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Joe Rogan Experience #1073 - Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker is a cognitive psychologist, linguist, and popular science author. He is Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. His new book "Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress" will be released in February 2018.

Joe RoganhostSteven Pinkerguest
Feb 4, 20182h 13mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:0015:00

    (laughs) If I can…

    1. JR

      (laughs) If I can keep it in check. (laughs)

    2. SP

      (laughs)

    3. JR

      Four, three, two... and we're live. First of all, Steve, thank you very much for doing this. I really appreciate it.

    4. SP

      Oh, thank you for having me.

    5. JR

      I've been a big fan of your work for a long time. And, um, you, you bring up some really fascinating subjects. And, um, we were talking right before the podcast about social media and how weird it is that you got lumped in with the alt-right for a comment saying something along the lines of, uh, that you find... W- what was the exact quote? Something along the lines of, "Highly intelligent people seem to..." Which is not saying they're good people.

    6. SP

      No, that's right.

    7. JR

      Yeah.

    8. SP

      And (clears throat) I think a lot of people who are, uh, ignorant of the alt-right, uh, e- equate them with the, uh, the, the skinheads and the neo-Nazis carrying the tiki torches.

    9. JR

      Yes.

    10. SP

      Uh, but when... I, I was referring strictly to the alt-right from its origin in internet discussion groups.

    11. JR

      Right.

    12. SP

      And I... You know, I, I know some of them. Some of them are former students and some of them are highly intelligent and, and, uh, high- highly read. So, uh... But, but that's not what people often think of when they think of the alt-right.

    13. JR

      Right.

    14. SP

      And that's what I was referring to. I was referring to, there are people in tech, there are some people in universities who stay undercover. And, uh, I was... I, I, uh, made some remarks on how to starve that movement, not how to feed it. But-

    15. JR

      But so many people jumped on it as if you were endorsing the alt-right. It was... What, what was the exact quote? You were just-

    16. SP

      Well-

    17. JR

      ... basically saying something along the lines of, "There's a lot of intelligent people that are involved in this."

    18. SP

      Well, it wasn't so much that. It was also that, that because of the, uh, the various taboos in mainstream intellectual culture, the, the, the... because of political correctness, there are certain things that are just kind of not discussable. But then when people in the alt-right discover them, they feel tremendously empowered. Like, "We are now, you know, privy to the truth that the establishment can't handle. You can't handle the truth." And since it was never discussed in the open, there are no counterarguments to some of the most toxic interpretations. And so the alt-right can run with the... Ne- never having been in a forum where these things are debated and criticized and put into context, they take, like, one fact and then they draw the most extreme conclusions. If these things were debated in the first place, then you'd realize that those conclusions, uh, are not warranted. Oh, f- I mean, an example is there are average differences between men and women in a lot of psychological traits. Now, uh, if that's... A- and that's often quite taboo in intellectual circles for, I think, bizarre reasons. There are people who think that somehow women's rights depend on men and women being, uh, indistinguishable.

    19. JR

      Right.

    20. SP

      Which I think is a bad equation in the first place.

    21. JR

      I agree.

    22. SP

      But, um, uh, as soon as you, uh, come across the fact that men and women on average are, are, are different, you also come across the fact that men and women overlap in a lot of these traits. That whatever trait you name that men on average are better at than women or vice versa, there are a lot of women who are better than a lot of men or vice versa. Uh, and so you can't really judge an individual from the average of, uh, their, their, their sex. Also, f- even though there are some traits where men score a little better than women, there are some traits where women score a little better than men. And that, that's the complete picture, but the thing is that if the entire subject is out of bounds, you never get to present the complete picture and some people run away with, "Oh, men and women are totally different."

    23. JR

      What, what are your thoughts on how the subject got out of bounds? Because it's, it's very confusing to me that certain subjects like, uh, the differences between genders are so taboo when they seem so obvious. I mean, you just could go to a mall and just look at the way the men dress and the women dress and you go, "Well, there's some obvious distinctions here."

    24. SP

      (laughs) Right.

    25. JR

      Can you-

    26. SP

      There's a history to it.

    27. JR

      Right.

    28. SP

      Because there were, there were a lot of, uh, cockamamie theories in the 19th century and a lot of the 20th century, that, uh, that men were intellectual and women were not, and women were governed by their emotions and their... If women thought too much, it would take blood away from their ovaries and their womb and they wouldn't be fertile and then they'd be all miserable. I mean, really, like, crazy stuff. And as a reaction to that, in the '70s when the second wave of feminism became prominent, it became almost an article of faith that there were no differences between men and women. Uh, and so if you say that there are differences between men and women, you're sending women back to the, to the kitchen and the nursery.

