we ought to send our youth to compulsory service in mines and factories and hospitals and farms I have an early version of the Peace Corps Teach for America a Civilian Conservation Corps to knock the childishness out of them the moral equivalent of war in James's case being not something that was as bad as war but something that was as good as war since in his day it was assumed that war was good anyway that was the naturalistic fallacy that if people and for that matter nature have a tendency to do something that must mean it is morally praiseworthy is implies art and it's pretty clear that this is a is a fallacy the moralistic fallacy is the inverse that ought implies is because we now believe that aggression is bad therefore it cannot be the case that people have aggressive instincts or impulses that would be too terrible to contemplate so let's declare that it is not so also a fallacy the finally final moralized hypothesis that that i've certainly had to grapple with is the following to say that we have made progress is to encourage complacency to suggest that everything is perfect that neoliberalism has worked and we should all sit back and relax well this is wrong for a number of reasons one of them is that a decline is not a disappearance to say that extreme poverty has declined by 90% and to say that 700 million people live in extreme poverty are both true there's no contradiction between those two likewise to say that there are fewer deaths in war than there were in the 50s 60s 70s and 80s and to say that every year tens of thousands of people are killed in wars in Syria and Yemen and elsewhere again there's no contradiction to say that X is less than Y is not to say that x equals 0 nonetheless this is an exam this this rather simple truth of algebra seems surprisingly difficult to grasp also progress does not mean that everything gets better for everyone everywhere all the time that would not be progress that would be a miracle and progress is not a miracle progress consists of using knowledge to solve problems problems are inevitable and solutions create new problems that must be solved in their turn always and forever and even if there are dangers in complacency I have argued that there are also dangers of thoughtless fact free pessimism one of them is fatalism if you think that despite all of our efforts to make the world a better place things just get worse and worse and worse the natural reaction is well why even bother why try to make the world a better place it's it's a fool's errand it's romantic it's utopian let's just enjoy ourselves while we can and then the other dangerous radicalism if you think that all of our institutions are failing and are beyond all hopes for reform then you'll be open to calls to smash the Machine or burn the empire to the ground and hope that anything that rises that if the ashes will be better than what we have now whereas in fact no matter how bad you think you think things are now in the democratic Worth west we know from history and we know from the non-democratic non West the thing doesn't get much much worse there they are now even with all the problems facing us and of course the other temptation in the slide to radicalism is to empower a demagogue who promises only I can fix it let me wrap up now we're in defense of controversy and in an acknowledgment of the value of this kind of effort the effort the the enterprise begun by the Sterling family and carried on by Simon Fraser University to acknowledge the importance of controversy why universities should recommit themselves to free speech open debate and constructive disagreement first it's the only way to acquire knowledge no one is infallible or omniscient I assume that that's not controversial but its implication is that no one should have the right to declare that their truth must be imposed and that disagreement is criminalized that we have reason to believe from the progress of science again I hope that it is not controversial to say that science has made progress that the only route to knowledge is what Karl Popper called conjecture and refutation namely lacking the gift of clairvoyance on your divine revelation the only way to know anything is you propose candidate explanations and you see if they withstand attempts to falsify them controversy is also the way to prevent what are sometimes called spirals of silence or technical terms pluralistic ignorance that's when there is a proposition that no one really believes in their heart but everyone avows because they think that everyone else believes them a classic example is a study of campus binge drinking what it turns out that none of the frat bros actually believes that it's cool to drink until you you can pass out but everyone mistakenly thinks that everyone else believes it but no one believes it the how do you puncture spirals of silence well there's a a parable that that tells you how called the Emperor's New Clothes that all it takes is for one ingenuously to say the Emperor is naked and now that boy was not telling anyone they didn't already know anything they didn't already know they could all see that the Emperor was naked but as soon as he punctured the the bubble of pluralistic ignorance everyone knew now that everyone else knew that the Emperor was naked and that's what gave them the empowered them to challenge the emperor with with their laughter open debate is the only way to make moral progress not just scientific progress and looking at the history of violence and oppression and discrimination it's quite sobering that positions that we now take for granted as moral no-brainers had to be argued for in their time they really were controversial for example that heretics should be allowed to live instead of being burned at the stake you wouldn't think that that could be a subjective debate that you would have you know Pro burning heretics con burning heretics then each will get your a minute of rebuttal but in fact debates like that did take place after the after the Reformation if anyone is by the way interested I have Rebecca Goldstein and I were turned into cartoons in a TED talk in which we actually debated whether intellectual arguments drive moral progress she took the conside I took the the pro side I'm sorry I