The Problem With Trying To Be Rational - Steven Pinker

1. 0:00 – 0:26

   Intro

   1. SPSteven Pinker0:00

      Reasoning itself has costs, and the benefit of choosing the optimal decision always has to be traded off. You can't spend the rest of your life gathering data, because then, you know, your life is gone. You've got to, at some point, act on the information you have, knowing that you're taking a risk, but still weighing in the cost of inaction. (wind blows)

   2. CWChris Williamson0:22

      Steven Pinker, welcome to the show.

   3. SPSteven Pinker0:25

      Thank you. Nice

2. 0:26 – 9:42

   Is Studying Cognitive Biases Beneficial?

   1. SPSteven Pinker0:26

      to be here.

   2. CWChris Williamson0:27

      There was a time not long ago when I thought that reading another Eliezer Yudkowsky blog post, or another Shane Parrish mental model definition about some cognitive bias that I didn't realize that I had, there was a period where I was adamant that that, that was going to be the solution to all of my problems in life, and then, uh, I found out that it wasn't. Why is it that I need a glossary mental models toolkit in order to be able to function? Has making sense of the world always been this difficult?

   3. SPSteven Pinker1:01

      It, it always has. We're, uh, I think we are equipped to reason about cause and effect, and about logical implications, and about probability when they, uh, the problems are ones that we have dealt with all our lives, when they're, i- involve subjects that we deeply care about that impinge on us. But when it comes to general purpose tools that we can apply across the board, including to novel situations, like, "Oh, it didn't occur to me this is another example of the sunk cost fallacy or of the availability bias," namely reasoning, uh, from anecdote. Having those tools at your fingertips as generic, uh, all-purpose cognitive, um, uh, tricks, that you really do need to be reminded of. You need to know the names of the fallacies and how to avoid them, the names of the normative models, that is, uh, uh, rules and, and systems of how you ought to reason, uh, to, uh, uh, to, to deal with n- novel situations, ones that aren't, uh, and abstract situations.

   4. CWChris Williamson2:03

      Daniel Kahneman got asked, I think by Sam Harris when they did a live event, about, "After all of this time, Daniel, learning about the human brain and biases, has it made you any more rational?" And his response was basically, "No." What's your thoughts on that? Have you managed to make yourself any more rational?

   5. SPSteven Pinker2:19

      Um, somewhat. Uh, I mean, I'm, uh, w- we know from the literature on biases that I'm probably not the person to ask-

   6. CWChris Williamson2:26

      (laughs)

   7. SPSteven Pinker2:26

      ... because all of us are subject to a biased bias, namely all of us think that everyone else is biased, but not us. Uh, so I, I might be the l- the person least equipped to spot my own biases, but I, I tend to think so. And there, there is research that suggests that people who are less susceptible to the classic cognitive, um, fallacies and biases have better outcomes in life, in general. They're less likely to get into accidents, to lose their jobs, um, to, uh, break up their relationships. Uh, uh, uh, as always, these p- pertain to averages. Certainly less likely to be scammed by, um, psychic or, um, uh, medical charlatans. So, uh, uh, so applying the average to myself, I would think so on average. I would hope so.

   8. CWChris Williamson3:15

      Are smart people any more or less likely to be rational?

   9. SPSteven Pinker3:20

      On average, yes. There is a correlation between intelligence and rationality, but it's far from a perfect one. So, there are plenty of smart people who are, uh, um, vulnerable to cognitive biases, uh, who are, uh, fixed in their, uh, beliefs and don't adjust them in response to, uh, changes in evidence, particularly when it comes to beliefs that are sacred values of one's own tribe, one's own coalition, one's own political ideology. The so-called my side bias, that is, you steer your reasoning toward a conclusion that makes your own, uh, tribe look good, where tribe can be your religion, your political party, your, um, uh, uh, y- your hobby group, um, then smart people are, uh, just as vulnerable as, uh, as less smart people. This is one of the conclusions from Keith Stanovich in his book, The Bias That Divides Us. Uh, Stanovich has developed what he calls a, a somewhat cheekily irrationality quotient as a, uh, you know, complement or alternative to the intelligence quotient. And they are correlated, but far from perfectly.

   10. CWChris Williamson4:30

       Is there something that smart people should look out for in particular with regards to irrationality?

