The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Steven Pinker on Rationality, Psychology, Language, & More

Episode Date: February 2, 2022

On this episode of The Origins Podcast, experimental psychologist, Steven Pinker shares an excellent conversation with Lawrence Krauss. Steven and Lawrence cover a variety of topics, including rationality, evolutionary psychology, and language. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, this is Lawrence Krauss, and welcome to the Origins Podcast. This episode is with my friend, the remarkable scientist, writer, all-around good guy, Stephen Pinker. Stephen is a brilliant scientist and a really brilliant writer. I learned something from him every time I read anything he's written. And I've enjoyed our friendship. and what's nice is in this case familiarity has not read contempt, quite the opposite. The more I get to know Stephen, the more impressed I am with him and the luckier I feel to know him. In this podcast, which we've been talking about doing a podcast together for a long time,

but this podcast follows on his recent book, Rationality, and we talk about that, but we also talk about Stephen's background, what got him interested in psychology and language. and his thoughts about writing in general and what he thinks about when he writes books. The new book Rationality is a book that really surprised me actually when I read it. It wasn't what I expected. It's about the reasons we are rational, the reasons we aren't rational and why we should be rational. And what rationality is, what it corresponds to. And it's specific and detailed with lots of good examples.

really a study of a lot of interesting aspects of logic and reason, including I was very proud and pleased to see that Stephen spent a long time talking about Bayesian analysis, which is something the average person doesn't talk about much, but which is really at the heart of modern science. And really that kind of thinking often leads to results which are quite unexpected and demonstrates in some sense how our kind of evolutionary training is not necessarily the best training to be completely rational. In any case, we talk about all of this in the podcast, and I found it fascinating, and I hope you do too. Once again, if you're watching this on YouTube, I hope you'll subscribe to our YouTube channel. And if you want to support the podcast,

which is provided by the Nonprofit Foundation, the Origins Project Foundation, you can do so by also subscribing to us through Patreon, in which case you can see these podcasts ad-free. No matter how you see this or listen to it, I hope you enjoy Stephen Pinker. Well, Stephen, thank you so much for agreeing to do this with me. It's been a while since we've been together,

but I find it's never failing to me that whenever I spend time with you, I'm enlightened. So thanks. Thank you, Lawrence. Good to be here. Good. And, you know, I want to, there's no, it's quite clear that what I want to do is talk about your new book. And that's, and that's probably what you're most excited about. But I, but it is the origins podcast. And I want to talk about, in some sense, how you got there and where you came from. And, and I want to begin at the beginning. You and I've already talked about the fact that we have a variety of kind of parallelisms. You're only four months younger than me, it turns out. We both grew up in Canada to Jewish parents and both moved to Boston to graduate school and then moved back and forth to 1990 and Harvard, although in opposite directions. But as I think about it, that's about as much of parallel as there is. You grew up in Montreal. I grew up in Toronto.

And one thing that I never asked you, it occurred to me, is your interest in language? Does it stem at all from the, from the. the fact that you're from English parents in a province that was French and the need to sort of try and speak to languages, did that impact on you at all when you were younger? You know, that it would be a good story, but it's not really true. I didn't know if it was, but I just wondered. I mean, you were probably the closest, the only connection might be that in McGill University, being in a bilingual city, had the way that many departments will specialize in areas that are locally relevant. They had a pretty strong program in psycholinguistics, and linguistics and psycholinguistics were big at McGill

when I was an undergraduate. I think that's the closest, especially since my interest in language was not so much from practical problems in the best way to learn a second language and how to, are there any advantages to being bilingual, but really more deeper questions like what is language, how did it evolve, how does it work, how do kids acquire it?

And I came to, language of just in my autobiography, really from reading a long-form article in the Sunday New York Times magazine in, I think maybe in 72, on this young upstart of linguistics named Noam Chomsky, who had turned the field upside down, was part of the cognitive revolution, helping to overthrow behaviorism as the reigning philosophy of psychology. This being the doctrine that, any reference to mental constructs, thoughts, beliefs, rules, plans, images, memories was unscientific because they can't be measured and science is only about things you can measure. Science of behavior, first of all, psychology should be a science of behavior, not a science

of mind because the mind is superstition like leprechauns or fairies. You can't, you know, how can you measure a mind with an instrument? Yeah. Therefore, you should, it should concentrate on relationships between the current stimulus situation of an organism, which, you know, you can measure with instruments, it's history of learning, and then you measure the responses. So that was kind of what dominated psychology in the middle decades of the 20th. And then this article pointed out how Chomsky was one of those who overturned that paradigm,

and the mind was a respectable thing to study scientifically again. And I think it was that article plus books around the home and exposure to cognitive psychology in college and then university. It just seemed tremendously exciting that you could actually study the human mind scientifically. Yeah, well, it is. I was fascinated when I was younger. There's another difference between my life and yours. Your parents were professional.

So I wanted to be a neurosurgeon because I figured that's as close as you could get to the mind. I didn't know there was anything else. But your parents, your father was a lawyer and your mother was a, sorry, go on. Yeah, so my father was, he was trained as a lawyer. And he actually stopped practicing pretty early in his career. He resumed it in midlife. And in our generation, the boomers, the yuppies, is almost inconceivable that if you had a law degree that you would go into business instead. but my father sold, he sold women's clothing.