took the con side and we hired actors to actually narrate excerpts from some of the arguments at the time over the centuries such as why it's a bad idea to burn heretics but yes that argument was really made a criminal should not be tortured to death that was controversial because traditionalists and representatives of the Church said that if you stopped breaking sinners on the wheel or disemboweling them then all hell would break loose and people would be depraved and what would deter them from committing evil acts war should be eliminated as I mentioned the argument had to be made that war is not healthy for children and other living things as we used to say in the in the 60s slavery should be abolished there were arguments that slavery was a natural institution sometimes justified by the Bible they lost homosexuality should not be punished as you probably all know as recently as the 1950s probably one of the greatest thinkers in Western civilization Alan Turing was arrested imprisoned and chemically castrated because he because he was gay women should have equal rights and many others if it wasn't for the airing of what at the time were controversial positions we would not enjoy the moral benefits that we see today opened rain is also necessary to secure the credibility of university research including causes that are probably dear to many people in this room such as climate change and gun violence although perhaps not to end not to everyone given some of the previous winners of the disturbing prize but I have sometimes in in arguing against people that I meet from business and libertarian circles and who countered my argument that climate change is a a pressing challenge based on a scientific near consensus and and I say well how can you challenge something that has been so firmly established by our best science and they say well look at what happens in universities anyone who had a dissenting view would be shut to show didn't shut it down D platformed the fact that professors of atmospheric science all believe that human activity has warmed the planet isn't something we have to take seriously because any dissenter would not be allowed to air his or her views now how do you counter that well the case of climate science the case really is overwhelming but still when universities develop a reputation for suppressing heterodox beliefs they forfeit their right to credibility on results that really ought not no longer to be controversial and encouraging debate is necessary to prevent perverse backlashes I have found sometimes to my horror that former students once or twice former students of mine move to are so aware and so appalled by the repression of open debate on campuses that they lurch to the ultra-right they figure you can't handle the truth and therefore in right wing echo chambers start to cultivate rather extreme versions of beliefs since in their double they don't get challenged by the people in the academic bubble and so examples are sex differences the fact that that one can be crucified for arguing that there are any differences between men on average and women on average since there is a large amount of scientific data as well as every day experience and common sense to suggest that men and women are not completely interchangeable those who look at the enforced consensus on university campuses and increasingly in tech companies figure well no clarity no approach to truth is possible on university campuses in our own internet discussion groups will hash it out and often come up with hypotheses that are way out of line of scientific consensus much more extreme views such as The provocateur Milo you Napoles who argue that women should not be admitted into medical school because have children they don't prioritize medical careers as much as men do and a crazy beliefs that can infest our if anyone who descents from the orthodoxy is simply exiled and therefore hashes it out in their own bubble the same is true of police shootings which are where most of the debate is quite out of touch with the the best data and for that matter capitalism where the opposition to markets is so entrenched in university campuses that the it gives rise to a kind of extreme anarcho-capitalist libertarianism that is opposed to all social redistribution all regulation contrary to capitalism as it's actually practiced in successful societies such as Canada and Scandinavia so let me sum up I think I've spoken long enough I have argued or suggested this evening that some of us are more controversial than others some of us are extremely controversial despite relatively moderate positions or at least so I would argue and that controversy can be exaggerated because academia is becoming more politically polarized because the intellectual world still falls into two cultures two solitudes one might say in a Canadian context and that empirical hypotheses are easily confused with moral convictions the same time I suggest that controversy must be encouraged as Simon Fraser University is admirably doing because it's the only way to advance knowledge it's the only way to make moral progress it secures the credibility of the Academy and it prevents perverse backlashes thank you thank you Simon Fraser University [Applause] well thank you dr. Pinker you've certainly given us a lot to think about and I suspect there will be a lot of questions what I'd like to suggest is that if you'd like to ask a question please raise your hand I know that one of the tendencies at these events is is to want to get into a debate with the speaker so I I'm gonna make this like Jeopardy could you please put your question in the form of a question rather than in the form of a lecture that way we will give plenty of opportunity for as many people as possible to ask questions I will try to identify a pretty diverse cross-section of the audience at some point I will have to cut this off because we are on a somewhat tight schedule with plane flights and things like this so let's jump right into the questions thank you very much for coming I very much appreciate and like your work you talked about you know the power of laughter and humor to pierce the spirals of silence right that's very appealing to me because I very much like calling morons to their