Steven Pinker: Why Heterodoxy Matters in the World

[Music] in an introduction one can do like the standard thing so I'll really do that so the standard thing is you know Steve Pinker is Canadian you know he's the Johnstone family professor at Harvard he's one of the leading researchers in language and linguistics and okay that's the standard thing and he's written lots of very important books for us they're not then I should add something personal which is this that there's this there's this community of academics and scientists around Jon Brockman and the third culture and as I understand it this concept of the third culture you know there was the two cultures in the 20th century the you know the literary intellectuals and the and the hard scientists and Brockman noticed that there we were beginning to have in the 90s some new intellectuals who were really doing what the old intellectuals had begun failing to do we heard some of there was a mention of what was the the academic gobbledygook of the deconstructionist s-- when the literary intellectuals went off into never-never land and stopped educating us on what it is to be human there was a gap and it was especially people like iya Wilson and Steve Pinker who begin to fill that gap because not only is their research interesting but they are among the best writers we have ever had they are just so beautiful to read and such such masters of crafting the English language and so when I wrote my first book the happiness hypothesis I took Steve's writings and and Richard Dawkins were my two models for great great and any a Wilson for great great science writing so Steve is just an extraordinary extraordinary academic the breadth of what he has studied the clarity of his thinking the research that he does to back it up he is the absolute paragon of of what an academic should be and he combines that with the kind of fearlessness that we've been talking about for the last two days here what was the introduction there was the what is your dangerous idea the Brockman volume and Steve wrote the introduction to that and we should all go Pat and what year was that was like five or six years ago oat okay good it was ten or twelve years ago that he wrote that I don't know if you could write that today and not be he literally murdered but Steve has the guts to do things like that and he has consistently had the guts and there are constant vilification campaigns against him there was the absurd thing where you said something about the alt-right it was a perfectly good academic thing to say but of course was taken out of context and he I mean absurd stuff happens to him because he's got the guts to speak clearly about important issues regardless of the consequences and so Steve is a hero of mine he's a hero of almost everybody in this room so please welcome Steve Pinker who will then be interviewed by Nick Gillespie thank you it's a real honor to be here and John is one of my heroes and I have tremendous respect for what he's done in setting up this Academy this meeting and in promoting this cause the title of my talk which I hope I will make clear is an unnecessary defense of reason and a necessary defense of University's role in advancing it or why we need universities to refine teach and promote objective truth and disinterested reason this is the general theme that that John invited me to speak on the first question that we have to ask in on this topic is is this a hopeless aspiration is it old-fashioned is it so 20th century haven't psychologists shown that humans are irrational and aren't we living in a post truth era so those are the objections that I would like to deal with first in arguing for this aspiration so first off we are not living in a post truth era why why aren't we well is the statement we are living in a post truth air true if so it cannot be true that is we are still evaluating propositions based on whether they are true so we are not in a post truth era likewise why humans are not irrational is the statement humans are irrational rational if so it cannot be true at least if uh turned by a human if this was a pronouncement from an advanced race of space aliens then maybe we could take it seriously but otherwise if humans were really irrational who specified the benchmark of rationality against which humans don't measure up and how did they conduct the comparison this is an argument that was a style of argument that was made most explicitly by the NYU philosopher Thomas Nagel in the last word where he made the case that truth objectivity and reason are not negotiable as soon as you are making the case for them or against them you are making a case and you are implicitly committed to reason he calls it a Cartesian argument that after the famous cogito ergo sum argument namely just as the very fact that one might be questioning one's own existence shows that one must exist the very fact that one is examining the question of rationality shows that one is committed to rationality another fancy word for is a transcendental argument one that invokes the preconditions for its own existence and a corollary is that we actually don't defend reason we don't justify reason and we certainly do not as it's sometimes claimed have a faith in reason as Nagel puts it this is one thought to many we don't believe in reason we don't have faith in reason we use a reason it's the water that would that die we swim in now this Cartesian argument sounds a little bit like fancy schmancy tricky logic chopping but it really isn't it's implicit in the the very way that we carry on discussions as soon as you try to provide reasons why we should trust anything other than reason that is as long as you're not bribing or threatening your audience but trying to persuade them soon as you provide reasons why you're right why other people should believe you that you're not lying or full of crap you've lost the argument because you have appealed to reason and that is why a defensive reason is unnecessary perhaps even impossible or self contradictory now I think we should retire the cliche post truth for a number of reasons one of them is that it is based on the the fact that some politicians one in particular lies a lot I mean and politicians have always lied it's sometimes said that in war truth is the first casualty I grew up with the expression the credibility gap that was big in the 1960s often applied to Lyndon Johnson and the bending or nullifying of the truth by people in power is as long been consequential it is thought to have led to this spanish-american war the first world war the Vietnam War the Iraq war and we've all been reading the papers the last few days and seen what's been happening in Gulf of Hormuz people are spreading conspiracy theories and fake news again this really is not a new development at least not in in quality in a forthcoming book by James cortada and William Ashbury called fake news nation they show that fake news and conspiracy theories have a long history in our country indeed in the in the of the world the protocols of the Elders of Zion the forgery by the Czarist secret police of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy the basis of many pogroms and lynchings and deadly ethnic it's worthy spread of rumours about the perfidy of some minority group the idea that fake news is displacing truth well we should examine the truth of that widespread belief Brendan Nyhan a political scientist the University of Michigan has did so in a quantitative analysis of the role of fake news in the 2016 American presidential election what do you found was that fake news was took up a minuscule proportion of the online communications during the election far less than 1% it was mainly received by people whose minds were already made up and it didn't change probably any minds and this actually makes sense when you think about it if you got an a an email or posts that said that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of a Washington pizzeria chances are unless you already despised Hillary Clinton your mind would not be changed but the real the main reason that we should retire the post to the cliche is that it's corrosive and if anything possibly self-fulfilling the implication is we may as well give up on reason and truth and just fight their propaganda lies and dogma with our propaganda lies and dogma I think we