Hope Is A Verb - Steven Pinker – Why Progress Is Possible

Episode Date: November 5, 2024

Meet Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist and public intellectual who is one of the world’s greatest thinkers on the topic of progress. He is the author of 12 books, including ‘Better Angels of Our Nature,’ which played a key role in the origin story of Fix The News. After five years of email correspondence between Steven and Gus, this is their first face to face conversation. From progress to politics and the rise of tattoos, this episode offers a big dose of perspective about the current state of the world. Other topics discussed: why longstanding peace never makes headlines; the best metrics for human progress; the decline of mental health in rich countries; the problem with word police; changes in social norms and how they happen; why today’s election in the US is better than 1968; the cognitive illusion perpetuated by mass media; how graphs and data can help change beliefs; designing better institutions to help drive more progress; two lessons that Steven learned the hard way; the power of reasonable hope. This episode wraps up season three of this podcast. To celebrate, we’re offering new and existing subscribers a 30% discount on 12-month subscriptions to our weekly newsletter. If you want to make your inbox a more hopeful place: go to fixthenews.com and enter the code PINKER at checkout. Find out more about Steven Pinker: https://stevenpinker.com/ This podcast is hosted by Angus Hervey and Amy Davoren-Rose from ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Fix The News⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Audio sweeting by Anthony Badolato at Ai3 – audio and voice.

Hope is a reminder. It's the fuel of your soul. It's so much more infused with action. Ability to see a much better future. You really have to earn it to have it. Hope is happiness. Welcome to Hope is a Verb, a podcast about what it takes to change the world through conversations with the people who are making it happen.

I'm Amy. I'm Amy. I'm Gus. And in each episode, we shine a spotlight on the ordinary heroes who are stitching our social fabric together, mending our planet, and creating solutions to some of today's biggest global challenges. In this episode, someone who needs no introduction, arguably the world's best thinker and writer on the topic of progress, Steven Pinker. When progress happens, it isn't just a rising tide. It's not a background force. It's because someone somewhere decided we have problems that are fixable. Let's try to fix them. When we do that, we can push back at all of these drags on our

well-being and what history has shown that it is possible. It's not easy. It's not automatic, but it is possible. Well, here we are, final guest for season three. And not only has he been incredibly supportive of the work that we do, but his work is actually part of our origin story here at Fix the News. In 2013, I read Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature, and it was like a light bulb going off in my head. It was the first time I'd ever encountered a really convincing intellectual argument that progress was not only possible, but it was actually happening all around us,

except it was largely invisible. And that book is a big part of the reason that I started Future Crunch, which subsequently became Fix the News. For anyone who doesn't know, Pinker is the Johnston Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He's the author of numerous books, one of the world's leading public intellectuals. And what's been really gratifying along this journey is that a few years after starting the email newsletter,

he actually reached out to us personally via email and Twitter. We started corresponding and he has been a huge supporter of Fix the News, regularly posting our content and sending regular messages of support. But this episode's a pretty special moment because it's the first time that we finally got to meet and to speak in person. It is a big moment, final episode of season three

and speaking to one of the guiding lights of this entire project. And so to celebrate, we are offering a 30% discount off a 12-month subscription to anyone who's curious. All you have to do is go to fixanduse.com, sign up for an annual subscription and enter the code PINKA at checkout. This will give you a weekly dose of good news in your email inbox. Also, just for a little bit of context, we're releasing this episode on the eve of the US-American election. And at a time when there is so much confusion and division, I think Stephen's voice of reason and his ability to take a step back and look at the wider project of progress comes as something of a relief. Steve, welcome to the podcast. Thank you.

