Steven Pinker Meets Richard Dawkins | On Reason and Rationality
What this covers
Two of the world’s most renowned scientists join us to explore the nature of reason and rationality in the age of fake news and conspiracy theories.
In the twenty-first century, humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding – and at the same time appears to be losing its mind. How can a species that discovered vaccines for Covid-19 in less than a year produce so much fake news, quack cures and conspiracy theorising?
From The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker to The Blank Slate and Enlightenment Now, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker have dedicated their lives to sharing their insights into what science and philosophy can tell us about human nature and the meaning and mystery of life.
Now they join us to debunk the cynical cliché that humans are an irrational species. Together, Richard and Steven will explore the powerful tools of reasoning that we have built up over millennia – and consider how rationality can lead to better choices in our lives and in the public sphere.
It’s an unmissable chance to hear from two of the most iconoclastic and distinguished thinkers of our time.
Steven Pinker is an experimental cognitive scientist. Currently Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has won many prizes for his research, teaching, and his eleven books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and Enlightenment Now. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Humanist of the Year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates, one of Foreign Policy’s ‘World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals’ and Time’s ‘100 Most Influential People in the World Today’.
Richard Dawkins is author of The Selfish Gene, voted The Royal Society’s Most Inspiring Science Book of All Time, and also the bestsellers The Blind Watchmaker, The Ancestor’s Tale, The God Delusion, and two volumes of autobiography, An Appetite for Wonder and Brief Candle in the Dark. He is a Fellow of New College, Oxford and both the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Literature. In 2013, Dawkins was voted the world’s top thinker in Prospect magazine’s poll of 10,000 readers from over 100 countries.
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Pinker argues that individual humans are chronically subject to cognitive biases and motivated reasoning, but institutions with mechanisms for open debate, empirical validation, and peer review can aggregate human irrationality into collective rationality, allowing societies to discover truth and solve problems despite our flawed minds.
- My-side bias and motivated reasoning are nearly universal and powerful enough to override numeracy and critical thinking skills when beliefs align with political identity
- Institutions like science, law, and governance can deploy adversarial processes and freedom of speech to expose fallacies that individuals cannot see in their own reasoning
- Protecting credible truth-establishing institutions and avoiding politicization of expertise is essential, as politicized institutions lose credibility and enable society-wide irrationality
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My-side bias—the tendency to believe claims that are politically congenial rather than what is supported by evidence—is one of the most robust of approximately 200 documented cognitive fallacies, and unlike most other fallacies, high intelligence and numeracy provide no protection against it.
“it is I I sadly the answer is more or less yes I don't want to say every last one of us but um is a very it's one of the perhaps the most robust of the 200 or so fallacies that cognitive psychologists and behavioral economists have documented this is according to an excellent book by Keith stanovich called the bias that divides Us in which he showed that it's equally powerful among left-wingers and right-wingers and uh High Intelligence is no protection unlike most of the other fallacies”
Tinbergen's framework for explaining behavior requires characterizing it at multiple levels: its neurophysiological basis, its development in the organism, its evolutionary history (phylogeny), and its adaptive function—just as explaining any complex object requires understanding what it was designed to do.
“here I appeal to a system by I believe your Mentor Nico tinbergen yes that to explain any Behaviour you have to characterize it at several levels it's neurophysiological basis it's development in the organism it's phylogeny over the course of evolutionary history and its adaptive function just as with any complex object the first question you ask is what is it for what what was it designed to do”
Political equality as a moral commitment does not depend on humans being blank slates or biological clones; it depends on treating people as individuals and not prejudging them by statistics of their race, sex, or ethnicity, which is compatible with acknowledging innate biological differences between individuals.
“I do endorse political equality uh for for All Humans but it doesn't depend on our being blank slates or clones it just depends on the moral commitment that people ought to be treated as individuals and not prejudged by the statistics of their their race or sex or ethnicity”
Human nature is complicated with many different parts, so even if humans have unsavory urges and impulses, other components of human nature—including self-control, empathy, social norms, and reason—can push back against them, allowing for social improvement without requiring a blank slate.