can do better going back to whether homo sapiens is irrational there are actually many reasons to believe and I say this as a cognitive psychologist that that this is overblown that people are not always irrational starting with a common argument that went often hears from evolutionary what people think of as evolutionary psychology that we have lizard brains that we our minds are adapted to rapidly detecting danger a predator in the grass from simple cues and that people can't be asked to be more cerebral than than what evolution gave us well as someone who can also knows a thing or two about evolutionary psychology I can I'm here to tell you that that is no an accurate portrayal of how the human mind evolved in a wonderful paper called the car the cognitive niche by john tooby and herb Devore they argue that homo sapiens is we are not lizards what makes us ZOA logically unusual is that we evolved to prosper by a combination of social cooperation language and know-how in particular that humans everywhere develop mental models of the world that allow us to explain predict and control things let me be concrete let me give you a couple of examples this one comes from Napoleon Chagnon who spent 30 years with the yanomamö of the Hornet hunter horticulturalists of the Amazon rainforest let me describe one of the ways in which they obtain food armadillos we have several feet underground in burrows that can run for many yards and have several entries when the Yanomami find an active burrow as determined by the presence around the entry of a cloud of insects found nowhere else they said about smoking out the armadillo the best fuel for this purpose is a crusty material from old termite nests which burns slowly and produces an intense heat and much heavy smoke a pile of this material is ignited at the entry of the burrow and the smoke is found inside the other entries are soon detected by the smoke rising from them and they are sealed with dirt the men then spread out on hands and knees holding their ears to the ground to listen for armadillo movements in the Burrow when they hear something they dig there until they hit the Burrow and with luck the animal on one occasion after the hunters had dug several holes all unsuccessful one of them ripped down a large vine tied a knot in the end of it and put the knotted end into the entrance twirling the vine between his hands he slowly pushed it into the hole as far as it would go as his companions put their ears to the ground he twirled the vine causing the knot to make it a noise and the spot was marked he broke off the vine at the Burrow entrance pulled out the piece in the hole and laid it on the ground along the axis of the Burrow the others dug down at the place where they had heard the knot and found the armadillo on their first attempt asphyxiated from the smoke there's an awful lot of rationality that went into that that that sequence of hunting let me give you another example from halfway across the world this is from the citizen scientist Lewis Leoben Berg who has spent a lot of his life studying the use of tracking by the Sun in the Kalahari Desert they use it in persistence hunting whereby they track animals by their spoor in or even though animals are much faster than humans animals if pursued will eventually keel over from the heat if the humans can track their whereabouts for long and long enough so the Sun leaving Berg points out engage in inference that is they form hypotheses from sparse data in tracks and bents twigs and displaced pebbles I often correctly inferring the species the age and the condition of the animal which allows them to predict its movements for example a deep pointed hoof print they infer comes from an agile Springbok who has to get a good grip a shallow flat-footed hoof print comes from a heavy kudu t' has to support its weight but together with the inference they engage in reasoning that is they in trying to figure out ooh what the animal was where it went they engage in debate they articulate their logic they defend it against alternatives and there's an leaving Berg observed plenty of skepticism challenging of Authority a young hunter could challenge the guess of an older hunter and challenging of dogma again I'll give you a couple of examples three tractors I will not try to reproduce the clicks not a USA and baro baro sow told me that when the monotonous lark sings it dries out the soil making the roots good to eat afterwards not a and wasps a told me that burrows L was wrong it's not the bird that dries out the sole soil it's the Sun that dries out the soil the bird is only telling them that the soil will dry out in the coming months and that it is the time of the year when the roots are good to eat now I'm attractive tracker from Barry in the central Kalahari Botswana told me the myth of how the Sun is like an eland which crosses the sky and is then killed by people who live in the West the red glow in the sky when the Sun Goes Down is the blood of the eland after they've eaten it they throw the shoulder blade across the sky back to the east where it falls into a pool and grows into a new Sun sometimes it is said you can hear the swishing noise of the shoulder blade threat flying through the air after telling you the story in great detail he told me that he thinks the old people lied because he has never seen the shoulder blade fly through the sky or heard the swishing noise so if anyone tries to excuse irrationality Dogma repression of alternative opinions by by saying that's just human nature that's the way they evolved I'm here to tell you don't blame the hunter-gatherers don't blame our ancestors skepticism Dogma debate are in our nature as much as reacting to the rustle in a grass white were truth and rationality selected for well reality is a pretty powerful selection pressure the armadillo is either there or not as philip k dick put it reality is that which when you stop believing in it doesn't go away also I'm often told why do you bother to try to persuade people with evidence people never change their mind when faced with evidence and I don't think that is an accurate reading of the literature it it can be true under certain circumstances but again appealing to the work of Brendan Nyhan eye on evidence can change people's minds even on highly politicized issues such as whether there has been a a rise in global temperature among people on the right whether the surge in Iraq worked among members of the left if it is presented in graphs people really Diana showed really can change their minds I'm a third reason that people are we should stop saying that people are irrational across the board is it's many of the demonstrations of human irrationality brilliant demonstrations from Amos Tversky Daniel Kahn and others turn out to depend on how the information is presented to people and how rationality itself is defined I won't have time to get into it this afternoon but GERD gigerenzer has shown that many allusions and fallacies can be eliminated if the information is presented to people with the right framing so given that we do have the capacity to be rational why are we so often irrational and there are a number of specific reasons one of them is the herb Simon's hypothesis of bounded rationality we can't process an infinite amount of information instantaneously we're obviously adapted to an environment that though reality was a potent selection pressure we did not evolve with the kind of truth augmenting technologies that we have developed over the millennia and centuries such as written language quantitative datasets scientific method hyper specialization and expertise perhaps even more potently facts and logic can often compromise our self-presentation as effective and benevolent which social psychologists have shown to be powerful motives if you want to convey the impression that you are infallible and omniscient and thoroughly noble in all respects then truth and rationality can be kind of a nuisance because inevitably there will be facts that show that you are merely mortal and a lot of denigration of facts and logic are really just attempts to shore up the advertising campaign for that we all conduct for ourselves some of us more than others beliefs also can be signals of group loyalty especially improbable beliefs as John Tobias pointed out it doesn't if you try to affirm your