Name: Stephen Pinker on What Has Happened to Being Rational
Uploaded: 2021-12-02T21:39:45.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Stephen Pinker on What Has Happened to Being Rational' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-12-02. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Stephen Pinker on What Has Happened to Being Rational' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-12-02. Transcript available.

The Joe Rogan Experience.
Your book, the new book, is Rationality.
Rationality. What it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters.
It is kind of scarce.
It certainly seems scarce.
What has happened to us?
Well, I think that there's a lot of rationality inequality.
Yeah.
Because, you know, at the top end, we've never been more rational.
Not only do we have just mind-boggling technology in terms of mRNA vaccines and
smartphones and 3D printing and artificial intelligence,
but we have rationality applied to areas of life that formerly were just a
matter of, you know, seat-of-the-pants guesswork and hunches and you rely on
experts.
So you have things like, you know, Moneyball, where some genius thought, well,
if you make decisions in sports like drafting and strategy based on data,
instead of the hunches of, you know, some old general manager, you could
actually have an advantage.
And so the Oakland A's went all the way with a fairly small budget for players
because they applied data.
Now every team has a statistician.
Hmm.
Data-driven policing.
One of the reasons that the crime rate in the U.S. fell by more than half in
the 1990s wasn't that all of a sudden guns were taken off the street.
It wasn't that, you know, racism vanished or inequality vanished.
Part of it was that police got smarter since a lot of violence happens in a few
small areas of a city, often by a few, you know, hotheads, a few perpetrators.
Yeah.
If you concentrate police on where the crime hotspots are, you can control a
lot of crime without that much manpower.
We were just having a conversation.
Evidence-based medicine.
Yeah.
You know, evidence-based policy and governance.
So there are areas in which we've applied rationality in areas that formerly
were just gut feelings and hunches.
I'll give you one other example, effective altruism, a movement that I'm kind
of loosely connected with.
Where do your charitable dollars save the most lives?
Should you buy malarial bed nets?
Should you buy seeing eye dogs for blind people?
It makes a big difference.
And that's, so charity now is becoming more rational.
So all of these areas, policing and sports and charity and government are
becoming more rational.
But of course, at the same time, you've got chemtrail conspiracy theorists.
You've got the idea that COVID vaccines are a way for Bill Gates to implant.
Microchips in people's-
They're not?
Yeah.
Don't they make you magnetic?
Right.
What's interesting to me is that there's a thing that goes along with
irrational thought where you have irrational thought that is confined to your
party lines, right?
Oh, yes.
Like if you are, I mean, this is just a blanket statement, but if you are right
wing, you are more likely to dismiss the worries of climate change.
Yeah, absolutely.
Why is that?
In fact, that is the main predictor of whether you dismiss climate change.
It has nothing to do with scientific literacy.
You know, a lot of my fellow scientists say, oh, the fact that there's so much
denial of man-made climate change means we need better science education in the
schools.
Yeah.
We need scientists becoming more popular and making the climate science more
accessible.
It turns out that whether you accept human-made climate change or not has
nothing to do with how much science you know.
And a lot of the people who do accept it know, you know, diddly about the
science.
They often will think, well, yeah, climate change isn't that because of, you
know, the hole in the ozone layer and toxic waste dumps and, you know, plastic
straws in the oceans.
Right.
A lot of them are out to lunch.
Whereas some of the climate deniers, they're like well-prepared litigators.
They can find every loophole.
They know every study.
You know, a good lawyer can argue against anything.
What does predict your acceptance of climate change is just where you are in
the political spectrum.
The farther to the right, the more denial.
So what you said is absolutely right.
It's not just more denial but this willingness to instantaneously argue it.
Like the subject came up, oddly enough, in jujitsu.
We're after class.
We're like just getting dressed and putting stuff away.
And someone said, man, it's just a fact of life that is getting hotter every
year.
And this guy jumped in immediately with like this defense of this idea that
climate change is nonsense.
And it's like, listen, it's a cycle.
It's always been going on like this.
How much research have you done?
Like you don't think people affect it at all?
I'm like, yeah, it is a cycle, right?
If you go back and look at core samples and you look at the ice ages and you
look at all the various times and the history of the earth, the climate has
moved.
We were actually just talking about this yesterday.
I had someone on who was an expert in ancient civilizations and all these
archaeological mysteries that they've found.
And one of the things we were talking about was the Sahara Desert, that the Sahara
Desert goes through this period of every like 20,000 years or so where it's
green and then it becomes a desert again and then it becomes green again.
