Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Steven Pinker: Things are Getting BETTER! (#148)

Starting point is 00:00:01 He is the Harvard professor, psychologist professor, whose newsby seller is Enlightenment now, the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress. Stephen Pinker! Many people face the news each morning with trepidation and dread. You can always fool yourself into seeing a decline if you compare leading headlines of the present with rose-tinted images of the past. But there are roadmaps to decarbonizing the economy that we have to implement and accelerate. They include both policy measures like a carbon tax so that every economic decision that everyone on the planet makes factors in the damage.

Starting point is 00:00:39 We're not doing it. That's the thing. There is no carbon tax. Let's start. Yeah. Life is better than death. Health is better than sickness. Abundance is better than want.

Starting point is 00:00:49 Freedom is better than coercion. Happiness is better than suffering. And knowledge is better than ignorance and superstition. Hi, everybody. Today's episode features none other than... Harvard University professor, Dr. Stephen Pinker, who is a phenomenal intellect. He is really one of these public intellectuals. He's a philosopher. He's a psychologist. He is a rational thinker. He is a humanist. And we got into all sorts of topics and more in today's episode. I think you're really

Starting point is 00:01:19 going to enjoy it. I hope that if you do, you'll leave a rating, a review, and let me know what you think about these podcasts wherever you're watching or listening to them. Please subscribe to my newsletter at brian keating.com. Most of my guests subscribe there and I get to keep in touch with them. And who knows, you couldn't find a better company to be within than the end of the impossible audience. I really thank you all so much in this time. We're still coming to the end of the pandemic, but the pandemic podcasting will remain

Starting point is 00:01:46 and continue because there's no reason to stop a good thing. I'm having so much fun. I hope you are too. Send me suggestions, leave comments, wherever you can, and subscribe to my newsletter and send me an email, briancating.com. Anyway, enjoy today's episode. Stephen is a brilliant person. He's just fun to talk to. Made plenty of time. He's a new book coming out in the fall. Stay tuned for that. I'm going to have him back and maybe a giveaway of his books. So please enjoy this episode with Professor Stephen Pinker.

Starting point is 00:02:21 Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Hey, we are joined on the Into the Impossible podcast by Professor Stephen. Pinker, the Johnstone family professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. He's the author of many books, including the language instinct, how the mind works, the blank slate, the stuff of thought, the better angels of our nature, the sense of style, which I do love that book, and Enlightenment Now, which is most recently. And actually, Stephen, you were, you actually preempted what I was going to open our conversation with by your forthcoming book rationality, because I actually got re-exposed to you during the pandemic,

Starting point is 00:03:06 courtesy of our mutual friend Michael Shermer, who tweeted out, how about a free Harvard education and rationality? This is in spring of 2020. Watch Stephen Pinker's Cog general education class on rationality, and I started to watch it. I watched all the lectures, including the guest lectures, and it was amusing kind of frozen in amber,

Starting point is 00:03:26 this transition from in-person lectures to COVID, remote lectures only. but I was going to write you, Stephen, you don't know who I am, but I have a good idea for you. Why don't you take all your lectures and turn it into a book? But I feel like you already had an idea. So can you mention briefly what the nature of rationality? Yeah, let's say I think you advice. We violate time and space.

Starting point is 00:03:50 And I took your advice. My next book is called Rationality, what it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters. Well, that's funny because supposedly once about a decade ago, Stephen Hawking set up a table in the university at Cambridge University and it said, welcome time travelers from the future. And people were like, what is he doing? And then the next day he advertised it. And the joke was, you know, they would only be able to attend this event. They could actually travel back and so that's the origin of Stephen's book. We're actually violating time and space.

Starting point is 00:04:30 I want to start off by talking about rationality, and I want to get your prescription as a doctor, as am I, of philosophy in the sense, about rationality. So today, on my way to campus, I walked by some students, and they were skateboarding, whizzing down the street or on the sidewalks or whatever, and they were on their cell phone or typing on their cell phone on their skateboard, not wearing a helmet, Stephen, but wearing a mask. So they were afraid, you know, nervous about COVID, but not wearing a helmet and going at breakneck speed.

Starting point is 00:05:01 What do you make of, you know, these are some of the brightest students and humans on the planet. And I assume similar phenomena can be witnessed at Harvard. What do you make of even educated people being so bad at making rational decisions? Yes, well, rationality is always a means to an end. We don't call someone rational if they just prove arbitrary theorems or, spin out the digits of pie, you've got to have a goal. And often the goal is one that we may not agree with or that may itself not be rational by held to certain criteria. So the wearing of masks, as we know, has become a decision that people make not only for the benefit toward themselves,

Starting point is 00:05:44 protecting themselves against catching a contagious disease or protection against others, not spreading it in case you do have it, but it's also become a symbol. It's become a means of advertising what coalition you are sympathetic with. And so, bizarrely enough, it became a symbol on the American right of defiance of the left, defiance of government. And even on the left, there are conditions in which there really is not a whole lot of benefit to wearing a mask, like you're by yourself on a beach. And some people wear it there to signal where their heart lies. In terms of whether or not you wear a helmet, there is a trade-off, of course, between the feeling of the wind through your hair and, you know, looking really cool and increasing the

Starting point is 00:06:38 chances that you will not die in a fatal accident. And there isn't, you know, an objectively correct answer to the question, which is the more irrational of those goals to pursue. I think if we thought it through deeply enough, we would probably come to agree. that that few moments of pleasure and vanity don't outweigh the chance, however small of dying in an accident. But those personal choices always involve tradeoffs between competing values. And I've heard it said even there was a study in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which I've taken to saying lately what they used to say about the journal Nature,

Starting point is 00:07:19 they used to say, just because it's in nature, doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong. But actually, we're finding a lot of things nowadays published in the New York Post. And these are like hardcore science papers, or at least the theories behind them are pretty significant. Like Avi Loeb had some pieces published in the New York Post or op-eds about his discoveries related to Oumuuma. I want to talk about that because actually it seems that sometimes the most polarized people in society.