common assumptions common ground with a group by saying that you believe that rocks fall down instead of up well anyone can say that rocks fall down rather than a nap on the other hand if you say that Jesus is three persons in one God as three persons and one person at the same time or that Hillary Clinton ran a child sex ring out of a Washington pizzeria then you have shown that you're willing to take risks at B in order to demonstrate your solidarity with your group this is I think an underestimated source of what we think of as irrationality in the public sphere especially when it comes to politicized scientific issues such as evolution and climate change the work of Daniel kahan which I assume many of you are familiar with shows that contrary to what most scientists think a denial of the fact of human evolution or of anthropogenic climate change is not correlated with scientific illiteracy that many people who believe in human-made climate change are out to lunch when it comes to the science they'll say things like you know helium is a greenhouse gas radon is a greenhouse gas global warming is caused by a hole in the ozone layer we can deal with it by cleaning up toxic waste dumps they just have a vague sense of you know green and natural and unnatural and the ability to predict belief in climate change from scientific literacy is pretty much zero what does predict it not quite perfectly but pretty close is simply political orientation the farther you are to the right the more you deny human-made about climate change ten points out that there is a perverse rationality of this expressive cognition that is holding beliefs to signal the coalition you belong to and that is unless you're a one of a small number of movers shakers or influencers your opinion on climate change really doesn't matter it's really not going to affect the climate you can think anything you want however your opinion on climate change or on evolution or on other issues it's going to matter a great deal in terms of how accepted you are in your social circle for someone in a modern University to deny that there has been human-made climate change conversely for someone in a more rural Midwestern community to affirm human-made climate change would be kind of social death you'd be someone who's just you know doesn't get it who someone is just too weird or or disloyal to be accepted in the group so it is perversely rational for people individually to hold beliefs that their group holds now the problem is that collectively it may not be so rational we have adopted a term by kind the tragedy of the belief Commons that what might be individually rational for everyone is collectively irrational because the climate itself the atmosphere doesn't care how accepted or not you are in your social group and you can see how this expressive cognition if locally rational can lead to nationwide irrationalities a related phenomenon is what economists sometimes call pluralistic ignorance or a spiral of silence namely when everyone firmly believes that everyone else believes something but no one may actually believe it a classic example being binge drinking in college fraternities well it turns out that very few fraternity boys actually believe that it's cool to drink until you puke and pass out but they are questioned individually they are all convinced that every other fraternity brother believes that even if none of them actually believe it Michael Macy Damon said centolla and I forget mr. Williams first name so this is especially true when you have enforcement when not only are there beliefs that never get challenged but people believe people in a group feel that not only must they affirm a belief but they must punish or condemn or denounce those who don't hold it often out of the equally mistaken belief that they will be denounced if they fail to denounce they see denunciation as a sign of loyalty to the group which can lead to a cascade of denunciation that can spiral into the what was called in the 19th century the extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds like which witch hunts and various bubbles and manias which can sometimes be deflated the bubble can be pricked by a little boy saying that the emperor has no clothes but you've got to be either a little boy a little boy or a very brave truth-teller in order to puncture this inflating bubble of preemptive denunciation now all the sounds kind of depressing but there are cognitive and social resources that can make us more rational that can bring out what we can think of as the rational angels of our nature and these have been explored by number of psychologist Jonathan Barron I dance bear bear and Hugo Messier Steve Sloman and Jason now fernback and others and they're based googley on a another saying from the the coiner of the term the better are angels of our nature a wise man who pointed out that you can fool some of the people all of the time and you can fool all of the people some of the time but you can't fool all of the people all of the time that is a principle that can allow us to be collectively more rational than any of us as individually and the psychologists who studied the promotion of rationality noted that there are various tricks and prods and nudges that can make people more rational one of them is simply calling on someone to articulate their position turns out that many people who have firm fervent opinions on say Obamacare when asked to explain what Obamacare actually is they they are dumbstruck I very actually know very little about it and simply asking people so what actually is NAFTA they realized that they don't know and that makes them a little more epistemic ly humble about their opinions having people defend a position against alternatives in front of disinterested bystanders having a small group reached some consensus after discussion among themselves there's another technique that was discovered long ago by rabbis which is that in a Talmudic dispute at the yeshiva after you have your you see the students arguing their different interpretations you then force them to switch sides and they have to make the strongest possible argument for the position that they were just arguing against there's a general rubric of what Jonathan Barron calls active open-mindedness the just the ethic that one ought always to reconsider one's opinions to listen to criticism knowledge of cognitive psychology itself to be aware of and discount the various cognitive biases and fallacies that psychologists have identified such as the availability heuristic the representative hereis heuristic confirmation bias gamblers fallacy and so on to be to have your feet held to the fire of empirical predictions and in a science the ideal of adversarial collaboration that two theorists who have opposite opinions on some issue get together and come up with some empirical test that a priori they both agree will settle the question so the conclusion up to this point it can be that humans can be collectively rational rational if they submit to norms and institutions that engage their rational faculties and sideline their rationality what are some examples well we've we have seen progress thanks to some of them a free press a court system better than trial by ordeal or by forced confession science when it works peer review for all it's all its Follies deliberative democracy checks and balances in a constitutional government as James Madison put it ambition must be made to counter ambition and maybe perhaps universities and I will I will get to that now is this just again an idealistic aspiration or can these rationality promoting institutions actually promote rationality well in many ways they are and I'm gonna say something that at first will sound shocking but but I'm going to spell out why I think it's true that there are many ways in which rationality is increasing compared to just say 20 or 25 years ago journalism for example is supplementing yo shoe leather shoe leather and opinion aiding with fact-checking organizations like PolitiFact did not exist 25 years ago and editors say that readers increasingly insist that that journalists and their editors check politicians statements against the factual record something you didn't know would not see several decades ago we've seen the rise of data journalism such as nate silver's fivethirtyeight.com where instead