    29. JR

      So this is-

    30. SP

      Now, this is a total non-sequitur, because fairness is not the same as sameness. So obviously, women should have equal rights to men whether or not they're cop- exact copies of men or have a distinctive profile, as men have a distinct profile. So I think it was just a mistake to, uh, to conflate the issue of women's rights with men and women being identical. Uh, but that's the way it kind of shook out, and it became kind of an article of faith in, uh, kind of in a lot of... In some feminists, some kind of left liberal circles, that men and women have to be identical. And if they aren't, that means you're a traitor to, to, uh, women's equality.

  2. 15:0030:00

    Right. …

    1. SP

      then, you know, other people see through that.

    2. JR

      Right.

    3. SP

      And so the i- uh, the, the, the, the paradox is that it's kind of got to be sincere for it to be credible to someone else.

    4. JR

      Yeah.

    5. SP

      So the most effective way to prove to someone else that you're a nice guy is to actually be a nice guy. (laughs)

    6. JR

      Yeah.

    7. SP

      Because if you're just calculating, if you're just doing the bare minimum you can get away with, then k-... Since we're, we're pretty good... we're all pretty good intuitive psychologists-

    8. JR

      Yeah.

    9. SP

      ... we're always kinda thinking, "Did he really mean it? Is he just kinda kissing up? Is he trying to g- you know, curry favors?" And we see through that.

    10. JR

      Yes.

    11. SP

      It's the person who actually isn't doing that calculation that we really admire and respect.

    12. JR

      Right. The, the... It's very unusual. It's one of the reasons why we admire. Like, "Look at this, uh, completely altruistic person."

    13. SP

      Yeah.

    14. JR

      Like, it's very rare.

    15. SP

      I mean, it's kind of like the market. The, the marketplace of reputations kinda selects, can select for true niceness and goodness-

    16. JR

      Yes.

    17. SP

      ... if you've got enough information and enough interactions. Uh, I mean, here's a crude analogy. Um, so in the business world, uh, you know, you can have cutthroat, fly-by-night businesses that just try to, you know, squeeze everything out of the customers and then, you know, take off as soon as the, the, the cheating is discovered, but they don't, they don't last very long. They don't actually make a lot of money. It's often the companies that will take back the product no questions asked, even if they lose a little bit of money, but they earn the loyalty of their customers. Uh, those are the companies that often do the best and stick around the longest.

    18. JR

      Yeah.

    19. SP

      So it's kind of an analogy to the way that being honorable, even if you have little losses, "Well, I did a little bit more for him than he did for me," but over the long run, that's what makes you desirable as someone that other people want to hang out with, if the reputations can, can spread.

    20. JR

      Yeah, it's, uh, kind of amazing if you think about how cherished true generosity and kindness, how cherished they are. Like, it's, it's an amazing thing. Like, you see people that are truly kind and truly generous, and we've, we value that so much. It's kind of amazing there aren't more of them.

    21. SP

      Yeah.

    22. JR

      Because it's such a, a virtue that we admire, and you, you... if someone does behave in that manner, like, people gravitate towards them. It's like, it's a, a, a real trait that, uh, is attractive to people.

    23. SP

      It is. And there's, uh, you know, there's a misunderstanding of the evolutionary explanation of the, um, uh, of appearance of altruism and generosity, a misunderstanding of, of, uh, the message that Dawkins conveyed in that book, that it predicts that we're all just kinda calculating, uh, favor traders, that we do just enough to, uh, get a favor in return, and if we don't think someone could help us in return, then we just cut them off, kind of a cynical view of generosity. But it's actually... The reason that that's not true is that as soon as the game begins, uh, y- you kind of get to higher and higher levels of e- people psyching each other out, seeing through them, because it's pr-... If I have a choice between who I'm gonna hang out with, who's... who I'm gonna befriend-There's one person who's going to do exactly for m- what, for me w- what will help him in the long run. And there's someone else who's really is generous and he's really gonna help me, and he's n- he's not gonna keep a long memory of who did what for whom. Well, I'm gonna pick the second guy.

    24. JR

      Right.

