Steven Pinker: the dangers of “pseudo intellectual bullsh*t”

[Music] ladies and gentlemen good evening and welcome i am thrilled tonight to welcome back to how to academy two genuine superstars of the intellectual world professor stephen pinker is the author of the language instinct the blank slate many other books and of course the subject of tonight's discussion rationality he's in conversation with oxford's professor marcus de soto please give them a huge welcome i guess in this age of kind of uh fake news uh quack kind of remedies for things um uh the idea of producing a book on trying to get people to think a bit straighter i mean there seems to be a surge of irrational thinking was that the kind of motivation for you writing this book just seeing that we seem to be losing our minds out there it wasn't the motive it originated as a course and like i think probably many mathematicians certainly many social scientists i had a feeling that some of the tools that we use in our line of work ought to be given away exported that anyone can profit from better intuitions about probability and logic and bayesian reasoning namely calibrating your degree of credence in a hypothesis to the strength of the evidence game theory these are just mental tools that everyone should command i didn't know of any course that packaged them all in one curriculum there are a lot of courses on statistics and probability but they tend not to have logic in the same curriculum or game theory and uh but of course as soon as i mentioned to people i'm going to be teaching a course on rationality the inevitable question is why does humanity seem to be losing its mind so it it it was adventitiously timely uh topical and i of course couldn't avoid that topic and it does make up one of the chapters of the book uh called what's wrong with people exactly i guess sitting here as a mathematician you're you're slightly preaching to the converted as far as i'm concerned because you know i kind of uh uh rationality is really the way that i think but and i particularly liked uh there was a quote to use of liveness which i think is my kind of philosophy of life that the only way to rectify our reasonings is to make them as tangible as those of the mathematicians so that we can find our error at a glance and when there are disputes among persons we can simply say let us calculate without further ado and see who is right um so why am i doomed to failure and trying to reduce everybody to calculations liveness leibniz's logical utopia in which any disagreement could be settled by deduction is not with us for for a number of reasons one of them is that a lot of our knowledge doesn't consist of propositions that are true or false and implications that necessarily follow from them which is the stuff of classical logic but consist of large numbers of probabilistic cues that we kind of add up and wait put into context in logic the people often ask me what's the difference between logic and reason or logic and rationality logic is just one of the tools of rationality and to do logic you you have to do something that can often be quite irrational namely forget everything you know and concentrate only on what's stated in the premises you forget the entirety of your world knowledge that's what makes logic and indeed academic thinking so foreign to people who haven't been immersed in schooling non-western peoples children where it never makes sense to forget everything you know uh in real life but that's exactly what you have to do in logic so if the if the syllogism that you're asked to validate is all plant products are healthy tobacco is a plant product therefore tobacco is healthy now that is a valid syllogism but people get it wrong because they can't get out of their head tobacco healthy what are you what are you kidding now of course that is highly relevant to anything you have to do in the world but in terms of the the task stated as a logic problem it gets you the the wrong answer uh and so logic is obviously an indispensable tool computers are basically logic and silicon and and there are cases in which you really do want to forget everything you know and concentrate only on what's stipulated in the premises in in legal reasoning for example you may want to deliberately blind yourself to presidential factors like say the race of the defendant and um in in biology sometimes you want to forget about uh superficial similarities so that you can call a porpoise a mammal instead of a fish where it's um closer to a deductive system so in formal science and in other informal law you you do want the gift of forgetting the entirety of your knowledge and concentrating only on the premises but generally in everyday life that would be a foolish thing to do i think the other point that you make in the book which is i think uh relevant to this was that you know as a mathematician when i'm trying to prove a theorem i have to define things very explicitly and so that definition will absolutely pin down the object that i'm trying to prove something about um but actually trying to pin down the definition of things that we use in everyday language is often a real problem i mean you talk about wittgenstein's attempt to try and define what a game is so you're trying to prove something uh you know reduce it to a mathematical logical proof but actually you can't pin down in language what what a game is i mean is that one of our problems that sort of and that's another reason why logic in the formal sense is often um kind of kind of useless in for everyday reasoning so game is an example and vegetable now of course there are domains of thinking in which we do have to stipulate rules and uh ascertain whether a fuzzy category uh fits the the definition for example did bill clinton and monica lewinsky have sex now sex is a fuzzy family resemblance category on the other hand the law has to deal with stipulated formal logical rules just so that the guilt and innocence aren't up to the whim of a judge but and a lot of legalistic reasoning consists of trying to shoehorn our fuzzy probabilistic concepts into these classical categories that have necessary and sufficient conditions i guess you talked about kahneman quite a lot in in the book and his ideas of the fact that we have these two systems of thinking seem to be the sort of um difficulty that some people are having with applying rationality that our first kind of reaction our intuitive idea about how to solve a problem is often