of citing the result of a single opinion poll which we know simply from sampling considerations can be highly misleading there are ways of aggregating many polls forecasting is no longer a matter of soothsaying or relying on the intuitions and gut feelings of experts but we have prediction markets which combine the principle of the wisdom of crowds with the principle of putting your money where your mouth is and forecasting tournaments of the kind that Phil tetlock one of John Hyde's co-authors has advanced that there there are ways of using Bayesian reasoning and active open mindedness to make quite good predictions about what will happen in the next year healthcare has seen the rise of evidence-based medicine this should have been and a tautology one would think but but in fact the practice of medicine descended from medieval barber surgeons and the idea that you should only do things to people for which there is evidence that they that their benefits outweigh their costs has been something that's only really been taking over the medical fashion rot recently in policing we're living in a we're meeting now in a city that saw a 75% reduction in its rate of homicide in just eight years the most astonishing reduction of crime in in history despite convictions by many people that violent crime would not disappear until we solve the problems of racist racism and inequality well I don't think we solve the problems of racism and inequality but New York has still managed to bring its murder rate down by three quarters in eight years they did it with largely with a system called CompStat which is basically crunching numbers on where the murders are occurring capitalizing on the fact that the distribution of violence is highly skewed follows a power law distribution so that a large proportion of the violence occurs in a tiny number of areas indeed a tiny number of perpetrators if you know what they are come down on them like a ton of bricks you can bring the murder rate down by a lot the world of philanthropy and volunteering has being shaped by the effective altruism movement which tries to distinguish measures that just cause a warm glow in donors from those that actually improve the lives of the intended beneficiaries psychotherapy is moving beyond the the couch of the notepad and starting to use feedback inform treatment where the coping and mental health of patients are tracked day by day to see which therapeutic interventions are actually helping them or hurting them government is starting too many governments are starting to use evidence-based policy that is not to base policy on their own convictions on what will work but actually measure if the streets are safer if if more kids are going to school and behavioral insights sometimes called the nudge movement after the book by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein which uses subtle manipulations to get people to do what's in their own interests Sports has seen the phenomenon of Moneyball we're smarter teams can be richard teams by processing data instead of relying on hot stove speculation online discussion has seen the rise of the rationality community sites such as les wrong and slate star codex which live by the credo of being aware of cognitive biases and trying to circumvent them data has been available on skills that are unprecedented thanks to open-source datasets and new methods of data graphics made available in sites like our world and data Gapminder and human progress for that matter even everyday fact-checking just settling barroom disputes has been revolutionized by the urban legend tracking site snopes.com and for that matter by wikipedia 80 times the size of Britannica and a number of studies shown about the same level of accuracy there's a cartoon that I saw a couple of years ago at the caption show two guys at a bar the caption was life before Google one of them says I wonder who played the skipper on Gilligan's Island and the other one says I guess we'll never know however all is not bright there are arenas in which rationality is decreasing the most conspicuous of which is electoral politics which is an arena is almost perversely set up to inhibit rationality voters act on issues that don't affect them personally but they vote as if rooting for sports teams there's no requirement that they inform themselves or defend their positions practical issues like energy and and healthcare are bundled together with symbolic hot buttons like euthanasia and the teaching of evolution these bundles are then strapped to regional ethnic or religious coalition's so encouraging group expressive cognition and the media by treating politics as in the proverbial horse racing encourage a kind of zero-sum competition rather than clarify occasion of issues the way I like to think about it is we're living in an era of rationality inequality that at the high end we've never been more rational but at the low end there's a lot of reason for concern there are institutions that bring out what I think of us the rational angels of our nature and others that that would be that's an interesting question particularly when it pertains to the institution that all of us are here to ponder namely universities now universities ought to be the premier institutions of rationality promotion that's kind of what they're in the business of doing one might think that's their essential mission and they are granted a number of perquisite Sande privileges that are in exchange for fulfilling the mission to to add to the stock of human knowledge and to transmit it there's government subsidization of entire universities when it comes to the state systems and to research and scholarship see when it comes even to private ones private ones have tax-exempt status there's the extraordinary institution of tenure which the idea is not to make it easy to become Deadwood but to allow certain kinds of professional intellectuals to express heterodox opinions without fear of being fired there's exorbitant and hyper inflating tuition we know the tuition is increased far faster than the rate of inflation for decades and to send a student to an institution like my own Harvard costs now close to three hundred thousand dollars the after house the most expensive thing that that people have to absorb and we we have given universities an enormous role in credentialing and gatekeeping in the world of business in the professions where a bachelor's degree is often a ticket or a prerequisite dubiously when it comes to the actual qualifications for the for the job studies that actually test how much knowledge people acquire after four years of university are not a pretty sight it is actually rather depressing and I say this as a university professor to see the results of exit surveys of what students actually know compared to what they came in with and cynics have suggested that really the reason that universities are allowed to credential people is that in effect the they are proof that someone has just the cognitive capacity to make it through university if they've acquired the degree and the self-discipline so I mean one way of thinking about it is that a modern University is a quarter-million-dollar IQ and marshmallow test now admittedly that's a cynical view and let's hope that that is that doesn't come down to that so our universities fulfilling their mandate to promote rationality well I'm not gonna go over the evidence I think many people in this room have evidence that at least leads us to question the extent to which they have been so let me start just by putting it into some perspective I have written two books that are largely driven by the observation of Franklin Pierce Adams that the best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory so I'm as someone who went to university in the 1970s one of my first one of my first experiences as a college freshman in 1972 was seeing the card table set up in the lobby of my college by the I forget whether it was the socialist democratic Marxist Leninist union or the Leninist Marxist democratic socialist union but a student was challenging them as they were handing handing out papers their newspaper adorned with Marx Lenin Stalin Mao and I'm I just don't remember yelling out fascists don't have the right to speak so this is not new orthodoxy intolerance repression of non leftist ideas are not an innovation