Starting point is 00:07:49 And even those that have the most polarized views about science and scientific things, things like global warming or our stem cell research, et cetera, they actually can be correlated with people with high scientific degrees of education. And I wonder, is that a byproduct of kind of, you know, not the Dunning Kruger effect, which as I understand, you are, of course, much more astute about it than I am, but it's sort of like, you know, this phrase that, you know, something so preposterous that only an intellectual could believe it. I do see things nowadays where people, you know, are so entrenched scientifically and they

Starting point is 00:08:21 they believe that their scientific credentials extend, you know, to other disciplines. And so we hear about people, you know, that won the Nobel Prize in condensed matter physics, and they'll opine about the Iran Treaty. So what is it about even rational people? Like, I know that this person is not an expert in Iran policy and nuclear, you know, the denuclearization. But why do we feel this need to kind of get authority from people that may not have the earn the discipline, you know, the prestige that we're ascribing to them. Why are academics in particular so quick to ascribe, you know, this bias in favor of things said by their fellow academicians, shall we say? Yes. Well, it's part of the inherent problem of knowing anything that we have to take advantage

Starting point is 00:09:10 of the division of labor because, you know, none of us knows everything. Most of us know at best a little bit about something, which means we have to, in some sense, trust those who know more about the subject matter than we do, which in turn raises the question of who and on what basis should we trust someone? Because truth be told, I don't understand enough about atmospheric chemistry to work out for myself that human-made climate change is a fact. And a lot of the people who do believe what you and I would probably say is the correct belief, namely that human activity is warming the planet, a lot of them are completely out to lunch as to why. If you ask them what's the cause of global warming, they might say, oh, toxic waste

Starting point is 00:09:58 dumps or the ozone hole, have this vague sense of something of pollution and green is good and pollution is bad. Nonetheless, by taking seriously the people who really do understand the problem, they do arrive at the, what we would agree is the best supported opinion. So the question is on what basis should you trust others? Now, credentials are a kind of shortcut. They're kind of heuristic that is a better guide to whom to trust than the guy at the end of the bar or something that you read on Twitter.

Starting point is 00:10:38 On the other hand, it's only as good as the actual basis for the credential. And as you point out, if you earn a PhD in a particular subject, if you get hired by a department, if you publish in those journals, that doesn't automatically entitlement expertise in other subjects. And there is a long list of Nobel Prize winners in science who have endorsed crackpot theories, including ESP and homeopathy and crank autism cures and denial of anthropogenic climate change and so on. Eugenics. Eugenics.

Starting point is 00:11:16 And you can't even go by whether the sheepskin on the wall is for that particular discipline, because even experts can fall out of the consensus of their own field or falling out of the way from the consensus. itself no indicator necessarily of being wrong, but they can pursue their own conceits. Conversely, people who take the time to learn about the best research in some other field might have a perfect right to express their opinions on it if they can back it up with research in the field that they're talking about. If they have good reasoning, if they base their factual claims on document,

Starting point is 00:12:10 findings. So there's no formula for who to trust, but one has to follow the train of evidence. Does that person have good grounds for what they are claiming? Does it stand up to logic? Is it supported by facts? Yeah, I always say when I'm asked, as I'm often done, and I assume it happens to you as well. At a talk, I'll give about cosmology. So I'll say, well, what do you think about global warming? And I'll say, I hope when you have an atmosphere, chemist, you know, from Scripps Institute of Oceanography here, when you have her come and speak and you ask her about cosmology, she doesn't answer the question. You know, she says, well, you should talk to a cosmologist. And just the same way. Yeah, so a little net knowledge is a

Starting point is 00:12:54 dangerous thing. As your late great colleague, Stephen Jay Gould, was the author of the leader of the series on scientific ex, these treatise of scientific classics, of which Galileo's dialogue is one. And in this book, translated by Stillman Drake, and it's a classic edition forward by some guy named Albert Einstein, in it, I note that Galileo says these wonderful things that I think, I want to run it by you, because I think I'll get, I will get a kick, and maybe my audience will too. But what does this sound like to you? This is Galileo, who is a wonderful writer, incredibly brilliant orator and writer, not so great politically, shall we say, but he said, he said the following, for anyone, this vain presumption of understanding

Starting point is 00:13:38 everything can have no other basis than never understanding anything. For anyone who had experienced just once the perfect understanding of one single thing and had tasted how knowledge is truly accomplished, he would recognize that of the infinity of other truths, he understands nothing. And I think of this as like the Dunning Kruger effect, like Galileo writing in 1632, anticipating this kind of effect that later, I believe that Richard Feynman, Nobel laureate said, he said, science is the belief in the ignorance of experts, not the wisdom of experts, in that if science would stagnate, if we all of a sudden just said, okay, well, you know, Newton was right, he was a genius, and I don't have to investigate these departures of the planet Mercury. I don't have to worry about that. What do you say about the fact this is always this tension, Stephen, between the respecting of the past, the received wisdom, if you will, as a scientist, but always having to assume that they're wrong. And it's sort of this dichotomy that is, because there's a danger of saying, well, you scientists don't know anything. You said 30 years ago, Manhattan would be underwater, but no, no, no, you should listen to us now. And 30 years from now,

