The Munk Debates Podcast - Steven Pinker Dialogue

Episode Date: January 18, 2022

Steven Pinker joins us for a thought-provoking, members-only discussion on how sectarian solidarity and our pursuit of self-interest has led to the demise of objectivity, truth, and collective rationality.  QUOTES: STEVEN PINKER “The most pervasive and robust cognitive bias is the one in which people steer their reasoning toward a conclusion that is one of the sacred values of their own tribe.” The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Executive Producer: Rudyard Griffiths Senior Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Editor: Reza DahyaBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Thanks for listening to the Monastery. Debates. This week, we're stepping away from our usual one-on-one debate to bring you a special monk dialogue. It's an extended, in-depth interview with world-renowned psychologist and scientist Stephen Pinker about why reason and rationality are under attack in our society and what we can collectively do about it. Here's our conversation for your listening pleasure. Hello and welcome to the Winter 2022 Monk Dialogues. My name is Rudyard-Griffis. I'm the host and moderator, these in-depth one-hour conversations that we've been having since April 2020, exploring the big issues and ideas transforming our world.

What is the purpose of the Monk Dialogues? Well, it's to break out of the tyranny of the 240-odd character tweet the five-minute cable interview to instead have in-depth and substantive conversations with some of the world's sharpest minds and brightest thinkers. For the winter 2020, monk dialogues, we're focusing on the topic of rationality. Why do we think the way we think? Can we still reason together as societies and as individuals? And what kind of learnings or inspirations can we take away from people who have pondered the questions of reason and rationality and apply them to our day-to-day lives to how we live and work in our communities? That's going to be the focus of these are 2022 Winter Monk Dialogues. We're exceedingly fortunate to kick off this six-part series on rationality with an exceptional thinker. Our audience knows him well as the Johnston family professor of psychology at Harvard University as the author of a whole series of big books on many of them on our bookshelves from Enlightenment Now to his latest bestseller Rationality, which we're going to go deep into today.

Foreign Policy Magazine rightly credits him as one of the world's top 100 public intellectuals. And I had the pleasure in 2015, I'm moderating him at the Monk Debate on Progress. Stephen Pinker, great to be in dialogue with you again. Nice to see you, Roger. Thank you for having me. Well, let's take advantage of the fact that not only have you written a book on rationality, but you've taught a course on it at Harvard. This is a real privilege for us.

It's an ability for our audience, me included, to get some insights into what rationality in fact is. How do we define this? What is this phenomenon? How should we be thinking about it? So let's get practical from the start and have you unpack your definition of rationality. I define rationality as the use of knowledge to attain goals.

Knowledge is conventionally defined by philosophers as justified true belief. And in practice, the way you use knowledge to attain goals is to employ implicitly or explicitly one of the normative models of rationality that have been worked out over the centuries, logic, probability, critical thinking, the theory of rational choice, the distinctions between correlation and causation, all the kinds of things that we try to formalize when we take university courses, but they're based on intuitive notions of what gets us what we want in the world. Okay, that's very helpful. Let me try another argument out on you. One, I expect that you know well. It's that view that all of us have these caveman brains that

we're running around driven by instinct, by irrationality. What's your response to the caveman brain argument? Because I think it frames a lot of the ways that people think about themselves and about society and it biases us towards this idea that we are all inherently at our core, irrational, unable to reason. Yeah, so I am an advocate of trying to understand human nature in an evolutionary framework, particularly in my book, How the Mind Works. But I begin rationality with an argument that we shouldn't blame our current craziness on our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

Because, in fact, what makes homo sapiens, such a weird species, is that we, we, and by we, I mean everyone, including the cavemen, deploy an awful lot of cause and effect reasoning, of logic, of probability to eking out in existence from an unforgiving environment. And the first few pages of the book describe how the San of the Kalahari Desert, formerly called the Bushmen, but one of the most recent surviving hunting and gathering people, how they hunt and gather. And they use an awful lot of rationality. It isn't just a question of running away from lions. That's what antelopes do, but we're not antelopes. Our ancestors killed at eight antelopes because we outsmarted them.

And what the San do is they engage in persistence hunting, which means that they take advantage of the human ability to dump heat because we're naked. We are good, Marathon runners were upright. So even though other mammals are faster than us, we can outlast them. Eventually, they'll overheat. They'll keel over a heat stroke. But crucially, we could only do that, since they spot a human, they sprint out of sight, by tracking them based on their hoof prints and other spore left behind.