And it goes back and forth.
And 5,000 plus years ago, it was very green.
And now it's an inhospitable desert.
And, you know, this guy just like had this like right wing talking point.
Instead of arguing with him, I said, how much research have you done?
I'm like, what do you think is happening?
Like, well, it's just a cycle.
Like, it's definitely a cycle.
But don't you think it's extraordinary the amount of CO2 we put in the
atmosphere?
Yeah.
There can be superimposed trends.
There can be a cycle.
And on top of that, there can be the forcing that we're doing.
It's both things.
It's both things.
It's clearly there's like the earth varies.
It has varied forever in terms of like the climate shifting back and forth.
But clearly, like if you look at any like Mexico City is a great example.
I flew into Mexico City once and I took photos because I couldn't believe there
wasn't a fire.
I'm like, I can't believe this.
Like when you live in Los Angeles, you're used to smoky skies when there's
forest fires and wildfires.
But Mexico City, there was no fire.
It was just pollution.
I'm like, these poor fucking people.
Yeah.
They have to live in this shit every day.
This is crazy.
No, that's true.
And actually, what surprised me the most of all the places I've been is Africa,
Tanzania and Uganda, where there is a brown haze everywhere.
And that's because people burn wood and charcoal.
Oh, that's the thing that people need to realize, too.
Well, they heat up wood to make the charcoal.
Yeah.
And they burn the charcoal.
And there is a haze over the landscape like nothing I've seen.
A lot of the worst, unhealthiest air pollution is people cooking with open
fires in their own houses.
Isn't that wild?
Which is wild, yeah.
You would never think that burning wood outside would have a significant impact
on the environment.
But it really does.
Yeah.
I mean, it isn't forcing climate change.
It's a different kind of problem.
Right.
It's another problem.
It's a different kind of pollution.
Yeah.
But going back to what we were talking about, one of the big conclusions of
rationality is that a lot of what we deplore now as just crazy stuff,
conspiracy theories and fake news, a lot of it comes from one bias, the my side
bias, which you kind of already alluded to.
Yeah.
Namely, you believe in the sacred beliefs of your own clique, your own
political party, your own coalition, your own tribe, your own sect, and you
paint the other side as stupid and evil for having different beliefs.
And there's a perverse kind of rationality in being a champion for your cause
because, you know, you get brownie points from all your friends.
And if you were to defy them, if you were to accept climate change in a
hardcore right-wing circle, you'd be a pariah.
You'd be social death.
So there's a perverse kind of rationality in championing the beliefs of your
side.
It isn't so good for whole democracy when everyone is just promoting the
beliefs that get them prestige within their own coalition rather than the
beliefs that are actually true.
Yeah, it's strangely prevalent, right?
Like it's so common that people have this ideology, they subscribe to the
belief system that is attached to that ideology and whatever, whether it's left-wing
or right-wing, and they just adopt a conglomeration of ideas.
Instead of having these things where they've thought them through rationally
and really like looked at it, instead they have an ideology, whether it's left
or right-wing.
And it seems, to me, it's a real shame that we only have two choices in this
country politically.
Like if you look at Holland, if you look at there's a lot of countries that
have many, many choices.
And I think if we had many, many choices, you would have, you still have tribalism,
but at least you'd probably have a more varied idea of what it is.
We have very polarizing perspectives.
We have a left and a right.
And each side thinks the other side are morons and are ruining the country.
Absolutely.
There has been a rise in negative polarization.
Yeah.
That is in a sense that the people you disagree with aren't just mistaken.
They don't just have a different opinion, but they are evil and stupid.
So that has risen, especially at the extremes.
It's still true that a majority of Americans call themselves moderate, but the
extremes hate each other more.
And it's interesting why that's happened.
The common explanation is you blame it on social media and people being in
filter bubbles.
You know, that might be part of it, but part of it may also be people segregate
themselves in terms of where they live more so that you get kind of educated
hipsters and knowledge workers in cities.
And you get less educated people moving out to the outer suburbs or staying in
rural areas.
So people just don't meet people who disagree with them anymore or have come
from different backgrounds or less than they used to.
And then some of the organizations and institutions that used to bring people
from different walks of life together, churches, service organizations like,
you know, the Elks, the Rotary Club and so on are declining.
So we tend to hang out more with people like ourselves.
Well, even in universities, which used to be a place where people on the left
and people on the right could debate.