Starting point is 00:14:48 it'll be underwater. But the reasoning is, you know, it's not like the laws of chemistry or physics have changed. How do you convince someone that the scientific method is provisional? It is subject to consensus, but it should be the best tool that we have as human beings to make sense of our world. Well, that absolutely is the crux of the issue of what ought a rational person to believe, negotiating the trade-off between having to trust in people who know more about it than you do, but not trusting them because of their credentials, because of their fancy-smansy position, because of their authoritative tone of voice,

Starting point is 00:15:27 but rather because they have done the relevant work, they can cite the relevant facts. And it is crucial, as you point out, to note that we all start out ignorant of everything. And in fact, if a scientist gets something wrong, that should not impugn the credibility of the enterprise, but strengthen it. Namely, since no one is omniscient,

Starting point is 00:15:50 no one has been vouchsafed with the truth, God has not implanted correct beliefs in any of us, our only option is to frame explanations of phenomena and to let the world tell us whether they're right or wrong. And so in the early days of the pandemic, for example, when opinion did change because it was a new pathogen, there was a new mode of transmission, no one really understood anything. And some of the advice did flip-flop, and the wrong conclusion would be, well, that just shows you shouldn't trust scientists because they say one thing one week and another thing the other week.

Starting point is 00:16:26 It should be, well, yes, we should trust at least the methods of science, not necessarily any given scientist, because given that we start out ignorant, it is our best means of reducing our ignorance. Right. Yeah, and similar, I think, on the radical or, you know, self-declared humanism or maybe even militant, militant self-declared atheists like Lawrence Krauss or Richard Dawkins, you know, there is this tendency. well, if you don't like it, if you don't believe in science, then you shouldn't use a cell phone

Starting point is 00:16:56 because a cell phone uses general relativity to make corrections to the time to let, you know, I think that's a little overblown as well. Like I don't think we have to, you know, accept the issue of, you know, it's like what scientists, another thing that Galileo said is, you know, a thousand, you know, scientists are not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. So it is true, although I get a lot of emails like people thought Einstein was wrong, people think I'm wrong, therefore I'm Einstein, you know, will you help me, you know, win a Nobel Prize and I'll share the money with you? But nevertheless, I do feel like

Starting point is 00:17:27 we live in this age where, as Carl Sagan said, you know, never has so much technology been present by people that understand it so poorly. And I feel like it's getting worse. Like Moore's law and everything else and the progress of inevitable, you know, progression of human technology and science that you and I are part of is only going to make that problem worse. So we're only going to understand technology less and less relative to what is available. So are you still optimistic? You know, is the trajectory that you outline so beautifully and enlightened in now, you know, do we feel after witnessing a pandemic and all the kind of irrationality that was surrounding it, are you more optimistic, less optimistic, sort of the same?

Starting point is 00:18:07 Youth sports families and fans huddle up. Wherever life takes you, game changer keeps you connected. Stream games live and full HD when you can't be there. Get play-by-play updates right on your phone and share game highlights with everyone, full bragging rights included. Live the game like never before with Game Changer. Create your free account today at gc.com. Well, the people often characterize Enlightenment now and the book that I wrote two books previously, The Better Angels of our nature, as briefs for optimism. But that really is not what they are. They're not encouraging people to take a particular mindset, to wear rose-colored glasses, see the glasses half full, look on the bright side, they're trying to make people aware of facts that they're ignorant of.

Starting point is 00:18:54 Most people, if you ask them, have wars gotten better or worse over the last 50 years? They'll say worse. You ask them, has global poverty, extreme poverty, gotten better or worse, they'll say it's gotten worse. And, you know, they're wrong and they're wrong. So, extreme poverty has been decimated. Literacy has increased. Longevity has increased.

Starting point is 00:19:18 Rates of death and war and genocide have plunged. Now, people just are incorrect in their beliefs about these phenomena. And because if you base your understanding of the world on events in the media, you're getting a highly distorted view of the world because journalism is a non-random sample of the worst events that have happened on a given day. Right. And all of the things that don't happen, like a country that is not at war, or things that happen gradually, like 137,000 people escaping from extreme poverty every single day, just aren't

Starting point is 00:19:54 headlines. They happen. They build up. They change the world. And no one's aware of them. So that's really the, was the point of both of those books, rather than, well, let's assume that everything will get better because things don't get better by themselves. They get better only because.

Starting point is 00:20:10 And as a physicist, you'd be the first to acknowledge that the laws of the universe don't care about us. If anything, they seem to grind us down. There's the second law of thermodynamics. When it comes to our position in the natural world as organisms, we are vulnerable to pathogens and parasites, like all living things. You and I are big, juicy hunks of meat there for the eating by, you know, any bitty organisms that can evolve a lot faster than we can because their generation time is in minutes rather than in decades. And so we're sitting ducks for pathogens and germs. We have to, the only reason we're not all dead is that we've fought back.

Starting point is 00:20:57 In our evolutionary history, we fought back with our immune system. We fought back with sexual reproduction, so our kids aren't clones of ourselves and our germs have to start all over again, evolving to crack their molecular defenses. We have primitive behavioral emotions like disgust and xenophobia. But what we've developed in the last couple of centuries is the application of reason to fight back against little germs, such as vaccination, such as antibiotics, such as sanitation, such as public health measures. And it's only by applying our ingenuity deployed toward the goal of keeping people alive and healthy and happy that we can push back against all these forces of the cosmos that are trying to grind us down. Or at best, that's a little bit too anthropomorphic. They aren't really trying. They just don't care.

Starting point is 00:21:52 And things left to their own devices, things get worse. Yeah, there's the teleological kind of overlay that's almost impossible in what I do. and to some extent with my colleagues in evolutionary biology, et cetera, do. You mentioned the media, and I thought, you know, I made this observation, you know, recently online somewhere, you know, that never has it been the case where media were never not guided by a profit motive. In other words, we're living in an extraordinary time where, you know, billionaires control huge media empires from pure electronic to print media and hybrid models as well.