We have been in touch for many years, but we are finally meeting in person, so to speak. We've really been looking forward to this conversation and we want to kick it off with a question that we ask all of our guests. Is there anything good happening in the world right now? Oh, plenty of good things happening. And I feel inappropriate telling you about it since you two have done the most to inform me of the ongoing positive developments. But certainly in technology, there are spectacular advances in carbon-free energy capture and generation and storage. In health and biotech,

there's real hope of doing something about previously intractable diseases like Alzheimer's, as well as chipping away at the toll from cancer and heart disease. More dramatically, progress all over the world in dealing with infectious disease, which causes far more years of life lost. Advances that are easy to ignore but are significant when you tally them of advances in women's rights, in gay rights, abolitions of capital punishment and corporate punishment, increases in literacy and schooling, in access to electricity and clean water. Despite the truly horrific developments, which everyone knows about, I don't need to tell you that there is a constant background

of promising signs that you don't hear about, either because sometimes they consist of things not happening, and that doesn't count as news. So if there's a part of the world that is not at war, you don't see a headline, you know, Vietnam not at war for the 40th consecutive year or 36th consecutive year, which by the way, when I was a younger person, that would have been inconceivable good news. What? No war in Vietnam? Are you dreaming? Are you some sort of crazy utopian? But the war ended and

they've kind of stayed out of it, more or less since 1978. Or things that build up by a few percentage points a year and then compound and that transform the world without anyone waking up some Thursday morning and saying, oh, we've got to have a headline about this. So those are a brief summary of some of the good things that are happening, as if you guys needed to hear it. Well, I think it's interesting to talk about it in this way, because we're aware of many of those developments. But I think the vast majority of people still feel like things are heading in the wrong direction. I mean, it's been 13 years since the publication of Better Angels of Our Nature. In that time period, for many people, I feel like there's this sense that things have somehow deteriorated.

And there are top line figures that suggest that might be so. I mean, on the one hand, we've got the overall number of conflict related deaths, including of civilians has risen to the highest level that has been in 30 years. There's 59 different conflicts in 34 countries, that's the highest in 20 years. We've had a global pandemic that's killed millions of people. Climate change is causing record temperatures, worsening disasters. And yet, as you've kind of alluded to here, on the other hand, half a billion fewer people require treatment for neglected tropical diseases. Hundreds of millions of people have escaped poverty in the last decade. And it looks like maybe global carbon emissions might peak as soon as this year. So when you're trying to evaluate

all of this and kind of say, okay, are we in the upswing or the downswing of history? What's the best way of trying to weigh all of this information and all of this news up? How do you set these things against each other? Yeah, so there certainly have been setbacks. And you've mentioned a couple of them, battle deaths have gone in the wrong direction. Democracy has retreated, although neither of these has erased the progress that we have seen in the last, say, 75 years, to say nothing of over the centuries. I find it helpful to visualize things as graphs. So even when there is a movement in the wrong direction, you can eyeball and see, you know, how bad has it been? Does it just mean there's

been no progress? Has it all been wiped out? Or have we just lost some of the gains that we have made? And in some cases, I don't want to say that this is a general rule. I think it's important not to be mystical about progress. It's not a force of the universe that carries us ever upward, and there are far more ways for things to go wrong than for things to go right. But it sometimes happens that reversals are themselves reversed. Just the other day, I was plotting American homicide rate, which would be of parochial interest to Americans. But it was disconcerting that after, oh, about 30 years of declines and plateaus from pretty high level, because America is a pretty violent country. We had the worst jump in violent crime since the 1960s in the year 2020. Fortunately, that is a

reversal which was itself reversed. In the last two years, the violent crime rate has plunged back to almost a record low. Likewise, some of the losses in life expectancy that COVID punched us with and the stalling or even reversal in global extreme poverty seems to be reversing and the world is back on track toward progress after a rather depressing and horrifying notch in the graphs. So I think the biggest answer to your question is just to keep in mind that when progress happens, it isn't just a rising tide. It's not a background force. It's because someone somewhere, many people in many places decided we have problems that are fixable. Let's try to fix them. Let's see if the solutions work. If so, let's keep them. Let's try not to repeat our mistakes. When they do that, then progress can be kind of clawed out of the universe, which really doesn't care about us. But there are many, many ways in which we can slip back. I believe that there is such a thing

as human nature, and it's got a lot of traits that are not particularly conducive to human progress. We're subject to many kinds of cognitive biases and fallacies and illusions, which makes the search for knowledge always arduous and error-prone. We've got capacity for greed and exploitation and even sadism, for tribalism, for deference to authority, for Puritanism. These aren't, fortunately, the only things baked into human nature. Otherwise, we would not have made any progress. But there are a constant drag on our attempts at progress, which should make us all the more appreciative of the ways in which we have made progress, which I try to identify with what I loosely call the values of the Enlightenment, namely reason, with what I loosely call the values of the Enlightenment, namely reason, science, and humanism.

