Professor Steven Pinker - The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism And Enlightenment Now

Full transcript: Professor Steven Pinker on London Real

4:59 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Steven Pinker, the best-selling author and professor of psychology at Harvard University. Time magazine called you one of the 100 most influential people in the world today, and your most popular books include The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Blank Slate, How the Mind Works, and The Language Instinct. Your most recent book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, tells the heroic story of human progress, and why we neglect it at our peril.

5:27 Brian Rose: Steven, welcome back to London Real.

5:29 Steven Pinker: Thank you. Great to have you here.

5:31 Brian Rose: You were here six years ago. I think we were talking about Better Angels at the time, a little less of a swank set-up, but it was great talking to you then, and as usual you always have some fascinating things to talk about.

5:43 Brian Rose: I can’t wait to get into that. What’s it like being back in London? You like the city?

5:48 Steven Pinker: Oh, I love London. Yes, and one of the great things about publishing books is I, I get to come over and talk about them.

5:54 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s, and it’s also, you live in Boston. You’ve been there for many, many years. Yes, it has probably the most similarities to that city than any city in America.

6:05 Steven Pinker: Well, you flatter us. It’s, Boston is no London, but I do love Boston as well, but London is just so much bigger and denser and more diverse.

6:14 London is in a different class of cities than Boston, as much as I love Boston.

6:19 Brian Rose: Yeah, and I was in Boston for four years, from ’89 to ’93. You know, when I actually look at this book, yeah, I look at it probably from a different lens than most people, because you know, I think my brain was actually probably physically and neuroplastically changed being at MIT from the years of 18 to 22, because it taught me a way of looking at the world, in a way of thinking, one that was based in science and reason.

6:43 So I think when I see this, I see the MIT, this kind of in here. You spent 20 years at that campus as well, right? That’s right. Yes. How much of that MIT ethos, perspective, culture, is woven into your works?

6:59 Steven Pinker: I think no one has ever asked me that question, but, but, but it’s an insightful one, because I think there is some of that attitude in the book, some of that mindset, the use of data to test ideas, the unwillingness to fall back on images and stereotypes and narratives, but the demand to see the data, particularly when it comes to generalizations, like, has the world gotten better or not? And everyone can think of things they like about the present era, because they’re not static about from past eras. But I think an MIT attitude would be well, let’s go to the data.

7:35 Let’s see, our people happier, are they living longer, are they free, or are they more or less violent? Left wisk with the curves, but also a mindset of solving problems as the key to human progress. There really are two different visions of how you make people better off. One of them is a moralistic vision that problems are the fault of evil people who must be defeated and shamed and punished. And I, I think we’re actually seeing a bit of an increase in that, especially on college campuses, but the other mindset is, there are problems, there always will be problems.

8:14 The universe doesn’t care about us. There are a lot of ways for things to go wrong. To make people better off, let’s try to solve the problems, where technology itself is a humane calling, because it feeds more people and cures more people and allows them to do what they want to do with less damage to the environment. So the more tech, the better people, better off people will be. So that is an MIT way of thinking, not the way of thinking that is dominant in our intellectual class, of the literary critics and cultural scholars.

8:47 And I personally think that I have gotten some pushback, because I do take the attitude that humans have advanced in large part through science and technology, an unpopular view among intellectuals these days. Yeah, unless they, they want to say we’ve advanced through activism and protest, and in many cases we have. But on the other hand, the reason that we don’t have to worry about famines anymore is not because there were petitions and angry protests, but it’s because of the invention of artificial fertilizer and vigorous crop hybrids.

9:23 Brian Rose: Yeah, solve problems. It’s funny, because, you know, MIT, and I’d love to get your perspective on how you would explain that place to the world, but that’s what I felt like when I went there. That’s what we do. You solve problems. You’re not going there to necessarily immerse yourself in history and the humanities and become a better person.

9:40 It’s like, at MIT there’s an unwritten rule that you’re there to solve problems, whether an engineer, computer science, or a mathematician.

9:48 Steven Pinker: All I have to say in defense of MIT humanities is, it doesn’t cover all of the humanities, but what it covers, it covers really, really well. I mean, MIT has a superb political scientist, has the world’s best linguistics department for many decades. But it’s true, and I noticed the difference having moved to Harvard.

10:05 And not to speak ill of my employer, but take a challenge like climate change. So Harvard put up a wind turbine and changed the toilet handle, so you could have a little flush or a big flush, and you had a campaign to bring your own coffee cup. So you know, throwing out a lot of cardboard. Now, all of these really are not going to solve the problem of climate change. It’s basically announcing to the world, we at Harvard are virtuous, we are conserving.

10:36 But you just do the math, and voluntary sacrifices are just not gonna make a nick in the problem of climate change. What Harvard ought to do, and what MIT is, is somewhat doing, is our comparative advantage. It’s not that we’re more virtuous. A university should say, but we have a lot of smart people and facilities that allow them to do their thing. Let’s figure out how to deliver lots of carbon-free energy to the world, and how to get people to agree that this ought to be a priority of society.

11:10 That we should also look at laws and policies and taxes that would shift the incentives, and as a place of analysis, a university really can contribute to climate change, but the way to do it isn’t to try to pretend to be a moral paragon and say, copy us in our virtuous behavior. We have, we unplug our chargers, and that saves you, you think, we see a little bit of fire energy, right?

11:33 Brian Rose: It’s all about solving the problems, and you’re a guy that looks at the big data, and you can tell what’s happening.

11:40 This book is chock full of charts and diagrams. Your TED Talks are full of these massive diagrams that just trend one way down, or trend one way up, and you’re telling people that based on the science and the reason, the world has improved in many different aspects. Safer to drive, more literacy, less poverty. There’s something you’re always looking at, the data and the science and the reason that that made that progress. Have you always been that guy that likes looking at those numbers?

12:09 Steven Pinker: Well, I’ve always, as a social scientist, I always look at numbers and believe that the respectable way of understanding anything is to look at the data. 2.2, and as a cognitive psychologist in particular, I’m sensitive to the way that our perception of the world can be distorted by cognitive biases. Among them, the availability heuristic, that was the term that Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky gave to the mind’s habit of using its own search engine as a surrogate for a probability.

12:44 If you wanted the way the brain assesses how common or rare or probable and improbable something is, it uses, try to think up examples. If I can think of examples, then it must be really common, and the quick, easy recall, as opposed to the more, the most worthy of the more scientific one, or even the numbers, or taking into account the things that you have not personally experienced but which might be far more plentiful, but you just don’t happen to see them. So, I’ll be concrete.

13:10 People read about a shooting in the news, particularly, say, a rampage shooting, such as the one at the time that you and I are talking. The whole world is reeling from an attack on a mosque in New Zealand, and they say, oh my god, the world is getting more violent now. There you have a rather perverse codependency between the way the human mind works, which is to reason from vivid examples, anecdotes, stories, the way the news media operate, namely that’s what they serve us.

13:47 A country that’s at peace is not news. A country that is, that isn’t having a famine that’s not news. So a lot of the gradual improvements in the human condition, our people are utterly ignorant of, because there’s never a Thursday in October in which they happened, in which they get news coverage. But the third component of this rather vicious codependency is the terrorist or the rampage shooter himself, who games the system, knowing that our own gruesome curiosity, our tendency to be terrified, that’s what they call it, terrorism, by vivid examples.

14:27 The journal news media’s policy of giving saturation coverage to glory atrocities creates an opening for these sickos to gain the world’s attention. They’re often pathetic nobodies, but one guaranteed way to become famous is to kill a bunch of innocent people. Yes, well, with a GoPro going live, so there’s the video. There doesn’t yeah, all the more horrifying, but you know, even without the GoPro, he knew he was, as he was plotting his repulsive scheme. He anticipated, I will become famous, my manifesto will be known, and he was absolutely right.

15:07 So it’s, it’s that way of understanding the world. Remember the atrocity, remember the headline, discuss it endlessly. I think contributes not only to this perverse incentive that more people will do it, but also it leads to a lack of appreciation of the through the real risks, the, and the real progress. Even everyday homicides, the ones that take place in arguments in a bar, or jealous lovers, or people fighting over a parking spot, they are massively more common than either the rampage shootings.