He was a traveling salesman. He sold tennis dresses and lingerie and these items that I don't think anyone has heard of these days called housecoats and house dresses. The housewives would wear in the 60s. And for me, like, he had a law degree. Why did he sell housecoats? And the answer was, it was a way to make a living. And in his generation, children of immigrants, the professional, degrees and being professional just wasn't a thing. It was if you were a minch and if you could

make a living and support your family, it didn't really matter what you did in the prestige of being a lawyer versus a salesman, just didn't register with them. And I think, you know, then in our generation, the thing was you got to get, you know, your MBA or your doctor, whatever. Mine was doctor or a lawyer, MBA or doctor was just too accurate. He was my brother, a lawyer, me a doctor. That's what my mother won. Oh, same, same. Yes, same with me. But the, so then, then I think when my father got into his 50s, he was sick of sleeping around the province of Quebec with sample bags full of clothing. And he did, he reopened, he,

he got his, renewed his law license and then opened to practice late in life. Even then, it was a kind of thing he did on the side, but he was more, again, in that generation. entrepreneurial business oriented, not particularly impressed by professionals. He was mainly a kind of a landlord. He had some rental properties. So I consider my background not so professional, more small business. And I had another uncle who had a law degree who, again, instead of practicing, he went into his father-in-law's auto parts business.

My other uncle got an engineering degree, but he went into his father's business making neckties. Wow. This is just this was the I think the values of that the first native board generation of Jewish immigrants. Yeah. It was you know can you can you make a living? Can you support your family? That was that that was yeah that's exactly right. And for and and for me, I guess they wanted the next generation to be professionals because they thought it might make a better living. At least my mother thought that. It's interesting. My father told shoes so we're closer than... Oh, no, I think we are. I think we're actually very close. And indeed, my mother said, early on, she said, why would you go into psychology, go into psychiatry? And then, you know,

you don't have to be at the mercy of the academic job market. You know, you can do everything that a psychologist does, but more. And besides, isn't psychology, isn't that just cats and rats? Which it actually was in her generation, because she was a student during the behaviorist brain. She said, you don't want to go into psychology. It's cats and rats. But she had got, she had a college degree. She was eventually a college degree.

She was her degree. What was her background in? She, she, she, she had a degree. She then went, became, in the 50s,

she did what everyone did. She had children move to the suburbs. Did not, did not work when I was a child. And again, like that generation, when, got,

restless when her kids started to be teenagers, when the feminist revolution happened. And so she then got a, went back to school, got a master's degree in counseling, became a high school guidance counselor, and then the vice principal of a high school. And for many genera, in fact, it's funny just, yeah, she has many generations of her students of people I meet in all walks of life. Oh, that's nice. Last night I gave a guest lecture at a course in Harvard. The instructor said, well, your mother probably doesn't remember me.

But, yeah. Oh, that's great. Well, I bet, but what she said to you is, I mean, you know, I remember when I got my first job at Harvard, my mother called my wife at the time and said he can still go to medical school. What does he want to get chalk on his hands? For me, with the idea of physics was somehow sitting at a blackboard and getting your chalk on your hands. So it just seemed like a real job. We're actually, yeah, we're really from very similar back. Yeah.

Okay. Well, maybe one of the reasons that we relate. At least I certainly enjoy you so much. But who which one of, in terms of, did either of them encourage you. you had interest early on in psychology, I guess, in terms of sort of being a quote-unquote scientist, did either have a stronger influence on you, or they'd just let you go in whatever direction you wanted? I probably had more, my mother had more of an interest, more of an influence on me. She herself, when she was a master's student in counseling, I at the same time was an

undergraduate in psychology. We actually weren't at the same time. We would sometimes commute in together and she and we would often read both of us read in psychology and cachet and uh cognitive behavior therapy so our interests overlapped of the two of my parents both very smart but my mother was more of a reader more of a more intellectual of the two and so i had much more intellectually in common and in fact to this day she's 87 and i dedicated rationality to her. Oh, wonderful. And she commented on a draft, as she does with most of my books, largely because I kind of

think of my reader as similar to her, someone who's not very smart, but not an academic, intellectually curious. And my, you know, I suspect this is true of you as well. I treat my readers as kind of equals, but people who just don't know what I have. happen to know. Yeah, no, exactly. Show them things that they can see with their own eyes, granting them the respect of being curious and willing to put a little bit of mental

work in. And my part of the bargain is that if my readers are willing to put a little bit of mental effort in, then I will reward them with a real understanding. They shouldn't be puzzled after putting some thought into it. I try not to leave stuff out or to make assumptions. Or appeal to authority. Appeal to authority. Yeah.

So it's exactly. So it's, you know, for something like Bayesian reasoning. Yeah. The theorem of the Reverend Thomas Bays. Which we'll get to, which is fascinating.

You know, change signs. Sometimes that may seem intimidating. Oh my God, a theorem. Yeah. It's got, you know,

three terms in it. So it's not that, you know, not that complicated. You do really have to give a little bit of thought to it. But my, I felt that it is something that any, intelligent person who's willing to think a little bit can grasp. And in fact, one of the arguments

I make in the book is that in some domains, we already are Bayesian, even though we don't think in terms of the algebraic formula of the theorem, but our intuition is Bayesian. In certain ways, and there's certain ways, as you also point out, it's Bayesian, but not Bayesian, because the priors are often things we want to be true rather than are true. But then we'll get to Bayes has changed in my own field of physics. It changed everything. And I, even, even though I've used it, I still have to always go back and kind of remember its basis every time I think about it. And that's why I was so pleased that you actually did that. I, you know, my late friend, Steven Weinberg used to say in his first book, you may remember the first three minutes. He said

his reader he thought of as a lawyer and a cunning lawyer, somebody didn't have a background in science, but was going to question the arguments and put work in. And I think that's the idea. And if you can, if people are willing to work through it, then they should, I mean, they may not have a mastery, but at least an understanding. And I find that to be a wonderful characteristic of your book. So I think that's, you know, that's, that's the best you can do.