And in fact, the sun engage in pretty lengthy and ingenious reconstruction of what species probably left the track, what condition it's in, what sex is it, which way is it likely to have gone. And they invent pretty sophisticated tools and traps and poisons and snares with cause and effect reasoning. They argue with each other. A young upstart can challenge a pompous elder. They recount superstitions, but then some of them challenge them. So it's in our nature. Yes, we don't innately command the theorems of logic and probability. Those have to be learned in school. But we do have an intuitive sense of rationality.

And it's a question of what social institutions bring it out because the capacity is there. So let's move on from the individuals to society because I think this is an interesting idea, a way to get us thinking in new and creative ways. this notion that rationality isn't something that is embedded just in the mind of the solitary actor. You see rationality expressing itself in community, in institutions. It, in effect, has a kind of normative context. Am I getting this right? Exactly.

One of the reasons that I defined rationality as the ability to pursue goals is that it makes it clear that the goal of deploying all our smarts isn't necessarily to get at objective reality. It could also be to advertise ourselves as brilliant know-it-alls, as angels with a halo over our head. Now, if each one of us deploys our smarts to do that, since none of us actually is perfectly good, perfectly rational, omniscient, infallible, you can get an awful lot of fruitless argumentation as everyone deploys their best arguments as to why they're right. now, and of course, not all of us can be right about everything always. So to attain rationality at the level of society, it's not just a question of having smart people or informed people, but we have to abide by rules of a game that allow the truth to emerge despite the fact that each one of us wants our truth to prevail. What's our side to look good, ourselves to look brilliant. And so we have things like free speech, freedom of the press, open debate, peer review,

empirical testing, fact checking, all the things where each of us, even though we're all kind of biased to deploy our reasoning for our own benefit, the biases ideally can kind of neutralize each other and over the long run, there's some hope that truth will emerge. Okay, well, that leads us on to where we find ourselves today. There is a perception, a strong one out there, that we are living in what people characterize as a post-truth society, that the very building blocks of rationality have been removed from our popular discourse, indeed from the very institutions that we once turn to to create a shared understanding of our world, of how our society works.

What's at the root of this, Stephen? And what is your diagnosis of the state and fate of reason at this moment? Well, the contributors to irrationality are in our nature. They've always been with us. Conspiracy theories have always been with us. They used to be worse. They led to pogroms and holocausts and deadly ethnic riots, vigilante killings and lynchings.

Quack cures and pseudoscience kind of was science until the scientific revolution and still to a large extent is. Fake news. I mean, what are accounts of miracles in scripture, but the original fake news, of paranormal normal phenomena? So we shouldn't, in assessing our current situation, we shouldn't imagine that there used to be a rational society

and we have fallen down from it. As I'd like to say, quoting Franklin Pierce Adams, the best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory. I think now what we are seeing, thanks to the rise of fractionated media, such as cable news, at least in the United States, and of course of social media, is that some of these, the pseudoscience, the conspiracy theories can circulate widely and quickly. The mechanisms of spreading information by hyper-partisan media and social media mean that they often do an end run around the conventional mechanisms of fact-checking and truth-seek. and error correction. But we shouldn't exaggerate to the point of saying that we're living in a post-truth society. That couldn't be true because if it was true, then that statement itself couldn't be true. And therefore, we couldn't be living in a post-truth society.

I think it's a rhetorical flourish because there are segments of the population that stubbornly cling to a partisan belief. But to say that we're living in a post-truth society would be hyperbole. One way to think about it from the Canadian psychologist Keith Stanovich is that we live in a my side society increasingly. Perhaps the most pervasive and robust cognitive bias is the one in which people steer their reasoning toward a conclusion that is one of the sacred values of their own tribe, their own political party, their own religion, their own social clique, and that we tend to promote the beliefs that make us heroes, within our own clique for pushing the positions that make our clique look noble and wise, make the opposing cliques look evil and foolish. And we have seen, particularly the United States, a rise of polarization, especially negative polarization. A growing proportion of each side

sees the other side as dangerous and evil. And that has led people to ratify the beliefs that are flattering to their own side. You wrote, people express opinions that advertise where their heart lies. As far as the fate of the expressor in a social setting, he or she is concerned with flaunting these loyalty badges. And this is anything but irrational. To me, this was a really interesting thought. It kind of helped me understand why we do what we do.

There's an element of self-interest here. People aren't just running off and believing in Q&N or that the world is flat. We're extracting something from this behavior that's important to us that's advancing our interests. Yeah. In particular, when it comes to the more outlandish beliefs, the one that really led to the idea that we live in a post-treat society, the kooky conspiracy theories that the deep state houses a cabal of Satan worshiping pedophiles, that jet contrails are mind-altering drugs dispersed by a secret government program, that Bill Gates is trying to implant microchips in us through vaccines.