Starting point is 00:22:30 well, and that can be shut off at a moment's notice. Access can be denied at a moment's notice. There's no appeals board. There's no, and there's no government court. It's not governmental, so you can't claim freedom of speech issues or denial of rights. But it's still a phenomenal experience in the sense that never has it been that a newspaper was completely free of any concern of making a profit. And I wonder, is that contributing to some of the radical kind of polarization that we're seeing, or do you feel like it's unprecedented or permanent, or do you think that that's going to change? And people will vote for their pocketbooks. I see that less happening less and less often nowadays. Yeah, it's certainly not unprecedented in that, as you note,

Starting point is 00:23:12 the organs of journalism have always been for-profit organizations. And that's, in some ways, it's a good thing if the alternative is Provda or as Vestia, where they're government-owned. BBC doesn't do too badly, although it has its own biases as well. But it has competition, which is a good thing. What we can count on, because even though it is true that their ultimate motive is to make a profit, and one of the ways of making a profit in the current climate is to appeal to a rabid constituency. that just the economics are not that you aim at the center and try to expand at the fringes, but rather you find your constituency and you feed them red meat.

Starting point is 00:24:03 So that is part of the problem. One hopes that journalists, and this is true of most of the journalists that I've spoken to, at least that the people doing the writing feel that they're serving a higher good. They are altruists or idealists in the sense that they think they're writing the first draft of history. preventing democracy from dying in darkness, and that one could appeal to that part of them that is idealistic, that isn't just chasing eyeballs and clicks, to say, well, stop and think twice about what you're doing to the marketplace of ideas,

Starting point is 00:24:38 to the public sphere, because it's true that I think there's a lot of thoughtlessness, not just in the pursuit of profit, but in the, in prosecuting various moral crusades in seeing their goal as to shift the discussion in a particular direction as opposed to giving people a factual basis on which to make these choices. Right. You mentioned a couple things there. One is the marketplace of ideas and the other is red meat. Let me go to red meat first. So looking back in history, I've been thinking, well, you know, obviously there are founding fathers had tremendous flaws, and they committed, you know, what we consider now, then the shifting moral zeitgeist, et cetera, and the moral relativism that every age employs.

Starting point is 00:25:33 But I'm wondering, like, if there might not be a trend to, like, pregame the future, you know, kind of a science fiction type way, which I know you're a fan of science fiction, having listened to your podcast with Dave Kurtley on the Geeks Guide to the Galaxy many years ago. But nevertheless, looking at the future and saying, well, in the future, probably there'll be no need for red meat. I had on Chase Purdy, who's the author of Billion Dollar Burger, about stem-celled grown meat, lab-grown meat. And it seems clear to me that this will be very commonplace. I had an impossible burger for lunch yesterday. In the future, is it not possible that any of us who ate red meat? I'm not saying that I did or ever have for the future, but that will be

Starting point is 00:26:14 looked upon the same way that people look upon our founding fathers for the atrocity of owning slaves. It could very well happen. So we we shifted from figurative red meat to literal red meat. Literally, yeah. It's eminently possible. In fact, we should hope that it happens that some of the practices today that we take for granted will be seen by our descendants as barbaric, as we certainly are doing plenty of harm. It also means that looking backward, this has been said before, that it's anachronistic and indeed morally obtuse to hold our answers.

Starting point is 00:26:52 to standards that they could not have dreamed of at the time. And therefore, the problem is going forward is that we are apt to blame harms on bad people as opposed to bad norms and institutions and assumptions and beliefs. And therefore, to exculpate ourselves, because, of course, I'm a good person, and you're a good person, and all my pals are good people, that is a way of giving yourself a pass at customs that may objectively. be abominable. But if your moral philosophy is bad things are done by bad people, and we get to decide what's good and bad, you're apt to give yourself a pass at indefensible

Starting point is 00:27:37 practices. So yes, it may be, and meat eating, especially when it comes from factory farms, might be a practice that our descendants look back on the way we look back on slave auctions and heretic burnings and public hangings. and laughing at the insane and keeping harams and so on. And there may be others. Our regime of criminal punishment, our drug laws, our possession of nuclear weapons. All of these in a particular frame of mind might be seen as both insane and evil. But they're the only way we know how to do things now.

Starting point is 00:28:15 And so we might accept them too quickly if we just think, oh, well, we're all good and decent people. You've given me another business idea. Thank you, Steve, for a job of future moral consultant. So what practices do I have to stop now in order not to be looked down upon a hundred years hence? And I'm going to be consulting with my friends who do have harems to this very day. Thank you for that, Steve. The problem is, well, the problem is it's so much, it's really easy to do it about our ancestors. It's not easy to do it about ourselves, yes. And I want to take the flip side of that coin. So in science, we talk, as Isaac Newton once said, you know, we stand on the shoulders of giants, although some say he was saying it as an insult, a pejorative one of his colleagues. Maybe Leibniz was very short and he was making fun of him or something. But, you know, the other one is looking over the shoulder of short people.

Starting point is 00:29:04 But nevertheless, we have this reverence. Okay, we know Aristotle believe there were four elements. Okay, now there's 114 on the table to my left over here on the wall. we know that he thought that the earth was the center of the universe. Okay, but he also came up with the laws of modus ponens. He came up with the laws of logic. He was the first to discover, as I point out, it's very relevant to me. And where you are in the Cape, he discovered that whales were mammals.

Starting point is 00:29:30 I think that's very important to my daily life. I'm sure yours, too. But we acknowledge he made mistakes. He made these incredible contributions to our understanding of the natural world and the processes by which we can apprise the world around us. We come in in the spinning globe. We have no, but why is it that the same kind of courtesy, reverence, forbearance, if you will, is not extended to in the moral sphere to religion.