And, yeah, it's, it's a shame that, it's interesting to me. I wasn't going to go in this direction, but we've both written a lot of books. And I'm always amazed that somehow maybe psychology is less intimidating than physics, probably, because I think that's an understatement. Well, for me, it's funny because for me,

I think I did, as I will talk about, I do physics because it's easier than neuroscience. But the notion that you should be willing to puzzle through in something like physics is something that, you know, reviewers in major magazines, they're willing to puzzle through in psychology or maybe history, economics, but in physics, they'd just rather say, it blew my mind. And so I think in psychology, it's important to present those puzzles. And you do actually begin the book with puzzles,

which is a wonderful thing. I have to say the book was quite different than I expected, but I'm not quite there yet. I want to talk about how you got there. And I promise within the next seven minutes, we're going to get to the book, because I know we have so much to talk about in so little time. I wish I had three times of time to talk to you now. One thing I did, there's some puzzles about you, though, that still surprised me. First, your PhD was an experimental psychology in vision, right? Is that right? Okay.

Visual cognition. 3D versus, yeah, mental imagery, yeah. And one thing I was going to ask is since Chomsky had changed, well, one thing that occurred me when you're talking, since Chomsky had been in some sense, kindled your imagination about psychology and the innate cognition and the innate cognition instead of behaviorism. You chose to go to Harvard rather than MIT. Was that, and Chomsky was in MIT?

Was that a... Well, he's also in a different department. He's not, he's a linguist. Yeah, so. I absolutely wanted to be a psychologist. It's a different field to make methods, different questions, different theories. I did apply to MIT's Department of Psychology at the time. And I kind of agonized, went back and forth.

I'm not even sure I made the right decision, but they were very, as MIT was and still is, it's kind of like they asked me, well, do you think you'll be able to raise your own money to support yourself? Okay. That's the MIT way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whereas at Harvard, it was, we'll, you know, we'll pay you full fare all the way. I didn't have to think about that.

When I went back to MIT as an assistant professor, you know, I had to raise half my salary from grants. That's the MIT style. The MIT way, okay. I didn't have that dilemma because I applied to both Harvard and MIT, but I only got into MIT. And happily, you know, they offered me money. In physics, it's more, physics is a richer field, so they tend to pay your way. But then, of course, it turned out I came, I came with money from Canada, and they immediately deducted that amount from what they were offering me.

Oh, same here. I had a insert. Now they called it an insert, but it was an NRC at the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, well, we both have to. Okay. But you made the transition from visual, cognition to language. Well, I actually studied them both in grad school. Oh, okay. I didn't know that.

My thesis was on the representation of three-dimensional space and mental images when we imagine a scene that isn't physically present, like if our eyes are closed. Do we imagine it from a particular vantage point, a particular perspective, or is it in an object-centered coordinate system where there's no viewpoint, and I argue that there actually always is a viewpoint, so that visual, mental 3D space is actually more like what David Marr called two and a half dimensional. I was going to say, I read about two and a half dimensional, and I was intrigued by that. What the hell does that mean?

It's a bit of a whimsical term. The idea is that this is a kind of a matrix or a graphic representation where the horizontal and vertical dimensions are represented by, you know, basically by different cells, different entries, but depth is represented by a quantity. So it's not like we have three-dimensional voxels, like a kind of mental sandbox, but rather we have, what we see is always a set of surfaces, and we are aware of how far away they are and what orientation. But it is not like a, like molding clay. Anyway, that was the thesis,

but at the same time, I wrote a theoretical paper when I was in grad school on language acquisition where I kind of worked my way into a conclusion similar to Chomsky's,

but coming from a very different direction. I mean, you know Chomsky well, you've interviewed a number of friends. The thing is for, he's a totally brilliant seminal thinker, but he tends to be treated as a kind of a guru. He is almost almost a cult figure. He's got his theory that's kind of, you know, idiosyncratic and personal, and it's his vision. And I was never part of that cult.

But I did kind of, to my surprise, wandered into a similar conclusion just by looking at AI and mathematical models of language acquisition. That is, so studying how kids learn language was a thing at Harvard when I was a grad student. But I always thought it was very, all the discussion was very squishy. It was just like they wrote down baby talk and it's in an active process, it's in a passive process. And I wanted a little more rigor. So I dove into algorithms for learning language.

That is, imagine, and this is a very tromsky conception. He called it a what, LAD, language acquisition device. The input to this box is sentences drawn from. any of the world's 6,000 languages. That would correspond to what you hear your parents and siblings say when you're a little baby. The output is a, Shamsky would call it a grammar, but we can think of it as an algorithm for understanding and producing. And so the question is, what's in that box?

How do you go from a few million sentences that you hear from your parents to a generative algorithm them for speaking and hearing for the rest of your life. And looking at those, the models that were around at the time, the AI models, the ones that actually worked had to have something built in as to an overall expectation as to how language works. What are the basic, what's the basic computational architecture? What are the basic units? Obviously, you couldn't build in English or Japanese, but the ones that tried to do it just as a blank slate were hopeless.

And the ones that at least had some priors, you can put in a, priors were much more successful. So I realized, oh, that's kind of a roundabout way to coming to, you know, in aateness. Yeah. That is, they are priors in a learning algorithm. So they're hardwired priors instead of software, I guess.