That is, if our goals are to improve human well-being, life, health, happiness, appreciation of one another and of nature and of culture, but to the extent that we fall back on what we have in common, namely most people would rather be alive than dead, they want their kids to grow up, they'd rather be healthy than starving, they'd rather be well than dead. They want their kids to grow up. They'd rather be healthy than starving. They'd rather be well than sick. If you start from that bedrock of things that pretty much everyone wants and say, can we figure out ways of having more of that? When we do that, we can push back at all of these drags on our well-being and what history has shown and what current affairs show, thanks to your efforts

and others, is that it is possible. It's not easy, it's not automatic, but it is possible. Okay, so within this context, Stephen, what counts as progress? Because it means different things to so many different people. Yeah, I would say that it consists of improvements in measures of human well-being, where human well-being would consist of longevity, of health, of education, of prosperity, of knowledge, of richness of experience. I think when it comes down to it, most people would rather that their children survive than die. They'd rather be healthy than sick. You know, a lot of people, most people. So if we agree that those are good things, then if there's kind of more of them, then that's progress.

If there was one overall metric to measure human progress that maybe you think we're not actually paying enough attention to, something that is the canary in the coal mine in terms of whether we're in the upswing or the downswing, what would that measure be? Well, there have been some attempts to put together composite measures of human well-being. There's the Social Progress Index, which came out of one of my colleagues' projects at Harvard. There's the simple composite of lifespan, income, and education. There are ones that try to factor in a few more things like environmental well-being, happiness, safety. So it's hard to prioritize one or to say what's most neglected. One of the things that almost gives some coherence to the notion of progress is that they really do tend to go together, not perfectly. Generally, there's some places that are pretty pleasant, like,

you know, New Zealand and Australia and Denmark and Switzerland and the Netherlands, where they're rich, they are democratic, they have relatively low crime rates, they are healthy, they're educated, women have rights, there are gay rights. These all roughly kind of correlate, which is, you know, it didn't have to be that way. And it's not always that way. There are rich and rather nasty countries. But in general, the rich countries are generally better places to live for reasons other than just luxury. They've got better environments, they have more gender equity. So, you know, it's not exactly clear why it's a classic social science correlation causation tangle where you don't know, is it that when you're rich, you have the luxury of educating your kids and you've got the luxury of allowing women to participate rather than slave in the kitchen, bring up the kids and you can build schools? you can build schools? Or is it that when you start with schools and everyone's educated,

they start to realize the compellingness of arguments for equality, that they also have the human capital to make their country richer? Very hard not to untangle, but we do know that lots of these things go together. Rich countries have fewer civil wars. They tend to have lower violence rates. Probably a good lesson is that anything that makes a country more affluent, other than just digging stuff out of the ground, but networks of cooperation and exchange and knowledge that increase wealth, tend to bring good things along with them. Perhaps good examples would be countries that not so long ago really were horribly poor, like South Korea and Taiwan, that have gotten better along a lot of measures. Education and affluence are kind of being neck and neck in terms of the causes.

Hmm. So how do you reconcile in these richer countries that the increasing material progress is also coinciding with reported declines in mental health and social connection, especially in Western countries? Yeah, so it does have to be unbundled because the mental health declines are concentrated in some demographic sectors. In the United States, young left-wing women and middle-aged and older right-wing men seem to be some of the biggest victims,

especially in rural areas. These have been the so-called deaths of despair. And then just in the last decade or so, there's been a decline in mental health of younger cohorts, but skewed towards women and skewed towards the political left. Now, I tend to think you guys could maybe start a branch of fix the news therapy, but no small part in the decline in mental health is the sense that we're the last generation, we're doomed. Human life is going to go extinct because of climate change before the year 2050. So why bring children into this hellscape of a world?

A lot of which are based on outright factual misconceptions. That's not the only reason, but I tend to think it's one reason. Another one is there does seem to be, at least there's some controversy here, but I think the case is plausible, though not proven, from Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, that consumption of social media by starting in adolescence has taken a toll on mental health. There's some data that suggests it. It's not absolutely conclusive.