not the right one we need to take slow down you know thinking fast and slow and the slow version is applying our kind of analytic mind so is this kind of a a sort of battle between these two sorts of thinking that we have in our brain that are what we use this system one the fast intuitive which often just is wrong and we have to slow down to do the this kind of rational sort of thing indeed and we can be fooled by certain intuitions that uh that don't apply to a particular uh case i mean another example from that style of of uh question is if um there are lily pads on a pond that double every day and after 30 days the pond is completely covered on what day will it be half covered people say well you know first inclination is 15 and maybe they adjust upward a little bit 16 or 70 the answer of course is day 29 because if it doubles every day and it's full on the 30th day then it was half covered on the 29th day it's an example of how exponential growth is uh surprisingly unintuitive and it does even though that might sound like a trick question a gotcha there are many cases in everyday life in which a failure to appreciate exponential growth has real consequences such as people don't save early enough for retirement even a small amount of money invested early on because of compound interest which grows exponentially can give you quite quite the nest egg by the time you're ready for retirement or conversely people who take out credit card loans where the credit card company charges interest on the interest can quickly wipe out a life savings another example this is one that afflicts even experts even the kind of person i'm not going to name any names but two different experts on uh statistical reasoning and its uh uh and the fallacies that people made themselves committed to fallacy when early in the days of the covet pandemic they said well the rate of death from covet is comparable to strep throat to uh to the flu to other things that we tolerate without shutting down society you're much more likely to be killed in a car crash it's a familiar trope in experts on human probabilistic fallacies and biases but in this case because the infectious disease can expand exponentially as every person you cough on not only gets sick but becomes an infector who coughs on others who then in turn become invectors the uh the death rate shot up exponentially and quickly uh over overtook uh strep throat and flu and and so on uh so it's a unintuitive concept that can have real life consequences but more generally the uh the the mindset of distrusting your first intuition your gut feeling and thinking it through to make sure you weren't uh uh fooled is one of the traits that goes into a kind of rationality quotient which is not the same as the intelligence quotient although there is a some degree of correlation uh people who are more resistant to the the quick but wrong answer also tend to be more skeptical of claims of the paranormal they tend to be less susceptible to conspiracy theories they even see are less susceptible to uh the technical term is pseudo-intellectual namely if you string together a lot of highfalutin fancy schmancy words so it sounds like it could be some profundity but it actually makes no sense and you ask people uh is this meaningful that people who fall for these uh these these simple math problems are more likely to attribute meaning to uh to pseudo-intellectual uh they're also more likely on average these there are a number of correlations that weakly but significantly correlate with each other probably less likely to get into accidents less likely to get into debt less likely to get into mishaps like locking their keys in the car so a general habit of non of uh avoiding cognitive impulsiveness is a big component of uh psychologically it's a major component of rationality insofar as it can be distinguished just from raw intelligence but i think the the example of exponential growth is very relevant obviously to today we i mean our governments just don't seem to learn what exponential growth is they they wait for it to become very big numbers and don't realize that one two four eight is also exponential growth is just very small numbers i mean the kind of uh the classic example i i often use is the um person who invented chess uh gets uh asked for a reward by the king who enjoys the game and says put one grain of rice on the first square of the chessboard two on the next four and the king thinks he's got away with a very cheap price for the game of chess but doesn't realize that you know the the first row the amount of rice might be a piece of sushi but um you know by the by the halfway across your you wiped out the whole rice population of india for 10 thousand years yeah exactly that's a wonderful example i i didn't use it in rationality because i used it in a previous book i like to repeat my examples but it's a it is a wonderful example well actually i'm wearing my um uh vampire count on counts tonight as well um and i i i found this one was quite good with kids actually that um because it's quite a good proof that there are no vampires because if there was a vampire then it has to feed on a human every month and then changes them into a vampire and then you've got two vampires and so the next month you they've got to feed on two other humans so so actually how would it how long would it take to make the whole population of the planet um into vampires and it's uh it's actually only 30 months or something like that and so that seemed to be a good proof of um uh but i i use that to try to explain to kids what was happening with this virus and that one seemed to work quite well well it's an interesting question as a psychologist and one who thinks in uh often in evolutionary terms and we have my my friend richard dawkins is here in the in the front row very pleased to see him but the question that we often ask is could they what would be the uh the best adaptive explanation for why we should be blind to exponential growth given that's what organisms do i mean that's what what pathogens do that's what you know scum on a pond does and it's it's a bit of a mystery the only thing i could the best i could do is that probably exponential growth in nature just never goes on for very long there's a lot i think it's called stein's law things that can things that can't go on forever don't and that in any finite environment because exponential growth really does saturate it very quickly that any living organism