And, and, and, but you, you, um, And so this innateness, I think is relevant to this. The reason I'm bringing it up is I think it's relevant to the rationality issue that, that I, as I say, that I was fascinated by in your book. And I have, I had, I have 60 questions, which I, which I've paired down to eight or 10 or 12, and we'll see. But, but this innateness is interesting to me because where I see, I mean, I'm not an expert, of course, but the difference having spent time with Chomsky and listening to you is that both agreed

that there's some innate, innate capability for language, which is an essential part of being human. But Shomsky surprised me when I first heard him say this, is that his argument is that language was more useful for thinking, not than communicating. And from what I gather, is you're more of the viewpoint, which seemed rational to me in advance, that language was developed for an evolutionary basis for communication. Could you comment on that? distinction between those two for me? Just to eliminate. I've actually never understood that claim.

It just seems patently false based on some of the basic design features of language, such as there are words. Now, why would you have to learn for every concept, a word with a pronunciation, if it was all in your head? Well, I think he argued that the ability to create an infinite number of sentences expanded your ability to be conscious in a sense. No, no, yes, I'm all for that. That would be an explanation for why thought is combinatorial.

Okay. We're talking about language. Why do you need stretches of sound for every concept? Why do you need the whole component of language called phonology, namely the mapping of sentences onto articulatory commands when you speak and acoustic signals when you hear. If it was all going on in the head, you wouldn't need that.

So that would not be an essential part of language. You'd be an internal medium of communication, like a programming language, and you don't have to pronounce, you don't have to machine code in a computer is not pronounceable. It doesn't have to. It's going to be total waste to convert it to and from

acoustic signals. Also, you wouldn't need the rules of phonology. A whole component of grammar which Chomsky himself helped to define back in the 1960s, mainly all of the little adjustments that we make when we speak that go into an accent, the slurring of adjacent sounds. Now, these obviously aid articulation, but the fact that it would be a massive coincidence if an inherent part of language was getting it out of the head in an acoustic signal, other people just happened to be able to hear, if language wasn't designed for communication. Now, of course, I agree that there is, part of it might depend on what you call language, and meaning, that is, Chomsky might call it logical form, that is the content of sentence,

is the gist, the actual, you know, what synonyms have in common. That obviously is what we think in. And but as long as you distinguish that from, say, you know, Japanese or Yiddish or Swedish or Yoruba, it seems to me the common sense for you, what anyone would say when you say, well, gee, you know, so and so on the street, why do we have language? Well, to communicate. Yeah.

And they're right. Of course you have it to communicate. Yeah, it certainly helps. But, you know, I've often wondered, I mean, I think it's hard to know what, whether you can think without language, I guess is the key question. Oh, you can definitely think without language. You do? Do when you think you don't internalize words? Well, you have snatches. You use stretches of sound as short-term memory representations, but you don't think in complete sentences. Thought would be way slower. If you did, also writing would be.

would not be a slog. It would just be output. Yeah. And struggling for what words actually express my thought. We've got, you know, going back to my thesis, we've got imagery. We think in, we mentally rotate a, you know, a cube or a stick figure. We're not describing it in words the whole time. Kids have to acquire language in the first place.

And if they couldn't think without language, how could they learn language? So we know that from studies of non-human animals, that animals can solve problems, they can recognize things. They can do technology. Which makes, you know, exponentiallyates the power of thought, not only because it allows us to share thoughts with other people and to think thoughts that would never occur to us on our own, but we can also use it, the sort of auditory and articulatory images of stretches of sound as a, kind of scratch pad to hold ideas while we're working through them. Okay, well, look, okay, that's fascinating. And I'm going to, I want to spend the last half of this on the, more directed to the book in a sense. But I have to ask you one last question, just of the curiosity.

When I was at Harvard, my favorite guy in the Society Fellows was David. He won the Nobel Prize for Figano Hatsi. Was he in psychology? David, who? I'm trying to remember his last name now. Oh, yeah, David Hubell. He was also Canadian. He was also from Montreal.

David Heuble. He's a, yeah, he's at the medical school. Always the medical. Did you interact at him at all when you were, when you were doing your cognitive, your vision, vision aspect? I, I, I didn't meet him when I was a grad student. Oh, okay. Every, every psychology student learns about the work of David Hubel and Torsten Reesel. Yeah, yeah. Just absolutely fundamental. Basically, it was, and to this day, I show my intro psych class, his original film in which he made the discovery of the, basically,

the line detectors in the visual brain of the cat. Yeah, McCann. It's an amazing little video, at least I think it's amazing. The students, you know, I think they're amused that I find it so gripping. I've seen it like 50 times and I find it as fascinating any time. That's great. Well, as long as you convey your enthusiasm, to me, that's a large part of teaching. So, because if they don't understand why you're interested, why would they be interested?

Okay. But this rules, the fact that there are rules for language and, you know, I'll, you know, I was thinking about your movement in writing, from writing about language to eventually writing about enlightenment, the better angels of our nature and then enlightenment now, was a move in some sense to try and ultimately come to what, you know, what I would say is rationality, what surprised me about your book? I picked it up and I thought, okay, this is going to be another Steve Pinker book explaining why rationality is necessary, but also, so why historically the world's getting better and what and and and and and instead what i'm to my

great pleasure in a sense because i would have bought into that but but but instead it's a discussion or a detailed discussion of of rationality and cognition and the rules by which rationality is acquired or abused in humans and and and in that sense it was such a unexpected pleasure to read and and and and and and and learning experience so let me just say that for those who may wonder what this is. It's quite, I mean, it's much more psychological than, then, then, then, you know, I would think, I tend to think of the better, of enlightenment now in better nations of every nature as, as trying to promote a, a worldview that, that, that, that, that, may go against the grain, but is important. But, but this is an exploration of an, of, of something that is, is interesting to define. And, and I want to begin with

your definition, which, well, you have a variety of them, and I want to come back to it, because it seems to me there's a circle in the book where you sort of begin and end. But what surprised me was in some sense you say that rationality is what allows you to get things you want. And that's not what I would have. I mean, there's a wonderful definition of it at the end of the book that we'll get to maybe if we get to it. But, you know, that's fascinating. I wonder if you can elaborate because it seems to me sometimes irrationality also gets you what you want. and emotion sometimes get to what you want.