A lot of these beliefs are not about people's day-to-day lives, about the actual objects and social networks that impinge on them. Because there, even the people who endorse the cookie theories, you know, they hold a job, they pay their taxes, kids dressed and clothed and fed and off to school on time. So it's not as if they're completely out of touch with reality. They couldn't be because, as Philip K. Dick said, reality is what doesn't go away when you stop believing in it.

But there are realities that just don't really affect most of us as citizens. Why do bad things happen to good people? What is the ultimate cause of death and disease and misfortune? What really goes on in closed cabinet meetings and at the White House in a 10 Downing Street and in scientific labs. You know, I'll never know. It doesn't, my opinion on it doesn't really affect my life. It doesn't affect anything.

But it can make me feel good. It can make me a hero within my social group. If I'm endorsing the beliefs that make my side look good and make the other side look bad, there people often hold beliefs. By there, I mean beliefs about the historical, historical forces, political power, distant corporations, metaphysical questions like what happens to you after you die, does the universe have a plan or a purpose, all these kind of cosmic

philosophical political questions as opposed to your day-to-day life. The idea that you should only believe things that you can prove to be true actually is a pretty exotic, unusual, weird belief when it comes to most people at most times. It's for people who are kind of children, of the Enlightenment and belief that we could strive for the truth in all things, scientific, historical, political, then we think that our beliefs should be kind of forged in the crucible of verification and fact-checking. But for most people, these beliefs are kind of statements of value, statements of purpose. So if someone says, I believe that Hillary Clinton ran a child sextering out of a person,

pizzeria, what are they really saying? What they're really saying is, I think she is so heinous and evil that that's the kind of thing, you know, she could do. And, you know, who's to say she doesn't? Or it's really kind of a way of saying, boo, Hillary. And you, I think you and I would be tempted to say, now, wait a second. You can't, you know, you have every right to hate Hillary. This is a democracy. You can believe anything you want. But you don't have the right to turn your hatred into a factual claim. If you and I believe that, and there's a sense in which we're the weird ones when it comes to the human species. Now, I think that is a conviction that ought to be shared.

We really should base all our beliefs on evidence and logic and consistency. But psychologically, that's not the way people naturally work. Another interesting takeaway from your writing and thinking on rationality is that you believe that our social media isn't solely or wholly to, to blame for the breakdown, the dysfunctionality of our popular discourse and the absence of reason, our inability to reason with each other. Unpack this a bit more for us. What is your take on how social media is affecting our conversations and should it really bear the full weight, the full criticism that many are bringing to it now as being the primary

reason, maybe the reason for why we are irrational or prone to irrational in this moment. Oh, yeah, I put it maybe a little differently because a lot of the rules of social media go completely against the guidelines for any institution or network or medium that is, that promotes truth. Because the thing is that on social media, of course, all of the rewards come from notoriety, notice, sharing, engagement, which can bring out the worst in us. So I wouldn't say that I'm a particularly fan of social media, but rather that I think that there's just too much kind of glim blaming of every social problem and political problem on social media without adequate testing and knowledge.

They're so new that we really don't have the studies that should convince us that they are to blame. In some cases, they very well might be, but some of the things attributed to them are probably exaggerations. Like fake news probably has little to no effect on election outcome, simply because most of it is so outlandish that unless you were a hyperpartisan to begin with, you would just blow it off. And if you are a hyperpartisan, it's kind of red meat. It kind of makes you feel even better.

Like a fake news headline, Obama bans the Pledge of Allegiance from American School. or Joe Biden calls Republicans the dregs of society. You know, I think most people would, unless they're already in the right-wing fever swamps, do not believe them. Those even in those fever swamps, I don't think they really care whether they're literally true or false, but they're very happy to read them. They're titillated. They're happy to pass it on because it kind of reinforces their moral condemnation of the

other side, whether it moves the need. on elections is unlikely because so few people get it as a proportion of all of the social messages. Anyway, that's just one example of a study. This is by Brendan Nyan. They actually try to see whether the effects are as pernicious as we feel, and there it's probably not a major phenomenon. Compared to something else, other forces that certainly do move the needle, especially in the United States, hyperpartisan cable news networks like Fox News with ingenious studies have shown that they really do make people more conservative. It isn't just that conservatives flock to Fox News. It's Fox News makes people more conservative. Let's talk about some of the other institutions that you

think are having a less than beneficial effect on rational discourse. You write in your book to bring up another quote that universities have a responsibility to secure the credibility of science and scholarship by committing themselves to viewpoint diversity, free inquiry, critical thinking, and active open-mindedness. to us a little bit today about what you think the state of the university is, is it living up to these lofty goals and ambitions? How important are universities to the sustenance of rationality in our society? And if you feel that universities are falling down when it comes to inculcating a culture of rationality, where is that happening and why? Yeah. So, I mean, certainly what's coming out of universities in general is better than what, you know, what you get on cable news or Twitter.