Starting point is 00:29:56 In other words, we sometimes act as if, well, the world starts spinning, and now we're the ones that can judge the people that ate meat in the 2020s, you know, something like that. But who's to say that, you know, these people weren't the equivalence in religion, which carried a lot of moral thinking through, as well as the Enlightenment. obviously. But who's to say that they're not giants as well? In other words, it seems like they're looked down upon, at least in the realm of pre-enlightment versus in science. We don't look down on Galileo because he didn't come up with the Lorentz contraction. So to what extent do we too harshly judge the moral standards of religious practitioners a few hundred years ago and even to

Starting point is 00:30:37 this day? Well, it depends who you're targeting. There are People like my friends, Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens and Dan Dennett, who point out that the Bible is a pretty awful guide to morality because the overwhelming opinion in our culture is that the Bible is the source of our moral values. Even someone has distinguished as Stephen Jay Gould, who we brought up a few minutes ago, in his book, Rocks of Ages, in making the valid point that science itself can't, on its own, be a source of morality. He says, well, that's what religion is for. And that is, you know, he was not a theologian, he was not a philosopher.

Starting point is 00:31:27 But he was conveying a widespread view that when it comes to right and wrong, we should look to the Bible. Our elected officials put their hands on the Bible when they're sworn in. So the people who note some of the atrocities that were sanctioned in the Bible are very much a minority. Now, you're right, if they tried to cancel the Bible and said we should burn the Bible and no one should ever read it and religions should be shut down because the Bible sanctioned genocide and slavery and rape, now that would be historically obtuse. There are some good things in the Bible and the Ten Commandments, but, you know, thou shalt not cover by covet by neighbors' livestock at the same time as it gave a pass to, you know, rape and slavery,

Starting point is 00:32:12 means that we shouldn't take it literally as the source of our values. We should acknowledge, as you say, we absolutely should acknowledge the advances over the rival morality of its time, such as child sacrifice or human sacrifice more generally. Slavery was prevalent throughout the ancient world still is on the earth today. There are people, you know, there are societies that practice. of slavery at this moment. Indeed. It's not legal anywhere on earth, which is a massive advance

Starting point is 00:32:43 and probably inconceivable around the times of the Bible. So we should, basically we should not search for saints and villains and say, you know, Bible, boo, or Bible, that's where our morality comes from.

Starting point is 00:32:59 Neither one of those is defensible. It's, let's look at what they were saying. Let's give them credit for advances in their own era, let's know where we have to go beyond it in moral issues that they did not reason through very well by the light of subsequent thinking. I heard it said once by some author, I'd rather have one reader a hundred years from now than 100 readers a year from now. Basically, prefers longevity. And I'm asking you, what would you prefer, you know,

Starting point is 00:33:33 kind of a single person discovering the work since Steve Finker, a thousand years from now or a thousand people tomorrow, you know, picking up all the copies of your books. Well, I sort of think of it in the way I think of our genealogical progeny, our genetic descendants, which I have zero directly through my own line, although I have some, I do have some nieces and nephews, but which is that you can't clone yourself. It's not you that's going to be, or that ought to be uniquely remembered, but you're contributing to a collective body of knowledge. And what I would hope to do is make contributions that make the entirety of our knowledge more accurate, deeper, not that someone would point to me and say, oh, he got

Starting point is 00:34:24 it right, however numerous they are now or 100 years, but that the whole idea pool has been enriched by some increment thanks to what I've tried to work out. Absolutely, and it has, and we're talking again, Stephen Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor at Harvard University, an influence on me, although we've just meeting for the first time. I love your mind, Stephen. It's so engaging when I listen to you and I read your works. But just to get back, one last thing on the Bible, you know, I always say the Bible had to speak to people thousands of years ago in a language they could understand. It's not simplistic, people that trivialize. It's just for Bronze Age peasants. It's fairly sophisticated,

Starting point is 00:35:07 and even self-consistent, and it has obviously troubling aspects. Richard Friedman. Dick Friedman's a good friend of mine formerly here at UC San Diego, who wrote the Bible, his famous work. But I always say, you know, something like that that spoke to people thousands of years ago. We don't know exactly when it was in its final form, but still speaks to people, but still will. not only would I trade, you know, my sales of my book, you know, for one percent of God's book sales. I would kill for one percent of God's book sales. But also the longevity, as you say. And maybe I want to turn to that because I know you don't have too much time.

Starting point is 00:35:40 You're so generous as it is already. But I've heard it said a lot. You talked about transmission to the future, not for your own progeny. I always point out, like, Steve, what was the name of your eighth great-grandparent on your mother's side's first name? Like, nobody knows who that is. And that's like a couple generations before, right? And that means, I think, per force, that in the future, no one's going to know who I am. I have kids, and they'll have kids, hopefully.

Starting point is 00:36:06 But eight generations later, they're going to know who Brian Keating was. I mean, hopefully, unless I do something to be note of it. But I want to ask you, what is sort of the most precious commodity to you? Is it, you know, material, immaterial? But it's often said, well, you know, money is very important or time is very important. What commodity do you think is the most conserved precious commodity there is in life? Well, certainly love and trust of my family and time, indeed time. Opportunity to access to knowledge and information.

Starting point is 00:36:45 Now, the material prosperity enables many other things in life, such as access to knowledge and not least time. So it would be a little hypocritical to say that it means nothing. And indeed, one of the things that I learned in documenting human progress is that prosperity, at least at the level of nations, leads to a lot of other really good things. Richer countries, on average, are more literate, more peaceable, more gender egalitarian, are safer, less likely to get into wars. there are some notable exceptions like the United States. But prosperity by itself should not be a goal. But a lot of things that prosperity brings are also valuable. Now, this doesn't mean that that's why I want to get as rich as possible.

