The Problem With Trying To Be Rational - Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker is a Cognitive Psychologist at Harvard University, a psycholinguist and a Best Selling Author. It would be nice to always make the right decision. To escape the prison of human emotions and biases and operate from a purely rational place. Steven's new book breaks down rationality into its components in an attempt to understand just what we're all missing from our mental makeup. Expect to learn why betting websites are the most accurate forecasters of the future, why learning lists of cognitive biases won't always make you more effective, whether smart people are more or less rational on average, whether politics makes you dumber, how to balance rationality with a desire to be intuitive and present and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy Rationality - https://amzn.to/3qtQ84X Follow Steven on Twitter - https://twitter.com/sapinker Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #stevenpinker #rationality #mentalmodels - 00:00 Intro 00:26 Is Studying Cognitive Biases Beneficial? 09:42 Applying Bayesian Reasoning in Life 22:20 Tensions between Rationality & Intuition 32:20 How Conspiracies Subvert Rationality 41:52 Conclusion - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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

• 0:22Chris Williamson?

  Steven Pinker, welcome to the show.

• 0:25Speaker 00

  Thank you. Nice to be here.

• 0:27Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:01Speaker 00

  It always has. I think we are equipped to reason about cause and effect and about logical implications and about probability, when the problems are ones that we have dealt with all our lives, when they involve subjects that we deeply care about, that impinge on us. But when it comes to general purpose tools that we can apply across the board, including to novel situations, like, oh, it didn't occur to me, this is another example of the sunk cost fallacy, or of the availability bias, namely reasoning from anecdote, having those tools at your fingertips as generic, all-purpose cognitive tricks, that you really

• 1:44Speaker 00

  do need to be reminded of, you need to know the names of the fallacies and how to avoid them, the names of the normative models, that is, rules and systems of how you ought to reason to deal with novel situations, ones that aren't, and abstract situations.

• 2:03Chris Williamson?

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

• 2:19Speaker 00

  Somewhat. I mean, we know from the literature on biases that I'm probably not the person to ask, because all of us are subject to a bias bias, namely, all of us think that everyone else is biased, but not us. So I might be the person least equipped to spot my own biases. But I tend to think so. And there is research that suggests that people who are less susceptible to the classic cognitive fallacies and biases have better outcomes in life in general. They're less likely to get into accidents, to lose their jobs, to break up their relationships. As always, these pertain to averages, certainly

• 3:00Speaker 00

  less likely to be scammed by psychic or medical charlatans. So applying the average to myself, I would think so on average. I would hope so.

• 3:15Chris Williamson?

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

• 3:20Speaker 00

  On average, yes, there is a correlation between intelligence and rationality, but it's far from a perfect one. So there are plenty of smart people who are vulnerable to cognitive biases, who are fixed in their beliefs and don't adjust them in response to changes in evidence, particularly when it comes to beliefs that are sacred values of one's own tribe, one's own coalition, one's own political ideology. The so-called my side bias, that is, you steer your reasoning toward a conclusion that makes your own tribe look good. Where tribe can be your religion, your political party, your...

• 4:05Speaker 00

  Your hobby group, then smart people are just as vulnerable as less smart people. This is one of the conclusions from Keith Stanovich in his book, The Bias That Divides Us. Stanovich has developed what he calls a somewhat cheekily irrationality quotient as a kind of complement or alternative to the intelligence quotient, and they are correlated, but far from perfectly.

• 4:30Chris Williamson?

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

• 4:36Speaker 00

  Certainly the my side bias, namely, are you really committed to some belief that is emblematic of your politics or your theory in some academic dispute? Then you're probably susceptible to various kinds of motivated reasoning like bias dissimulation, which is to say you gobble up information that seems to support your view and you stay away from or don't read or nitpick to death evidence that goes against your beliefs.

• 5:17Speaker 00

  You try to spin doctor everything so that if there's evidence that would seem to go against one of your beliefs, you try to find loopholes and ways that you don't have to believe it. And of course, we all do this. We're all lawyers that make the best, strongest possible case for our clients, but it certainly is a way in which each one of us can be

• 5:40Speaker 00

  less than optimally rational. But of course, it makes it all the harder to spot those biases in yourself. That's why we belong to communities where it isn't just up to you, but you expose your ideas to criticism, you allow them to be challenged, you have a community that abides by free speech so that any opinion can be voiced and then evaluated. The way we undo our bias typically, there are some... Self-aware souls, no doubt, who can step outside their own biases. More commonly, other people do it for us.

