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Conversations with Coleman
The Many Faces of Rationality with Steven Pinker [S2 Ep.37]
01:06:00
My guest today needs no introduction, so I won't give him one. Today's guest is Steven Pinker, and he has a new book called "Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters." We talk about what rationality is, we talk about rationality's PR problem, whether rationality has increased or decreased over time and how to apply reason to everyday life choices. We also discuss the behavioral economics revolution and cognitive biases, what it means to be intellectually humble, why people love conspiracy theories and when is it okay to be irrational. We go on to talk about the role "reason" has played in the enormous progress humanity has made since the dawn of civilization, and much more.
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- [00:00]
Steven Pinker
SA.
- [00:31]
Coleman Hughes
Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. If you're hearing this, then you're on the public feed, which means you'll get episodes a week after they come out and you'll hear advertisements. You can gain access to the subscriber feed by going to ColemanHughes.org and becoming a supporter. This means you'll have access to episodes a week early, you'll never hear ads, and you'll get access to bonus Q and A episodes. You can also support me by liking and subscribing on YouTube and sharing the show with friends and family. As always, thank you so much for your support. Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today needs no introduction, so I won't give him one. This is Steven Pinker, and he has a new book called Rationality what It Is, why It Seems Scarce, and why It Matters. We talk about what rationality is. We talk about rationality's PR problem. We discuss whether rationality has increased or decreased over time. We talk about how to apply reason to everyday life choices. We discuss the behavioral economics revolution and cognitive biases. We talk about what it means to be intellectually humble. We talk about why people love conspiracy theories. We talk about when it's okay to be irrational. We talk about the role reason has played in the enormous progress humanity has made since the dawn of civilization, and much more. So without further ado, Steven Pinker all right, Steven Pinker, thank you so much for coming on my show again.
- [02:12]
Steven Pinker
Thanks for having me, Coleman.
- [02:14]
Coleman Hughes
So you need no introduction on this podcast, so I won't ask you to give one. We'll get right into your new book. Your book is all about rationality. So I guess the first basic question is, what is rationality and why write a book about it?
- [02:32]
Steven Pinker
At this moment, I define it as the use of knowledge to attain a goal. That means that what is or isn't rational always has to be defined with respect to the goal that the agent is seeking. But as long as there is brain power calculation applied to achieving the goal, and it can be different, diverse means of attaining it, then we're apt to call it rationality. It also means that there isn't a single standard of rationality because there are different normative models, that is different mathematical and logical tools depending on what you're deploying your rationality for. Why now? Well, there's some aspects of rationality that I like to think are eternal. What are the benchmarks of rationality that is, given a goal such as, oh, inferring true propositions from Other true propositions, calculating a probability, calibrating your degree of credence in a hypothesis according to the strength of evidence distinguishing correlation from causation. There are ways of doing these, and I think they should be part of every educated person's cognitive toolkit. They're like reading and writing, that is skills that are necessary for understanding pretty much everything else. But though I think they ought to be part of the school curriculum starting from a very early age, I didn't know of any book that explained the most important ones between two covers. And I thought first I offered it as a course, then I turned it into a book of where would you find the rudiments of game theory and logic and statistical decision theory and Bayesian reasoning all in one place, and in a way that at least I hope is comprehensible to any open minded intelligent person. But of course there is another reason why this book might be seen to be timely. This became clear as soon as I told people that I was teaching a course then writing a book on rationality, namely the frequently asked question, well, that's a really interesting topic. Can you explain why humanity appears to be losing its mind? Why do we seem to be flooded with fake news and conspiracy theories and medical quackery and paranormal woo woo and post truth rhetoric? What's going on with our species today? And that makes it especially timely.
- [05:02]
Coleman Hughes
So a big theme of this book and something I've thought a lot about in my life is the problem of rationality. Having a kind of stench on it in the culture, having a PR problem. And there are various aspects to this, but one is I think the misimpression that rationality is. It's basically just plugging a problem or a question into a kind of calculator, whether that's a rational person's brain or a robot or a Spock type character and just it spitting out the one true answer to the problem, which is inevitably some cold lifeless kind of answer. And that's what rationality is. I think one thing your book, one realization I come away with from your book is that reason is a pretty open and creative space in many ways. One thing you talk about is the recursive nature of rationality. Just like with language you can embed thoughts within other thoughts and assess thoughts with meta thoughts. Reason is much the same way. So can you talk a little bit about the PR problem that rationality has and what people think it is and what it actually is?
- [06:37]
Steven Pinker
I'm so glad you brought up those two points because they really do lie at the heart of any explanation and defense of rationality. So yeah, the first one is that there is this PR problem. Rationality is not cool. People seem to think it requires being dour and joyless. And I do get questions like, gee, if we're supposed to be rational, does that mean I can't enjoy a sunset or fall in love or go dancing, listen to music? No, of course not. Rationality is the ability to attain a goal. And the state of being rational does not tell you what that goal is. Those goals are built into our emotional motivational makeup. And in fact, it would be highly irrational to deprive yourself of a source of pleasure that doesn't harm anyone else. Like loving your children, like listening to music, like enjoying beauty, like having a sense of awe and wonder. Rationality can deepen those pursuits. They can maximize both the short term pleasure and the long term satisfaction it can adjudicate among conflicts of goals. When two people want goals that can't be realized at the same time, we more or less call that morality or an ethics. It can adjudicate between goals that are satisfied at different times. Pleasure now versus long term satisfaction over the long run, but certainly does not rule out pleasure, joy, wonder, awe, and so on. Now the other point that I'm so glad you raised the recursive nature of rationality because it's a bit of a subtle point, but I think not once it's explained, is that rationality can always hop up a level and look down upon instances of itself. And that is an important counter to the criticism. Well, didn't the Soviet Union think that it was applying a rational plan for society? And look what happened there. They had the Gulag and the Holodomar and the Iron Curtain and so on. So rationality isn't so great. But of course the thing is that in making that argument, you are applying rationality to the so called rationality of, for example, the Soviet Union. And you can always do that. The fact that someone claims to be rational doesn't mean that they are rational. And it must be rationality that allows us to say that some claim to rationality in fact isn't. And an important point is, kind of a philosophical point, is that as soon as you ask for or debate or consider reasons for anything, you're already committed to rationality. You're not bribing someone, you're not threatening them. It's not like a hostage video and you got to say what you want or else you'll be hurt or someone being bribed to say something as soon as you're saying, why? What's the reason? Can you defend. It's too late to evaluate the importance of reason. Just by showing up, you've already conceded that point. And that's always because it is reason that we use to examine the value of particular instances of reason.