15:45 They in the United States, which admittedly has a higher homicide rate than other Western democracies, but probably forty people are murdered every day. Now, if twenty-five people are killed in a rampage shooting, people talked about it for four weeks, and it’s embedded in collective memory. But day in, day out, every day forty people are murdered, and that’s kind of below the fold for those of you who used to remember these printouts called newspapers. Yeah.

16:14 And getting back to Enlightenment Now, and to The Better Angels of Our Nature, my the overarching argument of both those books is that if we look at the world the way we rationally should, namely at data, which count up not only the the killings but the people who don’t get killed, not only the countries at war but the countries at peace, add them all up, calculate the proportion, then you see something that you can’t detect from the day-to-day dribble of the news, namely rates of warfare have gone down in the United States and many other countries. Rates of homicide have gone down, and then in Enlightenment Now, which broadened the scope from just violence to every measure of human well-being: longevity has gone up. Work hours have gone down.

17:03 Leisure time has gone up. famines have gone down. Deaths in natural disasters have gone down. Deaths in car accidents have gone down. Democracy has gone up in measure after measure.

17:16 When you look at the whole picture, not just the anecdotes and episodes, you see that there’s an improvement that is invisible from a journalism.

17:24 Brian Rose: Right, this cognitive bias is a great point. Maybe you can speak on this to people that are watching and listening, that, okay, they might have heard of this concept, but if you can know that this exists, can you arm yourself against your own cognitive biases, and just say, okay, this is what I’m naturally going to want to watch, this is what the news media is serving up to me, but how can I check that?

17:48 Brian Rose: Yeah. It’s an availability bias. It’s a survivorship bias. It’s, I mean, there’s quite a few cognitive biases.

17:54 Steven Pinker: Yes, there are a few.

17:55 If you go to Wikipedia and look up cognitive illusions, I was advised at 30 named ones, maybe even more. That’s right, and it’s a profound question, and it’s one that is often asked of Daniel Kahneman, who, with the, wait, hey, Mr. Friskie, brought cognitive biases to the world’s attention, and Kahneman became famous not only for winning the Nobel Prize in Economics, but for his bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow. And he is actually pessimistic about the ability to de-bias our cognitive illusions.

18:30 And it is true that it’s often not enough to just tell people about them, to say, oh, be careful of this from now on. But of course Kahneman himself, and me, and you, are aware of it. We do try to inoculate ourselves against it. And I think more sophisticated curricula in critical thinking, statistical reasoning, I have shown that people can be, they can learn to think more critically, more like a statistician and less like a consumer of news. But it is an uphill battle, because naturally we just go with the images and the stories and the anecdotes.

19:10 It has to become part of our kind of our conventional wisdom, beginning, I think, with elementary school education, but permeating the whole culture of intellectual life, cultural criticism, journalism, educated conversation around the dinner table, that you must not use an anecdote as a proof of a trend or development, and not fall prey to various other fallacies that Kahneman and others have shown, such as the gambler’s fallacy and the conjunction fallacy. It should be as silly or embarrassing to commit that error as to appeal to astrology, or evil demons, and even, the President of the United States now, not known for his critical acumen, I mean, doesn’t appeal to the horoscope or to demonic possession. So the culture can change to avoid some of these traps, and I would like to push that further, so that the statistical blunders have the status of appealing to astrology.

20:25 Brian Rose: Right. You know, it’s interesting, because I’m looking at what I do here. It looked real, and at this point our content has been watched by about a quarter of a billion people now. All right. Yeah, and thanks to our overlords in Silicon Valley, Google and YouTube.

20:40 You know, we’re able now, because of technology, which was created from science and reason, we’re able to blast out all these incredible long-form, nuanced conversations around the world, and put out education in a way that we’ll probably see on one of your charts in one of your books in 20 years as changing the world. And yet, Steven, when I, when you came in today, I was thinking at the same time, this technology that was created from science and reason has also created something called the flat earthers, which is almost, almost in direct opposition to that.

21:12 Steven Pinker: Racket, some create them, by the way, but it gave him a second wind.

21:16 Brian Rose: Wait, they went, they, they go back. Well, of course, they go back to the Catholic Church around the time of Galileo.

21:22 Steven Pinker: Well, I know that that is actually not right. They, yeah, but, but a biblical view of the world. They did exist when I was a child in the ’60s, so we’re kind of a joke, and I assumed that they’d vanished, but you’re right, they’ve come back,

21:33 Brian Rose: and it’s weird, because, you know, I see what my viewers watch, and I’ll be honest, even in them, you know, I’m coming from an engineering and science background.

21:41 Rupert Sheldrake would say I suffer from the science delusion, and that’s okay, but still, what the, the content that people love to voraciously eat is the stuff there that is kind of sometimes spiritual, sometimes not based on scientific fact. It’s almost like they kind of want to believe this stuff, and so we’re seeing like with this flat earthing phenomena, where people are trying to prove this, there’s conventions about it, which almost stands in direct you know, face of the technology and reason that we built. What do you see when you see that example?

22:12 Steven Pinker: No, it’s true. And there, and there, it’s not the only one.

22:15 Brian Rose: Yeah, I mean, many, many of my guests are more popular than others, whether it’s Bruce Lipton talking about epigenetics, or Joe Dispenza talking about, you know, human energy fields, that an MIT professor would probably rap my knuckles. We’re talking about those things, because they would say that was not covered in any of this science. We have no proof of that, so what are you doing talking about it?

22:35 But a lot of times that is what the human chooses to consider.

22:39 Steven Pinker: Well, it’s true, and they, so the challenge, and I need your theme in Enlightenment Now is that human nature, left to its own devices, is not particularly rational, as Tversky and Kahneman and others have shown, and for that matter the history of human folly, extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. On the other hand, we have to be capable of reason. We did invent logic as a species.

23:02 You and I are having this conversation right now. We have a benchmark of rationality against which we can say a lot of people fall short. If we weren’t capable of saying what’s rational in the first place, we’d have no basis for saying anyone is irrational, because, what are they not? Well, they’re not rational, and indeed you and I and Kahneman and others can appeal to probability theory and logic and mathematics and science.

23:26 Brian Rose: So how do you reconcile these?

23:28 Steven Pinker: Well, it’s that we, we do have some kernel of rationality. We don’t always deploy it, because often, for a number of reasons, probably rooted in evolution, some of it may just be that the brain has only so much processing power. But any more of it is that we’re social creatures, and that sometimes facts and reason kind of work against our interests.

23:50 Brian Rose: Right, I mean, I want to, Trump’s all, so that’s our survival mechanism. And yeah, and status.

23:56 Steven Pinker: I mean, one of us would like to be infallible. None of us is infallible, and that often means we’ve got to twist the truth to make ourselves look more virtuous. And so in the battle between logic and truth on the one hand, and tribal solidarity, prestige and status, winning allies, the winning allies will win every time, unless you set up rules of a game that everyone agrees to, where the rational part of us, which is there, you know, otherwise no one could have figured out how to design a trap that kills an animal, or had a baby sling that holds a baby.

24:42 You’ve got to have enough appreciation of the laws of physics to know how to tie the knot, and to process the fiber, and extract the poison from the mushroom, and fabricate the bow and arrow. So it’s crazy to say that humans aren’t rational. Well, obviously we have a capacity for reason. The challenge is to scale that up by implementing norms and institutions and rules that prevent us from sinking into our fallacies, from indulging our own biases, such as free speech, that is, you want to claim something that, say, elevates your prestige, but someone else gets to say you’re full of baloney.

25:27 Peer review in the sciences, empirical testing in the sciences, checks and balances, studies, double-blind studies, checks and balances in government, the presumption of innocence in the criminal justice system, and the right to legal counsel in the adversarial process, in the, in the courtroom. All of these are things that are kind of unpleasant when you have to go through them, and you don’t just get your way. On the other hand, we understand that a society is better off if people have to surrender to these rules, which can allow us to approach the truth, correct verdicts, correct theories, beneficial policies, to fight the fact that each one of us individually would much rather glorify our own power and wisdom.

26:11 Brian Rose: Okay, so these are remnants of the fact that we agree that we fail as humans to be objective, and so we put these things into place to kind of force us to use this.