face morons and I'm just wondering if you can you know talk a little bit more about that about the power of humor and the power of laughter to just you know yes I think I think that is a real insight and it's an idea that I plan to develop in a in my next book among other things that humor humor is a puzzle I I have a section in how the mind works called what's so funny or I try to make sense of humor and and humor has a number of puzzles why is it pleasurable if you are among the laughing and conversely painful if you are the butt of the joke or the target of the humor why is it accompanied by laughter I suggest to make a long story short that humor is our way of reducing dignity pulling someone down a few pegs it can be used both aggressively when someone is more is assuming a higher position that we then we think is is merited when they get too big for their britches when they get pompous when they get imperious so it's a lot of fun to take down politicians and preachers and and that the the barroom bloviator that but we are humor of course can also be used convivial one of the most enjoyable experiences in life is sitting in joking around with friends and it isn't all targeting people outside the group there is self-deprecating humor there is friendly teasing and I suggest there to the dignity and status is something that is actually incompatible with the egalitarian nature of a friendship that even though you have some friends and one of them is a bound to be smarter and better-looking more popular more powerful than the others but that's not the basis of a friendship that's the basis of a boss of a subordinate when you cultivate a friendship the underlying assumption has to be one of equality so you can use humor to pull yourself down a few pegs to pull down your friends a few pegs at least in dimensions that isn't at the core of their self-worth in order to reinforce the understanding that we're all friends none of us is good Lord anything over the others and the role of laughter I suspect is that it generates what is called you by philosophers and economists common knowledge common knowledge is the state in which you know something you know that someone else knows that they know that you know it you know that they know that you know it they know that you know that you know that they know it ad infinitum the Emperor's New Clothes is a story about common knowledge that when there is a salient public event that you can both witness and witness other people witnessing it generates common knowledge and common knowledge is the basis of social relationships like dominant subordinate or Galit Aryan communal and we often use laughter to generate a common understanding of what a new relationship is understood to be whether it or or to ratify an existing relationship namely Galit Arianism among friends or pulling down someone who has an unearned Queen to status dignity dominance anyway that's a long-winded answer to a profound question have a bunch of questions so I'll probably just choose the simplest one do you believe or not okay what do you think of do you think that the negatives of absolute free speech might away the positive well I would not argue for absolute free speech and even in a bastion of free speech namely the United States probably at the forefront of enshrining free speech in law free speech is not absolute there are obvious exceptions like extortion blackmail libel obscenity incitement to imminent lawless action and in the in the academic sphere clearly there can't be divulging of confidential information about patients there there are a number and for that matter the conduct of research form of intellectual inquiry is regulated by committees for the protection of human subjects I and many other researchers think they've gone too far and you know and actually you know fringe on open inquiry but there's no question that there have to be some restrictions and one can imagine that in some cases there could be reasons if not for repressing research all together for discouraging it there may be cases where we don't really need to get to the bottom of an issue on scientific grounds and it could cause enough personal or social harm that we collectively decide to deprioritize it I think the default should be study anything propose anything but that there can be circumscribed exceptions that can be justified thank you very much for coming mr. finger I actually want to ask a meta controversy question on your book better angels of our nature there's a very big controversy with Nasim I'm sure there's like a big back-and-forth between you and him and I was wondering yeah yeah till oh yeah Talib sir how unlikely it is the Black Swan might not happen in your defense yeah that's why in the better angels of our nature I have a actually an extensive section on what we can conclude from a decline in the number and severity of wars as andromaque in this group this here as a human security report project have documented acknowledging that because wars are distributed according to a power law that is a distribution with a thick tail namely there are lots and lots and lots of small Wars there are far fewer medium-sized horse fewer still big Wars but not astronomically few big Wars that is the statisticians call it a thick tailed or fat tail distribution Talib calls it a Black Swan I think he was rather peeved that I didn't cite him in talking about black swans but the concept had been explored by a brilliant English psychologist and physicist named Richard Richardson right yeah Richardson Lewis fry Richardson yes in statistics of deadly quarrels who documented even before computers that the distribution of wars was fat-tailed so yes it is it is possible it is not beyond the realm of rational expectation that there could be a an extreme one we know how it could happen if a nuclear war would be a is improbable but is so catastrophic that I have suggested that we ought to take steps to prevent it from happening and that it is simultaneously possible for the rate and damage of Wars to go down but for there to be a non-negligible probability of a of a severe war again those are not contradictory that's why I advocate for global zero now the they were together with such left-wing beatniks as Henry Kissinger