I mean, in high schools, even like I remember when I was in high school, Barney
Frank debated someone from the moral majority.
And I remember watching it.
I think I was 16 and we went and sat and watched this debate and watch Barney
Frank trounce this guy and mock him.
And it was pretty fun, but it was it was interesting because we got to hear two
very different perspectives.
But one at the time, Barney Frank, who's just better at it and had better
points, was more articulate and had a better argument.
And we walked away from that having heard both sides and but having heard one
side argued more effectively and you don't get that anymore.
Instead, now you get one side and when someone tries to bring someone in that
is of a differing opinion to debate this person, that person gets silenced.
They try pulling alarms and buildings and they shout and blow blowhorns and
call everyone a Nazi.
And it's unfortunate because you miss the opportunity like I got to see when I
was 16 where I got to see a more articulate person with better points of view,
better perspectives argue more effectively that their perspective was more
rational.
Yeah. No, I think that that's vital. Now, there is some evidence that people
who are have really hardcore beliefs can't be talked out of them with any
amount of evidence.
Some people.
Some people.
Yeah, some people, but exactly.
Right.
So, you know, people ask me, it's a question I get asked a lot when I talk
about rationality.
I say, well, how do you convince a real QAnon believer that there isn't a cabal
of Satan worshipping cannibalistic pedophiles in the Democratic Party and
Hollywood?
In the basement of a pizza house.
In the basement of a comet ping pong pizzeria.
You know, the answer might be for some of them, you can't.
It's kind of like the question, how do you convince the pope that Jesus was not
the son of God?
Well, you can't.
I mean, some people will go to their grave believing what they believe, but you
don't have to convince everyone.
There are people who are not so committed.
They might, you know, they may find a little plausible, but their identity isn't
fused with it.
It doesn't define who they are, and they might be open to argument.
And, of course, new babies are being born all the time, and they aren't born
believing in QAnon or chemtrails or 9/11 truther theories.
And some of them can be peeled off by rational arguments.
I think it's not tried enough, including in issues that I strongly believe in,
like human-made climate change, like safety and efficacy of vaccines, and on
and on.
I think that scientists and public health officials have not been willing
enough to show their work.
They've just set themselves up as priests and said, you know, "Believe me, I'm
a scientist."
Well, that could not be farther from the way science works.
The whole point of science is there is no authority.
You've got to show the goods.
It's data.
You always might be wrong.
What kind of increased my confidence, say, in human-made climate change, 25
years ago I was a little bit open to it, but then seeing the objections, like
it's all just cycles, or it's just because the temperature measurements were—the
cities grew, and so the weather monitoring stations used to be out in the
country.
Now they're in the city, and cities are hotter.
I actually heard this from a Nobel Prize winner.
But seeing the counterarguments, where there's a site called Skeptical Science,
where they take on every one of the objections to human-made climate change,
and they explain why it's unlikely to be true.
I find that fantastically convincing, and I think that we should not give up on
people's ability to take evidence seriously.
Granted, there are some people who won't.
The people—we all, to some extent, act like lawyers.
We argue a cause.
If there's a counterargument, we try to—we rack our brains to figure out how
we can refute the counterargument.
So there is that, especially when the belief is close to your personal identity.
That's not true of all beliefs for everyone, and public health officials,
government officials, scientists should be prepared to show their work.
This is why I believe it, not just this is the truth.
Thank you.

Stephen Pinker on What Has Happened to Being Rational

The Joe Rogan Experience.
Your book, the new book, is Rationality.
Rationality. What it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters.
It is kind of scarce.
It certainly seems scarce.
What has happened to us?
Well, I think that there's a lot of rationality inequality.
Yeah.
Because, you know, at the top end, we've never been more rational.
Not only do we have just mind-boggling technology in terms of mRNA vaccines and
smartphones and 3D printing and artificial intelligence,
but we have rationality applied to areas of life that formerly were just a
matter of, you know, seat-of-the-pants guesswork and hunches and you rely on
experts.
So you have things like, you know, Moneyball, where some genius thought, well,
if you make decisions in sports like drafting and strategy based on data,
instead of the hunches of, you know, some old general manager, you could
actually have an advantage.
And so the Oakland A's went all the way with a fairly small budget for players
because they applied data.
Now every team has a statistician.
Hmm.
Data-driven policing.
One of the reasons that the crime rate in the U.S. fell by more than half in
the 1990s wasn't that all of a sudden guns were taken off the street.