   11. SPSteven Pinker4:36

       Certainly the my side bias, namely, are you, uh, are, are, are you really committed, uh, to some belief that is, uh, emblematic of your politics, uh, or your theory in some academic dispute? Then it's, uh, you know, you're, you're, you're probably susceptible to, um, um, various kinds of motivated reasoning, like, uh, biased assimilation, which is to say you gobble up, um, information that seems to support your view and you stay away from or don't read or, or, or nitpick to death, uh, evidence that goes against your beliefs. Uh, you kind of spin doctor everything so that if it, if there's evidence that would seem to go against one of your beliefs, you try to find loopholes and ways that you don't have to believe it. And of course, we all, we all do this. Uh, we're all lawyers that, uh, that, that make the best, strongest possible case for our clients, but it, uh, it certainly is a way in which each one of us can be, uh, uh, less than optimally rational then. But of course, it makes it all the harder to spot those biases in yourself. That's why we, we belong to communities where it isn't just up to you, but you expose your ideas to criticism, you allow them to be challenged, you have a community that abides by, uh, free speech so that any opinion can be voiced and, and then evaluated. The way we undo our bias typically, there, there, there are some (clears throat) , uh, self-aware souls, no doubt, who can step outside their own biases.... more commonly, other people do it for us.

   12. CWChris Williamson6:15

       Yeah, it's interesting thinking about the effect socially that we have. I think a lot of what we need in the modern world is the ability to be rational while there's social pressure around us. It's very difficult to exist in a vacuum now, because even if you are the most excluded, isolated person working in a lighthouse in Antarctica somewhere, you probably still have Facebook and Twitter and an internet connection. So, are there things that we need to look out for when we're in a group, particular biases or ways our rationality gets perturbed and, uh, perverse when we're in a group?

   13. SPSteven Pinker6:49

       Yeah. Certainly to (clears throat) be- be open to sources of information other than the one that's going to ratify your- y- your side's beliefs. So, not just to read, you know, The- The Guardian or The Telegraph, but dip into the source that you don't habitually read. (smacks lips) To, um, seek out sources that have themselves cultivated a- a reputation for, uh, objectivity and accuracy. You mentioned, uh, a prominent member of the rationality community, Eliezer Yudkowsky. Although, also in that community is, um- um- uh, Scott Alexander, uh- uh, writing under the- uh- uh, in- in the blog, uh, AstralCodex10. And he does, often will do literature reviews, astonishingly thorough and astonishingly quickly, where it's pretty clear at the outset that he has not made up his mind a- and he does his best to, uh, say whether- whether lockdown policies are effective at- at stemming the spread of COVID, a highly politicized issue. Uh, but when he did a literature review, he s- uh, he- he concluded, (clears throat) this is a number of months ago, that yes, they are somewhat effective, better than not having them, uh, but only after looking at both sides of the issue and all of the extant studies that he could find.

   14. CWChris Williamson8:09

       Did you see that he got married the other week?

   15. SPSteven Pinker8:12

       I- I- I did see that yesterday. I just got the notice yesterday. Although I knew that. I am in the, uh- the, uh, in the Bay Area this- this, uh, year, so I had dinner with him, uh, a couple of months ago, and I met his fiancée.

   16. CWChris Williamson8:22

       Oh, amazing. Yeah, I saw the photo. I'm on the mailing list for AstralCodex10. It's like, it's so strange. After years and years of him writing under this anonymous pseudonym and just being this person, you- where you have a relationship with their words, but not with them.

   17. SPSteven Pinker8:36

       Yes.

   18. CWChris Williamson8:36

       It's so bizarre to now see a- a face to the words.

   19. SPSteven Pinker8:42

       It is indeed. And, uh, and for- for many months until I met him, I did wonder, uh, wh- what was the actual physical body behind this- uh, this brilliant intellect.

   20. CWChris Williamson8:53

       It's so strange how we- we do attach that sort of embodied sense to someone, you know? The pseudonymity that the internet affords. And there's a lot of talk at the moment as well about pseudonymous... Pseud- whatever it is.

   21. SPSteven Pinker9:05

       Pseudonymous.

   22. CWChris Williamson9:05

       Pseudonymous. Thank you for-

   23. SPSteven Pinker9:06

       Yeah.

   24. CWChris Williamson9:06

       ... walking me through that word. Uh, those sorts of accounts increasingly... ZeroHP Lovecraft is one of those. I think it's like Orange Tree is another one. We have a bunch of different people online that are, uh, deploying information, but hiding behind because they don't necessarily wanna put themselves out there. And yet, it's interesting to think that Scott, you know, was doing that, whatever, 10 or 15 years ago.

   25. SPSteven Pinker9:27

       Well, indeed. In his particular case, he's protective of his full name because he is a practicing psychiatrist, and he wanted his patients not to, um, be aware or be affected by- by his other identity as a blogger and commentator.

3. 9:42 – 22:20

   Applying Bayesian Reasoning in Life

   1. SPSteven Pinker9:42

   2. CWChris Williamson9:42

      Talk to me about Baysning- Bayesian reasoning, because it's a term that I've come up against previously, and yet I've never really understood how to use the principle of Bayesian reasoning to apply it to my own life on a day-to-day basis.