• 6:15Chris Williamson?

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

• 6:49Speaker 00

  Yes, certainly to be open to sources of information other than the one that's going to ratify your side's beliefs. So not just to read the Guardian or the Telegraph, but to dip into the source that you don't habitually read.

• 7:07Speaker 00

  Two, seek out sources that have themselves cultivated a reputation for objectivity and accuracy. You mentioned a prominent member of the irrationality community, Eliezer Yudkowsky, although also in that community is Scott Alexander, writing in the blog Astral Codex 10. And he does often will do literature reviews astonishingly thorough and astonishingly quickly, where it's pretty clear at the outset that he has not made up his mind and he does his best to say whether lockdown policies are effective at stemming the spread of COVID, a highly politicized issue.

• 7:53Speaker 00

  But when he did a literature review, he concluded, this is a number of months ago, that yes, they are. Somewhat effective, better than not having them, but only after looking at both sides of the issue and all of the extant studies that he could find.

• 8:09Chris Williamson?

  Did you see that he got married the other week?

• 8:11Speaker 00

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

• 8:22Chris Williamson?

  Amazing. Yeah, I saw the photo. I'm on the mailing list for Rassell Codex 10. It's like, it's so strange after years and years of him writing under this anonymous pseudonym and just being this person, where you have a relationship with their words but not with them?

• 8:35Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 8:36Chris Williamson?

  And it's so bizarre to now see a face to the words.

• 8:42Speaker 00

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

• 8:52Chris Williamson?

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

• 9:04Speaker 00

  Pseudonymous.

• 9:05Chris Williamson?

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

• 9:26Speaker 00

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

• 9:42Chris Williamson?

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

• 9:56Speaker 00

  Yes, so this is one of the kind of signifiers or identifiers or identity badges for being a member of the so-called rationality community. Do you think that every person should understand Bay's rule? And that's almost a membership requirement that you understand it and endorse it. It's the eponymous rule of the Reverend Thomas Bayes from the 18th century. And it's actually, it's a, it is an algebraic formula, but it's actually pretty simple. And it's already spilled over into our everyday language in the common term priors. What are your priors? That is actually taken right out of Bayes' rule.

• 10:39Speaker 00

  And the rule is simply, the purpose of the rule is, how should I calibrate my degree of credence in a hypothesis depending on the strength of the evidence? So the idea is you don't just believe it or disbelieve it. You've got a degree of belief from zero to one. And the key insight is, as soon as you take that conceptual leap, then you can apply the arithmetic of probability to the problem of how to calibrate your belief to the evidence. And so the, the idea is simple. The output, the deliverable, the point of Bayes' rule is what's called a posterior probability. Posterior just means after you've looked at the evidence.

• 11:19Speaker 00

  So when all is said and done, how much should I believe that, say, masks stop the spread of COVID? Or to what degree should I think that I have prostate cancer if I get a positive prostate specific antibody test reading? Now, so how do you figure that out? Well, there's just three numbers according to Bayes' rule. First is the prior. That is, before you even look at the evidence, the symptoms of the patient, the test result, the data in the literature, how credible is it to begin with? What is the sort of accumulated weight of evidence and plausibility before you, before you look at a single data point? That's the prior.

• 12:04Speaker 00

  Now, admittedly, there's some subjectivity that goes into that. For a disease, you usually take the base rate in the population. What percentage of men have prostate cancer? It raises a question of, you know, well, do you look at 65-year-old men? Do you care whether it's white men or black men? But let's just say that, that you start off with some kind of prior.

• 12:29Speaker 00

  Then you multiply that by the likelihood. And in the lingo of Bayes' rule, likelihood means if the hypothesis is true, what are the chances that you would see the data that you are now seeing? So let's say in the case of a medical test, of all the people, say, who do have prostate cancer, what percentage of them does the test correctly pick that up? It's the sensitivity of the test in the kind of the lingo of testing. So that is technically probability of the data, given the hypothesis. That is, you know, we still don't know whether it's true or not. But if it was true, how likely is it that we would get those results, those symptoms, those test data? You just divide that by how common the evidence is across the board.