- [09:44]
Coleman Hughes
So I guess my next question. I'll give a little context for this question. As probably most of my listeners know by now, initially out of high school, I went to music school. I was at Juilliard for a little while before school, switching over to majoring in philosophy. And in general, throughout my adult and teenage life, I've been pretty much as steeped in the world of music as I have been in the world of writing and philosophy and in the world of the arts. And you cite some funny quotes from Prince and other artists where there is a sort of motto of let go of your reason. Just enjoy this moment right now. Don't be rational, don't make sense. And that feels liberating to many people. Many people feel that that really embodies how they want to live, at least at certain moments. And I guess I'm curious whether I wouldn't define that as a dominant strain of the culture necessarily. It is in certain subcultures. But I'm curious in the culture in general, in America, the Western world and the world, do you think reason is declining at all? So when people come to you and they say, what's going on in the world? People are so irrational. Do you have a Pinker like response to give them that actually we are becoming more rational, or do you actually think there is. There's sort of a backslide in how much our culture values reason relative to some earlier era.
- [11:24]
Steven Pinker
Yeah, a couple of things. So certainly there's nothing irrational about going crazy on the dance floor when you're having fun. As long as you don't think that that is a way to, say, solve policy problems or social problems. There was a book in the 1960s, I think it was, by Abby Hoffman, called Revolution for the Hell of It. And there was an idea that the society's problems is an idea from my generation, before my generation, for older kids, that we ought to be spontaneous, that there's just too much policy wonkery coming out of the think tanks. So I think that's a mistake. But in terms of carving out times and places in which you are uninhibited, there's no rational reason not to. And in fact, here we are discussing it. We're saying that why not let loose on a Saturday night? Or in any other circumstance in which you are neither harming your future self nor harming someone else. And that's why rationality always does come into the picture, even when you're talking about going crazy, not making sense in circumscribed circumstances. And as long as you don't apply just mob rule the emotions of the crowd in order to accomplish something politically. Now it is a difficult question to ask whether we're getting more rational or not, because unlike some of the other measures of well being that I have plotted over time in my previous books, Better Angels of Our nature had 75 graphs on various measures of violence over the course of history. The Enlightenment now expanded that to measures of well being like famine and infant mortality and poverty and illiteracy. But for rationality, we don't have a a constant yardstick that goes back in time. So it's a little harder to answer the question. Here are a couple things that we can say, certainly at the top end, and acknowledging that there's a lot of rationality inequality at the top end. We've never been more rational. We've got our science, our engineering, our technology is just growing exponentially. We have MRNA vaccines, we've got genome sequencing, we have space probes. We have the application of more rational methods to domains of human life that formerly were just a matter of punches and authority and conventional wisdom and myth and rumor like evidence based medicine. So instead of your doctor's intuition, you have randomized controlled trials to see what works and what doesn't, often with some eye opening surprises. We've got evidence based policing that helped drive down the American crime rate starting in the 1990s by concentrating the police on the zones that have the highest levels of crime. We have evidence based sports. Moneyball, as the title of the book by Michael Lewis put it, where teams that aren't the richest in the league can outplay those who are far wealthier by applying data and statistics. An application of sabermetrics, that is the quantitative analysis of sports, in particular baseball. Anyway, in domain after domain there are ways in which we become more rational. At the other end of the scale though, there is no shortage of conspiracy theories and medical quackery and paranormal beliefs. Crystal healing power, astrology. It's not that they've gotten worse. They might have, but they've always been with us. And that at least gives us a hint that we shouldn't make the common error of saying, gee, there's a lot of stuff around that I don't like, therefore it's getting worse. And I have seen that fallacy over and over again when it comes to measures of violence and well being. There's pollution, therefore pollution's gotten worse. There's war, therefore war has gotten worse. People confuse a single point in time, namely now, with a worsening trend when often though, some problem or blight has not gone to zero. It used to be worse. In the case of irrationality, in the case of woo woo or spooky irrationality, belief in haunted houses, in telepathy. As best I can tell, there's been virtually no change in the last 50 years in beliefs such as astrology, precognition, being able to tell the future, omens. There are ups and downs. When there's a burst of publicity because of some special on the History Channel, then it goes up and it kind of goes back down again, but it looks pretty flat, which I actually find kind of depressing, but that's what the data suggests. On the other hand, if you look at even longer periods, probably about a third of Americans believe in ghosts today. I suspect if you went back 150 years or 200 years, it would be closer to 100%. And likewise, even in our political discourse, even though we tear our hair out at the 30,000 lies that Donald Trump told during his presidency, including some outlandish, indeed dangerous conspiracy theories, not a single one of them involved anything paranormal. No omens, no esp. I mean, it was deplorable stuff. It's at least some concession to rationality that we're kind of out of that space in elite decision making circles. So it's a mixed picture. Certainly the things that really strike us now as hair raising. The conspiracy theories have always been with us and have been quite dangerous in the past, like the protocols of the Elders of Zion, the anti Semitic conspiracy theory cooked up by the tsarist secret police. The fake news is probably as old as human language and has again led to some pretty big catastrophes like the explosion of the maine in the 1890s, which led to the Spanish American War. And the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which led to the escalation of the war in Vietnam. Even weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and we know the consequences. Or the rumor that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9, 11. All of those are fake news. We had supermarket tabloids with sightings of Elvis in convenience stores and two headed babies. We've had urban legends about the hippie who put the baby in the microwave and the Doberman who coughed up a human hand. We've had paranormal beliefs for as long as there's been religion, kind of what we define as religion. The miracles in scriptures are nothing but paranormal fake news. So I don't think we can give a single answer just because there are more than 7 billion of us and we vary a lot in our degree of rationality.