   3. SPSteven Pinker9:56

      Yes. So it's, this- this is one of the, uh, kind of signifiers or identifiers or identity badges for being a member of the so-called rationality community. Do you think that- that, you know, every person should understand Bayes' rule? Uh, and that's, it's almost an- an- a membership requirement that you, uh- you- you understand it and endorse it. It's, uh, the- the eponymous rule of the Reverend Thomas Bayes from the 18th century. And it's actually, uh, it's, uh, it is an algebraic formula, but it's actually pretty simple, and it's, uh, already (clears throat) has spilled over into our everyday language in the common term priors. What are your priors? That is actually taken right out of, uh, Bayes' rule. The rule is simply... The- the purpose of the rule is, how should I calibrate my degree of credence in a hypothesis depending on the strength of the evidence? So, the idea is you don't just believe it or disbelieve it. You've got a degree of belief from zero to one. And the key insight is, as soon as you take that conceptual leap, then you can apply the arithmetic of probability to the problem of how to calibrate your belief to the evidence. And so the, uh, (clears throat) the- the idea is simple. The output, the deliverable, the point of Bayes' rule is what's called a posterior probability. Posterior just means after you've looked at the evidence. So, when all is said and done, how much should I believe that, uh, say, um, masks stop the spread of COVID, or, uh, to what degree should I think that I have, uh, prostate cancer if I get a positive, uh, prostate-specific antibody test reading? Um, now, uh, so h- how do you figure that out? Well, there're just three numbers, according to Bayes' rule. First is the prior. That is, before you even look at the evidence, the- the symptoms of the patient, the test result, the- the- the data and the literature, how credible is it to begin with? What is the sort of accumulated weight of evidence and plausibility before you, uh, before you look at a single data point? Uh, that- so that's the prior. Now, admittedly, there's some subjectivity that goes into that. Um, e- e- for a disease, you usually take the base rate of the population. What percentage of men have prostate cancer?... uh, it raises the question of, you know, well, do you look at 65-year-old men? Do you care whether it's white men or Black men? But let's just say that the- you- that, uh, you, you start off with some kind of prior. Then (clears throat) you multiply that by the likelihood. And in the lingo of, of, of, uh, Bayes' rule, likelihood means if the hypothesis is true, what are the chances that you would see the data that you are now seeing? So let's say in the case of a medical test, of all the people, say, who do have prostate cancer, what percentage of them does the test, uh, correctly pick, pick that up? It's the sensitivity of the test in the kind of the lingo of, of testing. So that is technically probability of the data given the hypothesis. That is, you know, we still don't know whether it's true or not, but if it was true, how likely is it that we would get those, those, uh, those results, those symptoms, those test, test data? You just divide that by how common the evidence is across the board. If, uh, uh, if the symptoms or the test results, uh, occur a lot, that is, uh, there's a h- high false positive rate together with a true positive rate, that goes into the denominator. And as we all know from elementary school, if the denominator gets bigger, the whole fraction gets smaller. Um, and so it's just the prior times the likelihood divided by the commonness. Uh, and it is kind of intuitive. We all know that if a symptom of a disease, for example, occurs, uh, for a lot of diseases, you know, fatigue, uh, then just because, I don't know, Rocky Mountain spotted fever has the symptom of fatigue, you, you don't conclude that you have Rocky Mountain spotted fever, 'cause f- fatigue can come from lots of things. That's the commonness of the data in the denominator. Likewise, if something is really going around a lot, like Omicron, then you have some of the symptoms that, that would be the prior. You say, "Well, uh, you know, I am feeling a bit, uh, achy. Omicron doesn't seem like a, a implausible, um, uh, explanation." Uh, and likelihood, uh, too, is kind of intuitive. Namely, if it w- if it were true, uh, (clears throat) if you do have, say, Omicron, uh, are you gonna have a sore throat? Most people with Omicron do have a sore throat. I have a sore throat. Well, that ups my, um, credence that I have, uh, Omicron. (clears throat) Anyway, that's Bayes' rule. People are not very good at kind of applying it to novel situations, um, especially when the numbers are presented in a little bit the way that, that you and I have in terms of numbers between zero and one. If, on the other hand, you present it in terms of frequencies, that is there are 1,000 men in the population, uh, 10 of them have, uh, prostate cancer. Of the 990 who don't, uh, 10 of those will test positive. Of the, uh, 10 who do, nine will test positive. You test positive. Do you have prostate cancer? People are pretty good at saying, "Well, m- based on what you said, it's kind of 50/50, isn't it?" If I gave you the same numbers, the same information in terms of the chance that you have prostate cancer is 0.01, then all... then people, um, kind of blow off the base rate. They just think, "Oh my God, positive test, I must have the disease." And then they're, according to classic research by Kahneman and Tversky, people neglect the base rates. They reason kind of by stereotype, by anecdote, and then they're not so good. So that's kind of the s- the, the, the, the, the base, the base story. And anyone who's just heard it has all of a sudden become much more rational.