So I don't want to try to drag down the whole enterprise. And while I'm at a bite the hand that feeds me, since I am, I've spent my life in a university and continue to draw a salary from the one with the biggest name brand of all. But I think not all as well with universities. And indeed, there are data that show that universities have become increasingly politically and ideologically narrow that they're becoming a left-wing monoculture, the prominent conservatives or even right of center thinkers are often in their 80s and 90s and due to become emeritus or worse. There is growing, although not completely dominant, intolerance

at the idea that people who express unorthodox views should have a platform or a forum. There are terrifying habits such as journal editors succumbing to pressure from social media to withdraw controversial articles, not just allow a rebuttal to them, which is what they ought to do, but to remove them from the journals and throw them down the Orwellian memory hole, that controversial speakers are shouted down. Again, this is very different from argued against, which they ought to be, but prevented from articulating their positions. And people know it, because some of the more ludicrous examples have spilled out from the campus and are widely circulated. Professor, my friend Nicholas Christakis, whose wife Erica Christakis, wrote an op-ed

saying students should decide what hallowing costumes they wear without being told by adult authorities. And a mob of students cursed and screamed at Professor Christakis at Yale. And the president, instead of sanctioning students for cursing and screaming and mobbing, actually praised them. Now, people, these videos went viral, and it saps confidence in the university as an institution where opinions can be evaluated in terms of their truth value as opposed to their conformity to some left-wing orthodoxy. And indeed, even especially in cases where the scientific consensus is pretty clear, such as in human-caused climate change, which I have made the case for in my book Enlightenment now.

And then people write to me or speak to me and say, well, you say that it's the scientific consensus, but why should we, why should we give that anyway? Because the consensus could just be that anyone who disagrees gets bullied and deplatformed and canceled and sanctioned. If that's the way universities work, then why should the scientific consensus mean anything to us? and it's not an illegitimate question. There probably are cases in which there is a consensus.

I don't think climate change is one of them, but there probably are cases where there's a premature consensus because anyone departing from it will be punished, sanctioned, canceled, de-platformed. And that means that the entire academic establishment calls itself into disrepute and casts doubt on its own contributions. So that's a problem that we in universities really ought to do more to address. Stephen, thank you for that answer. It's just fascinating to think about how these debates reverberate beyond the university campus

and the effects that they have on society as a whole. Other institutions that you're concerned about, I know from your writing, is our courts that we've seen this increasing polarization of our judicial systems. In your book, Rationality, the justice system itself you hold forward is one of of those places where we traditionally have gone to, to inculcate, to discover some kind of shared understandings and norms that are based on facts that are based on objective truths. Maybe you could just provide us with a couple more examples of areas of vulnerability in our society, institutions where reason is under attack.

Yeah. So the thing about institutions that do in general, on average, ideally, push towards the truth is that they do have some kind of adversarial process where one person, no matter how confident they are and possibly how diluted they are, they don't get to impose their view that other people can criticize them. And so you have these adversarial proceedings in peer review in science and scholarship, in open debate in parliaments, in adversarial proceedings in the judicial system. So in all of them, one person can try to spot and make up for the flaws in another person's reasoning. That's what makes these things work.

So whenever those institutions get out of whack where that's not what's happening, that's when there's cause for concern. So we've talked about academia. I mean, the most obvious example where that's happened in the judicial system is the American Supreme Court, which has more and more the decisions simply are predictable based on the political party of the president that appointed them, the justice. Partly that's built into a real flaw. in the system, namely lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices, which is mad, which makes every nomination a highly politicized because people know that it's going to alter the constitution of the court forever. The process of confirmation of justices, which partly by procedure, partly by

change in just norms has become highly politicized. Most obviously when Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader simply held up the replacement for Antonin Scalia when he died, simply be waiting for Obama's term to expire so that a Republican rather than a Democrat could nominate the next justice. Now that's, that is a pathology in the system when that can happen. So that's the most obvious example, but there are no doubt expert watchers of the judicial system in the United States and Canada may know of other examples. If you're enjoying this extended monk dialogue with Stephen Pinker, consider picking up a free copy of his latest bestselling book, Rationality,