and George Shultz another area of dispute is whether one can conclude from the reduction in the rate of war and war deaths since 1946 which is the date and before that I don't need anyone argues that there's been a reduction a systematic reduction in war but could it just be a fluke could we be living through a 74 year and Counting period that where they're just the roll of the dice just hasn't turned up a war but the underlying odds are unchanged now that's not a because we know that with random processes there can be long runs without anything happening you can roll the die the dice for quite a while and there are no boxcars doesn't mean by itself the dice are loaded it just might mean that there's a long time conversely it also means that when wars come in clusters it doesn't mean that the frequency of war has been increasing cuz random events can often come in clusters this too is a point that had been established by Lewis fry Richardson that not only were Wars distributed according to a power law function but they in magnitude but they're distributed in time according to an apostle process which is to say that the instantaneous probability is has no memory that is the chance of a war occurring breaking out today is completely independent of whether there was a war yesterday or not and again I discussed this in some detail I did not cite talams fooled by randomness because again he didn't discover it it was known in the statistical literature for many decades but the question is even if the outbreaks of war are determined by the roll of dice are are the are they the same dice or are the dice becoming increasingly weighted with the passage of times that even if Wars are random they are less likely to occur that's not an easy question to answer when you only have 75 years of data and there only you know 100 192 countries recently there is a and then in one of Talib's papers he argued with a collaborator that looking over a two thousand year period you cannot conclude that the there's been any change since 1946 which is which is true although the claim is not that there's been a trance re big big the Cirillo and talib claims that there hasn't been any continuous change over the last two thousand years hasn't been any overall decline but of course the claim wasn't that there was a continuous change but rather there was a break point in 1945 now two studies have come out in the last three years from a wonderful Norwegian group one from a British group that applies a more sophisticated form of statistical analysis called break point or change point analysis to try to identify whether in a noisy process from dice rolling you can detect a change in the odds one of them argued that there has been a change later than than I am and under market reposed more in the 1970s with the decline of Vietnam War another study argued that it was earlier in the 1950s so I would say that the even though it is a challenge to say when the weddin if there's been a change in the frequency of war the most recent analysis confirms what you can kind of see with your eyeballs namely that it does go down of these detailed answers recently hundreds of protesting students chanted the slogan it's more than just a word referring to the n-word that was uttered by two students in a game of escalating vulgarity a pissing contest in your book the language instinct which I brought yeah you say that swearing isn't even genuine language what did you mean and do you now maintain that swearing at least sometimes is not genuine language and do you think that a theory of common knowledge could explain phenomenon of swearing yes so I in my book the stuff of thought I have a chapter called the seven words you can never say on television an allusion to the famous George Carlin comedy routine where I talk about the phenomenon of taboo language I have discussed it in public including mentioning many of the taboo taboo words like this tits and yes because it is a word and in fact one of the eye as linguist say I mentioned the word I don't use the word now there's a crucial difference because if you are a scientist interested in language you've got to be able to refer to the things that you're trying to understand such as these words in the same way that if you're a you know if you're a gynecologist her obstetrician you can't be prudish about pictures of genitalia that's what you're trying to understand and likewise in the case of language being a linguist I think that these we should try not allow ourselves as intelligent analysts to be victim of the primitive superstition that words have magical powers that the mere uttering a word can harm you this is a widespread belief it's why we often curse it's why we pray it's why so many cultures have taboos but probably the the fundamental insight of linguistics the first discovery is that a word is an arbitrary pairing between a sound and a meaning and an idea words really can't hurt you other than how they're interpreted by a community of speakers and indeed that interpretation is a matter of common knowledge you use a word not just because you know what it means about because you know why you know that other people know how you mean it and you know that they expect you to know how they'll understand it ad infinitum now that is an explanation why we are why our our our the emotional centers of our brains are indeed pained when we hear a taboo word and in that sense I wouldn't say they're not language they are language they are they follow the rules of English sound patterning they're they obey some although not all of the words of English syntax it's completely unclear what they what how to parse that the imperative you which actually does violate some of the rules of English syntax but we react to them emotionally because they would seem to if they are used in casual conversation they would seem to ratify a racist or misogynist or licensures and so we are a affront to decorum because using them would seem to say that it's okay to talk about exploitative sex or pejorative racial stereotypes by the same token mentioning them is the one of the ways in which we can diffuse them by noticing they really are just sounds that's what George Carlin did in his routine he repeated some of the taboo words to