   4. CWChris Williamson15:52

      I'm not gonna use Scott Alexander for every example here, but he does a thing at the beginning of the year where he makes predictions for the forthcoming year by the end of it. Is most of that, do you think, that that's an attempt at Bayesian reasoning?

   5. SPSteven Pinker16:07

      Yeah. So, um, forecasting-

   6. CWChris Williamson16:08

      Yeah.

   7. SPSteven Pinker16:08

      Rational forecasting, uh, does use Bayesian reasoning as one of its essential ingredients, yes. So for, just to give you a concrete example, this is based on the, on the work of Philip Tetlock and Barbara Mellers, uh, and, um, well, who run forecasting tournaments. They have become more popular through, um, prediction markets where you can actually get skin in the game, put money on the line. What are the, what is the chance that, uh, that Russia will invade Ukraine? What is the chance that, uh, inflation will exceed 10% this year? And you, yeah, y- you bet against other people. But the way that Bayesian reason comes in is a good ph- forecaster... And good forecasters tend not to be your name brand pundits, who t- tend to have a pretty crummy track record, because they're always pushing their political, uh, ideology, and it blinds them to the specifics of the situation. But the way Bayesian reasoning enters into accurate forecasting is the first thing you start off with is the, uh, is the base rate there with the prior. So for example, will there be a terrorist attack this year that will kill more than, uh, 10 people? Well, the first thing that a rational forecaster would do is go to Wikipedia, look at the number of terrorist attacks that have taken place every year for the last 10 years in that part of the world, and say, "Well, let, let me start with that as my, uh, first guess, and then I'll bump it up or down depending on the specifics of what's happening this year." Uh, likewise for, for Putin invading Ukraine, they might start off with, "Well, how many invasions have we... of one country by another have we seen? Um, that's where I... that, that's my starting point. Now let me increment or, or decrement it." Um, and that's not typically the way people do forecasting, which is why they're not particularly good at forecasting. They're not Bayesian enough.

   8. CWChris Williamson17:56

      Isn't it that betting websites are usually the most accurate ones when it comes to upcoming elections? I don't know whether that's a myth that I've seen on the internet or if that's actually correct.

   9. SPSteven Pinker18:05

      So I, I think that, um, the so-called super forecasters in, uh, Tetlock and Mellers' tournaments outperform prediction markets, but prediction markets outperform just about anything else. Yeah.

   10. CWChris Williamson18:17

       Wow.

   11. SPSteven Pinker18:17

       That's right.Well, 'cause you've got a lot of people with, uh, you know, who, who are moti- highly motivated to, um, learn about the, the situation. It's not just that they toss off some opinion. Uh-

   12. CWChris Williamson18:29

       Yeah. It's unlimited skin in the game.

   13. SPSteven Pinker18:32

       It, uh, that's right. And, uh, the, uh, the, what ultimately counts is not reputation, but are you right or wrong? Uh, and so, uh, it's not like plugging the ideology, making your side look good. The, the, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

   14. CWChris Williamson18:45

       Yeah. What about measuring risk and reward for people as they go through their life?

   15. SPSteven Pinker18:51

       That's another chapter in, in my book, Rationality. It pertains to what's sometimes called expected utility theory or rational choice theory. One of the, uh, less popular theories, people often blame it for, uh, the, the whole homo economicus, rational man. Um, it's basically the idea that you should, um, w- when you're faced with an option under, um, a, a risky option, you should, uh, multiply the probability of, uh, each outcome by its cost or benefit, its, its reward or its, uh, penalty. Um, add 'em up and choose the option with the highest, um, sum, the highest, uh, expected utility. That is, probability times payoff. Um, now, and there's a, a literature from, uh, goes back 50 or 60 years. Several Nobel Prizes have gone to, um, economists and game theorists who've shown cases where people n- don't seem to, uh, abide by the, uh, axioms of, of, of, uh, uh, expected utility theory. But by and large, it isn't a bad guideline to start with. I mean, obviously we often live under not, um, risk where we know the probabilities, but uncertainty where we don't even know the probabilities. As, as, uh, Donald Rumsfeld famously put it, "Unknown unknowns as opposed to known unknowns." But still, if you think through, what is the chance that something will happen? How good or bad will it be? It, it probably w- would lead to some wisdom. Like, um, you know, if I, if I step on the, on the, uh, accelerator to get home faster because I really don't wanna be, uh, late for dinner or miss the first, uh, you know, minute of a, of a show. Um, and, you know, what's the benefit o- of that? Now, I am taking a slightly greater chance of getting killed in a car accident. How much value do I place on my life? If you started to think that way, you know, should I wear a bicycle helmet? Should I, uh, fasten my, my seat belts? You'd probably make a lot of, uh, uh, a bunch of wiser decisions. Uh, or even more mundane ones like, I just bought, uh, an appliance. Should I also buy the, uh, additional extended warranty? Now, that costs typically about 25% of the price of the product itself. The, the salespeople will push it aggressively, and the reason is the expected utility calculation works out in favor of the, uh, the store and not the customer. Namely, uh, y- you buy something, uh, u- unless it's one out of four of those products is gonna break, paying a quarter of the price for a warranty does not make any sense.