Starting point is 00:37:38 But it does mean that I do appreciate the living in an affluent democracy and all of the gifts that it brings. Yeah, we're talking here in April of 2021. And, you know, Prince Philip of England just died. and he died at almost 100 years old, a storied life. And I was thinking when he was born, you know, in 1921 or whatever, he, you know, nobody on earth today would trade their life and their lifestyle for the life of the king or queen of England at that time. In other words, the lives of people today, even the poorest among, you know, American society, let's say, are better than the richest kings and queens of Europe 300 years ago. And so, you know, that is in part due to this flourishing of human,

Starting point is 00:38:20 of the human spirit. And that's why sometimes it does trouble me, Steve, when people want to get out of the problem of, say, anthropocentric global warming, which we both agree upon, but they want to get out of it by brute force approach. So, for example, I don't know if you're familiar with this. It was a great crisis both on Wall Street and in London, it was called the Great Horse Mnour Crisis of 1894. And it shut down Wall Street for weeks and months at a time because the traders couldn't get to Wall Street because the streets were covered in horse crab. And the same thing was predicted in the Times of London, predicted that by 1934, the streets of London be covered under nine feet of manure. Now, there are some people say that

Starting point is 00:39:01 wouldn't be a bad thing for London. But nevertheless, of course it didn't happen. But if you had tried to solve the problem using the technology of the day, you would have had horse diapers, you would have put horses on some, you know, vegan diet. I don't know. They're already on a vegan diet as far as I know. What do I know about horses? But the point being, if you try to to just brute force out. I think you're denying the scientific, not, I'm not saying you, but in general, these approaches where we just want to truncate the problem, brute force it into a solution by the means of the way that we got into it. I feel like that short changes and gives short shrift to the scientific method and the scientific progress that it will kind of

Starting point is 00:39:37 invalidate it. If I just say to my kids, kids, your future is bleak. Don't think of any new solutions. For example, we can have non-radiative thorium is much more clean source of nuclear fuel with fewer side effects and fewer applications for militaristic deployment of that fuel. But we seem to just want to either shut down all petroleum power or shut down, you know, coal digging and that has improved. But what do you make of this, that by telling people to curtail something in science, you're maybe stunting the possible growth that could get us out of future problems on Earth? Well, I think, you know, putting aside the horse manure scare and I think some

Starting point is 00:40:18 historians have to have a kind of jaunders view as to whether whether there were apocryphal elements to some of those fears. But nonetheless, it is definitely true that the approach to climate change that says we have to reverse the industrial revolution, we've got to stop economic growth, we've got to moralize so that everyone massively conserves and goes back to a simpler lifestyle, is just not going to do it. It's not going to solve the climate crisis because people want energy, they need energy, it's how we got out of extreme poverty, it's how the rest of the world is going to get out of extreme poverty, and if we tell them stay at your current level standard of living, they're just not going to listen to us. Likewise, any solution that

Starting point is 00:41:05 depends on heavy restrictions of energy capture is going to arouse furious political opposition, which means that probably our best hope for getting out of the climate crisis is to develop sources of energy that are so simultaneously abundant and clean and cheap that people will just naturally opt for them. And that once something is invented, then Donald Trump can't uninvent it, the way he could pull out of the Paris Climate Accords or any other political solution that perhaps a more enlightened administration implements a less-enlightened. lightened administration after them can reverse, but not technological advances. You can't un-invent them. So if we did have thorium power, and like you, I think this should be

Starting point is 00:41:57 explored, invested in, together with other sources of abundant zero-carbon energy, both conventional nuclear, fourth-generation nuclear, perhaps even fusion, although you might have stronger opinions on that than I do. But we should pursue them because that is a path to. That is a path towards solving the climate crisis. Now, it might also depend on changing the incentives. I wouldn't say that it's only technology that will lead to a zero-carbon economy. It may be that a price on carbon that increases the incentives to develop clean energy might be part of the solution, although then again, what we've learned, and I'm starting

Starting point is 00:42:40 to change my mind on this, that even though carbon taxes are, in some sense, the most rational way to move us in the direction of a zero-carbon economy. What one would hope people would do when there's a carbon tax is to insulate their water heaters and turn down their thermostats. In fact, what they do is they put on yellow vests and they riot and they set cars on fire and they block the subways. So again, even what I would consider a fairly moderate political economic solution immediately runs into problems that a technological solution does not.

Starting point is 00:43:13 The last kind of subjects that I want to talk about involve more my field. Obviously, I'm not going to ask you to come up with a 26-dimensional string theory. But I do see a very interesting dynamic that is more or less unknown or unprecedented in my field. Maybe it harkens back to the Big Bang versus steady state debates of the previous century. But this involves theories of everything and so-called quantum gravity and the unification of forces and fields with the unfinished business of Einstein. And so we have a book now, The God Equation, Mitch Yococo is on the show. And this follows up on some of the work. It actually ends with the exact last lines of Stephen Hawking, which in his brief history of time where if we can come up with the comprehensive theory of everything, then we will truly know the mind of God.

Starting point is 00:44:02 And I wonder, you know, your colleagues and my colleagues, you know, in the physics department that study condensed matter physics and the properties of a superconductor here or some, you know, some atomic particle. They never talk about these grandiose terms of God, the God particle, the mind of God, the, you know, the so-called God equation. What is it about, you know, physics in particular that engenders these really kind of violent, you know, like flights of grandiosity, perhaps, or is it really, you know, to be expected of something that purports to understand and explain the origin of the universe and everything we see around us? It's not entirely a coincidence because often our thoughts turn to God when we ponder the ultimate deepest explanation for the explanation for the explanation of everything. And that's when people kind of say, oh, well, that's what God's for.