    25. SP

      And so, he's gonna actually be better off for being the better person. Now that, I mean, uh, you can take that to an extreme and, and predict that it means that we're all infinitely generous, which of course, we're not. (laughs) Uh, and so there's a s- a kind of a trade-off, an equilibrium between, you know, not being a total, you know, sucker, or not, uh, giving so much away that you just harm yourself in the long run, and being the kind of person who is generous and honest enough that other people want to affiliate with them. And the reality is that all of us are probably mixtures. I mean, we're not cutthroat sociopaths, most of us, uh, though some of us are. (laughs) Uh, nor are we, you know, total s- uh, uh, uh, saints, self-sacrificing saints. We're somewhere in between, and different people are at different points in that continuum.

    26. JR

      When you look at social media, and you look at this, uh, this, the n- the nastiness that's so common, um, uh, uh, and do... obviously, in some ways, it's gotta be connected to the ability to be anonymous. But I feel like... and I've, I've thought of this more and more lately, that this negativity is, is, uh, probably, uh, a temporary thing. I feel like people are realizing that this is-

    27. SP

      Yeah.

    28. JR

      ... an unnatural way of communicating, and that it's so relative really, relatively recent in human history, and such a small window. I mean, 1994 is essentially when people started getting online, and here we are in 2018. And you're seeing people switching to flip phones, uh-

    29. SP

      (laughs)

    30. JR

      ... d- d- deleting their Facebook. They're, it's a very common thing, and almost a chic thing to do.

  3. 30:0045:00

    Well, there's just such…

    1. SP

      fanatics, uh, once we have a label for them, once we know that it's a thing, uh, it'll seem so ridiculous that people will be less tempted to do it. I mean, that's the optimistic, uh, uh, outcome.

    2. JR

      Well, there's just such a flaw in w- there's, there's a, a, a real issue in writing things. And one of the issues, especially if you're writing about-

    3. SP

      (clears throat)

    4. JR

      ... uh, a, a subject where there's a lot of people involved or perhaps an, even an individual, is that you're the only one that's writing. Like, if you were having a conversation with that person, they would be able to say something back. Like, you'd be able-

    5. SP

      Yeah.

    6. JR

      ... to say something and they would go, "Well, that's not exactly how I was thinking. Actually, I was looking at it this way." And the other person would go, "Oh, okay. So your take on it was..." You know, and they would g- go back and forth and exchange information, hopefully come to some sort of an understanding of what's going on in each person's mind.

    7. SP

      Absolutely.

    8. JR

      Whereas you can define someone in a tweet or in a Facebook post or a blog post. You can define someone without, uh, uh, them having any ability to respond in the moment. So you have this whole uninterrupted chunk where you could, you know, uh, talk about, you know, fill in the blank, some celebrity or some politician or whatever, and you can define them in some really horrible, nasty way, and they just have to sit there and read it. Like, it, it's just your thoughts-

    9. SP

      Yeah.

    10. JR

      ... but it's not an accurate method of communicating ideas with a person. It's just your one uninterrupted take on things.

    11. SP

      Absolutely. So I, my, my second-to-last book, the one just before my, my, um, current book, Enlightenment Now, but the previous book was called The Sense of Style. It was a writing manual. The way I began the, began it is, I said, "Why is so much wr- writing so bad? How come there's so much writing where you just can't understand what the person is talking about?" And I, I mentioned some theories. Some people think that it's, uh, you know, academics and intellectuals trying to show off how profound they are-

    12. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    13. SP

      ... by how un- incomprehensible (laughs) they are. Like, if people could understand it, it can't be that complicated, so I'm gonna w- write (laughs) the stuff that no one will understand, then they'll think I'm really smart. So that's one theory.

    14. JR

      Right.

    15. SP

      And, you know, there might be some truth to it. Uh, but I think that the main theory is that, that writing is as you, just as you described, it's a one-way channel of communication. It's very unnatural. You know, when we speak-

    16. JR

      Yes.

    17. SP

      ... you and I, we're having a conversation, we're looking each other in the eye and our eyebrows go up and they get knitted and, uh, if I say, if I m- start to become too obscure, you're gonna give me a quizzical look, or you c-

    18. JR

      I'm like, "Huh?" Yeah. (laughs)

    19. SP

      (laughs) Yeah. No, you're terrified to see someone with that expression on their face. Or you can interrupt and say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. What the hell was that about?"

    20. JR

      Right. Yeah.