26:21 Steven Pinker: Yeah, again, again, exactly. Wolves against, I know, it’s the last thing the dictator, last thing they want is free speech, and maybe in certain cases now they try to prevent it. And studies, double-blind studies, science, and everything. Yeah.

26:37 Rule of law, all of these procedures that are not so natural. We, they had to have been invented. They have the case for them continues to have, has to be made, but they’re ways that we collectively can be smarter than any of us is individually.

26:51 Brian Rose: Okay, and also going back to your, the paradox that you raised, which is one that there’s quite a cute. So how come, on the one hand, the internet has enabled things like this conversation, where, you know, we couldn’t have this on broadcast TV.

27:04 We couldn’t have it in the pages of the Guardian. Theaters, it would take up too much space, but the internet allows us to go into depth, to go down rabbit holes, to say, on the one hand, on the other hand, so if this kind of medium is, and there, others like it that make us, in a sense, make us smarter, but at the same time you’ve got the, the conspiracy theories and the fake news and the anti-vaxxers and the flat earthers.

27:31 Steven Pinker: The so I, the way I see it is we’ve got a kind of growing inequality of reason.

27:36 At the high end, you’ve got Wikipedia and Snopes and the Khan Academy and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and London Real at the bottom, and then you’ve got all of this, the swamp of conspiracy theories, and we haven’t, as a society, figured out how to maximize the benefits of this fantastic flow of information without just opening up a space where every crackpot can contain followers,

28:02 Brian Rose: and it’s so strange, because with all the technology we have now, with all of the GPS units and the, you know, visuals of the latest SpaceX rocket going up as well, that seems to not matter, because if you have a one-hour podcast with a flat earther with some pictures, then you can kind of get that point of view into someone’s head, or anti-vaxxer, like you said.

28:25 You can just tell this story and go in through these, you know, cognitive biases and exploit them in a way.

28:33 Steven Pinker: Yeah, well, the cognitive biases, there’s also the the tribes, the coalescing around moral causes. So one, I think one of them, one of the reasons that there are these these conspiracy theories and pseudoscience and flim-flam is, it’s not just that people are making statistical errors, but they have a mindset that the, the scientific establishment is not to be trusted, that they are part of a world of corporations and finance, seers, and political leaders that are exploiting the, the masses, that they themselves are hiding the truth, and that there’s something heroic, something speaking truth to power, about embracing these contrary views.

29:20 Steven Pinker: And I think it’s that, so that social, political elements, who are thinking more than just statistical errors, that gives rise to these movements, and they have in their rhetoric a lot of demonization of corporations and establishment scientists. And how do we gain their trust, or to at least unravel their own self-serving you know, circle of justifications, is, is not easy, especially in a democracy where there is, there’s got to be free speech. We can’t make it against the law to believe that the earth is flat, but what can we do to persuade people not to join their group, but to join the the, the mainstream, insofar as the mainstream is in touch with reality, which obviously it is when it comes to whether the earth is round or flat?

30:12 Brian Rose: And you talk about that tribalism in your book, and that this is kind of what happens when you, when you don’t embrace the science and the reason, and we’re seeing a lot of that today around the world. Your camp, my camp. Talk to me about why we’re seeing that now, and what’s the base that’s way too overcome. That, because just showing the more statistics isn’t necessarily always the best way to do that.

30:37 Steven Pinker: It isn’t, sometimes it can be.

30:39 And I was heartened by a very recent study by Brendan Nyhan, that when you present facts to people in the form of graphs, and this was due to my heart, because that’s the way I make my case. If you can actually persuade people, even often in the highly politicized, contentious issues, so that if you take, say, people on the right who deny global warming, and you show them graphs of three different estimates of global temperature over the past century, all of them going up, a lot of them changing their minds. And conversely, it’s not just the right at all that clings to beliefs that defy evidence.

31:22 It’s obviously a hazard on the left as well, and so we did a complementary study with people on the left, showing them the results of the 2007 surge in Iraq, George W. Bush’s strategy of reducing sectarian violence by sending in a surge of American soldiers, and it really did reduce the rate of deaths, something that people on the left are loath to acknowledge, but you show them the graphs, and a lot of them change their minds. So I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of a graph.

31:54 So maybe that’s a little self-serving, except that’s what I do. But it is true that it’s not, it’s generally not enough. It may not move the needle by as much as I’d like to move it.

32:03 Brian Rose: Okay, what everyone likes your point of view. I mean, Steven, you have a certain style.

32:08 Where are people, I think, want to listen to you? I don’t know if it’s because you’re, I’m, optimism about the situation. I don’t know, because it feels like you’re an objective kind of guy, but I find that the vibe I get from reading your books and seeing how people react to you, I think they always feel like you’re trying to make their life better when you’re telling the things that you don’t want to hear. Like, the surge worked.

32:30 Steven Pinker: Yeah, well, sometimes I, I have been the target of some angry attacks.

32:33 I’ve responded to them in an article called The Enlightenment War, and reflections on Enlightenment Now, a year later.

32:41 Brian Rose: Okay, it’s a lot about, what would he say?

32:44 Steven Pinker: Oh, there are, there a number of attacks from the, the hard left, the idea that capitalism has made people better off, which it clearly has. If you don’t believe me, we’d rather live in North Korea or South Korea? If you go back in time, we’d rather live in West Germany or East Germany, or today we’d rather live in Venezuela or in Chile.

33:06 So capitalism really works. It doesn’t mean that it has to be capitalism without social safety net or without regulation. In fact, there’s no such thing as capitalism without a social safety net or regulation. I show that in the book. A hundred percent of developed capitalist countries have extensive social redistribution, including Britain and the United States.

33:28 It’s not just Scandinavia. The difference is, it turns out the difference between Scandinavia and on the one hand the US and Britain, and the other, are pretty small. I mean, there, there is a difference, in the way you’d expect. Sweden and Norway really do have more extensive social welfare than the United States. They’re not that far apart.

33:47 So, so the question is, to whether we should have capitalism raw, untrammeled, unbridled, a hundred percent free market? It’s just not an issue that does not exist. Okay, maybe you try to try it for the first time, if you’re a hardcore libertarian, but if you do, you’re doing something that history has never seen.

34:06 Brian Rose: So anyway, by talking about that, inflame some people. On the way, does it, you can say, largest, you usually play into what they say.

34:14 Steven Pinker: Well, you know, I live in a left-wing world, being in a university, and and the, the, the culture of book reviewing, of journalism, definitely tilts left. So that’s one thing that gets people mad. I also, the, I also get flak from the kind of the Trumpian right, because I do believe that pretty much everything that authoritarian populism and Donald Trump stand for is the opposite of enlightenment thinking, and I think it can push back against a lot of this progress.

34:50 So there’s a lot of ire from them, then, and on the left now, because in our culture, everything, at least in America, no matter what the problem is, the the, the root cause is always racism. America has become absolutely obsessed with racism, and so there are critics who say, well, didn’t the Enlightenment give rise to modern racism and slavery and colonial exploitation? That’s total nonsense. It’s an exact opposite. It was during the Enlightenment you had the first movement to abolish slavery and to push back against imperialism for the first time in history.

35:36 But nonetheless there is a left-wing retrospective critique of Enlightenment, because of this, I think, anachronistic attribution. So no, I do, I do attract enemy fire, so you know, I try to be as reasonable as I can be, but it certainly doesn’t work on everyone.

35:57 Brian Rose: And you say that the progressives are actually about progress.

36:02 Steven Pinker: Yes, progressives hate progress. What is it that, well, the people who call themselves progressive, capital P, tend to be on the left, because the, their case depends on current society being just irredeemably corrupt and racist and exploitative, and has to be replaced by something completely different.

36:27 The idea that actually we’re better off than we used to be, and we still got severe problems, but that the institutions that we have now, like democracy, like markets, like international organizations, like universities, scientific establishments, where we have made the world better off, and so you should really think twice before you want to bulldoze them and create something from a clean drawing board. We are clearly, we have to improve the institutions that we have, but they’re better than a lot of alternatives. So that doesn’t sit well with with a certain so-called progressive critique, which, if it acknowledged progress, would be conceding that some of the institutions that we have now are not so bad, right?