Starting point is 00:44:55 He's the answer to the question, what's the ultimate explanation of everything? So the physicists find themselves in the same territory as the theologians, although so do the psychologists, because together with the the cosmological argument, well, God is there to press the button and he presses the on switch for the universe. But of course, God is also invoked to explain the soul and consciousness and awareness. And biologists find themselves rubbing shoulders with theologians because the argument for design was always one of the most compelling reasons to believe in God. namely, how could something as complex as the body of an animal arise from mindless physical laws? Well, there's got to be a cosmic designer. So I think the three of us, the psychologists, the biologists, and the physicists,

Starting point is 00:45:47 find ourselves bumping up against theological questions. And at some point, especially in physics, the mind of God, if you're a Spinozist, and here I'm going to defer to my other half, Rebecca Goldstein, who is a, among other things, an expert in Spinoza. Spinoza's version of God, he's called a pantheist, and people assume that he must think

Starting point is 00:46:15 that God is in flowers and trees and bluebirds and babbling brooks, but what he really meant was God is in the ultimate theory of, the final theory of everything in physics, that God is just a synonym for whatever equations there are that explain the universe and themselves.

Starting point is 00:46:32 So there is, maybe there is a bit of of a spinozistic thinking in the physicist invocation of God as an equating it with their ultimate goal. And of course, Einstein quite explicitly was a spinosist. Right. Yeah, although his divining his ultimate understanding or reckoning with God is more complicated coming up with a theory of everything in some sense. Because he said, you know, it's like they said of Stephen Hawking, he changed his mind so much, no matter which side of the bet you took, you always won. But just the last thing on that front, maybe it's related to it, but I'd be fascinated to hear what you have to say in your book.

Starting point is 00:47:13 Now you talk about things like beauty and simplicity and elegance. And you say something like would Billy Holiday and, you know, would she be appreciated by some intelligent alien? You know, as beauty just, you know, does an ardvark, you know, find Miss Universe attractive? No, there are some things that are, you know, context dependent. And there are all the things that might be universal. I wonder, do you think that we would search for things like the theory of everything? Because it's kind of a heuristic. It's like a hack. It would simplify things if there was a theory of everything, but I'll point out, you might not know this, maybe you do. There's no guarantee that there is a theory of everything. In other words, the theory of everything is needed

Starting point is 00:47:52 to quantize gravity, but gravity in its quantum form is only relevant in two instances. One is at the beginning of time, if the universe emerged from a singularity, which we don't know and can never observe, and two, at the center of a black hole within its event horizon, which is fundamentally unobservable. So in other words, the two main reasons for quantum gravity to exist, for the quantization, the need for quantum gravity, are unobservable, and therefore we have no contact with them. Do you think that this, you know, holding up the Paparian, and I would love to talk to Rebecca, I'd love to have her on the show to talk about this, but while you're here until she comes on, We tend to venerate Popper as mathematicians venerate girdle.

Starting point is 00:48:32 In other words, we have mathematician envy. You psychologists talk about penis envy. Well, they say the biological sciences have physics envy. We have math envy because at least in mathematics you can prove, which is fundamentally unprovable. But in physics, there's no law. We just have heuristics. So what do you make for advice for a scientist like me?

Starting point is 00:48:51 I mean, what would you be guided by? Is it really the Popperian demarcation? or is something more profound than that, perhaps? Well, I tend to, in terms of the philosophy of science or the capturing the scientific methodology, I tend to think that the Bayesian approach is more convincing than the Paparian approach. The Popper might even be a special case of Bays, namely that it's not that, it's not the skeet-shooting model of science, where you throw out a hypothesis and then you see whether it survives the bullet of falsification. But we increment our credence in a hypothesis up or down.

Starting point is 00:49:25 It's not just a binary falsified, not falsified. Evidence can increase confidence in hypothesis or decrease it without falsifying it altogether. And indeed, I'm not enough of a philosopher of science to work this out, but I suspect that a lot of the biases that scientists in general and physicists in particular have toward beauty in a theory and elegance, maybe that it deserves a kind of Bayesian high prior probability. Because to the extent that what we sense as beauty is often parsimony, simplicity, elegance that is a small number of postulates can unfold to deduce a large number of

Starting point is 00:50:16 implications, then you have to believe fewer things a priori if you posit an elegant, beautiful, simple theory than a complex one. You're kind of on the hook to prove more if you start out with a more complex theory than if you start out with a simpler theory. And maybe there's something to be worked out there as to why it seems reasonable for physicists to pursue beautiful theories and why often, though I'm sure you can give me examples. that not always the simple beautiful theory turns out to be correct, but I'm sure there are conspicuous cases where it has not been. The psychological question is why, as you point out,

Starting point is 00:50:56 and you're kind of channeling William James, who said, to the bear is the she bear that is meant to be loved, to the lion, the lioness. Our own standards of beauty, seen parochial and species specific. On the other hand, as David Deutsch pointed out, your fellow physicist, isn't it a little bit curious that, flowers evolved to attract insects and we find them beautiful, or butterflies or peacocks. Since the peahens' sense of beauty and our sense of beauty overlap and not because of descent from a common ancestor,

Starting point is 00:51:34 those evolved independently, could there be some kind of platonic definition of beauty that peahens and humans independently stumbled upon? Maybe having to do with some sort of counter-entropic force or phenomenon, something that gives us pure colors as opposed to muddy brown that you get from mixing stuff together. Symmetry, highly improbable state arrangement of matter, repetition, simplicity, things that signify some kind of underlying causal force amidst the chaos of the universe and therefore are worthy of attention. regardless of species. That's a kind of speculation at the intersection of physics and psychology. I really resonate with that figuratively at least, but yeah, I want to point out that they've done studies, and I'm sure you know, this really take, you know, Brad Pitt, who with the present exception of you and I, was once voted the most handsome man on Earth. And they take his face and they split it down the middle and they reflect the left on the right. And he's hideous and he's

Starting point is 00:52:38 grotesque. So it's really the broken symmetry and that applies to physics as well, the Higgs mechanism, spontaneous symmetry breaking, your Shelley Glashow, former Harvard, you know, disciple of Schwinger, et cetera. These are all broken symmetries, and that's where the physics gets interesting. I want to finish up if you have two more minutes, three more minutes, Steve. Yep. So you wrote a wonderful book speaking of parsimony called The Sense of Style. It's not as well known, but it should be as well known as all your other books.