    21. SP

      When you're writing, you have none of that.

    22. JR

      Right.

    23. SP

      And so I think part of the skill in writing, what I, at least what I argue in The Sense of Style, is to become a kind of, enough of an intuitive psychologist that you can try to anticipate what your reader knows and what your reader doesn't know. And that i- because you have no way of, of determining that as you're writing, 'cause you're just sitting there, you know, tapping away, whoever's gonna read what you write, they're, you, you're never gonna meet them. It might be, you know, three years from now, they might be halfway across the world, and it's just one way. And so, and there's a- another, uh, kind of a psychological problem that we all have, it's just part of being human, called the, the, the curse of knowledge; namely, when you know something, it's really, really hard to imagine what it's like not to know it. You just assume that everyone knows it-

    24. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    25. SP

      ... that your, your, your understanding i- is everyone's understanding. And so you write away, you know, write, write, write, write, write. Uh, and it never occurs to you that the, the reader doesn't know your abbreviations or your jargon or can't visualize what you're describing. It's just so clear to you, the writer. And a lot of bad writing comes from the curse of knowledge; that is, a writer not getting into the heads of, uh, his reader. Uh, and a lot of the cure is either to at least, at least know that it's a problem and think, "What can my reader be reasonably expected to know?" And because we're not even that good at that, I mean, none of us are mind readers, just showing someone a draft of what you've written-

    26. JR

      Hmm.

    27. SP

      ... and you're often surprised at how often they'll say, "I don't know what you're talking about." And then-

    28. JR

      Maybe that's what we should force people to do with Twitter. Maybe we should have, like-

    29. SP

      Yeah. (laughs)

    30. JR

      ... uh, a, a team of people that you send your tweet to.

  4. 45:001:00:00

    Yeah. …

    1. SP

      women, attitudes towards gays, attitudes towards child-rearing. But even in the Islamic world, there's been a drift in the liberal direction. We just saw it two weeks ago when Saudi Arabia allowed women to drive. (laughs)

    2. JR

      Yeah.

    3. SP

      You know, I mean, this is, I mean, kind of, you know, modest form of progress.

    4. JR

      Kind of hilarious, that's a big-

    5. SP

      Kind of hilarious. But, you know-

    6. JR

      ... statement of progress.

    7. SP

      But it, but it shows. I mean, they just could not live in this absurd situation forever.

    8. JR

      Right.

    9. SP

      I mean, the world really did drag them kicking and screaming out of the Middle Ages in this, in this way. And that kind of tends to happen over the long run.

    10. JR

      Yeah. I'm, I'm an optimist, and I, I really do look at all these trends.

    11. SP

      Well, you'll, you'll, you'll, you'll like the book then? 75-

    12. JR

      Oh, beautiful.

    13. SP

      75 Optimistic Graphs.

    14. JR

      Oh, excellent. Uh, yeah, I think that if we- you look at just the overall human race, I mean, one of the best in- uh, indications of that is go and look at media representations of life from the 1950s and 1960s. Watch movies especially from the '50s and just see how people behaved. I mean, it's... You're, you're getting sort of a, a time stamp of human interaction from 1950. I mean, it's obviously an artistic representation of a time, d- of that time, but you get a sense of how people thought it was okay to behave. There was a lot of smacking women.

    15. SP

      Yeah, that's right.

    16. JR

      Yeah. Really common in movies, right?

    17. SP

      And sh- and children.

    18. JR

      Yep.

    19. SP

      You remember the scene where, you know, Junior would misbehave and Mom would say, "Wait till your father gets home." And then Dad comes home and he pulls the belt out of his pants so he could use it as a weapon.

    20. JR

      Yeah.

    21. SP

      So the buckle would really, uh, hurt the- the- the child.

    22. JR

      Yeah.

    23. SP

      And the child would, you know, tie a, a, a pillow on his behind and there'd be stars and go off into the corner.

    24. JR

      Yeah.

    25. SP

      And, you know, now you'd call social services (laughs) and they'd take the child away or something.

    26. JR

      Yeah. Well, I mean, I, I, I think this idea of being dragged, kicking and screaming into this new age, I think we're all doing that. And I think you're seeing that in so many different parts of our, our culture today. You know, I think that's one of the things that's happening with this Me Too movement is that all this, this mass public shaming of sexual harassers and sexual assaulters and all this different thing, it's, like, forcing human beings to reassess the way they interact with each other. And, like, this really radical, very quick sort of a movement over just a, a short period of time has had a giant impact on culture.