37:12 Brian Rose: Or at least you could imagine a lot worse, but they can’t really acknowledge it, because, and then that kind of takes away everything that they’re about. I mean, even subconsciously it’s hard to acknowledge it, and I mean, you see it today. I mean, these things like the patriarchy, and then race is a huge issue in debate in America, and it seems like that from the left, the decision is, it’s got to all be torn down, and we have to come up with a new solution.

37:34 Steven Pinker: Absolutely, but, and there is a right-wing version as well, and to put it mildly, because it’s now kind of running the country. Donald Trump ran on a deeply distant worldview. His famous inaugural address, infamous inaugural address, and carnage and failing schools, probably written by Steve Bannon, who was, insofar as there’s a kind of brains behind the operation during the campaign. He was it, but it was a view that that in fact encapsulated by his campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”

38:09 It used to be great, now it’s not. Things have gotten worse, so the idea that there’s been progress is also anathema to the populist right. It’s not just a left-wing thing, I even, but it always sells.

38:21 Brian Rose: Steven, I mean, you look at every presidential campaign for the last 100 years, and there are similar themes of let’s make this country great again.

38:30 Steven Pinker: Well, no, there haven’t.

38:31 There are some differences. So for example, you know, Ronald Reagan, “It’s morning in America again,” morning in America, fantastically optimistic. Barack Obama, “Hope and change.” Of Franklin Roosevelt, the the idea that we’re living in a particularly dark moment, and we need a charismatic ruler to make us great again, is a theme that Trump was about the first to use it. It is always, but the appeal of fascist leaders, and there is, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t go so far as to most to say that Trump is a fascist.

39:05 He’s, good, the United States into a fascist dictatorship. You know, I think that that’s hyperbolic, but he does, it’s, it’s gruesomely fascinating to see some of the themes of fascism being replayed in a democracy. When Trump says, for example, he wants to prosecute the comedy show Saturday Night Live because they constantly make fun of him. Well, you know, shutting down a comedy show because they criticize the leader? I mean, that sounds like, you know, Kim Jong-un or Joseph Stalin.

39:37 It’s kind of shocking to hear that out of the mouth of an American president, and obviously it’s not gonna happen. I really, I’m not paranoid enough to think that he’s going to turn the country into a fascist dictatorship, but it is chilling to see that that kind of impulse that often leaders do exercise when they can get away with it, but to, to know that that’s a temptation of certain kinds of leaders,

40:01 Brian Rose: but it doesn’t surprise you, and you saw this kind of coming? you saw this coming.

40:06 Steven Pinker: Yeah, I can’t, you know, I wish I could say that, but the reality is that I didn’t. And like many, I was stunned on November 8th, 2016, and throughout from scan dealing, it can confess, I thought, oh, this is a, you know, he said he’s a media magnet. He’ll get a little bit of attention, and then he’ll fade away, so I was wrong. And I, as I was writing Enlightenment Now, his election took place when I was about halfway through. I had to figure out what’s, what’s going on.

40:39 This clearly, whatever forces toward enlightenment and progress that we have seen, such as international cooperation, such as respect for truth in institutions, of a fact-finding and truth-telling, such as cosmopolitanism, the idea that we’re better off when people and ideas mix than if we stick to our insular silos. All of these he pushed back at, and he got elected with a minority of the votes, but he did get elected, and so it, it was a reminder that these, that the process toward enlightenment is often a, and he’ll battle, and if it advances at all, it’s often, in the best of worlds, two steps forward, one step back.

41:23 Brian Rose: Now you’re the king of the graphs, and you put up these fantastic graphs, usually the last 100 years or 300 years.

41:31 Brian Rose: Um, a hundred years from now, what’s to keep us from having these same sort of strange cycles in our tribalism, in our leaders? I mean, where are these crazy little reactive monkeys that are running around? Sometimes we can be logical, sometimes we create enlightenment through reason and science, and then sometimes we don’t. Clear them. Do you think that this will be an anomaly?

41:54 And it’s Steven Pinker, the 14th, is we’re gonna show a graph one day at the TED talk and say, my great-great-great-grandfather used to talk about this, but now there’s no more of this. Now, yeah, we understand our cognitive biases. We’ve got much more science and reason, and that’s why that Trump thing that happened in the back, in the, in the day, will never happen again. Do you think we’ll get there?

42:15 Steven Pinker: Yeah, no, I think we can get better than we are now, but I think I would not be surprised if a hundred years, there are flat earthers, but question is, how influential will they be?

42:24 How kooky? How fringe? I think there are just features in human nature that pull us back toward magical thinking and tribalism and demonization, and they’re gonna be with us as long as we’re human. It’s our institutions and our norms that repress them. I think over the long run, they can, they really can make progress, as we see in the fact that some things that were open debate are open to debate, are now a done deal, and they aren’t brought up again, such as, I’m going to take an extreme example with which I began Better Angels of Our Nature: a human sacrifice.

43:02 The idea that you want better weather, or your crop, you’re worried about your crops failing, and so you throw a virgin into a volcano. Every civilization did that. The Bible, was, the people that I, were just getting over it, which is why they had to explicitly outlaw it. Now we don’t have to have a lot, because it just wouldn’t occur to most, be better to cut that, cut the beating heart out of a living person to placate an angry god. That’s progress.

43:28 We’ll be doing that as a problem. Be doing that, slave auctions. No, there is still, of course, human trafficking and underground slavery, but of course there used to be above-ground slavery, chattel slavery, and contracts, and government enforcing the right of slave owners to capture runaway slaves. And, you know, and that’s gone. No country has legal slavery anymore, and we see that in our own lifetimes: decriminalization of homosexuality, first women’s suffrage, then equality of women and under the law, so we can make progress despite our own worst selves.

44:07 It doesn’t mean that racism and sexism and magical thinking have been abolished, but they have been capped in one domain after another, and it will always be a struggle to keep, keep it going, but history tells us that not only there’s a direction to history that, that’s kind of mystical, and I’m not a mystic, but there are some mistakes that we make, that, you know, by and large we learn how to not make again. And just give an example of how they’re there, even though I don’t think we’re gonna see an end to irrationality, it’s gonna depend on the quality of our educational system, on what kind of unwritten norms and rules we impose on in journalism and intellectual discourse and conversations like this one, but I think progress can be made, and I think there may be kinds that might even seem romantic or utopian today that could very well happen.

45:01 Like, to be concrete, an end of interstate war, wars between two countries. Now, that might seem to be, like, you know, a result of having too much brown acid, a twin stock, or this was smoking of one too many legal joints. But I think that we could abolish devos war, war, but we’re kind of almost there, that if you look at the number of wars, but putting aside civil wars, which we still have, but country A declares war on country B, and they meet in the battlefield, and they have battalions of tanks, and they bomb each other’s cities, and they have naval battles with battleships, that doesn’t happen anymore.

45:41 Not that it can’t happen, but there are only 192 countries. If all of them agree that this is a stupid way to resolve disputes, it’s not inconceivable that that interstate war could go the way of slave auctions and dueling among men of honor. Civil wars are gonna be harder to stamp out, because all it takes is a bunch of young men and get their hands on some, some Kalashnikovs, and you’ve got the People’s Front for the Liberation of Whatever, and that’s harder to get rid of than an agreement among 192 countries.

46:14 It could pop up anywhere. Okay, but that’s an example of how things could get better, even though I don’t think it will never reach the point where it comes for free.

46:22 Brian Rose: Right, and if people look at the media, they would be like, wow, that’s, Steven’s obviously not done this research. Look at Iraq and Afghanistan and all these places, but by the, if you go back to the numbers and really look at the last 60 years, it used to be something where there was always countries at war, ya know?

46:37 It’s gone down dramatically, and in fact the Iraq war was the last interstate war where country A declares war on country B, even though we still have civil wars like in Syria, and sometimes these, you have something that’s somewhat in between, where you have a civil war where some foreign power butts in on the side of, typically on the side of the government, and that’s what we saw in Syria, with Russia and Iran helping Assad. So that’s, and those wars are kind of halfway between civil wars and dangers and full interstate wars.

47:13 Brian Rose: Okay, tell me about your thoughts on the gender debate because I’m trying to climb up the curve when it comes to this debate.