   16. CWChris Williamson21:30

       Mm-hmm.

   17. SPSteven Pinker21:30

       You'd be much better off just occasionally absorbing the price of the repair or replacement, and you're gonna be, uh, ahead. I mean, there's, it really does not make sense to buy a life insurance policy for your toaster. But -

   18. CWChris Williamson21:42

       But every... I was gonna say, ev- every insurance company would be bankrupt if that wasn't the case.

   19. SPSteven Pinker21:47

       Well, the thing is that for insurance makes sense for catastrophic losses that you can't, um, uh-

   20. CWChris Williamson21:53

       Recover from.

   21. SPSteven Pinker21:54

       ... replace your, your, your, your house, uh, for most people, your car, um, the livelihood of a, of a, of a breadwinner. Um, but for things where you really could replace it, even though, you know, it'd be, you'd be really annoyed if you had to buy a new toaster the, uh, month after you bought one, you, you probably could afford it. And it doesn't make sense to keep forking over money for every s- appliance that you buy. So there, self-insurance makes a lot more sense.

4. 22:20 – 32:20

   Tensions between Rationality & Intuition

   1. SPSteven Pinker22:20

   2. CWChris Williamson22:20

      Do you think about balancing rationality with a more sort of intuitive natural flow just generally to life? So rather than... A- a lot of the time when I find myself thinking a lot about the mental models and the biases that I use as I move through my day, I often find myself getting in my own head. And I don't find as much ease or flow or intuition with the way that I go about. Do you think that there's a tension there pulling between those two?

   3. SPSteven Pinker22:46

      There, there is. I mean, there is a phenomenon of, as we call it, overthinking. Uh, but, y- and there, about 20 years ago, as a result of a bestseller by Malcolm Gladwell called Blink, there was the popular idea, people in, in, in business love it, that you should go with your gut. Your first intuition is, uh, gonna be wiser than overthinking. It's probably not true in general that the, uh, um, there are rare cases in which the gut feeling is more accurate than, than reasoning out. But by and large, you're probably better thinking twice. Um, now granted, a lot of times you just don't have the information. No one has stated the probabilities. It's not like buying a lottery ticket where you can look up the odds or, or, uh, casino gambling. Um, and so we have no choice but to make, uh, intuitive, uh, guesses. But y- you know, in general, not acting on impulse is, you know, is probably the w- the wi- the wise philosophy of life.

   4. CWChris Williamson23:46

      The problem that we have is that with... we're not privy to the codes behind whatever the odds are of whatever it is that we're considering, right? And we can kid ourselves into believing, you know, y- it's for COVID masking or for the prostate cancer rate for men of your age in your area of your particular genetic heritage, there are some things. But most of the decisions that we make on a daily basis about whether to stay with a partner or leave, about whether to go to a new city or not, where would you even begin to try and do that?

   5. SPSteven Pinker24:15

      Yeah.

   6. CWChris Williamson24:15

      I suppose that this is where those more messy and emotional decisions are, where people are hoping that rationality will give them a lifeline out of it. Uh, and then ultimately a lot of the time end up coming back to something that was quite intuitive in the first place in any case.

   7. SPSteven Pinker24:29

      Sometimes, yes. And, and indeed, it is true that often that those critical probabilities, you know, you, no, no one knows and you can't find out. Uh, life, life is uncertain. But here's, there is a bit of advice that I'm going to credit to my colleague, uh, Daniel Gilbert, in the psychology department at Harvard, uh, which is that when people try to, uh, imagine how they will feel in the future, they're often not very good at it. Um, that we, we probably give too much, uh, credence to our own powers of imagination. And that often, you're better off looking for someone at... someone else who has faced that decision, and to look how, how it turned out for them. Uh, and, uh, they've actually... 'Cause then you're not relying on imagination. Now, granted, no two people are, are, are interchangeable, so, you know, maybe their situation's different mirrors, maybe the world has changed, you know, that was then, this is now. Still, probably a lot of the time, you're better off at trying to, as we s-... You, you might put a, you know, kind of ga- gathered data, real-world data for how it turned out. And it's w- it's particularly poignant for me, because he, uh, told me this many years ago when, um, over dinner, when I was at MIT at the time, I had a job offer from Harvard, I was agonizing over whether to take it or not. Uh, we, we had dinner, and, uh, granted he had an interest in the answer because he was recruiting me to be his colleague at Harvard, but he said, uh, he, he, he said, you know, most people when faced with an agonizing decision rely too much on their own power of imagination, and you're o- you're, you're better off finding out how it really did turn out for, for someone who was faced with that decision, who went one way or another. And sure enough, I asked two of my... I, uh, I was in the unusual position, perhaps, that two of my colleagues from MIT had made the, that exact jump. They had switched to Harvard, they had been poached, and I a- uh, asked them, "Are you... Do you regret your decision or did it turn out well?" And they both said it turned out well, and, and, um, you know, that, that, uh, that decided me. So, I decided to, uh, uh, to accept the offer, and, and I have been happy ever since.