• 13:14Speaker 00

  If the symptoms or the test results occur a lot, that is, there's a high false positive rate, together with a true positive rate, that goes into the denominator. And as we all know from elementary school, if the denominator gets bigger, the whole fraction gets smaller. And so it's just the prior times the likelihood divided by the commonness. And it is kind of intuitive. We all know that if a symptom of a disease, for example, occurs, for a lot of diseases, you know, fatigue, then just because, I don't know, Rocky Mountain spotted fever has the symptom of fatigue, you don't conclude that you have Rocky Mountain spotted fever because fatigue can come from lots of things. That's the commonness, the data in the denominator.

• 13:59Speaker 00

  Likewise, if something is really going around a lot, like Omicron, then you have some of the symptoms, that would be the prior. You say, well, you know, I am feeling a bit achy. Omicron doesn't seem like an implausible explanation. And likelihood two is kind of intuitive, namely, if it were true, if you do have, say, Omicron, are you going to have a sore throat? Most people with Omicron do have a sore throat. I have a sore throat. Well, that ups my credence that I have Omicron. Anyway, that's Bayes' rule. People are not very good at kind of applying it to novel situations,

• 14:43Speaker 00

  especially when the numbers are presented in a little bit the way that you and I have in terms of numbers between zero and one. If on the other hand, you present it in terms of frequencies, that is, there are a thousand men in the population, ten of them have prostate cancer, of the nine hundred and ninety who don't, ten of those will test positive, of the ten who do, nine will test positive, you test positive, do you have prostate cancer? People are pretty good at saying, well, based on what you said, it's got a fifty fifty, isn't it? If I gave you the same numbers, the same information in terms of the chance that you have prostate cancer is point oh one, then all then people

• 15:27Speaker 00

  kind of blow off the base rate, they just think, oh my god, positive test, I must have the disease. And then they're, according to classic research by Kahneman and Tversky, people neglect the base rates, they reason kind of by stereotype, by anecdote, and then they're not so good. So that's kind of the the the base, the base story. And anyone who's just heard it has all of a sudden become much more rational.

• 15:52Chris Williamson?

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

• 16:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, so forecasting, rational forecasting, does use Bayesian reasoning as one of its essential ingredients, yes. So for just to give you a concrete example, this is based on the work of Philip Tetlock and Barbara Mellors, and who run forecasting tournaments. They have become more popular through prediction markets where you can actually get skin in the game, put money on the line, what is it, what is the chance that that Russia will invade Ukraine? What is the chance that inflation will exceed ten percent this year? And you,

• 16:42Speaker 00

  You bet against other people. But the way that Bayesian reason comes in is a good forecaster. And good forecasters tend not to be your name brand pundits, who tend to have a pretty crummy track record, because they're always pushing their political ideology, and it blinds them to the specifics of the situation. But the way Bayesian reasoning enters into accurate forecasting is the first thing you start off with is the is the base rate, the prior. So for example, will there be a terrorist attack this year that will kill more than 10 people? Well, the first thing that a rational forecaster would do is go to Wikipedia, look at the number of terrorist attacks that have taken place every year for the last 10 years in that part of the world,

• 17:25Speaker 00

  and say, well, let me start with that as my first guess. And then I'll bump it up or down depending on the specifics of what's happening this year. Likewise, for Putin invading Ukraine, they might start off with, well, how many invasions have we, of one country by another, have we seen? That's where I, that's my starting point. Now let me increment or decrement it. And that's not typically the way people do forecasting, which is why they're not particularly good at forecasting. They're not Bayesian enough.

• 17:55Chris Williamson?

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

• 18:05Speaker 00

  So I think that the so-called super forecasters in Tetlock and Miller's tournaments outperform prediction markets. But prediction markets outperform just about anything else. Yeah, that's right. Well, because you've got a lot of people with, you know, who are highly motivated to learn about the situation. It's not just that they toss off some opinion.

• 18:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's unlimited skin in the game.