47:21 I’m no spring chicken. I’m in my 40s right now, and this, we weren’t talking about this when I was younger, and MIT people weren’t, you know, identifying anything other than the binary gender of male and female. Today people are, there’s a lot of discussion about, are there differences in the gender? You’ve got people like Jordan Peterson saying there should be a pay difference between men and women. You’ve got people at Google being thrown out because they say there’s a reason that men are engineers.

47:46 You’ve got other people saying that there should be fluidity between these two things. What can you tell us from their research, and what are the kind of conversations we should be having around this, and also, from science and reason, where can we go to where this becomes less tribal and less divisive?

48:05 Steven Pinker: Yes. So there is, I started writing about this in a chapter called Gender in my book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, where I note that the empirical issue of whether there are differences on average between men and women is often confused with a political issue, of should there be equality between the sexes.

48:25 And Minh, and it’s been an article of faith among at least a certain class of feminists, I wouldn’t say all, that the idea that men and women are different is inherently sexist, and we must combat that if we want women to advance to full equality. And I argue in that chapter and elsewhere, I’m a feminist. My belief that women have been oppressed, I believe that there should be equality, but we should pry that away from the empirical claim that men and women are indistinguishable.

49:00 First of all, it’s not true. Second of all, it doesn’t matter to the principle that we ought that women should not be harassed or assaulted or discriminated against or demeaned or belittled. You can believe that whether or not men and women are exactly the same. In fact, I would say it’s rather insulting to women to say that they only deserve equality if they are the same as men, and so that is the main conceptual point that I made. We’ve got to distinguish the scientific question of whether men and women are the same from the moral and political question of whether we should push back against sexism, and, and, and work toward equality.

49:40 In terms of what the facts are here, again, some statistical thinking is absolutely obligatory. Namely, if men and women differ in some average, that doesn’t mean that every man is worse than every woman, or vice versa. You have two overlapping distributions. Typically, here’s the average for men, and here’s the average for women. They’re not that far apart, but they’re not on top of each other either.

50:07 But at the same time, because the curves overlap, do you take an ability that women tend to be better at on average, say verbal fluency? It doesn’t mean that every woman is more fluent than every last man. A lot of men who are more fluent than your average woman. Conversely, if men are better at three-dimensional mental rotation of shapes, it doesn’t mean that every man is better than every woman. It’s on average.

50:31 So why should we care about averages? Well, the reason that the averages are relevant is you can’t go from a discrepancy in the gender ratio in a particular profession, say, the proportion of mechanical engineers that are female is less than 50%, say, aha, that’s proof of discrimination. I mean, there may be discrimination, but that doesn’t prove it, because there may be differences in ability or, more likely, in interests. Much bigger than any difference in cognitive styles between men and women are just differences in life priorities and interests in general, on average, and again, averages don’t apply to every individual, but women tend to be more interested in people than men.

51:16 You get a higher percentage of men who are in fields where they don’t have to think about human beings at all. Again, mighty, like MIT, men and women have, different on average, different work-life balance. The everyone cares about career, everyone cares about professional standing, everyone cares about family, but the weights that you give them differ between the sexes. Women tend to opt for a more balanced life. Men are, are more likely to be, you know, crazed careerists, sacrifice everything to climb the hierarchy.

51:55 Again, on average, right, not, not, and these averages get magnified over time, and sometimes that means that 90% of the Fortune 500 CEOs are men. Like it can go either way, because we know in some cases they can be neutralized or even reversed. So there are professions, for example, that are now majority female or very close to 50/50, that used to be male-dominated. Medicine is pretty close to gender parity. Veterinary medicine is female-dominated.

52:26 That was not true fifty years ago, and so in a free society people should be able to pursue their interests, and the proportions could vary from 50/50 in different directions, and my argument is that’s fine, as long as you have freedom and individuals treated as individuals, and lack of discrimination. That’s not the same as saying that the only justice is 50/50 in all professions, because if you insist on 50/50 in all professions, you’re going to be forcing some women to do things they don’t want to do, and the same, same for men. The reason that 50/50 is considered to be a benchmark for justice is the theory that we’re all blank slates, that nature did not give us anything, and therefore all differences between men and women come from the way that their parents bring them up, in cultures impose expectations.

53:21 Now, of course there are there are cultural stereotypes. Sometimes they reflect reality, sometimes they don’t, and there is evidence, I think, in some domains that there really are sex differences, certainly in sexuality. The differences are massive. I mean, that’s the case with it, the two means are often not so close.

53:43 Brian Rose: What does that mean?

53:44 Steven Pinker: Oh, and oh, desire for a variety of impersonal sexual encounters, got a type of promiscuity. It’s much more of a guy thing. It’s been historically, it’s the male leaders who assemble large harems, not not the queens’ men. They do much more sexual harassing. They do much more sexual assaulting.

54:07 They consume more visual pornography. They are the customers for prostitutes. They, and so there I think the difference is large. They’re perfectly understandable from the viewpoint of evolution, namely because of differences in the way we make babies. The role of the man and the role of a woman are very different.

54:28 A woman who gets, in order to reproduce, is tied up for nine months of pregnancy, and in traditional cultures, a couple of years of nursing. A man can get away with five minutes of copulation, and that’s the, you can get away with that minimum. That means that there is some selection pressure on the male to have sex with as many women as possible. It doesn’t buy the woman anything to have sex with as many men as possible, get pregnant the same number of times, whereas a man could in theory sire a large number of babies.

55:04 That’s why in many mammalian species, the male is the more rapacious in both senses, consumer or sex, and I think we see that in humans. Again, the reason that that’s more controversial than it should be, in a way it’s been the common sense and conventional wisdom throughout the ages and in all societies. Why would that be controversial? Because people confuse it with the moral claim that men can’t help it. They, boys will be boys, we shouldn’t try to punish men for sexual harassment or, or, or, or for rape.

55:41 They can’t help it, all of which is nonsense, but people tend to confuse those two claims, and once again there is a political push for the claim that I think is false, that men and women are indistinguishable, as a way to advance the moral claim that we should eliminate harassment and rape and exploitation. And they’re different. Of course we should eliminate rape and harassment and exploitation, and I think the best way to do that is to have a clear-eyed view of what men are like and what women are like, so that we can design policies that are in touch with reality.

56:15 Brian Rose: Yeah, what about this engineer at Google who wrote this piece? So, James, do more. Yeah, James Damore. He was, you know, later sacked. There’s, he’s in Silicon Valley, which is obviously probably leftist in views, and the company maybe is, but he was making some observations, I think, about men being coders, and maybe I don’t know all the details, but he was let go.

56:35 What do you make of that, and what do you think is the right thing to do there?

56:40 Steven Pinker: Yeah, so he was, he was making arguments in a little, little bit clumsily, in the sense of not anticipating the pushback and choosing the right applying the right delicacy and the right to try to make it palatable. But the arguments that he was making were, were ones that many researchers on sex differences would endorse, and the bottom line being that the fact that the ratio of coders is not exactly 50/50 doesn’t by itself prove discrimination.

57:08 It doesn’t mean that there isn’t discrimination, but that doesn’t tell you whether there is or isn’t. The way to show discrimination, I mean, it’s nothing. You can never show discrimination, or studies where you say, pass out fake resumes to employers, and you put a male or a female name on the same set of qualifications. In the past, that did unearth cases of sex discrimination. The most recent study in academia shows that it’s actually the bias, if anything, goes in the direction of favoring, favoring women, but that’s the gold standard for showing discrimination.

57:41 Looking at being counting and saying, well, there are more men than women, just doesn’t tell you anything, because it could reflect differences in life priorities and interests, and that was the point that he was making. It was absolutely right, even if he made it too clumsily for him to be fired. It shows how campus culture is creeping into the corporate world. Not so much that the Silicon Valley is on the left, because there’s, they’re pretty libertarian, although they have a special Silicon Valley version of libertarianism.