- [18:13]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah. So I want to get back to conspiracy theories in one moment, but I want to circle back to this question of how you can use rationality to deal with personal trade offs in your life and when to prioritize future enjoyment over present enjoyment. And to me, because this is immediately applicable to everyone's lives and it's an area where people don't tend to think of themselves as reasoning in the same way that you would be reasoning in a philosophy classroom or in a way in a logic classroom. But just like the simple decision to go out on a Friday night and drink with friends, a decision as simple as that involves competing trade offs that can be looked at rationally and should be. One is, okay, I'm going to be maybe a little hungover, a little tired the next day. But there is that against a trade off of entering a space where you're liable to have more interesting, more fun conversations and be more open to forming new connections with people that can then survive into sobriety. Right, like that. That's something. And then you just, you're at a point where you have to judge whether to do that once a week, once a month, five days a week. And you're just. And it's, it's even more complicated than that because it's not just that there's one thing trading off against another thing. It's, there could be 10 things trading off against each other. And you don't only apply this to your life. This is how policy wonks judge policies. And that's an area where we would be more inclined to say, okay, this economist is reasoning about the trade off between increasing the minimum wage and increasing unemployment, say. But we don't tend to think of ourselves as reasoning about our own choices and lifestyles. And I think that's one reason why reason has some of the bad PR it has is because we don't realize that reason can be the gateway into. Just like it could be the gateway into partying less, it could be the gateway into having a little more fun if you're judging the trade offs in the wrong direction. And I say all that just to convey, and I think it's a major obstacle to your project, is just the sense people have that reason is not for me, it's for the academics. It's for the people who are writing books and writing studies. It's not for just the average guy or girl on the street living his or her life. And it's like you're already doing it and you can't choose not to do it and doing more of it and doing it better. It's not only compatible with having more fun and deep enjoyment out of life, it's necessary to that project. So, anyway, that's just sort of the reaction I had reading your book. I hope others do too.
- [21:37]
Steven Pinker
Yeah. Once again, you've raised a number of, I think, really deep points. One of them is that we're all capable of rationality. And I take pains to avoid the impression that one can get, in reading the literature on human judgment and decision making, that humans are a bunch of boobs. We're saddled with these biases and fallacies. It's because we are just cavemen out of time. We have quick reactions so that we don't get eaten by leopards, and with the implication that it's only, you know, we psychologists, philosophers, statisticians that can make a claim to rationality. And I try to dispatch that idea early in the book with an extended discussion of the San people of the Kalahari Desert in South Africa and Botswana, formerly called the Bushmen, and how cerebral they are in hunting, how they have to engage in quite sophisticated reasoning in inferring what animal left behind, which tracks and where the animal is and what condition it's in, its sex, its age. All of which they do by a kind of scientific reasoning, at least I consider it to be deserving of that term, based on the work of Louis Liebenberg, who's lived with them for many decades. Likewise, when I reiterate some of the classic fallacies that anyone who's taken behavioral economics or cognitive psychology knows about the base rate, neglect the gambler's fallacy. I try to not just say, well, aren't we a stupid species? But rather, here is why. That mode of thinking actually is pretty useful in pretty narrow, circumscribed circumstances. It just can't scale, it can't generalize. And we're kind of trapping people into making these errors by hitting them with some circumstances, unlike one in which that mode of reasoning ordinarily works pretty well. And I distinguish between ecological rationality and formal rationality. It's a distinction I borrowed from Leda cosmodes and John Toobie and Gerd Gigerenzer, and it refers to the distinction between having the ability to reason that's kind of baked together with your subject matter knowledge. And it's very different from the kind of academic reasoning that we're taught to do in school, where you are given very general abstract rules with variables P and Q and A and B. Those are extremely useful. That's why we have education. It's not that people shouldn't know them, but in everyday life they often are inapplicable. And this becomes clear when you say, speak to people from a non literate, non educated culture, or for that matter, sometimes our own students, and you realize there is a kind of rationality to what they say, even though it doesn't fit with the application of formal rules. Let me just give you an example. This comes from the work of the great Russian psychologist Luria, who interviewed Russian peasants. He asked some questions, he gave them problems like this. All animals in Siberia are white. Are the bears white? And the peasant says, well, how should I know? I've never been to Siberia. And he said, well, I just said all animals are white. And he says, well, that's not the kind of thing that you can figure out just by words. You got to see them. So he's making a distinction between what philosophers call analytic versus synthetic or theoretical versus empirical knowledge. Mainly. There's some things you can't deduce. They're not like Pythagorean theorem. You have to be an empiricist. You got to look. But that would be an incorrect answer in a logic puzzle in one of our. In our schools, because we learn the habit of forgetting everything we know and concentrating only on the premises of the problem and deducing its implications. Again, that's a very powerful thing to learn. But people who don't do that, they're not foolish, they're not stupid, they're just reasoning in a different way, which one can call ecological rationality. I think the Ulrichmeister is probably the