   8. CWChris Williamson26:32

      I'm pretty sure that there's some evidence that shows people who make changes in their life, on average, are happier. That simply making a change, if you have a choice between staying where you are and making, uh, uh, or making an alteration, that on average people tend to be more happy with the new-

   9. SPSteven Pinker26:48

      Interesting. I, uh, I mean, if to the extent that that's true, it would say that I didn't necessarily choose wisely-

   10. CWChris Williamson26:55

       (laughs)

   11. SPSteven Pinker26:55

       ... other than, uh, deciding to, to make, to make the move. But I'm, I'm perfectly prepared to believe that, not least because, uh, once you have made the choice, you tend to... because of cognitive dissonance, that is, uh, uh, cognizance reduction, rationalization, uh, you know, we, we, we don't wanna look like idiots for having made the wrong, th- the wrong choice, so we do tend to, uh, f- find, uh, after the fact what made it th- the best choice and make the best of it. Not everyone. There are people who are constantly, you know, blaming their misfortune on, uh, on, on some, some regret. Uh, but that, that is interesting. I was not aware of that.

   12. CWChris Williamson27:32

       Yeah, I think a lot about people that say, uh, "It was meant to be," that they use that or, um, yeah, they, they go through perhaps some sort of hardship and then come out the other side, and they say, "Oh, it was meant to be, because look at the situation that I got myself into." And it always feels to me like that person's completely destroyed their own input into the good things that they made out of a tough situation. Let's say that you've got in some accident or some sort of injury, and then you end up on the other side of that finding a calling in life that really speaks to you. And I think, well, saying, "It was meant to be," takes away the agency that you had from-

   13. SPSteven Pinker28:06

       Yeah.

   14. CWChris Williamson28:06

       ... overcoming what was a pretty shitty situation. Like you-

   15. SPSteven Pinker28:09

       (laughs)

   16. CWChris Williamson28:09

       ... you did this. It wasn't meant to be, you made the best of a bad, a, a bad environment.

   17. SPSteven Pinker28:14

       Well, a- and that's... it's p- it's even more pernicious when it's done, uh, in advance, and you s- and you say, "Well, uh, it's fated, uh, uh, you know, either I'm going to get COVID or I'm not. There's nothing I can do about it. Either I'm going to get lung cancer or not." Uh, and so that you, uh, actually avoid making reasoned decisions because you're fatalistic. And people with... who believe in fate tend to have, uh, certainly worse predictors. One of the, one of the, uh, ingredients of successful prediction is believing in, um, contingency, that things could have turned out different, that the... things are not fated or in the stars. And, uh, I'm not sure if this has specifically been looked at, but I'd be willing to bet that people who don't believe in some sort of predestination, who, who actually, uh, attribute some sort of agency to themselves, probably have better outcomes in life-

   18. CWChris Williamson29:09

       Yeah.

   19. SPSteven Pinker29:09

       ... that are less likely to get sick.

   20. CWChris Williamson29:11

       I think the goal is, is to have sufficient thinking that you can make your decisions appropriately, but not so much that it slows you down, because I definitely have some friends and I've worked with some people as well who are, uh, o- over-thinkers that make me look like I'm the most rash, like playboy in town.

   21. SPSteven Pinker29:29

       (laughs) Yes. No, and that is, that is an, an important point. It's sometimes called, uh, in the literature, bounded rationality, from Herbert Simon. The idea that reasoning itself has costs, namely time, um, uh, information that you, that you have to, uh, gather, uh, computational resources, memory and, and data and so on. And the benefit of choosing the optimal decision always has to be, uh, traded off against the, the costs of the actual reasoning. Uh, you don't... you can't spend the rest of your life gathering data because then, you know, your life is gone. You've got to, at some point, act on the information you have, knowing that you're taking a risk, but still, um, uh, weighing in the cost of inaction. He... sometimes he who hesitates is lost. Uh, it doesn't mean... it doesn't guarantee you the, the best outcome, but, uh, it sometimes means that, uh, that acting on imperfect information is, uh, well, always essential.... unavoidable.