on us, on the Monk Debates. All you have to do is log on to our website, triplew monkdebates.com, using your existing membership credentials. Select the option to upgrade your membership from free to our paid supporter category and enter the promo code Pinker 2020. We'll give you 10% off our annual membership and all the great perks and privileges that it includes and we'll send you that free hard copy edition of rationality. Thanks in advance for your support of the monk debates. Now back to our program. Stephen, I now want to switch gears with you a bit to try to get some practical help here for

our viewers to think through things that they can do in their day-to-day lives to be more rational, either at an individual basis or in their interactions with other people and institutions. Maybe one way that we could ease ourselves into that conversation is to get a sense from you about some of the most common mistakes that we make when we reason. You explore a bunch in your book, and I wonder having done all this research, having taught students about rationality extensively, what is the big reasoning error that most of us trip up on? Because then it would be great to get your advice about how we correct for that error, how we can

develop a greater capacity to reason on our individual parts. So you're not asking necessarily about me personally, but about all of us. Yeah, just your observations of human behavior and maybe what studies show and maybe also what you see in your day-to-day life? A big one is to be to fall victim to the availability bias. That was, that's the type name given to that cognitive quirk by Amoski and Daniel Kahneman, by which we judge prevalence, probability, danger, risk, according to examples that come to mind that are available in memory. We use our brain search engine as a way of doing probability. So is car travel dangerous? Well, you know, my, my, my,

great aunt lost her life in a car crash. So yeah, it is. Or a plane crash or COVID or the flu or living in a polluted city where we have the great benefit of having data available to us on all of these questions. But still, what we think of is, did it happen to my uncle? Or did it happen to me? Can I remember it? So that's a big one. Probably another one is expected utility or the theory of rational choice. That is, do we weigh, in having options, do we weigh the probability times the cost or benefit in choosing outcomes? A simple example is buying an extended warranty for an appliance, which a lot of people do, often 25% of the price of the product, unless the product fail, one of every product fails, that that's a losing bargain. More consequentially, do we do it with our own lives when we

step on the gas pedal to get home 17 seconds faster with an increased probability of losing our lives or killing someone else. You know, if you thought it through in that way, you'd think, yeah, if I'm late by a few seconds, it's really a price worth paying compared to the gamble that I would take with my life. But probably people don't think that way thoroughly enough. That's a couple of examples. More generally, I think doubting our own wisdom, knowledge, competence. Another very pervasive bias is called the bias bias, namely all of us think that everyone else is biased, but not ourselves. And just thinking twice, thinking, gee, how good really is my track record? Do I make mistakes? Should I take advice from other people? Instead of trusting my

gut, should I look at the base rate of other people making that same decision in my shoes. That is another common error of reasoning. We trust our own intuition too much. And in the course of this pandemic, Stephen, you must have seen all kinds of examples as someone who's constantly thinking about whether our behavior is rational or not. What actions on the part of government have you felt, haven't lived up to the objective tests of rationality? Which of those tests have we failed when it comes to COVID in the last 20 months? Oh, yes. Well, certainly, most obviously in the case of the various politicized conspiracy theories, we had in the United States, Donald Trump saying it'll go away, it'll be a miracle, you just wait a couple of weeks and it'll be gone. Wrong. We have most saliently, since then, people avoiding vaccines for which the evidence is overwhelming that they are safe and effective. But there are intuitions that people, have that injecting a version of the disease agent into your flesh can't possibly be helpful.

It does go against our intuitions, but that's a nice case where our intuitions are wrong. Vaccination is perhaps the smartest thing that our species has ever invented, including the COVID vaccines. On the other hand, I think there are also been failures from the public health authorities, the politicians, the scientists, in partly because of politicization. early on, every single issue when it came to COVID treatment became a left-wing versus a right-wing issue. And sometimes, I think more often than not, the left was aligned with the better position, but not always, such as the utter dismissal of the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 came, leaked from a lab in China,

the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That was considered to be a racist right-wing conspiracy theory. it might be mistaken, but we don't know. And we really should know. And it is a live possibility. I bet against it publicly. I have skin in the game that it was zoonotic. But it's a terrible mistake to just squash a plausible alternative explanation because it reminds you of your political adversaries. And also in that vein, even when it's not politicized, I think there's a mistake when public health authorities act like a priesthood, like oracles. We're the scientists do as we say, as opposed to showing their work, to saying, look, our starting position about everything is ignorance. We don't have access to an oracle.