first one to come up with the term. I can't avoid mentioning one other example. There's been a huge amount of discussion of the trolley problem in moral philosophy. The driver of a trolley has had a heart attack and keeled over. The trolley is careening down the tracks. It's about to plow into five workers who can't see it approaching, but you're at a switch and you can divert it into a sidetrack where it'll only kill one worker. Is it morally permissible to divert the trolley, killing one instead of killing five? Sometimes students hear this problem and they say, well, why don't you just shout hey, there's a trolley coming. Get out of the way now. That's in some ways not a legitimate answer to that problem, considered as a thought experiment to clarify our intuitions. But of course, in real life that's exactly what you should do. So this is another illustration, the difference between ecological and formal rationality and one of the reasons not to bite off our species. Okay, that's a big digression. But getting back to the examples that you gave, say about deciding when and how much to let loose, to trade off sometimes very difficult, almost incommensurable values. There is a chapter in the book on rational choice theory or expected utility theory on given that you can kind of weigh things at all, prefer one thing to another, and that's a big if, but if you can, there is a kind of a beautiful mathematical body of knowledge from John von Neumann that tells you how you ought to do that as long as you can make choices at all. In the case of say, getting drunk now versus and then having a hangover tomorrow, you can weigh off how much pleasure do I get from being drunk versus how much discomfort do I have from being hungover. But on top of that, there's the time factor, namely, how do I compare pleasure now versus pleasure a day from now, a week from now, a year from now, 10 years from now? And it is a trade off that we in fact all animals, all rational agents, have to face. And the answer isn't, oh, you shouldn't care about time. You shouldn't sacrifice your future self, your present self. There's a body of research from economics, behavioral ecology called discounting the future on what is the optimal or rational way to do it. And the reason that you really should favor the present to some extent over the future is you might be hit by a bus tomorrow, in which case any deferral of pleasure now for the future would have gone to waste. Or you might have be planning for some future event and the best made plans of mice and men go off to glay. You might have miscalculated, maybe you're putting away funds for retirement and the retirement fund goes bankrupt. So there is a way that one ought to discount the future. And of course it doesn't make sense to scrimp and save all your life for a fantastic birthday bash when you turn 80. That really is not rational. You really should consume, enjoy as you live your life. The question is how much? And there is some reason to think that people tend to discount the future too steeply, that is, even though you really ought to favor the present over the future. To some extent, people do it too much. They act as if they're going to die in a couple of years. And probably our ancestors had a high chance of dying within a couple of years. We can be expected to live into our 80s, but we're kind of stuck with the time trade offs that aren't applicable to a more predictable and longer life society. And that is a matter of rationality and it is a kind of ecological rationale because our folk wisdom already has some bits of advice, of common wisdom that acknowledges that we are apt to overvalue the present compared to the future. Like advice, like say, for a rainy day. Count to 10 before you explode. Control your anger a little more rudely. The male to male advisory for discretion in sexual matters. Keep your pecker in your pocket. There's a whole set of sayings of don't blow it now. Think about the future, think twice, hold your horses. So that's already in our value, our belief system. And it is a part of rationality that as you point out, we already stick to. In addition, of course, there's the trade off between what's good for me and what's good for someone else. So in terms of the costs of getting drunk, you really ought to factor in the risks to others from driving drunk or for getting into fights. And so it isn't just a matter of you. And as soon as you realize that, me, you, it kind of makes no difference, rationally speaking. We're just, we're all people, we all experience pain and pleasure. You've got to weight other people's well being in your decisions in order that you can insist that they weight yours in their decisions. And that means that there are a number of things that feel good in the moment that you shouldn't do at the cost of harming others with the risk that they'll harm you.
- [30:54]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah. So I want to circle back to the points you were making about the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. And I think probably most people listening are by now familiar with the laundry list of fallacies and biases that the human brain is subject to. And I just want to sort of reiterate the point you're making here, which is a very interesting one. And it's that many of the ways in which we can shown to be irrational, these word problems given to us, the sunk cost fallacy, for instance, is a common one. All of these kinds of fallacies, sometimes the source of our mistake is not that we're stupid, it's Actually, that we're smart in our minds have made us smart by using shortcuts that are highly efficient in many practical scenarios. But a clever researcher can find what that shortcut, the corner that that shortcut is skirting around, and drill down on that corner in a way that reveals the trade off of that shortcut. And that really reframes the whole cognitive bias literature or the whole behavioral economic literature. The lesson to take turns from, wow, look how poorly evolved we are to reason effectively in the modern world. To look how really ingenious our brains are at solving many practical problems that can be sort of foiled in narrow and relatively narrow scenarios, some of which matter, some of which are very important to realize. But the lesson is not that we're irrational fundamentally. It's actually in some sense the opposite. It's that the ways in which we are rational are deep and highly useful in the real world, but can be exploited in experiments. Is that right?