Well, the way I put is irrationality. I don't think irrationally does get you what you want, although what you want could be irrational. Yeah, I mean, that's the key point. In fact, a large part of the latter part of your book is saying, we are rational beings, but we're not ultimately, we're using rationality in a local sense, and it doesn't get us what we need, want globally.

Exactly, yeah. So the definition is related. to the famous statement of David Hume that reason must always be a slave to the passions. Yes, which I was going to want to focus on later. Which is easily misunderstood as saying, well, we have no choice but to

splurge, to blow our stack, to shoot from the hip to do whatever feels good. That's not what Hume meant when he said that. I think what he meant is that reason always is a means to an end.

It's a way of getting something, but what that end is cannot itself be determined by reason. And one way to think about it is if you kind of try to imagine what reason without a goal might be, you might say, well, gee, why isn't just using logic to deduce new true propositions and old propositions? Isn't that rationality? Well, just imagine someone that simply spun out,

using the rules of logic, just spun out a bunch of true statements till the end of time. And they were strictly true logically, like if one and one equals three, then pigs can fly. Well, that is true by the, they're both false.

And if then statement is only false if the premise is true and the conclusion is false. And you can then say, oh, yes. And if two and two is seven, then pigs can fly. If two and two is eight, then pigs can fly until the end of the time. So you're just saying true statements forever. And you're totally logical. Well, is that rational?

I mean, no, whatever rationality is, it's not just saying true things. I think we call it rational when there is some goal that we accomplish. I use the wonderful passage from William James, the philosopher and psychologist and namesake of the building that I work in at Harvard, William James Hall. We said we tried to contrast a rational entity from a not rational entity. And he said, Romeo and Juliet, Romeo wants Juliet as the filings want the magnet. and if no obstacles intervene, he approaches her by as straight a path as they. But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall is built between them, don't press their faces against the opposite sides, you know, idiotically, like the filings and magnet with a card.

Romeo finds a way of getting over the wall or around the wall. The difference is that with a purely physical process, a non-rational process, the trajectory is fixed, and whether it reaches an end just depends on. on accidents, on other things are arranged right. With a rational agent, the end is fixed and the actual trajectories can be varied indefinitely. So that I think is a good characterization of intuitively what we mean by rationality,

but you're right that it opens the door to using rational means to some indefensible ends. And I think a lot of public rationality that concerns us so much today, why is there so much fake news and conspiracy theories, theories is that people can want certain goals like fortifying their side in a great, you know, in the culture war and making the other side look foolish and their side look wise and noble.

That's a goal. It's a dubious goal, but it is a goal. And people can be perfectly rational, entertaining that goal. Or the goal could be to achieve status as a fearless warrior for your side in the great culture war. And so people will say, yeah, go Steve. He's really stuck it to the conservatives or stuck it to the liberals. That's a goal.

If everyone pursues that goal, we're all worse off. But people can be, unfortunately, you're pretty clever initating those goals. Yeah, no. And that is a central premise, the last part of the book, which I do want to get to. Actually, your distinction, actually, in the preface of your book, you make that distinction between logic and rationality, which was fascinating to me when I first made it. And exactly that,

that's something to be logical but not rational. And in fact, the beginning of your book, you talk about classical logic, just so we can be clear on what classical logic is, because classical logic can be a component of rationality, but it's not the equal of rationality. I mean, if you're illogical,

it's hard to be rational. I think that, so the converse is the way of proving the, in fact, as you might have said in one of your chapters, that's the case. The law of contraposition, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, the reason that logic can be irrational is that when you apply logic,

you may only appeal to what is stated in the premises. Yeah. And the goal is to deduce conclusions that are true if the premises are true. But you've got to forget everything you know in order to do that. And in everyday life, even in the, science, it's never rational to set aside everything you know. Well, actually, sometimes it is. Sometimes. Not in everyday life. Yeah. The example is, you know, all, all plant products are healthful. Tobacco is a plant product, therefore tobacco is helpful. Yeah, yeah. So, you know,

that's, that that is a sound inference. It's not valid because, in fact, not all plants are helpful. And we know what tobacco is, so we know to reject it. But if you or a logician, you'd have to say, yes, that is a valid inference and it does follow. Hi, this is Lawrence Krause, and I'm really happy to talk to you today on behalf of Audible. Audible is a leading provider of spoken word entertainment all in one place. I'm an Audible user, and I also am an Audible producer. I've read a variety of my books on audiobooks that you can get through the Audible catalog. I find in my current position with the podcast that Audible has become even more important for me

because I have discussions with many different authors and I have to read a lot of books and I find through Audible I can listen to a number than when I'm otherwise doing other things like driving the car or working out. Almost any book I want to read electronically or in hard copy version I can find spoken on Audible. So all in all, there are a lot of good reasons to consider joining Audible. And right now, there's a particularly good reason. There's a promotion that Audible is involved in involving a new sort of masterclass podcast about well-being and ways that you can basically help yourself to feel better. So go to audible.com slash well-being.