But even as any of us knows who's tried to regulate our social media diet, I've turned off comments on Twitter. I don't go down rabbit holes because there's just a lot of ugliness in there, including a lot of personal nasty ugliness. I'm a big shot tenured professor, so if someone says something nasty about me on Twitter, it doesn't ruin my day. But if I was a 15-year-old girl and my entire social world was people on social media and they start to call me fat or ugly or a slut or whatever, that would be devastating. You can really see how, at least there's a plausible story behind the apparent data. I would love to dive into the role that language is playing in all of this and how language shapes our ideas of what's happening in the world. Do you think there's something about the way we speak now or the way we take in information that is making more people feel a lot of despair about the future?

I wouldn't pin the blame on language itself, although language changes to reflect our priorities. I'm against attempts to police word usage, often in almost comical ways to try to reduce prejudice and racism and bigotry. That is, I don't think that we should try to not use the word field because slaves worked in fields and it reminds people of slavery or don't use the word master or don't use the word bossy because it's been applied to girls. I think language is an organic product of human interaction. I don't think it drives our attitudes, but it's more likely to reflect them. The evidence for that is that generally attempts to rebrand words when there isn't underlying

attitude change just succumb to more cycles of replacing words. I call this the euphemism treadmill, that as you keep going, you have to replace one euphemism with another, because if the underlying attitude hasn't changed, it just taints the new word. So you see it in things like the word crippled is considered in dubious taste today, but it used to be perfectly neutral. There were hospitals for crippled children. That was then replaced by handicapped and then disabled and then differently abled. And likewise, words for what we now call cognitive impairment. I don't think anyone misses imbecile and idiot and moron, which were Greek words purposed for that more than a century

ago. But something like retarded, which literally just means slow, that's what retarded means. But now there's a very strong movement to stigmatize anyone who uses the previously unexceptionable word retarded. This, I think, is a losing cause, and it can make movements at improving attitudes look ridiculous, simply because there are lists of dozens, sometimes scores of innocuous words that people try to stigmatize because somehow there might be some chain of associations that leads to slavery or bigotry or sexism. You're saying that language is a reflection of shifts in trends or shifts in culture. So it's actually not a bad canary in the coal mine if you're trying to understand how things are changing. If that's the case, then what is it that you think is more important in terms of

driving those underlying changes? What is the balance in your mind between the role of individuals in driving progress and remarkable individuals in particular, and the kind of wider societal shifts that seem to happen through a much more complex mix of political, economic and social factors? just the self-sustaining positive feedback loop of virality. Some things just feed on themselves, get enough critical mass that it just starts to seem normal, kind of like fashions. In my lifetime, I've seen the rise of tattooing, which used to be something that only sailors and construction workers would sport, and they would be considered kind of de classe. And in fact, in my generation, kind of politically incorrect, like you'd be aligning yourself with the sexist sailors and the right wing construction workers. Then there was a flip, probably some starting around the early 90s, maybe a bit earlier, where everyone has tattoos and piercings. Now, that's a kind of a frivolous example, but it does show that there can be widespread social changes without anyone ever having decided,

argued, legislated. It just happened. It just became a new normal. Now, that can happen in positive ways. I'll give you an example, again, from my own lifetime, that used to be that ethnic jokes were just a perfectly normal form of amusement. You'd see them on broadcast television, where they'd be stereotypes of Polish people as stupid. That would almost be unthinkable now, even in some of the nastier swamps of the mass media, but you just don't do that anymore. Now there, unlike the tattoos and the piercings, there was a moral argument behind them, which then got converted into a social norm. behind them, which then got converted into a social norm. Sometimes I think the moral arguments are compelling, that often we do things prior to the change that really were like tattoos okay or not, you know, fat ties for men, skinny ties for men, short skirt lengths, long skirt lengths.