- [33:10]
Steven Pinker
I think that's right. And it is a point that Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman themselves made now and again to their credit. Although often that literature is kind of explained or passed down as just a number of ways you can poke fun at our species or at the ordinary who can get caught in all of these fallacies. And you're right, first of all that these are, many of them are ways of reasoning that depend on certain assumptions and that work serviceably well when those assumptions are satisfied. But they can be caught out if you cleverly change the problem so that those assumptions don't hold. There are some times in which the problems. You might have to even give the problem a second thought. Because sometimes human intuition might even be more rational than the psychologist who's trying to catch us in illusions. I'll give you an example. Here's typical, or a famous kind of fallacy. If I say that Amanda is very sensitive, has a highly refined aesthetic sense, she loves poetry, she wrote a sonnet for her boyfriend for his birthday, she has traveled to Italy. What's more likely, that she is a art history major or a psychology major? Everyone says, oh, an art history major, obviously. Now There are probably 100 psychology majors for every art history major. So no matter how much she fits the stereotype of an art history major, just the raw base rates, the law of averages, the luck of the draw, would say she's probably more likely to be a psychology major. So that's a fallacy sometimes called base rate neglect. That is people reason by stereotype. Trisky and Kahneman called it the representativeness Heuristic rather than by Bayes rule, which says you always start with the base rate, that is what's the prevalence in the population? So you say, oh, ha ha, people fall for this fallacy, they can't apply Bayes rule. But there is a twist, which is that the Bayesian logic in terms of starting with the base rate only applies if the person was picked at random from the population. That is I've chosen Amanda at random from the entire student body with its hundred times as many psychology students majors as art history majors. But a person, if you don't tell people that or if you don't emphasize it, then the person figuring out might think, well, why am I hearing all about her travel tastes and what she gave her boyfriend? Surely an intelligent conversational partner is telling me that for a reason, namely she wasn't picked at random. The only reason we're getting that character description is for me to connect the dots, read between the lines, which is of course highly intelligent, highly rational in ordinary conversation. That's the reason why it's so infuriating to talk to a chatbot on a helpline, because it takes you so literally and doesn't read between the lines. We do read between the lines. We assume that someone is presenting us information for a sensible purpose, such as I'm telling you about Amanda, because that is diagnostic information about the kind of person that she is. And so the Bayesian base rate actually doesn't apply if she's selected at random. And indeed, follow up studies, some done by Trisky and Kahneman themselves, but pursued further by Gigerenza, shows that if you really rub people's faces and in how random the selection process is, that is if you pick Amanda's description out of a jar with a bunch of student descriptions, then people don't fall for the fallacy anymore. So that would be an example of how people are not as foolish. And as you say, some of our demonstrations are not exactly fair to the ordinary human. Joe or Jill.
- [37:05]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah, I've even thought at times that the, the hot hand fallacy or the Gambler's fallacy is not quite so much a fallacy as it seems, and that this is just the idea. The Hot Hand fallacy is usually described as the false belief that say, if a basketball player just made his last shot, that he is more likely to make the next shot because he has a hot hand, when in reality it's whatever his field goal percentage is, that's, you know, that's going to be the same on the next throw. And I Can see how that could be narrowly true if defined as just based on whether he made the last shot. But, you know, intuitively, as someone who plays sports and basketball and also other skills like music and chess, just like intuitively, your level of skill actually with certain skills can vary quite dramatically from day to day. Even as a speaker, I notice some days I'm just. I'm mellifluous. The words just come out.
- [38:22]
Steven Pinker
Tell me about it. Yes. Oh, yes.
- [38:24]
Coleman Hughes
And you can sort of understand. You can understand certain elements, like if I tend to sleep more, I tend to be better. But certain aspects of it just remain mysterious, I think, forever. And so the intuition that if someone is having a good day on the team that you give them the ball is not, you know, it's actually deeply rational for many kinds of skills, if not most kinds of skills. And it's only a fallacy to the extent that your likelihood of success is deeply random and doesn't follow any kind of daily swing or pattern. So I've often thought that that was a fallacy that was overplayed a little bit.
- [39:08]
Steven Pinker
Well, I'm glad you brought it up, because in the book I talk about the hot hand fallacy. Fallacy, which is that there is no hot hand and shows that there is a hot hand. So there was the kind of analogy of the gambler's fallacy, which is that if a roulette wheel, say, lands on red six times in a row, people think it's due for a black. Now there, and what you engaged in, in talking about the fact that, yeah, we have our, you know, our ups, we have our downs, we have good days, we have bad days. And, you know, don't. I know there. Sometimes when I do an interview and afterwards I think, oh, God, I was really inarticulate that day. And other times it just seems to flow. And that would be no surprise if that happened to basketball players, as you noted. And that makes it different in terms of just your understanding of the underlying causal model compared to the roulette wheel, where it would be a shock if the gambler's fallacy was not a fallacy because the roulette wheel doesn't have a memory. And it's not as if the roulette wheel has a desire to appear fair, like, oh, I've landed on red six times in a row. I better start coughing up some blacks, Otherwise I'll violate the law of averages. And I can't do that. I'm a roulette wheel. So we know that it doesn't happen. With roulette wheels. And so that's how we know that the gambler's fallacy has pretty much got to be a fallacy. If it wasn't a fallacy, we'd say that the roulette wheel must have been fixed. And as Tversky and Kahneman point out in the gambler's fallacy and similar fallacies with coin flips and come from a misunderstanding of randomness and of the so called law of averages more accurate than the law of large numbers, which is that as the size of a sample increases, its parameters come to resemble the ones of the population from which it was drawn. But the reason that happens isn't because of a process of compensation. That is, if the samples start to veer too much in one direction, there's a force that pulls them back towards the middle. That's not how it works. It's a process of dilution. Namely, if it veers too much in one direction, which it inevitably will, because a random walk does tend to veer in a certain direction, then more and more stuff will kind of drown it out, will dilute it, and it'll tend to regress toward the average. However, as you note, the underlying causal model for basketball players isn't like that. I mean, we are not roulette wheels physically. Our physical state does get carried over from moment to moment. So there it's completely an empirical question whether basketball players are roulette wheels. Although it's kind of the gambler's fallacy in reverse, because you're more likely to make a shot rather than more likely to do the opposite, as in the case of the roulette wheel. But it's the same logic. And so that's one of the reasons why the claim by Tom Gilovich and Amos Tversky that there is no hot hand, namely that basketball players really are roulette wheels, was so shocking to sports fans and to common sense. It turns out that Tversky and Gilich probably did the statistics wrong. That by identifying streaks of hits or misses after the fact, they're kind of biasing the data against a continuation of the streak. Because let's say you make a shot, make a shot, make a shot, make a shot, make a shot. Five successful attempts in a row. Well, it's almost by definition that the next one is going to be a mission, because if the next one was a hit, you could have called it a streak of six shots instead of five shots. And therefore your delineation of the data is in part biased by whether there was A flip or not. So it's a subtle statistical point. It would have to be for someone as brilliant as Tversky to have missed it. But it's one that throws off the calculations. And so it turns out that common sense, conventional wisdom, sports fans understanding turns out to be right. And the kind of the gotcha gang, the ones trying to show how foolish and misled sports fans were, turned out to be wrong. So that's why I call it the hot Hand fallacy Fallacy.