• 18:32Speaker 00

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

• 18:45Chris Williamson?

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

• 18:50Speaker 00

  That's another chapter in my book Rationality. It pertains to what's sometimes called Expected Utility Theory or Rational Choice Theory. One of the less popular theories, people often blame it for the whole homo economicus, rational man. It's basically the idea that you should, when you're faced with an option under a risky option, you should multiply the probability of each outcome by its cost or benefit, its reward or its penalty, add them up, and choose the option with the highest sum, the highest expected utility, that is probability times payoff.

• 19:34Speaker 00

  Now, and there's a literature from, goes back 50 or 60 years, several Nobel Prizes have gone to economists and game theorists who've shown cases where people don't seem to abide by the axioms of Expected Utility Theory. But by and large, it isn't a bad guideline to start with. I mean, obviously, we often live under not risk where we know the probabilities, but uncertainty where we don't even know the probabilities. As Donald Rumsfeld famously put it, unknown unknowns as opposed to known unknowns. But still, if you think through, what is the chance that something will happen? How good or bad will it be?

• 20:19Speaker 00

  It probably would lead to some wisdom, like, you know, if I step on the accelerator to get home faster, because I really don't want to be late for dinner or miss the first minute of a show. And, you know, what's the benefit of that? Now, I am taking a slightly greater chance of getting killed in a car accident. How much value do I place on my life? If you started to think that way, you know, or should I wear a bicycle helmet? Should I fasten my seatbelts? You'd probably make a lot of, a bunch of wiser decisions. Or even more mundane ones like I just bought an appliance, should I also buy the additional extended warranty?

• 21:02Speaker 00

  Now that costs typically about 25% of the price of the product itself. The the salespeople will push it aggressively. And the reason is the expected utility calculation works out in favor of the the store and not the customer. Namely, you you buy something.

• 21:21Speaker 00

  Unless it's one out of four of those products is going to break. Paying a quarter of the price for a warranty does not make any sense. You'd be much better off just occasionally absorbing the price of the repair or replacement. And you're going to be ahead. I mean, it really does not make sense to buy a life insurance policy for your toaster.

• 21:42Chris Williamson?

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

• 21:47Speaker 00

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

• 21:53Chris Williamson?

  Recover from.

• 21:54Speaker 00

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

• 22:20Chris Williamson?

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

• 22:46Speaker 00

  There there is. I mean, there is a phenomenon of, as we call it, overthinking. But, you know, and there about 20 years ago, as a result of a bestseller by Malcolm Gladwell called Blink. There was the popular idea, people in in in business love it, that you should go with your gut. Your first intuition is going to be wiser than overthinking. It's probably not true in general that the there are rare cases in which the gut feeling is more accurate than than reasoning out. But by and large, you're probably better. Thinking twice. Now granted, a lot of times you just don't have the information. No one has stated the probabilities. It's not like buying a lottery ticket where you can

• 23:29Speaker 00

  look up the odds or casino gambling. And so we have no choice but to make intuitive guesses. But in general, not acting on impulse is probably the wise philosophy of life.

• 23:46Chris Williamson?

  The problem that we have is that we're not privy to the code behind whatever the odds are of whatever it is that we're considering, right? And we can kid ourselves into believing, you know, it's for COVID masking or for the prostate cancer rate for men of your age in your area or of your particular genetic heritage. There are some things, but most of the decisions that we make on a daily basis about whether to stay with a partner or leave, about whether to go to a new city or not. Where would you even begin to try and do that? And I suppose that this is where those more messy and emotional decisions are where people are hoping that rationality will give them a lifeline out of it. And then ultimately, a lot of the time, end up coming back to something that was quite intuitive in the first place in any case.