of the Millennials or the jen-jen disease and there are many examples in the 70s and 80s of behavioral scientists including Arthur Jensen hans eysenck richard Herrnstein thomas Bouchard linda godfrid s'en being the platform disinvited heckled shouted down and in some cases physically assaulted just to give you a little souvenir from this era here's a poster from 1984 coming here Edward o Wilson who John noted in his introduction socio biologists and the profit of right-wing patriarchy then at the bottom of the poster says bring noisemakers so it is not new although I don't doubt that it has been getting worse so by by saying that that this occurred when when I was a student it doesn't mean that we should be I'm concerned or that nothing has changed so why do universities fall short of what one might think of as their essential mission of promoting rationality there are a number of hypotheses and I think probably all the more true to various extents John Hyde and Greg McKeown office suggested if I can sort of some summarized in four words helicopter boomers gave rise to snowflake Millennials they made Jen's ears yes and because they're the the Millennials themselves are parents now yes helicopter Millennials there may be there may be an increase in homophily people being with people who are like them and the resulting tribalism of belief in opinion within universities bradley Campbell and Jason Manning have come up with an interesting hypothesis I know that John as it's called attention to it called the culture of victimhood sociological development in which individuals esteem their their the regard in which they are held are no longer depend on their ability to retaliate against insults with violence the so called culture of Honor nor to their ability to control their and under go stand and exercise self-discipline as in the culture of dignity in the culture of victimhood status and prestige comes with a claim to have been victimized often ratified and enforced by a grievance bureaucracy in universities and expanding cadre of professionals who working in many of them I must say are really more from the boomer generation that work in cahoots with students to reinforce this claim to esteem and status by assuming victimhood status and we're seeing spirals of pre-emptive denunciation and pluralistic ignorance where it's really an open question how many students really believe in these in in the the outrage in the victimhood or whether they believe that everyone else believes it enforced by denunciation if they fail to denounce but I sometimes I don't this is a pure conjecture but I do sometimes get the feeling that the students feel intimidated and many of them in private would disavow some of the the dogma and a liberalism that the noisier ones promulgate indeed some of this is a paradoxical byproduct of progress in equality very few people actually are at least very few people in universities are genuinely racist sexist sexist homophobic or transphobic virtually everyone believes these are bad things that means that accusations of racism sexism homophobia transphobia are are can be weaponized there's no one who defends them that means that everyone is vulnerable to being accused and probably the only convincing way of defending yourself since there's virtually nothing that you can say if you're accused of being a racist you say well some of my best friends are you know I mean that's just not gonna work however if you are denouncing others then that removes any cloud of suspicion that you yourself are racist and that could lead to these spirals and denunciation so should we care should should should everyone care it's sometimes said that academic disputes are fierce because the stakes are so small but no one knows who said it first by the way I did they I should have added that actually to the rationality promoting tech technologies that you can actually thanks to quote investigator and a couple of other sites you don't have to in tribute every quote to Mark Twain Winston Churchill and Woody Allen you can actually track down and and be aware that most people didn't say the things that they said as Yogi Bear Yogi Berra may or may not have said but in fact the stakes are not so small when it comes to what's happening in the university one of them is simply whether universities are carrying out their fiduciary duty to sound education and research that they for which they are absorbing massive amounts of money and time and attention the other is their influence on the rest of society as Andrew Sullivan said in an article last year we are all on campus now and the various follies of political correctness and social justice warfare have spread beyond the ivory tower and may be found in tech in business in healthcare and elsewhere I'll mention two other hazards of the current climate of intolerance and irrationality on campus one of them is that universities are losing the battle to secure the credibility of their own research when it comes to issues such as climate change or gun violence there are many skeptics generally on the right you say well you say that that scientists climate scientists are virtually unanimous that humans have been causing perhaps dangerous levels of climate change but that comes out of the University everyone knows that universities are just echo chambers of dogma ideological policing why should I believe what comes out of a climate science department at a university given the Folies that we all read about the other danger of allowing universities to fester in intolerance and dogma and repression is that it can lead to perverse backlashes that in many ways the regressive left is an incubator of the alt-right and I've seen this happen including to my shock in some of my own former students that when they see certain opinions being just unexpressable when they see student speakers being deep platformed people being assaulted demonized a natural conclusion is you can't handle the truth that there must be hidden truths that university that are just too uncomfortable to be voiced or discussed in universities and as a result the the only option is simply to withdraw into an alternative universe of understanding and since that alternative universe can have the opposite of the current dogmas but without any of the qualifications nuances counter-evidence context can often metastasize in rather a destructive form so I'll just give you some examples it is not quite undiscussables difficult to acknowledge sex differences in many universities nonetheless we're all you know men or women or people who notice our contrast between those who defend to find themselves as men and women we we deal with them we can't help but notice that men and women are not indistinguishable what do people conclude who aren't willing to kind of drink the kool-aid that that men and women are indistinguishable well if it's taboo they can often lead to categorical understanding men are this way women are that way often quite insulting to women just listen to speech by Milo you na+ and there some other hair-raising examples perhaps just performance but perhaps a reaction to the denial of any sex difference on campus whereas if sex differences were discussed openly and in a proper intellectual context then they could be presented as they are in reality namely hugely overlapping statistical differences when the sex differences exist so that in any trait in which women are better than men there'll be many individual men that are better than the average woman and vice versa and differences that go in both directions it's not such a flattering picture to men if you look at the literature on sex differences racial differences since the sociologists all know that if you take any social variable and you subdivide it by ethnicity and race the means are never identical it has never are the the reasons in the vast majority of cases probably perhaps all of the cases are because of cultural differences but because as the story of Amy wax at UPenn makes clear discussing cultural explanations for racial differences is almost as radioactive as discussing biological differences and the result is that observers of the squelching of analysis of ethnic and racial differences looking at what happened to say amy wax for even bringing up the possibility of cultural differences will say well there must be a repression