People just didn't question them. But when you first put a spotlight on them, I think there can be times when the arguments are just overwhelming and undeniable and you look like an idiot if you defend the status quo, which is why some changes can happen pretty rapidly. For example, the decriminalization of homosexuality and then the legal equality extending to marriage for gay people. These were remarkably quick shifts considering how much opposition there was when it seemed unthinkable, outrageous. The legal equality of women starting in the 1970s when countries started to take a scalpel to all those laws that said women had

to get their husband's permission to get a credit card, those fell in a pretty short period of time just because as soon as you start to think about them, you really can't defend them. Going back in history, it took longer, obviously. But once abolition of slavery became a thing, I don't want to say it was inevitable, because nothing is inevitable. But it had such moral force that people did defend slavery, but it didn't last. So I think when there is an idea whose time has come, that is you examine some practice where it really is indefensible if you actually bring the debate out into the open. And it can be tied to whatever forces of virality

made ethnic jokes go away, made gay marriage kind of unexceptionable. That's when you can have social and moral progress. And an often frequently raised example that has not yet happened is one could make a very cogent argument that factory farming is a source of tremendous evil that we somehow tolerate. That's a case where it hasn't moved in a direction that I think morally it ought to go. What comes through really strongly in the entire conversation is just this deep sense of rationality. It's just perspective about saying,

look, I'm not going to think about what's happening right at the cutting edge. I'm not going to think about what's happening right at the cutting edge. I'm not going to concentrate solely on events. I'm going to try to take a step back whenever I'm feeling overwhelmed about the world and look at the bigger picture. Where is the broader sweep of history taking us? What does this look like on a 5, 10, 50 year scale? Yeah, I agree. It actually reminds me of our conversation with historian Ada Palmer from earlier this season. And I really love thinking about progress, not just as this series of solutions, but as this ever-present mirror that is constantly reflecting back our values and our relationship, not only with the planet, but also with each other. Listening to you talk about some of these changes, I'm also aware that these things often have quite strong counter effects or pushbacks. And I'm thinking the level of rhetoric in the United States right now,

the vitriol, the racism, intolerance, there is a significant portion of people, I think, in the United States who have strong anti-immigrant sentiment. There is a strong pushback against LGBTQ rights. Of course, women's rights in the United States have seen a regression in the last three or four years. And in Europe, we have rising anti-immigrant sentiment, the rise of the far right, which has gained an increasing political power. So in these things that you're talking about here, of course, it's not a one-way street, that there is this effect and counter effect that seems to happen with social change. Does this suggest that these ideas are contestable and that often they sometimes go into reverse?

They certainly can. But one also has to take into account the changing standards. There's obviously racism in the United States, but we don't have a presidential candidate who's calling for legal segregation, which we had in my lifetime. In 1968, George Wallace ran for president. He won five states and 13.5% of the popular vote. That just, whatever you call racism now in the mainstream, isn't that. The setback for women's rights in the United States is really concentrated on abortion. And as you guys know, the worldwide trend is more in the other direction. Countries are expanding access to abortion. And even in the United States, abortion is, it's a women's issue.

But on the other hand, it's kind of unisex in terms of its politics, that a lot of the people, the conservative Americans, the Catholics, the fundamentalists who are against abortion, it's 50-50 male-female. On the other hand, there is no attempt to reverse the rights of women to serve in the armed forces or anything else. women to serve in the armed forces or anything else. We're always, you know, at the leading edge, we're always looking at the little range of movement back and forth as setbacks, but we kind of forget the massive movement that will be made. You know, likewise, in terms of LBGTQ rights, I don't know whether you consider the right of trans women to compete in women's sports and the pushback against that

to be a setback. I think that's highly debatable, but there's no attempt to recriminalize homosexuality. It used to be a crime. You know, it has to keep into perspective what the raging debates of today are compared to what the raging debates of, say, 10, 20, 50 years ago were. of, say, 10, 20, 50 years ago were. How do you think this concept of progress differs across cultures? And how can we then all work together on these big shared global challenges? Yeah, I think progress is not a particularly natural concept, probably in traditional religions and national ideologies. concept, probably in traditional religions and national ideologies. Religions sometimes are cyclical. Sometimes things suddenly get worse and chaos breaks out until you have a revelation or