• 24:29Speaker 00

  Sometimes, yes. And indeed, it is true that often that those critical probabilities, you know, no one knows and you can't find out. Life is uncertain. But here's, there is a bit of advice that I'm going to credit to my colleague, Daniel Gilbert, in the psychology department at Harvard, which is that when people try to imagine how they will feel in the future, they're often not very good at it. That we probably give too much credence to our own powers of imagination. And that often you're better off looking for someone at someone else who has faced that decision and to look how it turned out for them. And they've actually, because then you're not relying on imagination. Now granted, no two

• 25:14Speaker 00

  people are interchangeable. So maybe their situation's different mirrors, maybe the world has changed, you know, that was then, this is now. Still, probably a lot of the time, you're better off at trying to, as we might put a, you know, kind of gather data, real world data for how it turned out. And it's particularly poignant for me because he told me this many years ago, when, over dinner, when I was at MIT at the time, I had a job offer from Harvard. I was agonizing over whether to take it or not. We had dinner and granted he had an interest in the answer because he was recruiting me to be his colleague at Harvard. But he said, he said, you know, most people when faced with an agonizing decision rely

• 25:57Speaker 00

  too much on their own power of imagination. And you're you're better off finding out how it really did turn out for for someone who was faced with that decision, who went one way or another. And sure enough, I asked two of my, I was in the unusual position, perhaps, that two of my colleagues from MIT had made the that exact jump. They had switched to Harvard, they had been poached. And I asked them, are you, do you regret your decision or did it turn out well? And they both said it turned out well. And, and, you know, that, that, that decided me. So I decided to, to accept the offer and I have been happy ever since.

• 26:32Chris Williamson?

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

• 26:49Speaker 00

  Interesting. I mean, to the extent that that's true, it would say that I didn't necessarily choose wisely, other than deciding to make to make the move. But I'm, I'm perfectly prepared to believe that, not least because once you have made the choice, you tend, because of cognitive dissonance, that is, cognitive dissonance reduction, rationalization, you know, we, we don't want to look like idiots for having made the wrong, the wrong choice. So we do tend to find after the fact what made it the best choice and make the best of it. Not everyone, there are people who are constantly, you know, blaming their misfortune on, on some, some regret. But that, that is interesting. I was not aware of that.

• 27:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think a lot about people that say it was meant to be, that they use that or.

• 27:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, they go through perhaps some sort of hardship and then come out the other side. And so it was meant to be because look at the situation that I got myself into. And it always feels to me like that person's completely destroyed their own input into the good things that they made out of a tough situation. Let's say that you've got in some accident or some sort of injury and then you end up on the other side of that, finding a calling in life that really speaks to you. And I think, well, saying it was meant to be takes away the agency that you had from overcoming what was a pretty shitty situation. You did this, it wasn't meant to be, you made the best of a bad environment.

• 28:14Speaker 00

  Well, and that's, it's even more pernicious when it's done in advance. And you say, well, it's faded, either I'm going to get COVID or I'm not, there's nothing I can do about it, either I'm going to get lung cancer or not. And so that you actually avoid making reasoned decisions because you're fatalistic. And people with, who believe in fate tend to have certainly worse predictors. One of the, one of the ingredients of successful prediction is believing in contingency, that things could have turned out different, that things are not faded in the stars. And I'm not sure if this has specifically been looked at, but I'd be willing to bet

• 28:59Speaker 00

  that people who don't believe in some sort of predestination, who actually attribute some sort of agency to themselves, probably have better outcomes in life, less likely to get sick.

• 29:11Chris Williamson?

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

• 29:30Speaker 00

  Yes. No, and that is that is an important point. It's sometimes called in the literature bounded rationality from Herbert Simon. The idea that reasoning itself has costs, namely time, information that you have to gather,

• 29:48Speaker 00

  computational resources, memory and data and so on. And the benefit of choosing the optimal decision always has to be traded off against the costs of the actual reasoning. You don't, you can't spend the rest of your life gathering data because then, you know, your life is gone. You've got to at some point act on the information you have, knowing that you're taking a risk, but still weighing in the cost of inaction. Sometimes he who hesitates is lost. It doesn't mean, doesn't guarantee you that the best outcome, but it sometimes means that that acting on imperfect information is, well, always essential, unavoidable.

• 30:32Chris Williamson?

  I think it was, is it Seth Stephens Davidowitz that wrote Algorithms to Live By? Are you familiar with that?

• 30:37Speaker 00

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

• 30:46Chris Williamson?

  Oh, no, no, no, it wasn't that one.

• 30:48Speaker 00

  No, I think actually, I think Algorithms to Live By was actually a guy at

• 30:54Chris Williamson?