of big and negative racial biological differences between the races something that could have been preempted if the full range of hypotheses were examined and a third example is the fact that it's almost impossible to hear anything good about capitalism on an American campus even though again if you are not in that bubble there's plenty of evidence that capitalism brings more advantages and disadvantages which rather live in South Korea or North Korea would you rather live in Chile or Venezuela in the former East Germany or the former West Germany obvious facts but if saying something like that quite obvious is close to taboo then people who do look around the world and see what's happening will extricate themselves from that whole arena and come to conclusions that are far more extreme than a an open discussion would would lead to a form of anarcho-capitalism or plutocratic capitalism in which there can be no social safety net no regulations even the slightest provision of health care would be a slippery slope toward Mao and Stalin the reality being that there is no such thing as a developed capitalist country without extensive regulation and a social safety net so we're not even talking about reality when we talk about a unfettered untrammeled total free-market capitalism if that fact were better known that capitalism both brings advantages and in reality always is accompanied by regulation and a social safety net we probably have more intelligent discussions on all sides so to summarize suggest that we we must safeguard the truth and rationality promoting mission of universities it's feasible because we are not living in a post truth era and humans are not always irrational the rational angels of our nature must be encouraged by truth promoting norms and institutions many are succeeding despite perhaps growing rationality inequality universities may be falling short of their rationality promoting mission this mission nonetheless matters for society to enjoy the benefits of rationality and return for the perquisites and grants to universities to secure the credibility of university based research on vital issues and to prevent backlashes of irrationality thank you Thanks hi everybody I'm Nick Gillespie I'm added or Largent reason thank you for coming out and I want to thank Deb and John for a fantastic conference so let's give them around the point yeah well you know it gets around we truth was you know it seemed a little bit arch reason it's good and I want to also thank Steve as as John made clear as a Canadian and it's kind of he's one of those immigrants who's doing a job that Americans want which I think there's defending rationality and enlightenment values so thank you for you almost almost your spiritual Mexican in that so I want to ask a start off and I'll ask a couple of questions that would turn it over to you guys but what is the source of post truth or truth enos in the university because you know we're talking this is an organization that's about the Academy and there's a lot of reasons for you know things happening outside but where what is the you know kind of the wellspring of this in the university well I mentioned a number of hypotheses and I really does I can't claim to know the answer but there's the one that John and Greg have have noticed they may be generational differences in students the I I suspect that the the the success of that the drive for for equality and inclusion the fact that very few people really are racists especially in universities their data that backed this up in fact fewer and fewer people are racist in the country as a whole then this is bizarrely this is often considered a a reactionary thing to say but the not only our overt racist opinions in pretty steady decline that is the number of people who will say either blacks and whites go to six separate schools or if a black family moved in next door I would move out or pejorative opinions like the reason for inequality is that that blacks are less intelligent or less hard-working those have been going down down and down some of them are now in the range of crank opinion group like but also more subtle measures of implicit racism I reported an Enlightenment now with the help of Seth Stevens Davidowitz the result of google searches that people do in private how many people search for racist jokes I don't find them funny that's been going way down and my colleague mahzarin banaji looking at two decades of her own research on implicit bias from the implicit association test has shown that even unconscious bias has gone down so we all agree racism is bad and sexism and so on but that does provide a kind of an incentive for competitive status seeking or for who has the brighter halo by using it as a effective weapon of mass destruction accusations ones let me be more forceful I guess or direct what is the role and John made a joke about deconstruction and gobbledygook yesterday one of the speakers said I will tell you I got my literature PhD at the high-water mark of theory and I consider myself a post modernist capital-t theory yes that's right but is that is that part of the problem the the rise throughout the 70s 60s and 70s and into the 80s and 90s of a set of theories or a set of ideas that said that truth is absolutely socially constructed and that it reflects power I mean how important is that to the discussion that we're having there and then also saying then all viewpoints are essentially equally false and everything becomes a kind of will to power yes I might happen so how is that or did Kellyanne Conway take too many courses and French literary buddy Sarah Sarah Huckabee Sanders yeah most prominent exponent of Foucault and Lacan yeah literally literally unlike or Donald Trump for that matter yes who really does if you change the wording it really could sound like a lot of post modernist I don't think that it's there was a direct chain of influence but what it has done is left universities defenseless in counteracting well what is it is it coming within the universe I mean one of the arguments about political correctness when it started becoming the thing it was that it was something that the right wing imposed that you know they could it was almost like they were saying that people in the Universities were acting like witches it was it was something kind of forced on the university but isn't it true I mean that it's it's not the people who are questioning truth at Harvard are in Harvard departments and they're in certain types of disciplines and things like that so I mean are they the ones who are saying no the university is not a place for truth because truth doesn't exist it's actually a way of you know some of them are and I say this from the first-person experience that in fact my statement of the mission at the universities is not actually stated as the mission of the universities by the universities it's actually very hard to pin down administrators or professors to make statements along the lines that I just did so I actually was being somewhat presumptuous I was part of a curriculum review at Harvard about 15 years ago when and and for bizarre reasons the whole the world pays a lot of attention to Harvard and so the curriculum reform at Harvard got a lot of press outside the walls and so to start off is well what's the point of education and I love my colleagues to say things like well I see college education is as Soulcraft as building yourself and frankly I don't know how to build itself I don't know how to develop Soulcraft so leave me thank good thank goodness I have tenure because I can't say that and I won't get fired I think I do know how to teach linguistics and cognitive science and but so it is true the universities haven't despite what I the words that I think I put into my colleagues mouths I have not really dedicated themselves to that probably partly because of the influence of I think of post modernist thinking and is the motto of Harvard is Veritas right it is indeed something about truth when we fight but that that's actually is I mean so maybe you we if we're interested in the vision of the university that Steve but for which I I know I am is that that's actually an argument that needs to be one that the University is a place of production of truthful knowledge because a lot of people would say no it's not that it's something else do you find