   22. CWChris Williamson30:32

       I think it was... is it Seth Stephens-Davidowitz that wrote Algorithms To Live By? Are you familiar with that?

   23. SPSteven Pinker30:37

       Um, I'm familiar with, um... uh, i- i- it's plausible. I forget whether that was his, his exact title. He, he did write a book that I, for which I wrote a foreword called Everybody Lies.

   24. CWChris Williamson30:46

       Oh, no.

   25. SPSteven Pinker30:47

       Um-

   26. CWChris Williamson30:47

       No, no, no. It wasn't that one. Um-

   27. SPSteven Pinker30:48

       No. I think actually, I think Algorithms To Live By was, um, actually, uh, uh, a, uh, a guy Speaker 2<|agent|><|en|>

   28. CWChris Williamson30:54

       Brian Christian?

   29. SPSteven Pinker30:56

       ... speakers? Uh, Christiansen maybe, or, uh-

   30. CWChris Williamson30:58

       Yeah. Anyway-
5. 32:20 – 41:52

   How Conspiracies Subvert Rationality

   1. CWChris Williamson32:20

      Uh, what about conspiracies? They seem particularly good at, uh, subverting rationality.

   2. SPSteven Pinker32:26

      Uh, indeed, and, uh, th- for, for a number of reasons. One of them is that it's... they, they fall into a category of belief that is peculiarly unfalsifiable. Um, they are memes in the original Richard Dawkins sense of ideas that are adapted to being spread by their v- by their very nature. And the, uh, uh, the part of the conspiracy theory that says that the, uh, lack of evidence for the theory is proof of what a diabolical ingenious conspiracy it is, (laughs) that makes them uniquely, uh, uh, invulnerable to refutation. Kind of like the b- other beliefs, like God works in mysterious ways, uh, or if you (clears throat) , um, deny that you're, uh, th- th- that this is racist, that proves that you're a racist, uh, or... (clears throat) So there are... by their very nature, some ideas are, uh, contagious simply because they've kind of... by their very nature, they are designed to evade our cognitive immune system. Uh, also they... conspiracy theories tend to be moralistic. They are, uh, uh, uh, excellent, uh, examples of a my-side bias in that there's usually some villain, and the villain is often an identifiable opponent, such as the theory that Hillary Clinton ran a child sex ring out of a basement of a Washington pizzeria. Now, needless to say, it was not members of the Democratic Party who believed that conspiracy theory. It was people who hated Hi- Hillary. And indeed, a belief like that is kind of just another way of saying, "Boo, Hillary." Uh, the fact that it has propositional content is kind of irrelevant to why people believe it. And, and e- one... that was one of the major epiphanies that I had on, on, uh... in, in writing Rationality, and, and in dealing with these, uh, bizarre beliefs, such as that, uh, um, jet contrails are mind-altering drugs dispersed by a secret government program, uh, or that COVID vaccines are actually a s- uh, a subterfuge by Bill Gates to inject microchips into our body to (laughs) surveil us. And you ask me, do... how can, how can people believe these things? And part of the answer is, it depends what you mean by believe. That is, for a lot of people, factual warrant, empirical evidence, just that- that's not why you believe things when... when it comes to things that don't impinge on your day-to-day life. If it's gonna affect whether your car is gonna run out of petrol or whether there's gonna be, you know, beer in the fridge, then people are, are very, very attuned to reality. They, they kind of have to be. But when it comes to belief about, um (clears throat) , uh, things that you'll never encounter in life, like that pizzeria or Hillary Clinton, people believe things 'cause it, it expresses the right values, the right moral. It, it identifies, uh, villains that you think are evil. It identifies, uh, heroes, more often villains in the case of conspiracy theories. Sometimes it's an identifiable one, like Hillary Clinton. Sometimes it's just a general... and a hatred of the establishment, of elites, of institutions. There's a fairly, uh, sizable minority who just believes that the... uh, has kind of a need f- need for chaos, th- as M- Michael Bang Peterson put it. That is, they just think the whole system should, should burn, it's so, uh, corrupt and evil. And so any concentrated source of power, governments, corporations, uh, science, uh, uh, scientists, the public health establishment, could often be figured into these conspiracy theories, the theory portraying them as uniquely evil and insidious.

   3. CWChris Williamson36:11

      That's fascinating. That's such an interesting way to look at it. It's kind of like mental LARPing in a way. These people doing-

   4. SPSteven Pinker36:17

      Yes.