“Human Nature by pretty much any account is complicated there are lots of different parts to it and even if we have some unsavory urges or impulses we also have there are other parts of human nature that can push back against them we have self-control we don't if there's food on the table we don't just immediately stuff our mouths but we wait till the appropriate moment that's why we have these big outsized frontal lobes we have empathy so that we don't just exploit everyone at will we have norms rule asset rules that we feel that respectable people just don't do we have cognitive processes reason where we can set up problems like violence or War try to figure out institutions that can reduce them”
Internet and social media expose people to more diversity of viewpoints than the pre-internet era when newspapers were one-sided, yet the my-side bias persists—suggesting that mere exposure to opposing views is insufficient to overcome motivated reasoning.
“on the internet you're more likely to be exposed to both mainstream and opposing viewpoints than in the old days when a a hunk of paper was delivered to your doorstep and you could subscribe either to the telegraph or to the guardian and never see the other one now either one is a click away and in fact empirically it turns out people are exposed to they actually are exposed to a diversity of opinion it's not enough to get them to adopt the mindset of rationalia of let's see where the evidence goes the my side bias still keeps people wedded to Bear convictions”
In a controlled study on gun control efficacy, mathematically competent liberals and conservatives who saw data suggesting the policy didn't work failed to spot the correct interpretation at rates comparable to innumerate subjects, whereas they correctly identified seductive but wrong answers that supported their preferred position.
“when it came to the skin cream not surprisingly people who were highly who were familiar with numbers uh we're more likely to draw the correct conclusion that if they scaled the absolute numbers by the by the the base rate uh people who are less numerate uh kind of fell for it and didn't matter whether they were on the left or on the right but when you switch it to the efficacy of gun control now the uh and you switch the column headings so the same numbers for half the subject show that it's supported gun control that it showed it was effective for the other half it showed that it was uh if anything it seemed to increase crime now the um the uh innumerate people uh once again were fell for the bigger numbers in all cases the numerous people for the um the difficult case they were able to spot the um the effect but for the easy case they or the sorry I said that wrong when it's supported if they were on the left and they were highly numerate they correctly spotted the um seductive wrong answer if it went against the favored liberal position namely if it showed that gun control worked they were not seduced by the misleading numbers if it showed that gun control did not work they were no better than the uh the innumerate people”
Denial of scientific consensus on evolution and climate change is not primarily a matter of scientific literacy; even people who fully understand the science on both sides often accept or reject the consensus based on political ideology rather than evidence comprehension.
“denial of the scientific consensus in on illusion or climate change has nothing to do with scientific literacy despite your best efforts and my best efforts and the best efforts of many to enhance the understanding of science the Emeritus chair of the of the for the public understanding of Science and at Oxford something that is highly desirable but public understanding of Silence won't sadly get more people to believe in evolution or anthropogenic climate change because tests of public understanding of science so that the deniers know as much science as the acceptors”
While children are not blank slates, they do not know specific empirical beliefs or policies, which must be acquired through schooling, ambient culture, and environmental inputs including pubs, coffee houses, television, and internet.
“it's certainly true that they don't know particular policies to say nothing of empirical beliefs like as human activity warming the planet So that obviously has to be acquired and it is schooling matters ambient culture matters what you just what you hear in you know in in pubs and bars and coffee houses what you see on on television or on the Internet”
Rationality is fundamentally the use of knowledge to attain a goal; because rational means can be applied to destructive ends, rationality itself cannot determine what goals governments should pursue, yet goals can still be evaluated for consistency with other goals a society claims to hold.
“I say it's the the use of knowledge to attain a goal and going back to David Hume he pointed out that uh the that rationality itself can't tell you what that goal must be so if you apply rational means to a um a destructive end you're behaving in one sense rationally but it may not be commendable it may not be admirable”
One solution to science denial is to stop branding scientific consensus as politically left-wing; institutions should depoliticize themselves, be transparent about their reasoning, and ensure people across the political spectrum publicly endorse findings to establish political neutrality.