Armageddon at the end of days. And often there's just stasis that we're born into a world of pain and there's just nothing anyone can do about it other than be aware of suffering and valorize suffering. Historians of ideas can find predecessors of anything, but probably only with the Enlightenment was there a kind of a coherent philosophy of progress. And it's still, I think, quite exotic. Progress in the sense that we've been talking about in terms of human ingenuity,

making life better across the planet. It's kind of a deeply weird idea. And so we've got to get people kind of used to it. There are various tricks that I've learned and I've learned from others, like, would you like to have your surgery with or without anesthesia, for example? Or in the good old days, one out of every three children died before their fifth birthday. Or life expectancy at birth was about 30. Now, even in poor countries, it's more than 70, and worldwide, more than 80. People naturally take these things for granted and have an event, image, anecdote, narrative-driven

view of the world. Since there's no shortage of horrific images, there is a massive cognitive illusion that things are worse than ever, simply because journalism, again, I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, is a non-random sample of the worst things that happen anywhere on earth. And there are always going to be plenty of them in a world of 8 billion plus people. Since we are inescapably narrative and image and anecdote-driven species, we clearly need a mixed diet of information about what can improve for there to be a change in mindset. Steve, you accidentally became this sort of avatar of progress.

I know sometimes it's quite amusing to you. You're not a progress guy. Well, you are these days, but you're a cognitive psychologist. Yes. I want to talk about some of the psychology of this. We have various biases. You've spoken so eloquently about them so many times. The best way I can sum all of those up is that people don't believe what they see. They see what they believe. How do we help people overcome their bias towards the story of disaster, death, and division? It seems to be so intractable. Yeah. So people are, even as they consume the news, you know, there are all these problems that we have talked about. The fact that there's an inherent

bias in any source of information which samples events, simply because it's very easy for something terrible to happen very, very quickly. You know, a building can blow up or collapse. It could be an earthquake. Things that are good tend to build up incrementally because you're pushing against all these forces of disorder and chaos and destruction, and they happen incrementally. So the news, putting aside any nefarious profits and eyeballs and clicks, not that those aren't real, but even if they weren't real, anything that just focuses on events is necessarily going to

seem pessimistic. There also is probably built deeply into us a negativity bias. We are more attuned to negative information simply because something bad can do you a lot more harm than something good can improve your life. You know, there's an awful lot of ways to die. There are an awful lot of ways to become miserable. There aren't that many things that could happen to you that could make suddenly make your life much better. And probably our emotions reflect that reality. So we're on the lookout for all the terrible things that can happen. That's what we're pushing against. What can push in the other direction? People can have an appetite for data.

Sports fans consume data every day. They read the paper, they look at the standings, they look at the records, and they don't expect only bad news to be reported. If the team loses, they want to know that, but if their team wins, they want to know that too. And so the mindset of a kind of a constantly updated dashboard of indicators of well-being, I think is something that journalists should take more seriously. And it's not just sports. The business pages, people who have, you know, who's in retirement funds are invested in the share market, check the stock price, the weather. So it's not that people are insensitive to data. And there are methods of data presentation that make things sink in. I'm a big believer in graphs. And there are studies that show that people can

change their mind when they see a graph, even when it goes against some deeply held belief. So there are those ways of trying to overcome our cognitive biases. But because we're also tribal animals, that is another thing that we have to keep in mind. And this is pointed to me as someone who wants to popularize understanding of science, where I came to realize that what most of my fellow scientists think is the way to combat scientific illiteracy, namely greater scientific education, is totally missing the problem. That when you give tests of scientific literacy to people who either embrace or reject anthropogenic climate change, it turns out the climate deniers are not ignoramuses, they're not bumpkins. They

actually score the same on tests of scientific literacy as those who accept the scientific consensus. The only difference is politics. The farther you are to the right, the more you deny climate change. Likewise, when it comes to belief in whether humans evolved, kind of the mantra among biologists is, oh, education has become so dumbed down and people don't understand modern biology. We've got to have better science outreach, more science museums, science documentaries because everyone is so ignorant. It turns out that you give tests either of general scientific literacy, like what's bigger, an electron or an atom, or even questions about how evolution works. It's uncorrelated with what people say that humans evolved from other primates. What does predict it very well is how religious you are.