would pretty soon its growth rate would be checked by uh by by waste by running out of space by fouling its own environment so in fact probably most biological processes as we observe them are uh s-shaped rather than exponential yes yes and i suppose it's uh you know we don't actually have that good and experience of very large numbers so you know very quickly we're just not aware of um if something does go it explode that you know we know 100 people very well or something like that and i think you know you actually have uh kind of seven lessons in the book sort of trying to teach people each of these kind of different approaches to a rational approach to uh to kind of solving problems and one of the ones you've talked about already sort of probability i mean we seem to be very very bad at probability um our intuition often catches us out and you have some lovely examples in the book sort of showing why you know everyone's intuitive response is is wrong when you analyze the kind of mathematics of probability i mean why do you think we are so bad at assessing risk and probability yeah and i i in fact i don't i don't put it that way that we're bad and that is a natural conclusion to come to especially from reading the work of tversky and kahneman amis tversky daniel kahneman's late collaborator we showed a number of the ways in which we are systematically tripped up the gambler's fallacy people think that if the roulette wheel lands on if the ball lands on red uh seven or eight times in a row it's more likely to land black the next time even though x every spin of the wheel is independent and so it's a little less than fifty percent each time the uh infamous conjunction fallacy immortalized as the linda problem after this was in the 80s so we have a baby boomer protagonist but uh linda uh because i don't think girls are named linda anymore but uh i grew up with lots of lindas so uh linda is a is very smart she majored in philosophy she's kind of a social justice warrior she marches in black lives matter protests what is the what is the probability that linda is a um a bank teller where's the probability that linda is a bank teller who's active is active in the feminist movement and people tend to give a higher probability to the second even though that violates the conjunction rule namely that the probability of a and b must be less than or equal to the probability of a and the fallacy is like saying that you're more likely to draw a red queen from a deck of cards than a red card and when you think about that that just can't be right so that that's another example of a systematic probability illusion and yet another one is the availability bias namely that people use availability of anecdotes episodes narratives from memory as a way of estimating probability so notoriously they feel that plane travel is um a hazard and so drive from one place to another even though per passenger mile car travel is vastly more dangerous but because every plane crash gets saturation coverage in in the news but car crashes kind of dribble in a few deaths at a time it's easy to remember a plane crash not so easy to remember a dozen car crashes and so our sense of probability is distorted so those are all examples that can lead to the conclusion that we are oblivious to probability we're probability blind as as one psychologist put that can't be right and again there are many animals who have a keen sense of probability as they forage and you you really since the world is you know einstein to the contrary notwithstanding god does play dice or at least it's on scales that are relevant to our well-being and the rumbling of all animals and it would be quite anomalous we have no sense of probability at all and i try to resolve that paradox by drawing on the work of other psychologists who know that the way in which the problems are presented to people make a big difference and people can be [Music] less less less foolish than you might think if you present probability in a more mind-friendly format in particular the concept probability itself is actually a word with many senses there isn't actually one rigorous concept called probability but the word itself can refer to propensity namely uh how likely is a physical object to behave in a particular way owing to its its makeup frequency in the long run you flip a coin a thousand times how many of them will be heads degree of confidence in a single event namely for this coin flip on a scale from zero to one what is your subjective confidence that it will land heads and warrant by the evidence how the kind of probability that's applied in a court of law have i given you good reasons to believe in it or how good are the reasons that i've given you to believe in a an outcome and people like philosophers of probability distinguish them and when problems are presented in the asking for the probability of a single event which when you think about it is something of an enigmatic concept like what does it mean to say that what's the problem to ask what the probability is that linda is a bank teller you know either she is a bank teller or she isn't a bank teller that you might think well it's not a question about probability that's a sense the only meaning of probability that is sensible in the context of a single event has to be subjective degree of confidence because you don't have a thousand lindas uh and so you can count up how many of them are bank tellers or feminist bank tellers people's sense of probability might correspond more to frequency in the long run which is really the way in which we encounter probability relevant information in our lives in a natural environment namely you of all the times that you eat a particular food how often do you get sick of all the times in which you look for rabbit along this route how many of them do you actually find rabbits and indeed when you present some of these problems to people not couched as probability of a single event you know again there are even some i understand some statisticians who claim that it's an incoherent concept then people are um do better they don't not all of them get the right answer but if you say instead of saying uh here's linda you say imagine a hundred women like linda how many of them are bank tellers how many of them are feminist bank tellers and there very few commit the conjunction fallacy interestingly some still do but but far fewer you

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Published: Thu Dec 23 2021