That's audible.com slash well-being. Let me connect. I'm jumping around because I know we're never going to get in a logical order, where do I want to get? But it's interesting you say that because in some sense, that's true. But then Bayesian conditional probability, which is so important, as you point out that later, well, after describing Bayesian statistics very well, point out that people are Bayesian, but as I said earlier, they take a prior, which doesn't correspond to reality. It corresponds to the reality they want. isn't that very similar in some sense to an abuse of logic?

In some sense, the conditional probability is really, you're being irrational in the same sense. You're being, while being logical, you're being irrational because your prior is wrong, which is really what, in some sense, what's the problem with the statement about plants and tobacco? Exactly. Yeah, I think that is exactly right. It's just the probabilistic equivalent of what we were just saying about logic. Now, in fact, go on. No, no.

Yeah. In fact, a lot of, you know, probability is related to logic in that a lot of inferences in logic have a counterpart in probability if you switch from things are just true or false to the kind of basing conception that you have degrees of credence in an hypothesis. So, for example, the fallacy of affirming the consequent in logic, namely P implies Q, Q, therefore P, We know that's invalid. If you're a heroin addict, you smoked marijuana. Therefore, if you smoke marijuana, you'll be a heroin addict. So that's the fallacy of affirming the consequent. In logic, the corresponding fallacy is confusing conditional probabilities.

That is the probability of A given B with the probability of B given. But the conditional probability is a lot like if then, but a probabilistic version of if then. then. What's the probability of if that then is, and then it then occurs in some sense. So instead of being a rigid if then, it's kind of a probabilistic if then is, I guess is a way of. Exactly. It's almost like it's not exactly the same as what they call fuzzy logic. Yeah. But it's, it's related. Yeah. Before we get on to there, I'm going to skip a lot, but you did mention Hume and I and I, and you know, I kept for the last third of your book, but you know, your book is structured into sort of the here are the components of rationality.

Now, let me understand them. And then the last part of the book is kind of what I thought that, you know, you had to address. As you say, this is the part you've been waiting for. Because you think this is what people are going to look for is why are we not rational and sort of the more sociological perspective of how this is implemented in the real world or abused? And I, and for that part of the book, I kept coming up with reason as the slave of the passions. The reason, ultimately, the reason we appear to be irrational. And you're the eternal optimist, I guess, in a way, as saying it's not that we're inherently irrational. It's just, that we're rational, but rational by being a slave to a passion, which may not produce a global rationality, but rather a local rationality is the way I think global is societal, or what's ultimately best for everyone, or what ultimately is even best for you, you don't get because you're still thinking kind of myopically. Right. It's, I call it the tragedy of the rationality comments. Common, exactly. And there is a chapter in the book on game theory. One of the classic results from game theory is that there are situations in which a number of rational agents, each doing what is in their own self-interest, can end up worse off than if they made some

sacrifice of their interests. Well, I'm going to interrupt you there. I'm going to try not to interrupt too much because I don't people say I do, but we have a limited time. Otherwise, I wouldn't. But that's an incredibly important point. And I want to go there for two reasons. because I want to address something that's clearly relevant now to the time we're talking, and also as it turns out, it's relevant to the last book I wrote on climate change, this tragedy of the rational commons in some sense that makes, when I read your book, I have good, I have optimistic days and pessimistic days.

But the notion, but climate change is a clear example of that dichotomy between what may be good for you apparently and what's good for you ultimately. Why don't you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, it's the tragedy of the Carbon Commons. Just to get straight on what the original tragedy of Commons was. This is the hypothetical case in which there's a town commons. And for every shepherd, it makes sense to bring his sheep to graze on the town commons because he gets, you know, because his sheep get fattened.

If everyone doesn't, they can denude the common sense. faster than the grass can grow back, and then everyone is worse off compared to if they, in fact, each one has an incentive to allow his sheep to graze as many of his sheep as possible, to graze as much as possible, but that makes everyone worse off. So we talked about the analog of that in the case of rationality, namely everyone might pursue the goal of achieving hero status within their own tribe with the result that the public sphere is just a war between different tribes over each one plugging their version of the truth and each member of the tribe getting brownie points for how well they can advance the fight and we're all worse off if we end up with

just the the belief of the strongest coalition as opposed to to the true belief. That is if we all kind of cooperated to collectively pursue the truth, which is what science, at least in theory, ought to do. Now, the carbon commons is yet another analogy with the sheep on the town commons. Namely, it's every individual within a society has the incentive to enjoy all the benefits of fossil fuels. You get to drive in an air-conditioned car and you're toasty in the winter and cool in the summer. But, and if you stint on that, if you kind of get wet during a rainstorm and waiting for the bus, you're not saving the planet, you yourself, unless everyone else does.