58:12 It’s not the Koch brothers libertarian party version, or, to say nothing of the minor and Objectivist version, but, but certainly the leadership, they know which way the winds are blowing. They know what, what will keep influence and prestige of the companies. And so there is some leftist orientation on the management. Yeah, I think it was regrettable that he, that he was fired just for circulating a memo, because it does, I think truth and reality are really good things, and if there is – if there is harassment or demeaning of women in a tech company, that ought to be addressed, but it may not be the reason that women aren’t able to pursue careers in tech, and maybe other things, such as if, if it, in fact, one of the reasons that women are not as prevalent in tech as they, they themselves would want to be, it may be family-unfriendly policies that, for example, make it extraordinarily difficult to keep a job and have a child, and since we all depend on there being children, it could be that policies that make it impossible to work and have a child are discriminated against women, not arbitrarily, but as a byproduct of just not acknowledging that there were mammals.

59:39 Knowing that that is the real cause of women being kept out of tech could lead to policies that actually increase the number of women in tech, or at least increase the number of women who want to be in tech in tech. And so understanding the true causes of gender representation, I would argue, is essential, and that is exactly what’s getting squelched if you fire a guy who even questions the dominant consensus, that the dogma.

1:00:06 Brian Rose: Right. I keep hearing this word patriarchy come up a lot, and actually have Rose McGowan here last week, and she was talking about her experiences, and, you know, very powerful, what she did, what it was all about.

1:00:20 But that word patriarchy was kind of something thrown out there, that it was representing everything bad about America, this male dominance piece. And I was just wondering how you view that word through the lens of, okay, what does that mean? What is that, very historically, what does that word mean to you? It’s kind of like, well, it’s loaded these days.

1:00:38 Steven Pinker: It is, it’s, it’s not that recent a coinage.

1:00:40 That certainly goes back to the second wave of feminism in the 1970s, when the word was bandied about. Well, it’s often used to mean a regime of male dominance, in particular older men, fathers. That’s what patriarchal originally, I think, patriarchy literally means rule by a father or a male ancestor. And there’s no question that there are societies where the elder male is awarded power and keeps it, such as the ones in the Old Testament. That’s as patriarchal as you can get.

1:01:16 You know, it’s used often now as a way of implying that arbitrary political structures are, which keep men in power, with this, with an explicit goal of keeping men in power, are the reason for all gender disparities. I think that’s the way it tends to be used.

1:01:36 Brian Rose: And is it valid, or do we have lots of checks and balances in place?

1:01:42 Steven Pinker: To, what, it’s certainly, it’s what we overused, in the sense that it’s that, sum in two ways. One is the one that we’ve been talking about, namely that the only way that you can go from absence of a 50:50 sex ratio to discrimination, or ever use it as evidence of discrimination, is if you think that the sexes are indistinguishable to begin with.

1:02:09 And so some claims of patriarchy may try to explain facts that really do, due to differences on average between the sexes in their interests and talents and life priorities, but also it tends to politicize behavior that may not be political at all, in particular rape and sexual assault and sexual harassment, which I think are, come from the different natures of male and female sexuality, that it’s a much more powerful desire in men to have sex with a lot of partners than it is in women, and that leads to crimes such as rape and harassment and exploitation. And again, again, to just say, as I would, that this is not part of an explicit part of the patriarchy in the sense of system of practices and laws that are designed to keep men in power, that rape is an intimidation tactic, a way of keeping women in their place.

1:03:17 I think is nonsense. But the concept of patriarchy is often used to make that argument, and it’s confused with, and even this conversation could lead to outrage on the part of people who want to confuse the issue of whether rape is a horrific crime, which we ought to eliminate, with a claim that rape is a tactic to solidify the patriarchy, as opposed to a horrible byproduct of male sexuality. Because it is something of a dogma in educated circles that rape has nothing to do with sex, that rape is only to do with power.

1:03:58 That was an idea that goes back to actually quite an excellent book by Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will, in 1975, which first raised awareness of the somewhat lax treatment of rape in the culture and in the legal system. Things. It was a very important book, but buried entirely true. Well, if, in just, I went back to the book and I reread it. There’s just two sentences in which she mentions the theory that rape is a tactic by which all men control all women, which is crazy, because it would mean that men are happy for their their sisters and their daughters and their mothers and their wives and girlfriends to be raped, because it helps them stay on top of women.

1:04:43 It has a gender, but it also implies that even though men will pay for sex, even though men will try to persuade women to have sex, even men will do anything that they didn’t think of to get sex. They’ll never try to take it by force. That makes no sense if you just think about how human beings work. Anything that people will want, some people will try to steal, including sex. Now, the reason that that should be controversial is that it’s confused with the idea, so you’re justifying it.

1:05:17 You’re saying that men can’t help it, that it’s only natural, it’s only part of the male nature, therefore we shouldn’t try to combat it. Now that’s, that makes no sense. All kinds of things that people do can have obvious self-interested motives, like murder, robbery, like slavery, like theft, and we still try to eliminate them because they’re evil, because they harm other people. But because of the way that they that, that intellectual academic feminism advanced starting in the ’70s, that just became part of the catechism, part of the dogma.

1:05:54 I don’t think it’s very useful in combating rape. I think recognizing the ugliness of male sexuality is something that we have to deal with in order to reduce rape as much as possible, but that’s the way the disguise the conversation is gone. And the, by the way, one of the missing ingredients in this whole debate is that human beings, although they have all kinds of ugly and destructive urges and impulses, also have the power of self-control. We don’t act on lots of things that we feel, and a legal regime that punishes aggression, like rape, like harassment, can engage the parts of the brain that disincentivize people from acting on their impulses.

1:06:54 Now, we know that this is just, there’s just a feature of human life. We have receiving with things that we want to do that we don’t do, because we know that we shouldn’t do them. Do you pull people on their homicidal fantasies? If they were fantasized about killing someone, majority of people of both sexes, by the way, confess that at least once, sometimes many, many, much more often than once, they fantasize about killing a rival, a romantic rival, a stepparent, a boss.

1:07:26 Needless to say, the vast majority of people don’t act on those fantasies. Likewise with rape and sexual assault. It is no contradiction between saying that in some men there is, that the sexual urge can result in the use of power to get sex, the use of violence to get sex, and that that can be completely inhibited, especially if we have a legal regime that punishes it.

1:07:54 Brian Rose: Hmm. Misha, and just strangely, maybe off-topic question, but it’s not a topic for me.

1:08:01 Um, last year I went down to Costa Rica, and I took in three ayahuasca ceremonies. It’s a plant medicine, and before that I had Michael Pollan on here talking about his book, I think, How to Change Your Mind, and about psychedelics, and one thing that always comes up in those ceremonies for me is that the tribalism and all of that goes away, and it’s almost as if I’m told that that’s a bunch of nonsense, and that’s a way that we try to fight with each other, and always walk out of those ceremonies with a feeling of, if we need to include everybody, we need to be one race, we need to look out for each other, and we need to be less selfish, more helping to other people, less violence. And you know, obviously that’s playing with some interesting brain chemistry by doing that, but it doesn’t seem to be that there’s no correlation between that and much of what you talk about, and I’m wondering if you have thought about some of that from a brain science standpoint, or even from things that we deep down know are important, and just wanted to get your thoughts on that.

1:09:00 And if you’re ever gonna write a book, yeah, like Michael’s book.

1:09:05 Steven Pinker: Yeah, no, you’re right, that I am that I, I don’t go there, partly because of my own ignorance and my own focus, and this is in a sense some of that is almost a hacking our hardware, to at least when it comes to medicinals and herbs and drugs. And you’re right, there, there is a reason to think that a sense of universal solidarity, love, communality can be encouraged by, some might say, the release of oxytocin in the brain.

1:09:35 I tend to be a software guy, who, or rather than a hardware guy. You remember the old joke from MIT: how many software engineers does it take to change a light bulb? The answer is none. It’s a hardware problem. So maybe I’m a victim of that.

1:09:50 Of course it’s not just, it’s not just you know, chemistry. I’m not just chemistry that that changes our brain chemistry, ingesting substances, but you’re right that certain ceremonies and symbolism and coordinated activity could empower those parts of the, of the brain, and and, and, and you’re right that that would certainly be a positive development, and it’s just one that I, that I have neglected, least so far.

1:10:14 Brian Rose: Right. Well, you’re pretty busy with this stuff.