it within the university campus setting is it is it professors or is it students who are the foam enters of you know it turn away from rational discourse away from truth or approaching objective truth you know I think among professors well obviously more acquaintance with it's I think there is some some pluralistic ignorance that I think in private many professors will say things that are completely by our lengths reasonable that is acknowledging the value of objective objectivity truth knowledge all that stuff but then when it comes to public arenas they're all afraid to do it because they're all afraid though it'll get they won't be able to defend it if for forced to among students you know I think that the there are again I I'm hesitant to say without a good sampling of a privately stated opinions of students and hesitant to generalize from my own experience so I don't know what kind of students gravitate to me that come to my office hours in general the I don't find among the students that I speak to in dinners and office hours have these intolerant beliefs but I may I may be getting a buy a sample or maybe it's a buy a sample that are making the headlines I don't know which of those is right what do you think is the role and Harvard and many kind of research one schools or flagship state schools are in in different situations than many other universities where there's a sense if you talk to the professor yet I mean tenure tenured lines are being shut down you know or in decline compared to where they were a few years ago how much of this is or is considerably that the the resources are dwindling so the stakes get higher actually and then people are fighting not for the future that they might inhabit but they just want to be able to be the last ones who get to turn the lights off at the university yeah and it wouldn't I don't think would explain the what's coming up with students I suspect it institutionally a big factor maybe the the massive expansion of the student life bureaucracy of the the deans at various levels and we just know from academic economics that they are absorbing a larger and larger proportion of the university resources they're at least partly responsible for the hyperinflation of tuition it is in their interests to foment as much discontent and outrage as possible and because universities have got a futile istic in the sense that there are a lot of sort of semi-autonomous fiefs that aren't really responsible to anyone so the people at the the top of the academic was chain of command for whom the buck stops that the president's the Provost's often are just our titular heads of a vast organization that have a number of self-replicating bodies the the the title nine bureaucracy the formative action Duroc recei the human subjects protection bureaucracy where they have their own culture that spreads beyond the walls of any particular institutions they're hired from similar positions at other universities it's very it's convenient for a top-level administrator like a provost or a Dean to hire someone and just give them responsibilities for running around a specter the university takes them it takes out of their hair and it's a thankless job there's a lot of pain and nuisance and if you could just outsource it to some professional then it makes your life as a Provost easier and no one criticizes you for having a bureaucracy that often runs counter to the mission of a university so I think there's something more distributed in the structure a university in the chain of command it's not we don't have the equivalent of the military being under civilian control right do you final question and then we'll have time for some questions from the audience yes okay yes so what you know what is a model of in some of the stuff you were talking about what what is a model that faculty can do to show how to settle disputes in a rational kind of way I mean is and as part of the problem here that in the past and kind of not in the distant past necessarily either people who spoke with about truth with a capital T oftentimes were very inflexible or they were later revealed to be wrong or to be kind of fakers or you mentioned Hans IDEs Isaac who is just the fascinating character in this where not only did he have a lot of odd beliefs and he started pushing for parapsychology and astrology at the end of his life but then it was revealed that he took he was very outspoken that smoking does not cause cancer and it turned out he was paid by tobacco companies as well how much of the epistemological humility that we want out of students are out of faculty or out of society needs to be modeled better within the university you know absolutely and the the the lessons of the cognitive psychology of the irrational T from her scheming I'm not widely penetrated even the University they're starting to because of books like Thinking Fast and Slow and Dan Ariely is predictably irrational and they picked up by colonists like like that David Brooks and others but still a lot of I think a lot of intellectuals are in many fields put too much stock in their own sense of personal rectitude and fallibilities based on just sheer area edition and we know that in addition among other things is not a reliable cue to do right well this is my pitch for for post-modernism I use the Jean Francois leotards short definition which is incredulity toward meta-narratives it doesn't mean they don't exist it doesn't mean we don't use them and need them but we are always kicking the tires on the car in the model well that's a good thing let's let's open it up for some questions we have a microphone that's rotating around okay so how about the gentleman over there in the shadows and thank you for coming Alex Goodwin I work at MIT I wanted to ask how can we lower the stakes for confronting the guy turned up confronting pluralistic ignorance and if not if there's no way to lower the stakes on confronting that as in like what the repercussions for confronting it how do we stop it and the destructive effects well the the study that I cited by Michael may see in this collaborators de Monsanto 'la show that if there are open channels of communication if there aren't self-contained communities where the interactions are tightly knit but there are long-distance connections so the people from outsider community are their opinions can be sampled rather than just the people you rub shoulders with if there is more openness and more little boys pointing out the the state of address of the emperor those are ways of deflating these these bubbles but another big factor this goes also to something that Nick was asking I think the huge danger in combating the intolerance the repression and so on is to make it seem like it's a right-wing issue because that will only stoke it that if you're a respectable member of the left or even er than the non right then if you will if you read react or recoil from a movement that you see as aligned with you know ultimately Donald Trump or the alt-right then that will just push people even farther along become make them even more entrenched and resistant so one just as with climate change the worst thing that happened to that movement was when it became a left-wing issue when some people did it to Al Gore producing an inconvenient truth being a Democratic presidential candidate or a former vice president he kind of stamped it with with a left wing aroma leading to greater polarization if that happens to free speech heterodoxy open inquiry then it's gonna get worse over here front row sir wait for the microphone please on the election and you said that it didn't about the influence of it in the next election mMmmm I'm not aware of that but maybe afterwards you know tell you about so this was based on work of Brendan Nyhan it was a paper not a book well I'm worried about it just because whenever you have the proliferation of disinformation it can can't be a good thing at best it can be ineffective but at worst it can be purchase so yeah III would worry about it I think we'll obviously the social media companies and and conventional news organizations ought to combat it's not that it's innocuous but it's not as if we should surrender to the idea that it's proliferating so much that the battle is lost the by the way and it isn't knowing points out that it isn't that in general it's not so easy to shift