We're not divinely inspired. Everything that we do is based on gathering data. Here are the data that we have so far that lead us to recommend this as a policy, protecting them when facts change and advice changes, as it did during the pandemic, as it is, if they sound like priests to begin with, as soon as they say something wrong, they just get dismissed. Whereas at every step, justifying advice, respecting the intelligence of the population a bit more, I think would have been more effective at conveying best practices at every step. Well, those are great insights. Well, Stephen, what are the mental habits that we can develop to flex, to exercise, to exercise our muscle of rationality inside our brain. Are there a series of techniques or some

kind of discipline that we could subscribe to? I mean, I'd urge everybody to to break the back of your book rationality because I really enjoyed how practical it is. Right off the bat, you're getting into both some of the errors that we make when it comes to thinking that we're thinking rationally, but more importantly, you're giving us some very practical advice, some lessons and cues as to how to train ourselves to push back against these biases and inclinations and to have a more rational view of the world. Certainly one of them is simply to think, twice. That is, don't trust your first impulse. Sometimes it's right, but you should step back and give second thoughts because we know that a lot of errors and fallacies come from gut level

thinking. In other words, to cultivate the mindset that's sometimes called active open-mindedness, and that is that you always should be prepared to calibrate your degree of belief in something according to evidence as it comes in, not to tie up your own ego or your own moral worth with your factual beliefs, but to realize, look, you know, we're all ignorant of everything, pretty much. We try to increase our confidence in a particular belief, according to the strength of the evidence, according to its consistency with our understanding of how the world works, but often we should be prepared to be surprised and challenged. So that's the general mindset called active open-mindedness. There's a quote attributed to John Maynard Keynes. He probably didn't say it

when he changed his mind and someone called him a flip-flopper or words to that effect. And he said, well, when the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir? Great story. He probably didn't say it. But someone said it. And it is worth keeping in mind. You make an important distinction between logic and reason. I think it'd be interesting for our audience to hear you unpack that for us. I think there's some confusion, at least often on my part, in just thinking how reason and logic are different, and that the capacity to reason is, in fact, different than just simply being logical about things. Yeah, so logic, sometimes, now admittedly, sometimes the word logic is used as a synonym for

rationality. As when Mr. Spock said, I don't like working with humans. They're illogic, drives me crazy. But technically, logic is the set of rules that allow you to deduce true implications from true premises. Now, it only works to the extent that you are sure that your premises are true in the first place, which we rarely are, and where the rule of inference, the P implies Q, if P then Q, if we know that that always applies. In a lot of cases, our knowledge just falls short of that. We have a degree of confidence or credence in a belief, say from zero on a scale from zero to one. And as evidence comes in, we increment or decrement our degree of confidence, but it's never, you know, one or zero, true or false.

Also, in many cases, there isn't just one fact that is completely dispositive, completely certain that just settles the issue once and for all. There are lots of considerations, each one of which, kind of some increase your confidence, some decrease your confidence, and you kind of weigh them all. I think a lot of that kind of probabilistic reasoning is what we think of as intuition, and that is in part what powers current artificial intelligence models, the so-called neural networks or deep learning networks. They don't do step-by-step deduction, like in a traditional computer program, but they weigh together thousands, sometimes millions of bits of information, little cues,

each one of which kind of increments or decrements confidence in a particular hypothesis. So that's why logic, there aren't that many things that you can just settle once and for all with a logical deduction. Often you've got to weigh a lot of evidence. Your mention of computers got me thinking when I was reading your book about how optimistic we should be about the future of sophisticated machine learning, so-called artificial intelligence. Could this help us escape our irrationality? Should we be giving more decision-making over to machines who could use logic circuits,

but maybe as they get smarter, apply these kind of rules of reasoning to the choices that we face to help us make. better decisions? I think there probably are benefits to be gained in not necessarily turning over the decision to artificial intelligence system, because ultimately, you know, we've got to decide that. So it's the responsibility of the person outsourcing the decision to something else. That's a decision. So we've got to always think carefully about ultimately what the decision is. But I think some of our more of our decisions could be and should be informed by artificial intelligence. It's just an extension of something that psychologists have known for decades,

which is that even, you forget fancy, schmancy, deep learning networks, even a simple statistical formula, you have a bunch of predictors, you add them up, if they're above a level, you make one diagnosis below it, you make another one, that more often than not outperforms the human expert, that human expertise, we tend to overrate it, because even though we are pretty good at identifying particular kinds of evidence or information, is that person trustworthy, is that person competent? We're not very good at combining them.