If you're a fundamentalist Christian, you reject evolution, even if you understand it perfectly well. So what does all this mean? It means we also have to be sensitive to politicization and ideological tribalism. If people think that decline is congenial to their politics, they'll say we're declining. You see this most blatantly in the case of in the United States, in the authoritarian populism of Donald Trump, where his slogan is, make America great again. And his rhetoric is constant dystopian picture of a hellscape, because I mean, fed by all the biases we've talked about, but also it's just part of their demonology, that is the establishment that is in charge, has ruined the country, and it'll get even worse only by empowering charismatic demagogue can we march back to a better state. Conversely, I joked before that progressives often hate progress,

not because I think they're more susceptible to the cognitive biases that infect all of us, but because if you want to tear down the establishment, you've got to make the case that the establishment is responsible for decline or at least stasis. If things are getting better, well, maybe not all of the establishment is so terrible. Maybe some of them are doing something right. So dissociating the fact of progress from particular political tribes is another, I think, prerequisite to getting people to see progress

where it hasn't occurred. Hearing you speak, this is all just, it's just a very centrist argument for a way of looking at the world, which it's unusual to hear it because so many of the arguments we speak about or that we hear about tend to have this hue of left versus right. Taking into account all these factors that you've spoken about, biases, tribalism, separating out the ideas of progress from your political beliefs, what does that mean for the way that we design institutions? If we want more progress in the world, how do you design institutions to take into account the fact that people don't believe what they see, they see what they believe? Yeah, it's absolutely a vital question.

And it's one that I took up in my most recent book, Rationality. When you think about, you know, I'm a cognitive psychologist, so I have to think about it. You know, are humans rational or are we doofuses and ignoramuses and imbeciles who can't possibly understand the way the world works? Well, obviously there's some capacity for both because we've done, you know, as a species, we've done some literally awesome things. We invented vaccines, we invented smartphones, we've sequenced the genome, we've figured out a lot of neural circuitry. You know, how do we manage to do that if we're just saddled with all these biases? And a good part of the answer is that we formed institutions that try to pull out of us what rationality we have and make us more collectively rational than any of us is individually. Namely, even though each of us is subject to egocentric biases, we always think we're

right, we're too confident, we blow off counterexamples. If you have a community where free speech is a norm, so you can challenge orthodoxy, you can challenge dogma, and there is a set of ground rules that are designed to steer you toward the truth. In the case of science, it's got to test your ideas empirically. In the case of both science and democracies, you've got freedom of speech. In the case of journalism, you have demands for sourcing and fact-checking and error correction and editing, all of which are kind of nuisances when you have got to work within them, because

it's much easier to just say, I'm right, and believe me, and have a smooth rhetoric and spellbinding oratory. But it really is kind of better if you're part of a regime that says, you believe something, you got to show why it's true. Again, not terribly intuitive, but the institutions like universities, like responsible government record keeping agencies, like responsible journalism, like scientific societies, even Wikipedia, one of the few success stories on the internet in terms of truth and accuracy. It's written down there. If you want to be a Wikipedian, you've got to subscribe to the pillars of objectivity and sourcing and so on.

So it's those institutions that I think channel what rationality we have and kind of purify and concentrate it. Now, obviously, they're fallible. Institutions can be dead wrong. You can have the madness of crowds. But it's, I think, safeguarding our institutions, preventing them from becoming too politicized. That is essential to creeping toward rationality and knowledge and truth. Stephen, I would love to know, what is one thing that you've learned the hard way that you wish more people knew? Oh, in the transition from strict academic publishing to also publishing for a wider audience, one thing I've learned is the popular audience has much higher standards than academia. Academia, you know, peer review means two guys look at your paper,

and if they kind of like it, they might like it for all kinds of reasons. Like they like you, they like the ideas, then it's in, and if they don't like it, you're out. When you publish something in the press or you want it to become a bestseller, there are like hundreds of thousands of eyeballs that it passes by, and they would love nothing more than to show that the fancy schmancy Harvard professor made an error. So I've learned to be much more careful in fact checking including my own memory because a lot of things that I remember with

perfect clarity I look them up they didn't happen. Now I should know this as a cognitive psychologist because memory is not a perfectly accurate record. And memory is kind of like a Wikipedia page. It's constantly being updated. Not just memory, but degree of subjective confidence in a hypothesis, things that intuitively just seem obvious, and then turn out to be wrong. I've got to say, even the idea of progress, when I wrote The Blank Slate, which was a defense of the idea of human nature, there was a kind of tragic tone to it that there always will be human nature, that there are aspects of the human condition that we probably are stuck with. And I think I underestimated how much progress, even though I acknowledged it in