Starting point is 00:53:05 And it speaks about this, you know, the distillation and the construction of a voice and the style as a writer. I want to ask you, first of all, what's the best, writing advice you ever heard or gave or, you know, received? And then what book do you give out most frequently that's not your own as a gift? Oh, yes. I guess the two main bits of writing advice would be to read good writers, savor their writing, try to reverse engineer what makes it work, because there are just too many rules to memorize them one by one. And you're never really going to assimilate them if you memorize them and apply them. But if you absorb good writing

Starting point is 00:53:46 and you think, oh gee, that sentence really zings or it's really beautiful, what makes it work? That's one bit of advice. Another is to be aware of the curse of knowledge, the fact that when you know something, it's extraordinarily difficult to imagine what it's like not to know it. And probably the chief sin of writing, especially in the sciences, is that when writers assume too much on the part of the reader, it's just obvious to the writer at the time and they don't bother to provide the vivid perceptual detail, the concrete examples, the explanation of the technical concepts that are second nature to them, but not to their readers. Certainly strunk and white, the elements of style is the first style manual I got, and it's got a lot of flaws, but it's

Starting point is 00:54:30 charming in its own way and a lot of the bits of advice that it has stood the test of time. Not all, but a lot of, especially their prime directive, which is an excellent example of itself, omit needless words. That's right. And superfluous commas that are extemporaneous. Okay, so Steve, the last section of this podcast is called the Impossible Three, the thrilling three. If you've got a couple more minutes, I'll ask them, and we'll get you out of there.

Starting point is 00:54:58 So the first one involves writing, and it's writing your ethical will, and it's something that is known in Hebrew as a Zava-a-a. and people use it, Jews, non-Jews, people with children without children, it's essentially meant to distill your wisdom or ethical teachings into something that your ideological errors, as you spoke about earlier, would inherit, not just your biological errors for those of us that happen. What would you put on a will that would encapsulate your ethical imperative, if you will? Well, the original ethical will from Jacob to his 12 sons

Starting point is 00:55:30 was a little bit problematic. It included, you know, may you have your hand around the necks of your enemies, So I think I'll appeal to a slightly later era in Judaism, the rabbinical as opposed to the tribal era. And I don't think we can do much better than Rabbi Hillel, who said, if I am not for myself, who will be for me, if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when? Well, you're the second humanist to quote from the Bible, the Tanakh. The other one was a woman by the name of Andurion, who is Carl Sagan's widow. And she quoted, act justly love mercy, period.

Starting point is 00:56:13 So she quoted from Mika, but the last sentence is, walk humbly with your God. But she omitted that as a good humanist would. Okay, second question. What material object or knowledge would you put on a monolith like that in 2001, a space odyssey that has meant to be discovered by extraterrestrials, that basically is a billboard to say, how awesome was planet Earth, in the year 2021. What would you put on a billion-year lasting time capsule?

Starting point is 00:56:39 Well, how about the contents of Wikipedia? It would be a pretty big solid state drive, but it should be doable, and it would be hard to single anything out, but it itself is a remarkable cultural achievement, and, of course, embedded in it would be the vast amount of human knowledge that we've accumulated. much better than one of those AOL CDs that we used to get in the mail.

Starting point is 00:57:06 Last question, Steve, going backwards in time instead of going billions of years or hundreds of years, the only way of, according to Arthur C. Clark, the namesake of our organization here, the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination, the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. That's the name of this podcast origin. I want to ask you as a 20-year-old or a 30-year-old, what advice would you give yourself to give you the courage to do as you have done to go into the impossible? Well, I think a great part of wisdom is to savor what you have, to appreciate what you have.

Starting point is 00:57:41 And I have been so improbably fortunate in my life that to look back with regret would itself be unwise. I by no means led a perfect life. Lots of suffered tragedies as all human beings have. But in terms of the fates of humanity, I just have to appreciate how fantastic we fortunate I am and to look backward in appreciation rather than regret or second-guessing. Steve, I could talk to you for hours, but you'd grow weary of me and maybe get some Harvard bodyguards out on it. Steve, I want to thank you so much for going into The Impossible with me, and I wish you a wonderful weekend and all the best. I hope we can meet someday in person. I sure hope so.

Starting point is 00:58:22 Thanks so much, Brian. Thanks, Steve. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Thanks for listening to End of the Impossible with Professor Brian Keating. Please support the show by rating, commenting, sharing, and leaving reviews. We appreciate hearing from you, and it really helps keep our universe expanding. Watch our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating. That's DR. Brian Keating and join our premieres Tuesdays at 8 a.m. Pacific Time.

Starting point is 00:58:49 Follow Brian on Twitter and Medium and support us on Patreon at Dr. Brian Keating. For exclusive content, visit Brian Keating's website and sign up for his informative newsletter. at Brian Keating.com. Into the Impossible is produced with the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Produced by Stuart Volko and Brian Keating.

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Steven Pinker: Things are Getting BETTER! (#148)

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