So it makes sense to take your car instead of waiting for the bus. The problem is if everyone makes that decision, then everyone is worse off with an unstable, dangerous planet. And which is also true, of course, of countries that each country would be best off if all the other countries conserved and they used abundant portable energy and fossil fuels to power economic development. If everyone does it, then we're all worse off. And that's why there have to be these global agreements or within a country, you know, carbon pricing or other regulations to shift the incentives so that people, when people, and countries opt for what is most advantageous to them, everyone will do what's most advantageous to the planet. Yeah, in fact, and it plays into the game theory argument

that when you're doing a game, you're trying to decide in some sense what your opponent will do. And if playing by a certain set of rules, and if both of you do it, it's good for both of you, but you realize if they don't, then they're going to win. And each country says, well, I can, I can start, you know, conserving or or, or, you know, restricting my GDP with, you know, using fewer cheap fossil fuels. But what if, you know, China or what is some other competitor doesn't, then I better do it

quickly because if they do it all, you know, and it's, and it's that, it's that game, it's that, and that's why, you know, in games you need rules to, to, to, and you often crave them. As you, as I think somewhere in the book, you say, you know, hey, I really give me a rule that stops me from doing what I would do naturally anyway. In some sense, it's like, it's like Rousseau, right? We're born free, but we live forever and change. If you agree to be part of a society, you're saying, give me the rules so that I know in the long run that there'll be peace and security and I'll be happier, even though I can't go out

and steal money today if I need it and that sort of thing. Yeah, the social contract. The social contract of Rousseau. So, yeah, proposed namely, I will sacrifice some of my liberty as long as, as everyone else does as well, since we're better off if we aren't all praying on each other and exploiting each other, I forego my, all the advantages of exploiting you. On the other hand, I'm better off if I can get everyone, all of you to forego your prerogative to exploit me. So we're all better off that way, exactly.

You know, there's so much I want to talk about it's literally so little time. But this notion, which I guess I hadn't occurred to me until after reading your your book, which now makes things clear of what I would call local rationality versus global, the notion that one may be good for you is not good for everyone and ultimately not good for you. Talking about rules, that we need rules, but in fact, in some sense, it's science. Science is a set of rules that in principle allow us to go from the local to the global. Recognizing that people are biased and science is a set of rules that eventually leads to the rational public good of understanding.

But it requires, but I was going to ask what you thought about, Jonathan Rauch's notion that it, and you sort of say it in the book, it's a science requires a social, it's a social discipline by necessity because each player in science is not a purely rational operator. Namely, you need other people to check your rationality.

Then the rules, the rules provide that method of checking so that you know ultimately what comes out, is a collective good. Oh, exactly. And in fact, I come to a similar conclusion to Jonathan Rauchess, and his book came out after rationality went to press. But I would have cited an essay that he previewed his book.

And the idea that both he and I push is that collective rationality comes from submitting to certain rules within certain institutions. that filter out the vast amount of false belief that we all propose for the rare correct beliefs and that allow the ambitions of one person to counteract the ambitions of another. Now, psychologically, the key, the engine to this is that even though we're all subject to biases and fallacies and blind spots, we're much better at pointing out other people's fallacies and biases and blind spots. And so you can harness that ability that we're, you know,

since we are all arguers, kind of more intuitive lawyers than intuitive scientists. Yeah. But you can put that to work if you have people criticizing each other's ideas, checking each other's ambitions. And science is an example of how that can work, at least when it works well. There should not be authority, arguments for authority in science. There should not be repression and censorship of hypotheses in science. There should not be...

If only. If only, right. And the same is true of liberal democracy, where you have checks and balances built into the government system. And the American framers were, they didn't have the language of game theory, but they analyzed it in exactly the same way. They said, yeah, human beings are flawed. We all want to be right.

We all want power. So the key is you have one guy's power checking another guy's power. That's our only hope. Yeah, that was a game theory. It's a definitely game theory picture. Actually, with Broush, by the way, I wasn't thinking of his new book. I was thinking of the old one, kindly inquisitors, I think. The notion of liberal science, that science itself is a liberal.

And liberal in the same sense as democracy, this notion that it's based, it requires that you only get to rationality by having a group being able to question each other, that really you can't expect an individual. You can't, any individual is ultimately, for the reasons we talk about it, ultimately going to be led to local rationality and not global rationale, something they want, an idea that's too sacred to them to give up,

et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And all of those things are discussed in your book. I'll avoid human, but I want to get, I want to get back to this, this notion of collection, of coordinated games and the fact that that the tragedy of the commons, which we, which you discussed very well for climate, which makes me wonder, since really the tragedy of climate commons is, as you kind of allude, is both personal and governmental. Each individual

has motivations for violating the collective rationality. And each country does as well. And it makes one, when you think about that, you wonder whether it certainly makes one maybe not pessimistic, but it's going to be a challenge to work that way. But, you know, I have to say, because I want to get to at least twice in your book, concepts from physics came to my mind. Oh, yeah? Yeah, yeah, because it's,

if you think of a large physical system, it gets stuck in what you call a local minimum rather than the global minima. And the reason it gets stuck in that global minimum is just each atom or each component of that system can't go from one, the minimum, to change the minimum, say from a system where there's a twist to a system where there's no twist, you can't locally do that. You have to globally do that. And therefore, the system, each atom is never being pushed in the direction to do,

to get to that global minimum. And so this, it's exactly, it seems to me, to the tragedy of commons. And so when we get stuck locally at a local minimum, it's exactly the same as a system, which really could be better off and have. more free energy and all the rest if it ever made the transition and it won't. The other area of physics that I wanted to see if you thought was too much of an stretch was you spent a lot of time on another key aspect of sort of rationality or rationally, which is risk assessment. And humans are pretty bad at that innately.

Although one of the things that you do point out, which I think is really important, is that people may say they believe something, but when it comes down to the evidence of their senses, they generally, common sense often reigns. So they, with an abstract thing, they may be, they may be wrong. But when they, you know, when George Bush may have said, well, maybe we should have teach both, both creationism and intelligent design and in schools. But when, but when the avian flu first came out, which is, which was the sort of pandemic at the time, potential pandemic at the time, he said, you know, we've got to look for mutations. Because ultimately, you know, when it, when their danger happens, you go to the science.