  Brian Christian?

• 30:55Speaker 00

  Christensen, maybe.

• 30:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, anyway.

• 30:58Speaker 00

  Yes, I think, yes.

• 30:59Chris Williamson?

  Algorithms to Live By, Algorithms to Live By has, has a really funny way of how you should pick your partner. So it's averaged out that over 100 dates, you should go for, I think it's go to 30 or 33 dates, go out on 33 dates, and then go out, decide to pick the next person that is the best out of the people that you've seen. And that on average is going to be the best person that you're going to find.

• 31:26Speaker 00

  Well, indeed, that speaks, it's an old finding, and I think it was, I originally learned it in the context of you're driving down the highway and you want to know, you want to figure out where, which restaurant to stop at, and you don't know whether there'll be a really, really good restaurant just around the bend. On the other hand, you're getting hungry. And so it's this, the mathematics is the same, namely, it is, it is a theorem, I'm not sure why it comes out this way, but yeah, sample about a third of the expected number, and then choose the first one that's above the average of that, the third that you've measured so far. So it applies in that case as well. Yeah, again, that's a really good example, because it's trading off the costs of waiting indefinitely, namely,

• 32:06Speaker 00

  you don't want to, you know, marry your perfect match at the age of 80, because it's taken that long to wait for them. On the other hand, you don't want to propose marriage to the first good-looking person you meet, either.

• 32:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What about conspiracies? They seem particularly good at subverting rationality.

• 32:25Speaker 00

  Indeed, and for a number of reasons. One of them is that it's, they fall into a category of belief that is peculiarly unfalsifiable. They are memes in the original Richard Dawkins sense of ideas that are adapted to being spread by their very nature. And the part of the conspiracy theory that says that the lack of evidence for the theory is proof of what a diabolical ingenious conspiracy it is, that makes them uniquely invulnerable to refutation. Kind of like the other beliefs like, God works in mysterious ways. Or if

• 33:06Speaker 00

  you deny that you're, that this is racist, that proves that you're a racist. Or, so there are, by their very nature, some ideas are contagious, simply because they've kind of... By their very nature, they are designed to evade our cognitive immune system. Also, they conspiracy theories tend to be moralistic. They are excellent examples of a my side bias, and there's usually some villain. And the villain is often an identifiable opponent, such as the theory that Hillary Clinton ran a child sex ring out of the basement of a Washington pizzeria.

• 33:49Speaker 00

  Now, needless to say, it was not members of the Democratic Party who believed that conspiracy theory, it was people who hated Hillary. And indeed, a belief like that is kind of just another way of saying boo Hillary. The fact that it has propositional content is kind of irrelevant to why people believe it. And that was one of the major epiphanies that I had in writing rationality. And in dealing with these bizarre beliefs, such as that jet contrails are mind altering drugs dispersed by a secret government program, or that COVID vaccines are actually a subterfuge

• 34:34Speaker 00

  by Bill Gates to inject microchips into our body to surveil us. And you ask, how can people believe these things? And part of the answer is it depends what you mean by believe. That is, for a lot of people, factual warrant, empirical evidence, that's not why you believe things. When it comes to things that don't impinge on your day to day life, if it's going to affect whether your car is going to run out of petrol, or whether there's going to be beer in the fridge, then people are very, very attuned to reality. They kind of have to be. But when it comes to belief about things that you'll never encounter in life, like that pizzeria or Hillary Clinton, people believe things because it expresses the right values, the right moral.

• 35:18Speaker 00

  It identifies villains that you think are evil, it identifies heroes, more often villains in the case of conspiracy theories. Sometimes it's an identifiable one, like Hillary Clinton. Sometimes it's just a general. And a hatred of the establishment of elites, of institutions. There's a fairly sizable minority who just believes that the, has kind of a need for chaos, as Michael Bang Peterson put it. That is, they just think the whole system should burn. It's so corrupt and evil. And so any concentrated source of power, governments, corporations, scientists, the

• 36:01Speaker 00

  public health establishment could often be, figure into these conspiracy theories, the theory portraying them as uniquely evil and insidious.

• 36:11Chris Williamson?