a few places, it wasn't until I was kind of clobbered with graph after graph of human improvement, such as deaths in war since 1945, such as rates of violence against women, such as rates of child abuse. I saw all these graphs where violence kind of crept down from the top left corner to the bottom right corner. I realized, wow, this is amazing. No one having read the blank slate would have called me an optimist. And I still don't like to think of myself as an optimist. It's not about me. It's not about my emotional life, my personality. What does that have to do with the way the world works? But still people think of me as an optimist. And that's because there has been a change in emphasis where I've

come to appreciate the huge scope for progress that I think I was just not fully aware of. I guess a more recent example that I haven't quite assimilated yet, because I don't think anyone has, if you asked me two years ago, could an artificial intelligence system that was simply trained on gargantuan amounts of data have a perfect command of the English language, including all of its grammatical nuances, I would have said, nah, I don't think that's possible. We now know it is possible. We don't know exactly why, because no one exactly knows how these things work. They're just beyond human comprehension for the time being. But I'm now kind of processing how to kind of update my understanding of language learning in the light of the success of these data-driven models.

In turn, I'll give you an embarrassing example of fallibility of memory. For a while, I told people how I remember exactly when Justin Trudeau was born. At the time, his father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, was the Prime Minister of Canada. Trudeau-Pere, the father, was a big deal. There was Trudeau-mania in Canada because he was charismatic, he was handsome, he was witty, he was suave, and he was uniquely Canadian. So as a Canadian, this is a big deal. And then he married a beautiful woman much younger, and the whole country was riveted on that marriage and on their first child, Justin. And I remember when my high school teacher announced in

the class, a baby is born, that I looked up the date, I wasn't in high school. This is a totally, this is a hallucinated memory, or a blended memory, perhaps an updated memory. But things like that happen, including more consequential false memories of news events. This is like a whole rabbit hole. I want to go down now, but we're not going to go down that rabbit hole. There's a whole other hour conversation that we could have about large numbers. Next conversation. We have one final question. What does the word hope mean to you? I think it's a desire for some future event coupled with some reasonable expectation.

I don't hope there will be permanent world peace. I hope there'll be a lot fewer wars. I hope the war in Ukraine will come to an end. I hope the war in Gaza will come to an end. I hope the war in Sudan will come to an end. Zero wars anywhere. I'm not hoping for that yet, just because it would be a waste of emotion. And I tend to think that that characterizes what people mean by hope. Maybe there's some people who hope for things that are utterly impossible or extraordinarily unlikely, like winning the lottery. I tend to think that in general, it is a desire for some future event that has some reasonable chance of happening. I really loved that definition of hope.

The idea that it's wanting a certain outcome in the future, but only wanting that outcome if it's one that is within the realms of possibility. And I feel like that just informs so much of the work that we do and informs so much of my own worldview. You know, when I think about the kind of world that I hope for my two daughters, everything that I hope for them for the year 2060 or the year 2070 are all things that I hope based on current trends.

And I believe that we might get there. That hope is deeply instilled from looking at these trends and this data for more than decade now. That hope is now baked into my system so it's hard-earned hope. As we said at the beginning of this conversation this wraps up season three of Hope as a Verb which has really been such an epic exploration of hope, especially in places of the world where it feels the hardest to find right now. The generosity of our guests is something that we never take for granted

and we'd like to thank each and every one of them for taking the time to share their story with us. And if you haven't already, please subscribe to this podcast as we will be releasing a few bonus episodes before Season 4 kicks off in 2025. We'd like to thank our paying subscribers for making projects like this podcast possible. If you're interested in finding out more about our work,

check out fixthenews.com. There are a lot of podcasts out there. It means a lot to us that you chose this one. This podcast is recorded in Australia on the lands of the Gadigal and the Wurundjeri and Woiwurrung people. If you enjoyed this conversation and would like to support Hope as a Verb, make sure you subscribe and leave a review. Thanks for listening.