“what it means is how do we get people to accept a scientific consensus and that is stop branding it as left-wing talking point get people on the right who endorse it or establish the political neutrality the political Bona fides of the scientific societies the public health agencies”
The medical advice 'When you hear hoof beats, think horses not zebras' pushes back against base rate neglect, where medical students who have studied exotic diseases tend to ignore the base rate of common diseases when diagnosing symptoms.
“the advice given to medical students again a uh pushing back at the base rate neglect economy documented economy and trisky if you hear hoof beats outside a window don't expect to see a zebra and this is pushing back against the bad habit of medical students having read about all these exotic diseases to reason from the symptom to the disease forgetting about the base rate”
Blackstone's ratio—'Better 10 guilty men be acquitted than one innocent man be convicted'—represents a decision criterion for courts that balances the relative costs of false convictions versus false acquittals, based on the moral values society assigns to these errors.
“and then there's some there's some mathematics behind it not not that complicated but where it does where it already is recognized is in the legal Arena not quantitatively where when we say better one guilty uh man be sorry better ten of the guilty be acquitted than one innocent be convicted blackstone's ratio that is an example of setting a Criterion a threshold a decision cut off based on not on your degree of uh Credence in the in the um in the guilt”
Empiricists in the philosophical sense (like Francis Bacon, John Locke, David Hume) believed knowledge must be rooted in observation of the world, while rationalists (like Spinoza, Descartes, Leibniz) believed it could be derived from reason and first principles, but in cognitive science and linguistics these terms have a different meaning related to the blank slate hypothesis.
“this it goes back to the uh Age of Reason and the Enlightenment and this is a kind of introductory philosophy dichotomy or at least a way of organizing the philosophers it has a slightly different meaning in my own field of cognitive science and cognitive psychology and Linguistics there if you're an empiricist you believe in the blank slate if you're a rationalist you believe the mind comes equipped with lots of uh innate capabilities but I think in the philosophical sense it referred to philosophers who wanted to root an understanding of reality in in reason and logic and first principles what we might pejoratively call from the armchair and uh in empiricist would mean that you have to go out into the world and look so you uh uh Francis Bacon John Locke David Hume um David Hartley Bishop Barkley were all called empiricists uh the classic uh rationalists were Spinoza Descartes and uh leibniz”
David Hume pointed out that rationality cannot tell you what your goals should be; the appeal to extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims (per Carl Sagan) is a practical application of Bayesian reasoning to the case of reported miracles, where prior improbability is so high that testimony alone is unlikely to overcome it.
“it can be made intuitive and it we actually have versions of it in our Collective folklore in for example uh Carl Sagan's motto extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence itself a pithy uh distillation of a point made by Hume namely when someone the hume's example is if someone reports having witnessed a miracle um should you believe it now that that would be a high second term in base theorem”
Bayes' theorem allows people to calibrate their degree of credence in a hypothesis by translating beliefs into probabilities between 0 (certain it's false) and 1 (certain it's true) and applying the mathematics of conditional probability to update beliefs based on evidence.
“you can as long as you don't either believe something or reject it but you have degrees of confidence degrees of con of uh Credence in an idea you can conceive of those degrees of confidence as probabilities between zero you're positive that it's false one you're positive that it's true 0.5 you could go either way and so on now as soon as you take that leap that you translate your degree of belief of a hypothesis into a number then the mathematics of probability apply”
Signal detection theory or statistical decision theory addresses the problem of how to make decisions under uncertainty by setting a probability threshold for action based on the relative costs and benefits of false alarms versus misses, not merely on degree of credence.
“signal detection Theory takes the next step and says given that we're uncertain about almost and everything you know maybe we're 90 certain maybe we're 10 certain uh but we're virtually never 100 certain or zero percent certain what do you do about it if you have to make a decision so in the case of say a cancer diagnosis do you operate or not”
The existence of nuclear weapons represents a reversal of 'The Long Peace'—a 77-year period after World War II with reduction in interstate war and war deaths—and Putin's recent threats demonstrate that nuclear weapons are not merely hypothetical deterrents but could be used.