1:10:17 Last time you were here on the show, there was, there was not this thing called Instagram, and now it is one of the most prevalent social media platforms, where people are sharing pictures and videos of themselves and communicating, and things are going viral in a crazy way. Social media has changed a lot in the last six years. What do we have to know about this media, because it’s a media unlike what happened before? And you were saying earlier how we need to look at how we educate ourselves.

1:10:46 Journalism, I mean, journalism is kind of nothing like we used to be. Twenty years ago it was something that was created by institutions, people that were employed, and journalists that had editors, that had protocols. Nowadays there’s none of that stuff. I watched the New York Times the past seven or eight days, and I was a bit surprised on how biased it was towards, for example, what happened in New Zealand. But on top of that, you’ve now got YouTube, Instagram, all these other things.

1:11:13 Brian Rose: What do you think we need to look out for when it comes to this social media, and, you know, and what is it gonna look like in 10 years?

1:11:22 Steven Pinker: Yeah, great question, and it’s so new, and it overtook us, with leading us thinking and not comprehending what, what exactly has been unleashed. I am, I’m interested in this. I can’t claim to have any answers. I do think that social media tend to be blamed for every problem in society now.

1:11:42 That’s a kind of lazy cliché: whatever happens, it’s going wrong, blame it on social media. And a lot of the phenomenon that get blamed on social media are as old as civilization: conspiracy theories. I mean, so a lot of anti-Semitic pogroms, a lot of lynchings, in ethnic riots, wars have been started because of false information, including the Iraq war and the war in Vietnam, the Spanish-American war, World War One. All kinds of rumors and conspiracies that were circulated.

1:12:16 Social media makes some of them easier to circulate, no doubt. And there are also some media, like cable news in the United States, in particular Fox News, that really has changed the political landscape independent of social media. So I think we just have to be careful not to blame everything on social media, but there’s no question that it’s had an effect. And one of things we have to understand is, well, how people see what they do when they post something.

1:12:45 They often perceive it as out there, in a form that, whether or not it’s true, that everyone is seeing it, and everyone knows that everyone else is seeing it. What damn logicians call common knowledge, in the technical sense of everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows something, which is different from the everyone just knowing it. And social media seem to generate that common knowledge. That you get a sense that it’s out there that you can’t ignore it, because everyone not only sees it, knows that you’re seeing it, and that tends to engage a part of our psychology that wants to form coalitions that demonize, that are in the majority, by finding someone to blame or demonize, and ganging up on them.

1:13:32 That kind of mobbing, and that’s a, the social media shaming, the outraged mobs. I’m trying to make sense of them. It wasn’t anticipated, and I, the phenomenon of common knowledge. The reason I’m going there is that it’s going to be the topic of my next book, which is going to be called Don’t Go There, okay? Common Knowledge in the Science of Hypocrisy, Outraged Civility, and Taboo.

1:14:01 Brian Rose: Wow, it’s interesting, because you know, I just asked you about things like patriarchy and these other words and gender bias, but it’s probably because I’m responding to the everyone knows and everyone knows that everyone knows, for, though. That’s right, because I don’t have direct, you know, no one called me a patriarch, and no one told me about a gender bias, but I’m hearing that everyone’s talking about it, and so I’m already doing what you’re talking about.

1:14:27 Steven Pinker: Yeah, there is that, so that that sense of everyone is talking about it is a, our own intuitive grasp of this logical concept of common knowledge.

1:14:35 If A knows something, B knows something, A knows the B knows, and B knows that A knows that, ad infinitum. And it is a distinction that, even though, you know, to write it down as a formula, it would seem unbelievably mathematically abstract, but it’s intuitively very powerful. In things like the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes, where when the little boy said the Emperor was naked, he wasn’t telling anyone anything that they didn’t already know. They could see the Emperor was naked, but by blurting it out, he made it common knowledge.

1:15:08 Now everyone knew that everyone else knew that everyone else knew that everyone else knew. Or things like, it can be ignored. There can’t be, exactly. So everyone knows that anyone can be ignored. That’s the crucial difference: you can’t plausibly deny that, that you know that other people know it, and social media seem to generate common knowledge Emperor’s New Clothes phenomenon, although not always correct.

1:15:32 Once there can be a kind of false common knowledge, but it, the, the way I’m trying to make sense of it is that there’s a combination, on the one hand, of the distinction between common knowledge and just individual knowledge, which is psychologically very powerful, together with the part of our psychology that likes to be in the majority coalition, where the coalition is defined by everyone opposing some evil or infraction or bad guy. And so you often outraged, outraged, you’re in the position where you want to join the snowballing denounces out of terror that you might be denounced. You might even be denounced for failing to denounce.

1:16:15 And we see that in things like the McCarthy era, in which trials, which hunts, in Stalinist Russia and Maoist China, and we are, I think, seeing some of that today, in the the relentless hunt for racists, and the terror that if you don’t denounce racism, that’s proof that you must be a racist, or a trans-phobe. And it is disconcerting to see, in what you would think are enlightened populations, such as on university campuses, this dynamic of denouncing out of fear that you’ll be denounced if you don’t denounce. Good.

1:17:01 Brian Rose: I think that’s a great subject of your next book, and I look forward to trying to understand more of that phenomenon that’s constantly changing. It’s almost like this petri dish, and we’re seeing things that have never happened before, because of the technology. Really?

1:17:16 Steven Pinker: Yeah, yeah, indeed, and it’s a, it’s something that that landed on us, and in the original idea that you open up channels of communication to anyone, can publish anything. I don’t think anyone anticipated it at the time.

1:17:28 We’re living with it now. I’d be interesting to go back and see if in and say, oh my god, you think social media is such a great idea? Here’s what’s gonna happen. All the people who are denouncing, by the way, social media themselves are, have become, I think, a topic of denunciation, mob. But and it would be interesting to go back to see for all the people demonizing Mark Zuckerberg and the Google guys, how many of them, dozen years ago, could really say, well, this technology is going to result in shaming mobs and conspiracy theories and fake news?

1:18:07 Probably not that many.

1:18:08 Brian Rose: No, no, but watch, it happens. So tell me a bit about you, Stephen. What is something that’s your daily practice these days that just is not negotiable for you? What sort of, you have to do every day, whether it’s a writing style or even just something that you do every day to be, you are there.

1:18:26 Brian Rose: Are there some things that you have that are non-negotiable? What scares you?

1:18:51 Steven Pinker: Oh, well, threat of nuclear war. I, I hope improbable.

1:19:08 It’s not that I think that it’s this likely to happen, but if it did happen, it could be awful beyond imagining. My worry about climate change. I worry about the rise of authoritarian populism and the backsliding from cosmopolitan, secular humanist liberal democracy, which we see in a number of parts of the world, not least the United States. So those would be the top three. Okay.

1:19:36 Brian Rose: How we doing with the environment now?

1:19:39 Steven Pinker: So, so, not doing at all well with greenhouse gases in rich countries. Doing better in water and air, but not as good as we should, but you know, as any Londoner knows, there’s no longer the famous London Fog, which wasn’t father, but coal smoke. There, clear skies more often. The Thames is obviously cleaner.

1:20:03 It’s got, you know, salmon and waterfowl and birds of prey.

1:20:07 Brian Rose: Yeah. And The Crown showed us how bad it got.

1:20:10 Steven Pinker: That’s right, that unforgettable episode of The Fog, where people were dropping like flies. Yeah, coal smoke was so thick.

1:20:17 Yeah, so there has been progress. Some, some species have been rescued from the brink of extinction. Not nearly as well as we should be doing, and we should be encouraging the combination of legislation and technology that improves the environment. This includes, you’re not only pricing pollutants, which most notably carbon, which would just send signals at every decision that everyone makes, pushing them away from carbon. And I can imagine taxes on other pollutants, such as plastics, a change in technology so that we get more of what we want with less damage to the environment.

1:21:04 And the advantage of that over policy is that you don’t have to constantly fight political battles and often lose them. But if it just becomes cheaper to get your energy and your packaging and your transportation and your heat without damaging the environment, people will just do it without having to be coerced or persuaded. And a lot of the advances that we’ve seen in the environment have come about for that reason, such as the intensification of agriculture.