Just like, you know, if you have a whole bunch of groceries on the supermarket checkout counter, you can't say to the checkout person, well, it looks to me like it's about $77. Is that good enough? They'll say, no, no, I'm sorry, it may look that way to you, but we really have to count. And that's probably true for a lot of human decisions. And I think we underestimate, we overestimate ourselves. And probably in the future of physician, plugging the symptoms and the base rates into a formula, an artificial intelligence program, would probably do better than relying on their experience,

on their memory of similar cases. And likewise in business, likewise in other areas. Now, again, we always have to justify our choice of an algorithm in informing the decision. And ultimately, the human is in the loop, if only for choosing one algorithm over another and having to defend that choice. But when we ask how biased, how inaccurate algorithms are, we should always compare it to how biased and how accurate are humans. And the answer is more biased than we like to think. Fascinating stuff. In our remaining moments, let's talk a bit more about solutions because you think there are some practical things, not simply at the individual level that we,

we can do to be more rational, but that society as a whole can take a role in enhancing rationality in our culture. You point out how vital the education system is in the absence of teaching young people how to reason rationally. Explain a bit more of your thinking to us there. Well, I do think that the models of rationality, like probability, like logic, like correlation in causation, like a rational choice, should be woven into our curriculum, educational curricula earlier on.

I think a lot of what we teach kids goes back to the middle ages, to the monks and priests and ought to be rethought. There are only so many hours in the day, admittedly, so that if you introduce a base rule, which I think everyone should know, something's got to give. But those are discussions we ought to have. What should an educated person command? And I think many of the tools of rationality, including kind of hygiene for critical thinking,

like you attack the argument, not the person. You don't invest too much faith in authority and prestige, but rather on quality of argumentation. Those mental habits ought to be inculcated early on and should be second nature in our public discourse, openness to evidence, active open-mindedness, and so on. I do think that the particular tools, like the ones I try to explain in rationality, should be kind of second nature to people.

But more generally, our general norms and morees of discourse should have more open-mindedness, that instead of just immediately reaching for the right-wing position or the left-wing position and just hammering it home, and whenever a bit of contrary evidence comes in, racking your brains on how to make it go away, how to refute it, kind of consider, well, maybe I should adjust it. Maybe I should give this a second look. That set of habits, it's part of the norms and mores of this nerdish community called the rationality community,

to try to flaunt their openness to evidence, their rational thinking. But they should be part of everyone's norms. And it is bracing sometimes to read, say, an essay from a proponent of the rationality community, like the blogger Scott Alexander, where he'll give an argument for something. He said, well, you know, but maybe I'm wrong. Here's some of the reasons that I take seriously as to why everything that I just said might be mistaken. And it's kind of surprising when you can compare it to a typical op-ed,

which just hammers home the poem, moreover, furthermore. And in addition, we should get more in the habit of saying, yes, but on the other hand, but this is what could prove me wrong. So to play that back to you, Stephen, is there a counter argument to your argument that maybe you don't give credence or as much credence to that you're willing to think a bit on that you might want to explore a bit more? say one of your detractors' key points, which, if any of these, resonate with you? Well, there's, you know, I've said a lot of stuff, so it would depend on which particular claim. Well, let's talk about rationality and your views here about the ability of people to learn these mental habits, for society to reform itself, for rationality to become more, not less prevalent. It connects to some of your thinking that many of our viewers will be familiar about regarding

a belief in the inevitability of human progress. Yes. So when it comes to rationality, there can be the cynical view that we are cavemen, that it's hopeless to try to collectively strive for rationality, that really what we ought to do is promote the side of justice and correctness, often means one's own side. And one could argue, say, in the left-right disputes, that it is not symmetrical, that the, in fact, that the distortions are more flagrant and severe by the right, and the only reason that universities have become more left is that they, as some people put it,

reality has a liberal bias. There is the criticism that attempts at fostering objectivity, truth and rationality are, since there's no such thing as objectivity and truth, they're inevitably going to be ploys by the powerful to cement their own privilege, in particular the power and privilege of white heterosexual males, that encouraging the expression of opinions that will disadvantage vulnerable people is can't. the harm that people could, vulnerable who could undergo outweighs any commitment to free speech or open inquiry as a general principle. Those are some of the counter arguments.