“well it's the the it does show that um it is a reversal of the process called the called The Long piece the fact that for 77 years after World War II there was a well there's an absence of Interstate war in Europe there was a reduction in Interstate War across the globe and reduction in the number of deaths in in war so far it hasn't um reversed it in the sense of sending the curves back up to where they used to be say in the 1960s when the war in Vietnam was raging but it was certainly a shattering of a precedent and the most people most nations are appalled”
Babies are not blank slates; from infancy, they possess innate ways of organizing the world, including concepts of objects and causation, and they lock onto faces and acquire sound patterns of their native language from birth.
“certainly many of my colleagues in in developmental cognitive science would dispute the claim that babies are blank slates and my colleague Elizabeth skelke has a brilliant scientist using ingenious methods has shown that babies from as young as you can test them in some cases newborns probably have uh ways of organizing the world like the concept of object the concept of causation newborns lock onto faces they have already um acquired the sound pattern of their language”
Sociologist Keith Stanovich's book 'The Bias That Divides Us' demonstrates that my-side bias is equally powerful among left-wingers and right-wingers, making it a bipartisan cognitive phenomenon rather than a partisan political strategy.
“according to an excellent book by Keith stanovich called the bias that divides Us in which he showed that it's equally powerful among left-wingers and right-wingers and uh High Intelligence is no protection”
In the Obama Administration's 'Dear Colleague' letter on campus sexual assault, bureaucrats changed the standard of proof from 'beyond a reasonable doubt' to 'preponderance of evidence' (50% plus a feather) without considering signal detection theory, which shows that lowering the threshold necessarily increases both false convictions and true convictions.
“there has been a raging debate over a a memo issued by the Obama Administration called the dear colleague letter uh pertaining to accusations of sexual assault on campus overturning the Beyond A Reasonable Doubt standard to preponderance of evidence sometimes called 50 plus a feather now uh the and I think the it wasn't Obama himself but the bureaucrats of the administration who changed that rule um did not think through the signal detection analysis or statistical decision analysis all they thought of was damn it we've got to punish more people who are guilty of sexual assault what didn't seem to occur to them is if all you do is you change the standard of proof you will punish more uh guilty men you'll also punish more innocent men that is unavoidable it's just a fact of mathematics”
Nonsense proliferates in dictatorships and autocracies that suppress freedom of speech because insulating autocrats from criticism disables the social mechanisms—adversarial challenge, peer review, open debate—that make societies more rational than their individual members.
“conversely what allows uh nonsense to proliferate it's precisely the Arenas in which there isn't a evaluation of ideas in dictatorships which suppress freedom of speech then you can have the autocrats with lunatic ideas like like Putin like like now perhaps like even Xi Jinping in today's China if you insulate yourself from criticism you've disabled the social mechanism that can make us more rational despite how our self-serving biases”
Criminal punishment that exceeds what is necessary as a deterrent may be immoral; if the goal of punishment is to reduce wrongdoing through incentive structures, punishing beyond effective deterrence wastes suffering without additional benefit.
“the degree of criminal punishment that we it might exceed what is effective as a deterrent and if the goal of criminal punishment is to reduce the uh amount of crime by setting up incentives that will inhibit people from committing them we may uh punish people above and beyond or in different ways than than uh than what would reduce the the amount of wrongdoing”
Evolutionary psychology generates intense hostility because many intellectuals fear that acknowledging innate human nature—shaped by evolution—contradicts the politically desirable blank slate hypothesis, which they believe is the ultimate guarantor of equality between groups.
“I got it better it better but it had better and here I appeal to a system by I believe your Mentor Nico tinbergen yes that to explain any Behaviour you have to characterize it at several levels it's neurophysiological basis it's development in the organism it's phylogeny over the course of evolutionary history and its adaptive function”
It is a failure of rationality to judge people from past centuries by the moral standards of today while ignoring the prevailing norms of their own historical period, particularly for practices like slavery that were nearly universal at the time.
“it is a a particular uh failure of rationality which is that um in other times another historical periods uh uh all Mortal humans at least in part go with the prevailing Norms that uh it wasn't that only that bad people kept slaves around stocks and companies that traded slaves kind of everyone did it and it would take some kind of super uh human Angelic moral sense to actually defy everything you know everyone you know uh and that it's we we should ought to judge people by what they uh believed and held relative to um the prevailing Norms of the day not that we should make the moral judgments themselves uh because slavery was immoral whether it was questioned or not”
One can argue that different goals are irrational or inconsistent if they conflict with other goals that a person explicitly endorses; for example, if Putin claims to value his own survival, it is inconsistent for him to deny that same right to others.