- [43:16]
Coleman Hughes
And I think this is another example of reason or rationality being a more open space than people assume it to be right. Because reason is not just always siding with the person who's showing stats and debunking something intuitive. Reason can just as often side with intuition when it's applied to some observation that turns out not to be as rational as it seemed. And the whole time you're using reason, you're using reason to get to. You're using reason at some level on the initial intuition, you're using reason on the thing that debunks the intuition, you're using reason to debunk the debunking. And so reasoning is this process we engage in. It's not, as I said, it's not. You just feed Spock the question and he tells you, he gives you the Wikipedia page for the gambler's fallacy or something. Right. It's a much more open and creative space than it's assumed to be.
- [44:21]
Steven Pinker
I think that that's exactly right. And so it would be a mistake to say, ha ha, Gilovich and Tversky thought they were being rational, but they weren't. Therefore, you know, what's the big deal with rationality? It's you're using an even more subtle form of rationality. And there were a couple of statisticians who kind of dug a little bit deeper, who exposed the hot hand fallacy fallacy. But they were applying rationality to an attempt to be rational. Which brings a key point that's somewhat related, which is even though rationality ought to be an aspiration, none of us ever knows when we actually have it. The same thing with objective truth. And some of the backlash, the recoil to the insistence on objectivity, truth, rationality is who the hell are you to say that you're the rational one or that you've got a monopoly on the truth? And the answer is you don't. No one ever does that. The standards of rationality and truth are things that you always aspire to. But because we're not angels, we're not infallible. All of us might be wrong at any given moment, which is why we need continuous reexamination of our assumptions, why we need to move to an issue that both of us are concerned with. Why you need free speech because no arbiters has the truth and therefore can shut down debate and criminalize incorrect opinions because no one knows what the incorrect opinions are. That's exactly why we have open debate. Freedom of the press, freedom of speech and other liberal values.
- [45:57]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah. I've often thought about the paradox of any person with a normal amount of humility is that you believe everything you believe. Every belief you have you think is true. Or else it wouldn't be a belief just circularly. Yet you must know that you're not the first person in the history of the human race to only have correct beliefs and no false beliefs.
- [46:23]
Steven Pinker
Exactly.
- [46:24]
Coleman Hughes
Both of those things are true. And frankly, I know that I'm not even close. I've met enough people that are way smarter than me to know that I'm not even close to having all correct beliefs, to being the first person.
- [46:38]
Steven Pinker
Me too. And all of us sometimes. There's a related paradox that I've seen in the philosophy literature called the preface paradox. So you know when you open a book and you read the preface and the author always says, I thank so and so for his comments and so and so for her comments, then at the end he says, all remaining errors are my responsibility. You might say, well, if you know your book has errors, why don't you fix them? And yeah, the answer is, well, I know that book must have errors because all books have errors, and I'm not that much of a genius. I just don't know which ones they are.
- [47:10]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah. And I think the paradox is probably resolved by having some kind of level of credence in everything you believe, some level of confidence. There are some things I'm so confident in just that I'm in this room right now, something as simple as that. And my level of confidence in assertions about complex issues just goes progressively downward, I guess.
- [47:35]
Steven Pinker
Yeah, that's right. Well, there's. I think that is indeed one of the implications that our degrees of belief ought to be graded or qualified, and they're never 1.0. And we all have to submit ourselves to examination, criticism, debate, simply because I'm not going to know what my flaws are. Someone else is probably going to have to point them out to me. Now, it's possible that a whole community can be deluded. We know that that happens. But still, Generally, a community of reasoners and debaters is likely to be more rational than any one guy or one woman who is imposing their version of the truth. It comes from an interesting feature of human reason pointed out by Dan Sperbert and Hugo Mercier, which is often, even though people, they really do have these blind spots and overconfidence and confirmation bias and all these flaws. So we often are pretty bad judges of our own beliefs, but we tend to be much better at criticizing other people's beliefs. So even though we can find the flaw in someone else's argument, even though we kind of pass over it in our own arguments, now that's human weakness, human shortcomings. But the bright spot is that if you put people together in communities where you're allowed to point out the flaws in someone else's line of reasoning, and in a kind of marketplace of ideas, all of the different people poking holes in one another's arguments, you can start to see which arguments tend to survive. That holds out the hope that the community can become rational, even though it's composed individual reasoners who are not so rational.