It wasn't that, you know, racism vanished or inequality vanished.
Part of it was that police got smarter since a lot of violence happens in a few
small areas of a city, often by a few, you know, hotheads, a few perpetrators.
Yeah.
If you concentrate police on where the crime hotspots are, you can control a
lot of crime without that much manpower.
We were just having a conversation.
Evidence-based medicine.
Yeah.
You know, evidence-based policy and governance.
So there are areas in which we've applied rationality in areas that formerly
were just gut feelings and hunches.
I'll give you one other example, effective altruism, a movement that I'm kind
of loosely connected with.
Where do your charitable dollars save the most lives?
Should you buy malarial bed nets?
Should you buy seeing eye dogs for blind people?
It makes a big difference.
And that's, so charity now is becoming more rational.
So all of these areas, policing and sports and charity and government are
becoming more rational.
But of course, at the same time, you've got chemtrail conspiracy theorists.
You've got the idea that COVID vaccines are a way for Bill Gates to implant.
Microchips in people's-
They're not?
Yeah.
Don't they make you magnetic?
Right.
What's interesting to me is that there's a thing that goes along with
irrational thought where you have irrational thought that is confined to your
party lines, right?
Oh, yes.
Like if you are, I mean, this is just a blanket statement, but if you are right
wing, you are more likely to dismiss the worries of climate change.
Yeah, absolutely.
Why is that?
In fact, that is the main predictor of whether you dismiss climate change.
It has nothing to do with scientific literacy.
You know, a lot of my fellow scientists say, oh, the fact that there's so much
denial of man-made climate change means we need better science education in the
schools.
Yeah.
We need scientists becoming more popular and making the climate science more
accessible.
It turns out that whether you accept human-made climate change or not has
nothing to do with how much science you know.
And a lot of the people who do accept it know, you know, diddly about the
science.
They often will think, well, yeah, climate change isn't that because of, you
know, the hole in the ozone layer and toxic waste dumps and, you know, plastic
straws in the oceans.
Right.
A lot of them are out to lunch.
Whereas some of the climate deniers, they're like well-prepared litigators.
They can find every loophole.
They know every study.
You know, a good lawyer can argue against anything.
What does predict your acceptance of climate change is just where you are in
the political spectrum.
The farther to the right, the more denial.
So what you said is absolutely right.
It's not just more denial but this willingness to instantaneously argue it.
Like the subject came up, oddly enough, in jujitsu.
We're after class.
We're like just getting dressed and putting stuff away.
And someone said, man, it's just a fact of life that is getting hotter every
year.
And this guy jumped in immediately with like this defense of this idea that
climate change is nonsense.
And it's like, listen, it's a cycle.
It's always been going on like this.
How much research have you done?
Like you don't think people affect it at all?
I'm like, yeah, it is a cycle, right?
If you go back and look at core samples and you look at the ice ages and you
look at all the various times and the history of the earth, the climate has
moved.
We were actually just talking about this yesterday.
I had someone on who was an expert in ancient civilizations and all these
archaeological mysteries that they've found.
And one of the things we were talking about was the Sahara Desert, that the Sahara
Desert goes through this period of every like 20,000 years or so where it's
green and then it becomes a desert again and then it becomes green again.
And it goes back and forth.
And 5,000 plus years ago, it was very green.
And now it's an inhospitable desert.
And, you know, this guy just like had this like right wing talking point.
Instead of arguing with him, I said, how much research have you done?
I'm like, what do you think is happening?
Like, well, it's just a cycle.
Like, it's definitely a cycle.
But don't you think it's extraordinary the amount of CO2 we put in the
atmosphere?
Yeah.
There can be superimposed trends.
There can be a cycle.
And on top of that, there can be the forcing that we're doing.
It's both things.
It's both things.
It's clearly there's like the earth varies.
It has varied forever in terms of like the climate shifting back and forth.
But clearly, like if you look at any like Mexico City is a great example.
I flew into Mexico City once and I took photos because I couldn't believe there
wasn't a fire.
I'm like, I can't believe this.
Like when you live in Los Angeles, you're used to smoky skies when there's
forest fires and wildfires.
But Mexico City, there was no fire.
It was just pollution.
I'm like, these poor fucking people.
Yeah.
They have to live in this shit every day.
This is crazy.
No, that's true.
And actually, what surprised me the most of all the places I've been is Africa,
Tanzania and Uganda, where there is a brown haze everywhere.
And that's because people burn wood and charcoal.