  That's fascinating. That's such an interesting way to look at it. It's kind of like mental lapping, in a way. These people doing live action role play but bounded within their own minds. One of the things that I've found really fascinating about conspiratorial thinking, especially recently, is that over the last two years, faith in institutions has just gone through the floor. We've continued to see the people that were supposed to know what they were doing and be in charge, just put their foot in their mouth on live camera, daily, sometimes, just over and over and over again. We've seen, whatever, duplicitous, purposeful neglect, just idiocy play out in front of us.

• 36:49Chris Williamson?

  And I think that that has enabled people to have far more belief in non-typical bureaucratic, what would you say, positions of power, speaking truth. We just have no, we have no time for it, therefore, we're going to make our own truth here. But increasingly now, people's, I see a lot on the internet that people say, look, when you're saying conspiracy, why shouldn't I believe in conspiracies? This was a conspiracy and that was a conspiracy. And the definition of what a conspiracy consists of now has started to be expanded to include a lot of different things. Conspiracy used to mean something that was basically totally unbelievable, but now because the boundary of what is true and what isn't, and our faith in institutions has been eroded,

• 37:34Chris Williamson?

  that really anything is permitted to be a part of a conspiracy. It's no longer Flat Earth and beyond. It's a whole host of things that come back from that, towards stuff that me and you probably might even have believed.

• 37:50Speaker 00

  Yes, so a couple of things. One is that, yes, many conspiracy theorists say, "Well, look there. The CIA really did mount an invasion in the Bay of Pigs in Cuba in 1961. The CIA really did overthrow, help overthrow, our bans in Guatemala and Mossad in Iran." But still, that is an unwillingness to consider just how many probabilities would have to be multiplied for something as outlandish as that the moon landings were faked or that jet contrails are tranquilizing drugs. How many people would have to be silent?

• 38:34Speaker 00

  How many people would have to not screw up? Just how many pieces would have to fall into place? So that quantitative thinking of a conspiracy, one kind of conspiracy can be very different from another. And in fact, it's vaguely, it's even stretching it to call, say, the Bay of Pigs a conspiracy. There was government secrecy, as there always is, but it doesn't mean that anything can happen. And it's true that trusted institutions have gone down since there. Although it's important to keep in mind that probably the default is that people don't trust institutions. There was kind of a peak in the 60s where trusted institutions reached their high watermark and they've been sinking ever since.

• 39:18Speaker 00

  And it isn't helped when the institutions themselves don't take steps to safeguard their integrity and objectivity. And either, when you have experts that either make pronouncements as if they were oracles, they don't kind of show their work. That is, explain how they arrived at their recommendations, but just, "Trust us, we're scientists."

• 39:41Speaker 00

  That just, as you say, that just sets them up for failure because no one is infallible. Even our best experts are going to make mistakes. That doesn't discredit them. That's just a reflection of the fact that humans are not oracles with a pipeline to the truth. That should be made clearer, that our starting position in any new phenomenon is ignorance. SARS-CoV-2 popped up and no one knew anything. And that should have been clear and should always have been that the public health instructions should be based on the following evidence that we have so far. This is what we recommend for the time being. That at least would have helped.

• 40:20Speaker 00

  The other is, many of our institutions are flagrantly politicizing themselves. They're just advertising, "We are a branch of the political left." They use the vocabulary, the cant words, the cliches. And people who haven't identified themselves as part of that branding, that political coalition, are just going to say, "Well, this is just another bunch of woke academics or journalists." And they've kind of set themselves up to be rejected under the principle that applies to all of us, that we tend to be more receptive to people from our own coalition.

• 41:01Chris Williamson?

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

• 41:08Speaker 00

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

• 41:51Chris Williamson?

  Pretty cool. I like it. Cheers, Steven. Thank you very much. Thanks Chris, thanks for having me on.

• 41:56Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company foreme of the explosion on our rig.

• 41:59Speaker 03

  On October 2nd.

• 42:00Speaker 02

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 42:05Speaker 03

  Tom Cruise is.

• 42:07Speaker 02

  Digger got us into this mess. And Digger's gonna dig us up.

• 42:10Speaker 03

  From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 42:13Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stalled, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 42:17Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 42:20Speaker 04

  I'm not the first nanny.

• 42:21Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.