    27. SP

      Yeah. And, and like a lot of social changes, it, it happens really quickly-

    28. JR

      Yeah.

    29. SP

      ... and probably mixes some good things and some not-so-good things.

    30. JR

      Right.

  5. 1:00:001:13:46

    (laughs) …

    1. JR

      about, you're watching CNN and it'd be death, AIDS, pit bulls. You go outside, birds are chirping. Like, "Where is all this shit happening?"

    2. SP

      (laughs)

    3. JR

      Like... (laughs) It's...

    4. SP

      You know, and, and there's a, there's a lot to that, that's a good-

    5. JR

      Yeah.

    6. SP

      ... those are great, great examples. But it's-

    7. JR

      But why do we concentrate?

    8. SP

      Yeah.

    9. JR

      What is our d- our desire to concentrate only on the negative or s- uh, mostly on the negative?

    10. SP

      Well, there is a phenomenon in psychology called the negativity bias.

    11. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    12. SP

      The, uh... that bad is psychologically stronger than good.

    13. JR

      Wow.

    14. SP

      So we dread-

    15. JR

      Why is that?

    16. SP

      We dread losses more than we enjoy gains, and criticism hurts much more than praise makes you feel better. Uh, we're... our, uh, our, our minds are attracted to possibilities of, of death and danger and so on. Uh, I think it's because we are really... as, as you say, we are vulnerable. There are many more things that can go wrong than can go right, and that's kind of a implication of the law of entropy. Uh, there's a tiny fraction of the ways th- the world could work that works, works out well for you, and an awful lot of ways that things can go wrong. And so, our minds are attuned to things that could go wrong, and that kind of opens up a market for experts to remind us of things that can go wrong that we may have forgotten. And so, the, the news tends to gravitate to the negative, and there are actually studies that show this. You give editors, uh, two different, uh, framings of an event, an optimistic one and a pessimistic one, they pick the pessimistic one. And that's a trend that's actually increased. I have a graph in the book, one of the 75 graphs, uh, that shows, uh, a, an automatic analysis of the tone of the news. That is, how often are there positive words, like, you know, improve, better? How often are there negative words, like crisis, disaster, catastrophe? And the news has been getting more and more negative for about 70 years.

    17. JR

      Is it uniform on both sides, right and left?

    18. SP

      Uh, good question. I don't know the answer. I suspect it is, but I don't know, I don't know the answer for sure. There, and there are fluctuations, there are ups and downs, but overall, the trend has been downward. So partly it's al-... even though, by the way (laughs) all of the other graphs in the book show that i- in reality, the world has actually been getting better. There are fewer deaths from war, there's fewer homicides, um, we're making some progress in, uh, in pollution, there's less poverty than there used to be, more education. Uh, but the news has been getting more and more morose. Part of it is also that there's a, there is an ethic of journalism that to be responsible is to point out what's going wrong. Uh, one, one editor said, um, uh, "Good, good news isn't news, it's advertising." (laughs)

    19. JR

      Hmm.

    20. SP

      Um, and it's also because of the time scale that it's very easy to destroy something really quickly. I mean, something blows up, and, uh, that's news. Improvements tend to be gradual, day by day. And there's never a Thursday in March in which something happens that... be- uh, as, uh, as Max Roser, an economist put, pointed out, newspapers could run the headline, "138,000 people escaped from extreme poverty yesterday," every day for the last 30 years.

    21. JR

      (laughs)

    22. SP

      But that... they never ran that headline even once, because there was never a particular day in which the 138,000 people were different from the 138,000 people the day before. And so the... a lot of the good things kind of creep up on us, and they're never reported in headlines, whereas it's easy to blow something up, and that ha- that does happen on a Thursday.

    23. JR

      So you have a, a very positive view of the future of humans?

    24. SP

      Well, it's... uh, as, as, uh, the great, uh, Swedish, uh, uh, doctor and TED Talk star Hans Rosling put it, when he was asked, "Are you an optimist?" He said, "I'm not an optimist. I'm a very serious possibilist."

    25. JR

      (laughs)

    26. SP

      (laughs)

    27. JR

      (laughs)

    28. SP

      So what happens in the future, it depends on what we do now.

    29. JR

      Right.

    30. SP

      And there are... you know, there are real threats and dangers.

Episode duration: 2:13:09

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