I'll have to say, and perhaps I'm biased in saying this, but when it comes to rationality, as opposed to some of the other positions that I have argued, such as the risk of war has gone down, where we're there, there can be. debates depending on interpretation of history and interpretation of trends. When it comes to rationality, it actually is very hard to mount a contrary position because the only way you can do it is by appealing to rationality itself. And so rationality is kind of special in that even though I would be, I must be willing to confess to flaws and uncertainties in my arguments for anything else,

If you do that for rationality, the question is, is that opinion itself rational? And if not, should it be taken seriously? So I would say that of all of the things that I have advocated for, I think rationality is special. And there I'm less willing to entertain counter arguments, because if the counter argument is any good, it would have to be rational. Hmm. Just to touch on one of those counter arguments, because I think it's a big part of the popular debate now, especially on university campuses. And this is the idea, again, that, you know, power relations, how institutions are structured, serves vested interests, that they are using rules to construct a reality that privileges their position and leads to the continued subjugation of traditionally marginalized groups. groups. So just on that particular one, I'd like to hear your refutation of why we shouldn't lump a belief in the importance of rationality and these kind of rules of reasoning into, at times, a legitimate condemnation of vested power structures in our society that use those very

rules to sustain their position of privilege. Well, there absolutely should be criticism. of unjustified power structures and of structures of oppression, institutions and norms and rules and biases that disadvantage people. But to make that case, that can't go against rationality because if itself is rational, then its actual power comes from that very fact. And so the one absolutely ought to question, subvert the imposition of beliefs by brute force, by power, that is the application of rationality. It's not contrary to it.

Now, some people may claim to be rational in imposing dogma or privilege or advantage, but they're mistaken. And it is rationality that allows you to point that out. Yeah, just to bring up another quote from your book, Rationality, you wrote, my great surprise in making sense of moral progress is how many times in history the first domino to fall was the result of a reasoned argument. You obviously give the example of slavery in this case. Well, indeed. And I end the book with a argument that far from being opposed to social justice and moral progress,

it's rationality that propels it. Not only historically is it the case that great movements for social change, such as abolitionism, had rational arguments to appeal to. And when it comes to abolition, none was better than Frederick Douglass, himself a formerly enslaved person, that they really should. Unless there is a good reason to change some practice, to question some law or custom, unless you can justify that, that isn't. social change, you should endorse. It may just be breaking things. It may just be a lynch mob or a

pogrom or lead to the situation getting worse rather than better. It's rationality also always has to be the lodestar by which we choose some activist movements to support. Namely, they will rectify injustice. They will make people better off if implemented. And in fact, I give examples for women's rights, for democracy, for peace, for religious toleration, where centuries ago people did do the work of making the argument. And it's a good thing that they did. And they were right. Yeah, Stephen.

Just finally, your 12th book now, a decades-long career, a commitment to these ideas that you've stuck with. I'm just curious, what's the motivation behind all of this for you personally? Where does this wellspring of concern about reason, rationality, its role in human progress, how we should think of ourselves as a reasoning species? What's driving all this? Well, personally, a lot of it has just been driven by the curiosity about what makes us tick. People say, why did you choose to, why did you go into psychology?

And I say, well, what could be more interesting than how the mind works? Now, admittedly, there's a bit of circularity in there. I find it interesting. Perhaps not everyone finds it as interesting as I do. But I do have a drive to figure out what is this strange thing that we call human nature. But also, it's not just curiosity. I like to quote Anton Chekhov, man will be better when you show him what he is like. Today, we would say humanity will be better when you show them or it what it is like.

I do think that a deeper knowledge of what makes us tick makes us better equipped to dealing with our problems, to coming up with democratic, equitable, and progress promoting solutions. Well, Stephen, thank you so much for your scholarship and your generous time today. I hope this awful pandemic can finally be over, and we can have the pleasure of once again hosting you here in Toronto for either a discussion like this or another debate. I've really enjoyed the time that we've spent together today. I sure hope so, and I thank you again, Roger.

Thank you for listening to my Monk Dialogue with Stephen Pinker. We'll be featuring many more dialogues on our podcast feed over the next few months, conversations with big thinkers like Ian Hersey-Alee, Daniel Dennett, Gadsat. For a complete list of our winter dialogue speakers, go to monkdebates.com forward slash dialogues. We also appreciate your feedback on this podcast. Let us know what you thought of Stephen Pinker's conversation with me. Send us email to podcast at monkdebates. Thank you for helping us bring back the art of civil and substantive public conversation in our time.

I'm your host and moderator, Rudyard Griffith. The Monk Debates are a project of the Aure and Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundations. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gurwitz are the producers. The Monk Debates podcast is mixed by Residia. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. And if you like us, feel free to be. give us a five-star rating. Thank you again for listening.