But when you point out when people are thinking about risk, avoiding loss is something that they're more willing to take a risk for than gain. And again, but I'm wondering if that, if that's not, it seems to me that's eminently rational for a physics reason. And the physics reason is that is entropy. Yeah. The fact that it's much harder to do good than bad in some sense is the fact that the world, you know, the natural tendency is to, is to move away from that plateau to the, to the,

to disorder. And so people in their lives see that it's much, much easier for a system to, to, to, to go away from the plateau. And therefore, that experience tells them I better, it's much more important for me to avoid loss than it is to seek gain. What do you think of that? Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. And I think it's, it's, it's not far from what Amosferski and Dan McConnell had in mind as the explanation for loss aversion. Loss aversion being the fact that people, that losses are more painful than gains are pleasurable and people will do go out of their way to avoid a loss. Ultimately, the ultimate loss is the loss of life, is death.

And there are a lot of ways that can happen because we're very important. probable collections of matter. We have locally fought against entropy by taking in, you know, energy and our metabolism and developmental processes allow our bodies to, you know, hanging together for a few decades, despite all of the ravages of disorder. They're just in calculably more ways for something to go wrong than to go right. And so we ought to be cautious about, more cautious about the downside. And Amos himself, although I don't know if he actually appealed to the second law of thermodynamics, but he once said to me, and I reproduced this in the book, how much better off can you be imagined being than you are now? How much worse off can you imagine being?

How many really good things can you imagine happening today? How many really bad things can you imagine happening? In each case, there's a massive asymmetry. In fact, the second one is bottomless. Well, it was exactly reading that analogy of his that you do that made me think of entropy. It's because I know. I think it's exactly right. And I think it's probably more than an analogy. It might literally be true in that death is, you know, there are very few ways of being alive. And there are very, very many ways of being dead.

Or as Richard Dawkins put it, not alive. Exactly. Well, in fact, we locally, you know, life is locally, you know, like, as these poor creationists who don't understand the second law, if they're thinking, they think life is a violation of the second law. It's only what it's doing is locally, you know, storing energy eventually, you know,

and at the expense of the environment. And so, and so, and eventually it goes back to the environment. That's the, and that's death. Ashes to ashes. Yeah. But I'm going to avoid loss because I'm going to lose you in two or three minutes.

Oh, yes. Okay. And so, you know, there's just so much I would love to talk to you about. Well, we'll talk privately, but maybe we'll do it again sometime because there's just so it's i mean everything you write is rich but this book is as i say provoked so much thought but i want to go to the end of your book because ultimately there's two there's two quotes i want to read if you'll which i think will get us to the

end um it's seen to me near the end you say the ultimate explanation for the paradox of how our species could be both so rational and irrational is not some bug in our cognitive software there's the the stephen pinker optimism there it's not that we're inherently irrational it's rather, it lies in the duality of self and other. Our powers of reason are guarded by our motives and limited by our points of view. Which is really, it seems to me, the modern, which is, if I thought of it, I think is the thesis in some sense. If I had to distill the thesis for your book, I might say that. And I might say another way of saying that would be that reason is a slave for our passions.

Do you think it's a modern way of expressing that very point? I'm not sure. Okay, well, think about it. Anyway, I will think about it. Because, I mean, basically, you know, I think the point of the book is that we're not innately irrational. And here's all the components of rationally. And sometimes we abuse them. And sometimes we're just, for various evolutionary reasons, rationality may not be a good thing.

Again, locally. But once again, it's this competition of what I guess I keep thinking of local versus global. And that's what I take out of the book is that when he, human beings are appear to be irrational, it's not that there's no reason involved, is that the reason may not, may be guided by passion or momentary circumstances rather than what ultimately, if you've looked far enough ahead, would be for your own and society's good. Yeah, it's often you apply rational means to an irrational end, irrational in the sense that it is incompatible with other goals that you want to attain.

Now, there are sometimes when, you know, you just have brain freeze, when you really just screw up. So, I mean, that can happen. It's not, it was true by definition. You can never be irrational. And then that would be kind of, you know, circular, you know, vacuous. So, you know, we do all have moments where we thought, oh, my God, how did I, you know, do something so stupid.

And that, you know, that happens. Yeah, sure. And then the other reason is that, of course, the tragedy of the rationality commons, that often what is rational for each individual is not rational for everyone acting together. Okay, and let me read the last sentence of your book, because I think it's a good way to end this, and I am aware of your time. We are species that's been endowed with an elementary faculty of reason, and that has discovered formulas and institutions that magnify its scope. They awaken us to ideas and expose us to realities that confound our intuitions, but are true for all that. And to me, that, I mean,

that's your ultimate optimism and why you're a scientist as well as I'm a scientist. The real, you know, the end of the book is why, you know, wise rationality. It's not just to make our society better and happier, but using those tools appropriately and the fact that we as a human species have developed rules like science, allow us to make the, to explore the world and discover things we would never know otherwise. And for me, and I think for you, that's really the greatest good. I mean, the fact that we... It is.

Yeah. And I think... And so I found that a really important thing because that's really the greatest goal of rationality. It's to allow us to develop something that allows us to discover things and intuitively we would never have understood otherwise. And that's one of the wonderful things that you do in your books. I try in my own work.

And it's, I don't think one of the reasons for both scientists and one of the reasons I so enjoy discovering new things that may not be intuitive by listening to you. So thank you. much, Stephen. Thank you so much, Lawrence. As always, a pleasure to talk to you. Okay, you take care. Have a good day. You do. Okay. Bye-bye. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. You can continue the discussion with us on social media

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