1:21:30 You can grow more food on less land, so the abandoned farmland reverts to forest. And then we’ve seen that throughout the temperate world. I think, and ideally, our best hope for dealing with climate, even though I’m an advocate of policies like carbon pricing, it probably would be the development of technologies that just give us lots and lots of carbon-free energy at not much cost, and that’s our best hope, because then people will do it. But we need, there’s one other ingredient to environmental progress, I mean, together with technology and policy, one that is not sufficiently appreciated is that when people get more prosperous and better educated, they tend to put a higher priority on the environment.

1:22:21 We, if you’re in a desperately poor country, quality of the air is kind of low on your priority list. You’d rather have electricity, even if it results in some smog. As you get richer, you’ll spring for the clean air as well, but people do prioritize cooking their food, heating their homes, getting to where they want. And I think that’s something that we have to realize. That’s one of some several areas in which I think the environmental movement has not been good for the environment, by ignoring that fact.

1:22:56 Brian Rose: Right. Energy is good, prosperity is good, and they actually lead, not by themselves, but they encourage what we ultimately want, which is protecting the environment. Yeah. So progress begets progress. In this, din, it can.

1:23:12 Steven Pinker: Yes, and often does.

1:23:13 Brian Rose: Right, Steven. Always ask everyone just a few questions at the end. If I were to give you a magic phone where you can call up the twenty-year-old Steven? Oh, oh, yeah, and give that young man a bit of advice.

1:23:25 Steven Pinker: He wouldn’t listen. He wouldn’t listen.

1:23:27 Brian Rose: Yes, well, what would you tell them anyways? Yes, what would you tell them? Where were you at, son?

1:23:32 Steven Pinker: Yeah. I’ll say something really prosaic, which is that, which I’d tell students, ’cause good time to take math, because you get, you have to, you know, do the problem sets. I guess another MIT, yeah. I have exams, and you can education is clearly a lifelong pursuit. You can’t learn everything you have to know in college.

1:23:56 However, there’s some things that are much easier to learn in college, then than watching the, the, the Brian Rose show. As much as we are enlightening the people who are listening in, they won’t be doing homework, and so I’d say, take, I did take, you know, a fair amount of math, but I would take more. I would have taken more if I could. If I told myself what else, well, you know, some things clearly went, went, went wrong with my marriage choices, if they, they didn’t work out, although who knows whether there was any advice, but the twenty-year-old could have put to use that that’s always the problem in answering that kind of question.

1:24:42 Brian Rose: Would you have been at the stage in which you could have actually acted on the advice? In my situation that you are in, or maybe you needed to make those other choices to get to.

1:24:52 Steven Pinker: Unfortunately, I, I mean, I, I’m, I’m grateful for a lot of things that went well in my life, and I think one of the keys to satisfaction and happiness is to, as they say, say no, wait, no. When you’re winning, no one thinks are going right, don’t always complain about everything.

1:25:08 Yeah, and I’m fortunate, and I appreciate my good fortune, in that I don’t think I’m made a lot of really bad decisions. I mean, I made some, everyone does, but but especially comparing, as much as I feel anxiety, as much as I feel, you know, occasional anger and disgruntlement, as we all do, I try to keep it in perspective, that looking at the mass of humanity, I’ve been extremely fortunate.

1:25:31 Brian Rose: And I thought your work, that allows you to feel so grateful when you look at these graphs, so you look at the rest of the world, that because you always seem to have an innate sense of gratitude about your world.

1:25:44 Steven Pinker: Well, it does mean reading history really leads you to appreciate the present, but living in a prosperous liberal democracy is a really good thing in that way, and then from the perspective of all of human history, our ancestors really had to suffer through a lot that we don’t have to worry about as much.

1:26:02 Brian Rose: Yeah, very much so. Second part of that question: best advice you’ve ever received, could have come from a parent, from a writing instructor, from a professor, from a colleague.

1:26:12 Things out. It’s just good advice for life or teaching or anything.

1:26:17 Steven Pinker: Oh, oh. First one that pops to mind is advice that I got from an editor when I was just making the transition from academic writing to more popular writing, and she said, she was an editor at Cambridge University Press, Susan Bell, Mulkey, would have given her credit, and she was trying to sign me up to write my first popular book. She said, a mistake that a lot of academics make when they cross over is to talk down, to assume that their audience is just, you know, not that bright.

1:26:51 But I said, that’s the wrong attitude. You’ve got to assume that your readers are as smart as you are, but just don’t know something that you happen to know, your college roommate up here, but they went into some other line of work, and you’re now sharing with them what you’ve done. And that I actually took advantage of that bit of advice, not only in over the course of my writing career, but when I wrote my own writing manual, The Sense of Style, I noted that one of the keys to good writing is that the writer treats the reader as an equal.

1:27:25 Now, of course, the writer, I mean, it may not be true that your readers are as smart as you, or they may be smarter, but the thing is that you adopt the mindset that they are, and that’s a, that’s a key to good responsible writing, and even helps those people who made, mean, obvious, as smart as you are, or maybe smarter. But that that might say that was a bit of a good bit of advice. Probably lots of scraps that I learned along the way that, if I had a little more time to think about it, I could, I could come up with.

1:27:57 Brian Rose: That’s a good nugget. Really good. I mean, it comes out of your writing, and it makes a lot of sense that you think that way. Last part of that, that 20-year-old is watching, us, listening to us out there. What’s the one piece of advice you can kind of give them, arm them with?

1:28:08 Steven Pinker: Oh yeah, actually, this is one that has occurred to me. Okay, I’ve always been tongue-tied when people ask me that, but here’s one, and one that I retrospectively realized that I, I, fired by, is, that not to have intellectual heroes, in the sense of, or I shouldn’t say not to have heroes, but rather not to have prophets or gurus or leaders, in the sense that whatever they say, you then adopt that as part of your belief system. Because I have found that all the people that I tremendously admire, all the geniuses who’ve influenced me, there’s always a point at which I, you know, I can’t follow them there, and that’s natural.

1:28:50 No one is a god. No one is omniscient. No one is a real prophet. We’re all humans. And some people have brilliant insights, discoveries, but it is never the case that everything they say is true or worth believing.

1:29:07 And then, it may sound kind of obvious, but I have seen in academia people treat other people as infallible fonts of wisdom, and so I have always been aware of when to jump off the train, even if I’m following someone.

1:29:23 Brian Rose: It’s very good advice. I appreciate that. The book is Enlightenment Now. Bill Gates says, my new favorite book of all time.

1:29:32 Do you know Bill?

1:29:33 Steven Pinker: Not well, and we were not best buddies, but I’ve had conversations with him over the years on a number of occasions. Item recommendation. It is sure to be, the law. Talk about being grateful.

1:29:43 Brian Rose: Yeah, that’s super grateful. Um, Stephen, thank you so much. There’s great stuff in this book, and again, you don’t have to be a scientist to understand and appreciate just this concept of enlightenment, that it was a recent thing, and then it’s caused all of this progress. And it’s a great lens, I think, to view this world, because people can get overwhelmed when they tap into social media, in the news, and overwhelmed with this kind of bad news. With it, leads, it bleeds, and it’s great to kind of frame all of those things in perspective and see if we can drill down to some of the science, taking some, some deep breaths of air, and just trying to make sense of it.

1:30:17 And I really appreciate what you do, Stephen. Is you bring a tone to this that’s different than anybody else. It’s optimistic. It’s maybe because you’re talking to the audience, maybe it’s that that you bring, where you’d, over, talk down to the audience. You include people, and that’s what I think makes you really unique.

1:30:34 And so very much appreciate that. And I always see with a big smile on the TED stage, and you actually seem to embody that gratitude, and that’s why I think you have so many fans, because you kind of want to say, let’s go there together, let’s learn these lessons together. I’m not here to tell you you’re wrong. I’m not here to be divisive. I’m here so we all can learn how to just be more objective and get to the next level.

1:30:55 So thank you so much for all of that stuff.

1:30:57 Steven Pinker: Well, thank you, and there’s quite a bit here. Let’s not let it make, be another six years before you come back.

1:31:03 Brian Rose: Oh gosh, oh, and good luck for the next book. Um, and hopefully we’ll have you back.

1:31:08 Steven Pinker: Sure, hope so. Has so much, thanks so much.