“I think Hume can be taken too far I do think we can discuss the advisability of different goals in terms of how consistent they are with other goals that we have and in particular goals that we claim for ourselves like presumably Putin would rather be alive and dead and that that means that it you can say that it is irrational or at least inconsistent if you were to deny that very right to others which he claims for himself”
The environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA) for understanding human behavior does not necessarily need to be the Pleistocene or stone age; mismatch hypotheses can be explained by any earlier environment, such as any time before synthetic sugar became ubiquitous or before reliable contraception was invented.
“I actually think it's somewhat gratuitous because so many of the mismatches that motivate evolutionary explanations for example to take a not so controversial example why we have a sweet tooth why do we consume more salt and fat than is good for us a common answer and it's an evolutionary answer is that in the world in which we evolved there weren't mass quantities of affordable ubiquitous Suites the danger rather was insufficient calories we evolved the Sweet Tooth in our current environment in which sweet foods are abundant we consumed too much of it it used to be the world that limited our supply now the world no longer limits our supply notice that you don't need um the Stone Age you don't need the pleister scene you don't need hunter-gatherers for that explanation because mass production of foods with synthetic sugar is only maybe a hundred years old”
Base rate neglect—failing to account for the prior probability of an event when interpreting new evidence—is a fundamental human fallacy; a woman with a 1% prior probability of breast cancer who tests positive with a 90% sensitivity test and 9% false positive rate has only a 9% posterior probability of actually having the disease, not 90% as most people estimate.
“suppose that the probability that a woman has breast cancer is one percent there is a test for breast cancer and if a woman does have the disease then the test results is positive ninety percent of the time but like many medical tests there are some false positives and there is a the false positive rate is 0.9 uh a woman tests positive what are the chances that she has the disease okay so there's a uh 0.01 chance that uh any randomly selected woman has that has the disease a 0.9 chance that if she does have the disease the test herself comes out positive a 0.09 chance that if she doesn't have the disease the test comes out positive she tests positive what are the chances that she has the the cancer you can part of that for a minute the most popular answer is 90 including among a sample of doctors the correct answer according to Bay's theorem is nine percent”
Natural selection is the only explanation that can account for the appearance of design in nature without requiring an intelligent designer; it shows how complex, apparently engineered systems can arise through non-conscious processes, which is Dawkins' contribution to understanding evolution.
“and actually I I have to credit you with this argument and the blind watchmaker you uh noted that the what natural selection can explain and nothing else can explain is how signs of design the illusion of engineering can appear in the natural world”
Male sexual indiscriminacy and risk-taking that increased reproductive success in ancestral environments are no longer adaptive in the modern context of reliable contraception, in vitro fertilization, and adoption; yet these psychological drives persist because only a few generations have passed since these innovations, insufficient for evolutionary selection to operate.
“Reliable contraception why do people have sexual Liaisons that might make them unhappy well in say men who are indiscriminate in seeking multiple sexual partners would have had more offspring that is no longer even adaptive in terms of maximizing reproductive output in a world of contraception”
A large portion of the American electorate—possibly more than half—has rejected the value of rationality itself and the idea of following evidence to conclusions, as exemplified by denial of factual events like January 6, presenting a crisis for democratic society.
“half maybe even more than half of sort of the American electorate has turned their back on the idea of rationality I mean the idea that not just scientific evidence I mean this is it but but really I mean just uh that if you look at sort of January 6 I mean just uh the you know what you see I mean it's still that is is somehow not true”
Motivated reasoning—starting with a desired conclusion and spinning the evidence to support it—arises from genuine evolutionary selection pressures, because in zero-sum social competitions there is advantage to winning an argument and gaining status even if you're objectively wrong.