- [49:18]
Coleman Hughes
So I want to circle back to the problem of conspiracy theories. Oh yeah, this is something I've talked about a few times, Michael Shermer and some other people. And the first observation is just that conspiracy theorists are often very smart. And conspiracy theories often require a lot of intelligence to, you know, as pictures, to paint, to connect all of the dots often requires a level of focus and intelligence and ingenuity that makes it clear the person who believes this is highly intelligent. And yet the conspiracies are just ridiculously unlikely. And yet it's also true that conspiracies have happened. Many have been discovered. Cointelpro, usually being the first example. People call to mind that people conspire to do things and try not to get caught. And when they do, we have evidence that, well, people conspire to do things. So one thing I've always been curious about is what is so attractive about conspiracy theories? Because they're clearly doing something for the person that believes them at a psychological level. And people vary in their propensity to be taken in by these theories. So what do you know about that question?
- [50:52]
Steven Pinker
Yeah, so there's a grain of rationality in conspiracy theories that conspiracies are possible. They're generally something like there is a difference between the Bay of Pigs, which really was a conspiracy by the CIA to invade Cuba, and something like the chemtrail theory that jet contrails are actually mind altering drugs dispersed by A secret government program to pacify the population. So I mean there are degrees of difference between the credibility or the outlandishness of the real conspiracies tend not to be as out there as the 911 truthers or the chemtrail theorists or the QAnon. But there is a continuum and our ancestors probably were vulnerable to conspiracies in the sense that tribal warfare before we had standing armies and states and large scale civilized societies were matters of ambush and pre dawn raids, not pitched battles. And people really were in danger of enemy village plotting in secret. So I think there's a little bit of sometimes motivated paranoia that's maybe the germ, psychological germ of conspiracy theories. There's a second component which is there's certain ideas that just have built in intrinsic qualities that make them difficult to falsify, such as God works in mysterious ways. I'm looking for evidence of God and I don't see it. The universe seems capricious. Well, who are you to understand the mind of God? That's a kind of self contained belief that's resistant to falsification. Likewise, conspiracy theories by their very nature are hard to falsify. If the lack of evidence for a conspiracy can be taken as proof of what a diabolical conspiracy it really is, then there's also another contributor I think is that often conspiracy theories are really morality tales. They're saying that some sect, some coalition, some tribes, some social entity is even more evil than you can imagine. That the CIA is so nefarious or the Bush administration that they could have had a controlled implosion of 9 11, that Hillary Clinton, she's the kind of person who really could run a pedophile ring of Satan worshipping cannibals. And sometimes the degree of belief in the factuality of the conspiracy theory is pretty shallow. May not even be that people literally believe that it has taken place, but they just don't care. That is the point of certain kinds of beliefs isn't their factual veracity, it's the moral that they deliver. And so saying that Hillary Clinton ran a pedophile ring is basically another way of saying boo Hillary. Or Hillary is so depraved that she might even be capable of that. Now I think you or I would say, well no, no, no, you can't do that. It's one thing if you say Boo Hillary, but you can't translate that emotion into a factual claim that she actually did something. Because it is incumbent on us to ground all of our factual claims on the degree of Evidence whether they actually happened or not. You can't just say it because you think she's capable of it. Either she did it or she didn't. But that mindset, call it the reality mindset, is not the way that the human mind naturally works. I think we bifurcate our belief system into a reality zone where we really are pretty rational. We have to be if we want to hold a job and pay the bills and get the kids off to school and keep food in the fridge. You can't believe in too much woo woo. You can't believe that beer is going to magically appear in your fridge because you open your fridge and there won't be any beer. You really have to be grounded in reality. There's a whole other zone in which whether your beliefs are true or false don't really matter, at least to you. What was the origin of the universe? Was it God going shazam or was it a big bang? What difference does it make to me? Or what actually goes on in the Oval Office of the White House when I'm not there and can't witness it? Can I ever know? And corporate boardrooms and why do bad things happen to good people? These cosmic questions are ones where people are, I think, satisfied with mythological beliefs, with empowering, uplifting, mobilizing stories. And whether the stories actually took place or not is kind of seen as pedantic, as nitpicking. And I think that's why some of the more outlandish conspiracy theories can be kind of held by people who are otherwise rational. Namely, they're not subjecting them to the same scrutiny as they would their factual beliefs. They don't feel they have to. And for many of our beliefs, for most of our existence of a species, you couldn't find out anyway.
- [55:53]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah, I think so. I like this distinction between the reality mindset and mythology mindset. And an interesting example is astrology. And just the ubiquity, at least in my generation, of people having astrology apps on their phones to tell them what their day is going to be like. And just the second question after, what is your name nowadays to people in my generation is what's your sign?
- [56:23]
Steven Pinker
By the way, that was true. In my generation. It is. It was true. I was holding out hopes that that would kind of fade and that the baby boomer woo woo would be replaced by a more sensible attitude. But I've actually plotted data on belief in astrology over time, and sad to say, it is pretty flat. I mean, there are ups and downs, but absolutely, it's kind of depressing how that still persists, right?
- [56:50]
Coleman Hughes
I used to have a policy earlier in college when I was probably slightly more disagreeable, of just telling people my sign and then immediately telling them that I think astrology is bullshit as a litmus test for whether we could likely be friends or not. But which raises a question of if someone is in a mythology mindset about something that's not practically important to your immediate life, as you say, whether it's the origins of the universe or something like that, or whether you're going to have a good day in a kind of loose sense that people believe astrology, is it useful? Does it make sense to engage them on it from a rational, reality based point of view? Or does it make sense to live and let live? People are deciding this with their family members and friends all the time. Do I keep the peace? Do I try to engage in a rational discussion? What advice do you have for people in this scenario?