Oh, that's the thing that people need to realize, too.
Well, they heat up wood to make the charcoal.
Yeah.
And they burn the charcoal.
And there is a haze over the landscape like nothing I've seen.
A lot of the worst, unhealthiest air pollution is people cooking with open
fires in their own houses.
Isn't that wild?
Which is wild, yeah.
You would never think that burning wood outside would have a significant impact
on the environment.
But it really does.
Yeah.
I mean, it isn't forcing climate change.
It's a different kind of problem.
Right.
It's another problem.
It's a different kind of pollution.
Yeah.
But going back to what we were talking about, one of the big conclusions of
rationality is that a lot of what we deplore now as just crazy stuff,
conspiracy theories and fake news, a lot of it comes from one bias, the my side
bias, which you kind of already alluded to.
Yeah.
Namely, you believe in the sacred beliefs of your own clique, your own
political party, your own coalition, your own tribe, your own sect, and you
paint the other side as stupid and evil for having different beliefs.
And there's a perverse kind of rationality in being a champion for your cause
because, you know, you get brownie points from all your friends.
And if you were to defy them, if you were to accept climate change in a
hardcore right-wing circle, you'd be a pariah.
You'd be social death.
So there's a perverse kind of rationality in championing the beliefs of your
side.
It isn't so good for whole democracy when everyone is just promoting the
beliefs that get them prestige within their own coalition rather than the
beliefs that are actually true.
Yeah, it's strangely prevalent, right?
Like it's so common that people have this ideology, they subscribe to the
belief system that is attached to that ideology and whatever, whether it's left-wing
or right-wing, and they just adopt a conglomeration of ideas.
Instead of having these things where they've thought them through rationally
and really like looked at it, instead they have an ideology, whether it's left
or right-wing.
And it seems, to me, it's a real shame that we only have two choices in this
country politically.
Like if you look at Holland, if you look at there's a lot of countries that
have many, many choices.
And I think if we had many, many choices, you would have, you still have tribalism,
but at least you'd probably have a more varied idea of what it is.
We have very polarizing perspectives.
We have a left and a right.
And each side thinks the other side are morons and are ruining the country.
Absolutely.
There has been a rise in negative polarization.
Yeah.
That is in a sense that the people you disagree with aren't just mistaken.
They don't just have a different opinion, but they are evil and stupid.
So that has risen, especially at the extremes.
It's still true that a majority of Americans call themselves moderate, but the
extremes hate each other more.
And it's interesting why that's happened.
The common explanation is you blame it on social media and people being in
filter bubbles.
You know, that might be part of it, but part of it may also be people segregate
themselves in terms of where they live more so that you get kind of educated
hipsters and knowledge workers in cities.
And you get less educated people moving out to the outer suburbs or staying in
rural areas.
So people just don't meet people who disagree with them anymore or have come
from different backgrounds or less than they used to.
And then some of the organizations and institutions that used to bring people
from different walks of life together, churches, service organizations like,
you know, the Elks, the Rotary Club and so on are declining.
So we tend to hang out more with people like ourselves.
Well, even in universities, which used to be a place where people on the left
and people on the right could debate.
I mean, in high schools, even like I remember when I was in high school, Barney
Frank debated someone from the moral majority.
And I remember watching it.
I think I was 16 and we went and sat and watched this debate and watch Barney
Frank trounce this guy and mock him.
And it was pretty fun, but it was it was interesting because we got to hear two
very different perspectives.
But one at the time, Barney Frank, who's just better at it and had better
points, was more articulate and had a better argument.
And we walked away from that having heard both sides and but having heard one
side argued more effectively and you don't get that anymore.
Instead, now you get one side and when someone tries to bring someone in that
is of a differing opinion to debate this person, that person gets silenced.
They try pulling alarms and buildings and they shout and blow blowhorns and
call everyone a Nazi.
And it's unfortunate because you miss the opportunity like I got to see when I
was 16 where I got to see a more articulate person with better points of view,
better perspectives argue more effectively that their perspective was more
rational.
Yeah. No, I think that that's vital. Now, there is some evidence that people
who are have really hardcore beliefs can't be talked out of them with any
amount of evidence.
Some people.
Some people.
Yeah, some people, but exactly.
Right.
So, you know, people ask me, it's a question I get asked a lot when I talk
about rationality.
I say, well, how do you convince a real QAnon believer that there isn't a cabal
of Satan worshipping cannibalistic pedophiles in the Democratic Pa