the point of bed where they started become meaningless they just sounded like sounds let Hebrews do the same thing in some of his routines that got him arrested and I think it behooves all of us not to use these words because they do ratify reprehensible attitudes but to mention them when necessary precisely in order to rob them of their of their power to to harm which of course is wide and this is pointed out umpteen times that african-americans themselves can use the n-word in banter among themselves in the hip-hop lyrics humor and the reason that they use it which is the same reason why most ethnic groups appropriate pejorative words such as what happened with the word queer originally a pejorative for homosexual sexuals now appropriated there was a band country-and-western band called Kinky Friedman in the Texas Jew boys again appropriating an anti-semitic term because if you flaunt it then you are robbing it of its power acknowledging that words only have power in terms of how we understand them in context anyway that's a discussion in the stuff of thought but it is a what as part of the general combination of intolerance political correctness and I gotta say stupid if occation of discourse on campus there is less and less acknowledgment that taboo words are words and fewer and fewer circumstances in which they can be even mentioned and there professors who've gotten into trouble I had a close call for discussing taboo racial and ethnic terms in discussions of racism but anyway that's just how crazy things can get on campus you had a slide up that lists of things that you considered or were considered to be once controversial mm-hm and I wonder how something goes from the once the controversial bucket to the once controversial bucket and if it can fall out of the ones controversial bucket and go back to the controversial bucket because there were things on that list that I think are still controversial well it is a interesting problem at the intersection of sociology history and maybe complexity theory or network theory how there can be a tipping point where something that can go from taboo to controversial to universally understood gay marriage is the most recent example that we've all lived lived through at least in the certainly in the United States where at the beginning of his first term Barack Obama was opposed to gay marriage by oh sorry when he was a congressman I should say that's not that's not right but then in was it 15 in obergefell a case in the Supreme Court gay marriage was legalized in the United States and it was no longer an issue no one even it's not debated rescinding gay marriage is even in the extreme conservative lurch of trumpism it's just not an issue likewise women suffrage likewise racial segregation you just don't see that maybe in some of the the cesspools of the the internet but in but in actual discussion we don't have debates on whether black people should go back to segregated schools when the vote should be taken away from women and so on I'm not sure what and the question is why do you get can you can the flip sometimes be so rapid and I don't think we know the answer I suspect and I suggested an Enlightenment now is that one reason is that one possibility is that if there's a position it really cannot be justified on moral grounds and it survives by dint of inertia culture tradition but it is not exposed no one shines a light on it once it is out there and once someone who tries to defend something like keeping the boat away from women they they lose pretty quickly once there's an intense enough debate that there really is a tipping point but that's just a conjecture now what was the position that you thought is still controversial they it's but it's no longer a subject of live debate well by controversial I mean yeah so but I would mean say discussed in public forums in legislatures in TV talk shows on campus in debates the you know I don't know even in a time and place as conservative as the contemporary United States it's just not an issue at Trump's rallies he never says let's let's undo gay marriage well no but it's not a question of what people think it's a question what they debate so let me let me just go back to that slice let's see if there any others yes let's see okay heretics should be allowed to live I don't think there's any debater we should go back to burning burning heretics criminals should not be tortured to death we don't normally have that I mean maybe an Isis that they do but that's a well yes but I I would not count that as a by controversy I mean I don't mean all 7.5 billion people on earth but I mean in the forums that that any of us would encounter as serious possibilities for changes in any Western country were shall be eliminated well there there are certain wars that are indeed uh prosecuted but I don't remember seeing less time I saw anyone argue that war is inherently worthy and ought to be conducted just to improve people's moral fiber there may be specific Wars that people say our Wars of necessity but the arguments that were common up to 1914 that war is just inherently good let's just pick a fight so that our young men can be brave and altruistic that is an argument that but I've never heard slavery should be abolished no oh no our I don't think they're any arguments that we should go back to slave auctions homosexual I should not be punished again outside of Isis and well and and admittedly some Islamic and sub-saharan African countries homosexuality is still a crime and is indeed a capital crime in in a couple of dozen so it is you're right that it is controversial there but nonetheless even again even in if you if you look at the extended West including Latin America including Japan South Korea Taiwan that is in developed countries this is this is now a dead issue women should have equal rights there's only one country in which men can vote and women cannot now some countries in which no one can vote this is a bit of a trick question but what is the what is the one country in which men only men have the right to vote live a trick question that considers greetings mr. benka I'm a really big advocate of free speech on University campuses just like you and my question is who gets to draw the line between free speech in