   5. CWChris Williamson36:17

      ... live action role play-

   6. SPSteven Pinker36:19

      It's-

   7. CWChris Williamson36:19

      ... but bounded within their own minds. One of the things that I found really fascinating about conspiratorial thinking, especially recently, is that over the last two years, faith in institutions has just gone through the floor. We've continued to see the people that were supposed to know what they were doing and be in charge just-... put their foot in their mouth on live camera, daily sometimes, just over and over and over again. We've seen whatever duplicitous, purposeful neglect, just idiocy play out in front of us. And I think that that has enabled people to have far more belief in nontypical bureaucratic, um, what would you say? Positions of power, speaking truth. We just have no, we have no time for it, therefore, we're going to make our own truth here. But increasingly now, people s- I, I see a lot on the internet that people say, "Look. When you're saying conspiracy, why shouldn't I believe in conspiracies? This was a conspiracy and that was a conspiracy," and the definition of what a conspiracy consists of now has started to be expanded to include a lot of different things. Conspiracy used to mean something that was basically totally unbelievable. But now because the boundary of what is true and what isn't, and our faith in institutions has been eroded, that really anything is permitted to be a part of a conspiracy. It's no longer flat earth and, and, and beyond. It's a whole host of things that come back from that towards stuff that me and you probably might even have believed.

   8. SPSteven Pinker37:50

      Yeah. So, uh, a couple of things. One is that, that, uh, yeah, some- uh, many conspiracy theorists say, "Well, well, look there, you know, the, the CIA really did, uh, mount an invasion in the Bay of Pigs in Cuba in, in, uh, 1960, uh, '61. Um, they, the CIA really did overthrow, help overthrow, uh, Arbenz in Guatemala and Mosaddegh in, in, uh, Iran." But still there, um, that is a, uh, you know, unwillingness to consider just how many probabilities would have to be multiplied for something as, uh, outlandish as that the Moon landings were faked, or that, um, uh, jet contrails are, um, tranquilizing drugs. How, how many people would have to be silent? How many people would have to not screw up? Uh, just how many pieces would have to fall into place? So that quantitative thinking of, um, you know, a conspiracy, one kind of conspiracy is, can be very different from, from another. And in fact, it's vaguely, uh, it's even stretching it to call, say, the Bay of Pigs a conspiracy. There was government secrecy, as there always is, but it doesn't mean that... You know, anything can happen. And it's true that trust in institutions have gone down since there... Uh, although it's, uh, important to keep in mind that probably the default is that people don't trust institutions. There was kind of a peak in the '60s where trusted institutions reached their high water mark, and they've been sinking ever since. Um, but, uh, and, um, it isn't helped when the institutions themselves don't take steps to safeguard their integrity and objectivity, and either when you have experts that either make pronouncements as if they were oracles, they don't kind of show their work, that is explain how they arrived at their recommendations, but just, you know, "Trust us, we're scientists." That just... As, as you say, that just sets them up for failure because no one is infallible. Uh, even our best experts are gonna make mistakes. That doesn't discredit them. That's just a reflection of the fact that humans are not, you know, oracles with a pipeline to the truth. Um, that should be made clearer, that our starting position in any new phenomenon is ignorance. You know, SARS-CoV-2, uh, popped up and, you know, no, no one knew anything, and that should've been clear and, and should always have been that the public health instructions should be, "Based on the following evidence that we have so far, this is what we recommend for the time being." That at least would have helped. The other is, uh, uh, many of our institutions are, um, are, are flagrantly politicizing themselves. They're just advertising, "We are a branch of the political left." Uh, they use the vocabulary, the can't words, the cliches, and people who, uh, aren't, um, uh, haven't identified themselves as part of that branding, that political coalition, are just gonna say, "Well, this is just another, um, uh, another bunch of, you know, woke academics or, or, or journalists," and they've kind of set themselves up to be rejected, uh, under the principle that applies to all of us that we tend to be more receptive to people from our own, uh, coalition.

   9. CWChris Williamson41:02

      We made it. Steven Pinker, ladies and gentlemen. Steven, what are you working on next? What can people expect, whatever, this year or next year?

   10. SPSteven Pinker41:09

       Well, I have for a number of years been, um, working on the psychology of, of common knowledge in the technical sense of "I know something, you know it, I know that you know it, you know that I know it, I know that you know that you know that I know that you know that I know it," ad infinitum. And I think we're... Even though that sounds like it would just make anyone dizzy to think through, and it, and it does, we have an intuitive sense of common knowledge in the sense that something is kind of out there, or public, or you can't take it back, uh, and I've been exploring how that enters into a range of, uh, psychological and economic and political, uh, phenomena. And that will be the topic of my, my next book, The Psychology of Common Knowledge.

   11. CWChris Williamson41:51

       Pretty cool.

6. 41:52 – 42:14

   Conclusion

   1. CWChris Williamson41:52

      I like it. Cheers, Steven. Thank you very much.

   2. SPSteven Pinker41:54

      Thanks, Chris. Thanks for having me on.

   3. CWChris Williamson41:56

      What's happening, people? Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks. And don't forget to subscribe. Peace.

Episode duration: 42:15