- [57:51]
Steven Pinker
I think if there is some risk that the person is going to make a consequential decision and therefore blunder into some kind of disaster or even foolish outcome, and depending on your social relationship with the person, then it might be advisable you would be doing them a favor. Now, you may not convince them. Some people, it's not easy to disabuse people of some of their beliefs, but in that case, if they're really going to do something foolish on the basis of an astrological prediction, then I think it would be friendly advice well given and not to be well taken. In other cases it could be anywhere from a waste of time to cruel. I'll give you an example of a woman that I know who underwent a terrible tragedy. Her sister was killed in a car crash. Her sister's grandchildren were killed in the car crash. So it's just like a loss of a lot of family members. And she said, well, my only consolation is that we'll all be reunited in heaven. Now I'm not going to say, oh well, you know, really consciousness consists in brain activity, and when the brain stops functioning, consciousness vanishes from the universe forever. So you're not going to meet them in heaven. That would just be cruel and you shouldn't be cruel. And it also has no consequences in the sense, or at least all the consequences would be negative. It would be deepening her grief without any compensating benefit. So that would be kind of a case where you really shouldn't try to spread that kind of rationality. Only if it was really to head off some disastrous decision where you think there's some probability that you might change their mind.
- [59:33]
Coleman Hughes
All right, well, we're at the end here, I guess. I just want to leave my listeners thinking about the connection between rationality and moral progress before, before I let you go. You've written a couple great books about moral progress, including the Decline of Violence and then Enlightenment now, which is one of my favorite books, just about the progress, the evidence for all the progress we've made in pretty much every domain we care about, from health to wealth to violence to human rights. And I think one of your arguments is that there's a direct connection between reason and all of the benefits of modernity. Like, you know, when most people who talk to their grandparents have a intuitive and basic sense that life now is better than it used to be. And many academics, as you know, will challenge this. But for most people, it does kind of gel with some of their intuitions. So just assuming you've persuaded someone of that, which is of course a big assumption, how do you persuade them that reason is a major source, a major reason why all of this progress has happened?
- [60:59]
Steven Pinker
Well, in a way, it's not distinct from the incredulity that people have about the actual existence of progress, namely that our lives have gotten longer and safer and healthier and more peaceful and more respectful of human rights because there is no force in the universe, no mystical elevator that just carries us ever upward. That was a kind of 19th century Victorian conception of progress. Progress is just built into the universe and it really isn't. The universe doesn't care about us. And if anything, the universe tries to kind of squash us to the extent that the only way that we could make progress is at least material progress in terms of famine and poverty and natural disasters and longevity, is by figuring out how the world works. That is, applying our ingenuity, our rationality, with the goal of making people better off. And when people have succeeded at that, and we retain the improvements that work and try not to repeat our mistakes, that's what progress is now. Somewhat of a surprise, and I can't make as strong an argument for this, is that when it comes to moral progress, like the decriminalization of homosexuality, the movement toward peace, the equality of women, the abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement, there I was surprised to find that at the very outset of each one of those movements, there was a highly rational argument. Now, rational in the sense that some philosopher or theologian or activist pointed out that the practices of the day were inconsistent with other values or beliefs that people claim to Hold. So exposing a contradiction, even for things where you wouldn't think that a rational argument would be called for, like why do you need an argument? There might be something a wee bit wrong with burning heretics at the stake or keeping slaves. And it just seems like such a no brainer. But of course, everyone did it at the time and there really were activists and thinkers and rhetoricians who made that argument. Now, the more effective ones combined some emotional appeal, empathy, with a rational argument. But they provided the rational argument. Just one of many examples was Frederick Douglass perhaps the greatest orator in history. And he used kind of searing imagery of the cruelties of slavery. But he was also a genius at undercutting every single argument at the time. And people made arguments at the time for slavery and he just eviscerated them one after another. Said, well, you know, are enslaved people like, equivalent to livestock? Well, you don't have any laws that prevent livestock from learning to read, do you? But you do have laws preventing enslaved people from learning to read. You don't have capital punishment for animals. You do for enslaved people. So you yourself have conceded that enslaved people are people with a moral sense, with intellectual faculties, and on and on. And he was just withering in, not just the moral condemnation, but exposing all of the contradictions in their worldview. And that happened many times with arguments for what we now recognize as great movements for moral progress, decriminalization of homosexuality. Jeremy Bentham said, well, the only thing that makes something immoral is if anyone suffers or anyone suffers harm. And you have two gay people engaging in sex in private. No one's harmed. There's nothing but pleasure, therefore it can't be immoral. Things like that, which now almost strike us as too obvious to mention. That's because they won the day. Their argument persuaded people. And it's also a way to. You can distinguish social justice movements that deserve our support from mob justice movements, lynch mobs, and other forms of madness, of crowds. You can't just say, if someone is passionate about some cause, that must show that they're right. Because we know that there have been horrible popular movements that arouse people's emotions that were, in retrospect, we realize, horrific. And the difference between them is we can see why the arguments for the social justice movements that we ought to support really are convincing, and the ones for the lynch mobs were not.
- [65:31]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah, so that's a great note to leave on. Steven Pinker, thank you so much for your time.
- [65:37]
Steven Pinker
Thank you, Coleman. It's an honor to be on your conversations.
- [65:44]
Coleman Hughes
If you appreciate the work I do, the best ways to support me are to subscribe directly through my website, colemanhughes. Org, and to subscribe to my YouTube channel so you'll never miss my new content. As always, thanks for your support.