hate speech thank you well I think that I mean I think you put your finger on the problem that the category of hate speech has been used to stigmatize it and and repress opinions that that people are disagree with which is one of the reasons that at least in American jurisprudence hate speech is protected by the First Amendment you cannot criminalize hate speech in the United States you can criminalize I forgot the exact wording I think it's incitement to imminent lawless action t if you go out and you say I won't you all go now and kill the Jews that that can be prohibited but if it's that I think that Jews advocate theories that work to the disadvantage of Christian civilization like psychoanalysis and Marxism some people could call that hate speech but it is legally protected in the United States and I think that it ought to be protected on American campuses because there are arguments why it's wrong and if it can't be expressed then you can't show why it's wrong if it's if it's repressed and not refuted that will inevitably mean that there will be subcultures that will cling to it already all the more avidly so I don't so other than you know I think that a line can be drawn when it comes to violence advocacy of violence especially if it is incitement rather than argue even when it's argument perhaps it would fall on the other side of the line but in general I don't think that that hate speech should be prohibited now by though I should also add in terms of and this is relevant to the earlier question the fact that universities should not prohibit controversial ideas does aa mean that universities should not apply standards of skull over your rigor because there are all kinds of kooky ideas that are not controversial they're just they're just wacko and universities are under no obligation to tolerate whacko ideas not everyone gets to stand at a lectern not everyone gets to publish in a refereed journal but as long as the standards are ones of logic and evidence namely do you cite literature there's one statement follow from another it's perfectly fine for in fact it's meant I mean that's what makes universities universities is that we apply those standards all the time so speech so racist speech that just consists of vilifying a group but but does not have any any claim to some to scholarly rigor of course you could toss that out just you can toss out any inferior argument thank you dr. Pinker in referencing your books better angels and enlightenment no I wanted to ask that despite the quality of life improving by so many measures why does it seem like there's a slower or disproportional trend of improvement on perceived quality of life or life satisfaction and kind of what does that suggest about the human dition or if there's something maybe less optimistic that we can derive from the data no it's a good question of why so many of these advances are are completely unknown they come as a shock I mean they came as a surprise to me I got to say hardly it's because of the nature of use of the view of the world that we get from journalism journalism being a non random sample of the worst things that are happening happen on earth at any given day so day after day after day you are shown all the things that go wrong anywhere now things always go wrong somewhere and that's what news consists of things that go right often consist of nothing happening like a country at peace or incremental improvements like 137 thousand people escaping extreme poverty every day it just don't happen all at once on a Thursday in October and so they never they never make a headline that that I think is one reason and I've called on journalism to be more aware of the misleading view of the world that they give by only reporting their disasters another reason is that there is a discrepancy that that polling experts are often find between people's judgments of their own lives and their judgement of their society so very people tend to be irrationally optimistic about their own life everyone thinks that they are less likely than average to get into an accident or to have cancer or to have a divorce you know they can't all be right at least at least half of them after more than half of them have to be wrong at the same time if you switch the question to your life to your society then people go from irrationally optimistic to irrationally pessimistic probably so the most obvious example is happiness how happy are you on a scale of one to ten people say oh I know seven eight maybe how happy are other people in your society oh four to five I met that's a pretty consistent gap that's another reason there's a third is that there is a I think this relates to the idea of decline which is popular in intellectual culture but you get more gravitas by your pessimist a pessimist as it sometimes it sounds like he's trying to help you an optimist sounds like he's trying to sell you something so there is that asymmetry and just the the moral brownie points that you get from the to use anyway there are a number of reasons for optimism also there some paradoxes that some countries that are really really good shape tend to be really really pessimistic of which France is the best example the French are the most pessimistic country on earth but uh finds a pretty nice place to live china is the world's most optimistic country and I you know I wouldn't live there if you paid me I'd much rather live in France but but for some reason the the prospective look in the future perhaps because I'm sorry I'll wrap up my answer the question but it's it's possible I don't think there's strong data on this then it may be the sine or the slope that is more influential than the absolute level so if you are doing much better than your parents if every year you've been increasing even if you're still kind of poor that gives you more optimism than if you are rich but stagnant relatively speaking [Applause]
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Channel: SFU Public Square
Views: 4,749
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Keywords: Steven Pinker, Steven Pinker Lecture
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Length: 89min 10sec (5350 seconds)
Published: Wed Nov 13 2019
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