people's political opinions with with messages even campaign ads don't make a big difference for all the money that gets lavished on them but there are some things that do have a provable effect such as cable news networks so Fox News for example really does move the needle it does push people to the right in a way that that fake news does not but anyway yes I am I think we should be concerned sir up front I'm sorry to make the mic holders get a workout here Steve you said that it was an interest is it was in the interest of bureaucracies - or the bureaucracies to foment disagreement maybe that was obvious - but it wasn't exactly I think I see what you mean but can you expand on that well how is it in their interests to foment discord well it proves they need four more bureaucrats and in fact the comfortable reply of any kind of chain of command university administrator by which I mean Dean's Provost's presidents whenever there's trouble they may hire more staff if there's an accusation of racism if there's a student who is questioned by a police officer and the student is african-american it makes the papers then the president hires more diversity officers so when things are blown out then it tends to expand the they were the range of these of these bureaucrats and each one of them not only gets a salary but they also get a staff they have administrative assistants they have higher level assistants so this can increase the burden and bloat in the university and because they often don't don't really report to someone who's has the fiduciary duty to advance the truth enhancing mission of a university but act pretty much autonomously and our convenient ways of deflecting the controversies there offer presidents in a safe passage across the minefield of academic life just hire more diversity officers or then there's a unstoppable dynamic within the structure of a university something that there probably are people in organizational behavior and the who study the dynamics of organizations who might be able to shed light on what what I see is something of a pathology in the organization the university so can a faculty do stuff about it so this is an interesting question the faculty the in general not directly in that it isn't the the faculty don't choose the the Dean or the the president they certainly don't choose say the director of admissions or the the various no title nine and diversity and and other bureaucracies they can make a nuisance of themselves you know it can make it they can make a five second force presidents to resign if they if the president loses the confidence in the faculty depending it actually on how the trustees or the governor's or the corporation of the university reacts to them but it's often quite opaque what the chain of command is in the university and I know this just from my own experience in the last few days when I wrote to a number of my colleagues at Harvard about the case of Kyle Kossuth the many of you probably read about him being the young man who was a survivor of the Parkland High School shooting and then became a conservative advocate of gun rights but also of school safety not involving gun control very intelligent and mature man who was accepted to Harvard then when he was it was outed that he had contributed to kind of a chatroom like document several years ago in which he had made some use of some racist language he was his acceptance was withdrawn from from Harvard and I wrote to the president I wrote to the Dean of the Harvard College wrote to the director admissions and I kind of got a bit of a runaround as to who actually could defend this because the president said well this is up to the Director of Admissions I have a policy not commenting on a director of admissions as well I have a policy of not commenting on individual cases so who actually would would actually defend this decision and there was no one that could be identical and maybe he should just show up what let's have one more question we have time for one more please thank you you spoke to why universities should care about rationality what kind of case do you make to students for why they should care about rationality especially in a climate where it's not politically or socially rewarded yes well the same case I mean I believe that my policy is always to treat students as as peers to make the same argument that I do to my colleagues as I do to students so I mean I would like to think that the kind of considerations come up in this discussion would be as pertinent and pertinent and as intelligently received by students as by by anyone else anyone else do you do you think part of the problem here and I realize you know what we talk about the university of the academy and you know there's something like 4,400 it's like for year two or for you two and four-year schools very different but it is part of this that the university is now focused so much on education and some people say it's you know no it's it you know we've taken scholarship too far but it seems to me over the past 20 or 30 years the student experience is foregrounded so much and then if you take it with John and Greg's work you know we just want to keep the you know the middle school or the nursery school element of their childhood alive for four more years and that we should be focusing more on the university as a place that produces truth you know provisional truth for sure but and that that's that's really what's driving a lot of this it's funny because the argument could go both ways because we also have seen arguments that students get neglected that universities just rewards star researchers that can be bumbling teachers in the classroom although that by the way is a weird linkage to because it's you know I knew a lot of bad researchers who were like well I'm a good teacher and it wasn't really that there were a good teacher it's just they sucked at research so it's like that'd be good and if you're so busy doing research you can't be a good teacher but my best teachers with as an undergrad Cranston were inevitably people who are really interested in doing good research no I think that is true and I do believe in the particular bundling of education and research that we see in the American University I think certainly for all the criticism that I and many people in school level at American University it is on the whole a fantastically successful institution and one that the envy of many other countries and I think the the bundling of teaching and research is what is one of them but for one thing why are we developing all this knowledge why we're doing all this research you know in a few decades we're gonna be dead the whole value is there it gets it's perpetuated and also we all know any any researcher knows that you have an undergraduate as one of your collaborators and though no problems they'll suggest hypotheses though we've just you know smart people they know less but they know they're smart and that kind of diversity of generations diversity of experience I'm not I'm sure I'm not the only professor who knows a lot of tech from students there's a lot of statistics from from from my students so and what many students identify is the most valuable part of their education is working with with professors on on research so I think it is a successful model but it is also true that a lot of the student experience is not necessarily oriented toward that part of the the portfolio mainly of classes and lab work but of the extracurriculars which to my shock are enormous even at a at top echelon brand name universities like Harvard I find their be with the encouragement of the administration education is just one of many activities at this luxury resort it's like they've got you know there's there's they just like when you go to some little resort there's the you know this thing the sailing you know there's the buffet table and there's the you know the entertainment the classes are one perk of being the University and for many students not not the chief one it's like well we will leave it there thank you so much [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Heterodox Academy

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Keywords: heterodox academy, steven pinker, higher education

Id: zzK3jS209GI

Length: 79min 47sec (4787 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 01 2019