“motivated reasoning that is instead of following the evidence and logic to where it leads you start off with the conclusion that you want to be true and you and spin doctor and Julie Rigg the evidence to take you there uh the uh the the idea that we are intuitive lawyers is that that we don't necessarily follow the trail of evidence to the most defensible conclusion but we all of us want the certain things to be true and we're ingenious at um arguing for them now that is a kind of rationality in the sense that again rationality is always in pursuit of the goal ideally the goal should be disinterested truth but for any given person at any given time it might be to show how smart you are how wise you are to argue for a conclusion that that favors you”
The Penelope vignette demonstrates base rate neglect: given that there are many more psychology majors than art history majors, most people who fit the stereotype of an art history major are actually psychology majors, yet people intuitively guess art history because she matches the stereotype.
“maybe even a better example despite the fact that this is one of the classics as a a imagine consider Penelope Penelope is um very has a highly refined aesthetic sense she likes to spend her summers in Tuscany she wrote a sonnet for her boyfriend for his birthday what are the what are the chances that her University major is art history what are the chances that her University major is psychology everyone says well it's got to be art history however for every heart history major there are probably a hundred psychology Majors”
Humans evolved as intuitive lawyers and theologians rather than scientists, meaning we naturally try to press our preferred conclusions using whatever rhetorical tricks work, rather than following evidence and logic disinterestedly to wherever they lead.
“we evolved as intuitive lawyers not as intuitive scientists um I think I see what that means yes this was um I think it was uh the the uh cognitive Anthropologist Dan spare bear but and Phil Phillip tetlock another cognitive psychologist um uh said it in slightly different words we're also intuitive theologians uh so a lawyer tries to press her case as using whatever trick works that that's a responsibility the idea is that if they're in an adversarial system the lawyer on the other side will push back and the truth will emerge from both Advocates making their strongest possible argument”
Society can be more rational than any of its individual members through institutions designed to expose and correct individual biases: the adversarial legal system allows lawyers' self-serving advocacy to cancel out through opposing arguments; science uses peer review and empirical validation; governance uses checks and balances and open debate.
“but there are institutions where we can use the uh our argumentative abilities to their advantage uh to try to a allow the truth to emerge from disputation that is the logic behind the adversarial system in a courtroom that yeah you've got a lawyer he's going to or she's going to pull out every every trick that that she can on the other hand there's a lawyer on the other side and there's a jury and they listen to them and the best argument will come out from their disputation or in science where we have peer review and a demand for empirical validation in governance where we have checks and balances separation of powers open debate in Parliament the idea is that you deploy people's ability to poke holes in the other side”
My-side bias was not the default state but is a persistent threat; rationality requires continuous defense of institutions like a responsible free press, government record-keeping, and science, since there is always danger of backsliding into conspiracy theories and demonization.
“the way I think of it is that it's not as if there was a a golden age which we are all rational and we're um the southern pernicious threat I think it's easier to think that at least in the political Arena the default is that we that we're all victims to the my side bias we ought to support the disinterested institutions like perhaps the rationalia or uh uh open debates empirical evaluation that would pull us away from our our self-serving bias and but they're they're fragile they we always are in danger of backsliding into conspiracy theories into demonization of the other side”
If two independent juries listened to the same courtroom evidence and rendered verdicts separately, the rate of agreement between them would be depressingly low, showing that 'beyond a reasonable doubt' provides far less certainty than the phrase implies.
“another way to put that would be if you imagine having two juries independently listening to the same evidence and then disappearing into their own jewelry rooms then coming back how many times would you bet they'd come back with the same verdict we probably don't want to know the answer yeah because it's it's it is depressingly uh low”
Revenge motivations can be explained by evolutionary mismatch without invoking the Pleistocene, since reliable criminal justice systems and police forces are recent (measurable in centuries) and unavailable in most times and places, so humans retain desires for vengeance from a world without law enforcement.
“The Thirst for Revenge as opposed to the availing yourself of a criminal justice system again reliable criminal justice systems and police forces are you can measure them in centuries uh the fact that most people most times and most of the world didn't have them”
The belief that humans are blank slates with no innate human nature is politically appealing because it suggests perfect equality is achievable and that any undesirable behavior can be conditioned out through proper education and parenting, offering hope for a utopian society free from conflict.
“if we're blank slates because nothing equals nothing equals nothing it's the ultimate guarantor of equality the men can't be women different from women and and races can't be different ethnic groups can't be different because we're all zero there's nothing there so there can't be any innate differences”
Candidate practices that our descendants may judge negatively include: excessive criminal punishment beyond what deters crime, possession of nuclear weapons that create existential risk, and possibly eating animals for food.
“what practices we often don't even question perhaps the degree of criminal punishment that we it might exceed what is effective as a deterrent and if the goal of criminal punishment is to reduce the uh amount of crime by setting up incentives that will inhibit people from committing them we may uh punish people above and beyond or in different ways than than uh than what would reduce the the amount of wrongdoing uh nuclear weapons the the fact that we possess nuclear weapons we've just been reminded by Putin's threats that they aren't just hypothetical uh devices that kept it kept in storage but uh if they're there they could be used”
Practicing self-reflection about what practices we currently consider unexceptionable that our descendants might find horrific can help us challenge unquestioned assumptions, making us more rational and improving the likelihood of positive moral progress.
“it's we we should ought to judge people by what they uh believed and held relative to um the prevailing Norms of the day not that we should make the moral judgments themselves uh because slavery was immoral whether it was questioned or not uh we don't have to be moral relativists but in judging individuals in terms of their moral fiber uh in a more moral character one has to look at the society in which they they were born and and uh traded ideas particularly since this is a high much more moral stance it's not amoral in giving a pass to evil people in the past on the contrary it is a prod to us to take a look at what beliefs that we have that we might consider completely unexceptionable that our descendants might find uh horrific”
People generally prefer to read editorial commentary they agree with over commentary they disagree with, reflecting the human preference for consonant information, and while one should counteract this bias by intentionally consuming opposing viewpoints, most people do not.
“who Among Us doesn't prefer to read editorial that we agree with and one that we don't agree with and it feels great the point of reading the Daily Telegraph every day just enough to counteract that”
Richard Dawkins is one of the leading advocates for the public understanding of science and has held the Simonyi Professorship for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, though despite efforts by him and others to improve scientific understanding, this alone will not increase public acceptance of evolution or climate science.
“the Emeritus chair of the of the for the public understanding of Science and at Oxford something that is highly desirable but public understanding of Silence won't sadly get more people to believe in evolution or anthropogenic climate change”
The fact that Pinker and Dawkins have no significant disagreements was so problematic for a BBC interviewer that she canceled an interview, suggesting that media may preferentially seek conflict and controversy over substantive discussion.
“the BBC got wind of it afterwards and they rang up and said would we like to reprise our encounter on News 9 that evening so we said yes and then I got a phone call from the producer and she said tell me what exactly is the nature of your disagreement that Dr Pinker and I said um I don't think we really have much of a disagreement and she said no disagreement and the interview was promptly canceled”
An important part of Pinker's book 'Rationality' contains humor and satire, including examples of false news stories and tall tales that people believe, demonstrating the cognitive vulnerabilities that make people susceptible to misinformation.
“it is actually a very funny book lots of good jokes um shut up he explained I love that um a list of tall tales that some people believe I laughed out loud at woman's sues Samsung for 1.8 million dollars after cell phone gets stuck in her vagina this is what I like it she's sued at 1.8 million dollars fake news these are examples of real I mean they're real examples of fake news”
Pinker did not predict Russia would invade Ukraine; if he had been forced to bet on the probability of Russian territorial conquest, he would have 'lost his shirt' because his prediction was wrong.
“and I would have and to be honest I would have uh if I had entered a prediction Market if I was forced to make a bet as to what is the probability that um uh that Russia would actually invade and try to Annex or or conquer territory I uh I would have lost my shirt”
Stephen Pinker is one of the most iconic and distinguished public intellectuals of our time, known for introducing non-specialist readers to expert subjects while simultaneously contributing to expert literature across multiple domains including linguistics, cognitive psychology, history, philosophy, and political advocacy.
“Stephen Pinker is always high in such lists and he's my favorite public intellectual he introduces non-specialist readers to his own expert subject while simultaneously contributing to the expert literature of that subject”