Speaker 1: Today. It's great to have Stephen Pinker on the podcast.
Speaker 1: Doctor Pinker is the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University,
Speaker 1: a two time Pultzer Prize finalist, and the winner of
Speaker 1: many awards for his research, teaching in books. He has
Speaker 1: been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and named
Speaker 1: one of Times one hundred Most Influential People and one
Speaker 1: of Foreign Policies one hundred Leading Global Thinkers. His books
Speaker 1: include How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Stuff
Speaker 1: of Thought, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Sense
Speaker 1: of Style, Enlightenment Now, and most recently, Rationality, What it Is,
Speaker 1: Why it Seems Scarce, Why it matters? Stephen Pinker, So
Speaker 1: great to have you back on the Psychology podcast. Nice.
Speaker 1: I always enjoy talking to you. You always stimulate my brain,
Speaker 1: which is the motto of our podcast is that we
Speaker 1: might people with brains. We used to my brain. So
Speaker 1: you say in this new book of yours, you argue
Speaker 1: that that quote rationality ought to be the load star
Speaker 1: for everything we think and do. Why is that? The
Speaker 1: very fact that you're asking that question and waiting for
Speaker 1: my answer means you've already accepted the answer, namely that
Speaker 1: we ought to persuade each other with good reasons. Now
Speaker 1: it's not the only way that we can get other
Speaker 1: people's ascent. We can bribe them, we can threaten them,
Speaker 1: we can beat them up, we can try to cancel them.
Speaker 1: But if you're tossing out a question waiting for the answer,
Speaker 1: presumably pondering what I'm saying, that you have already committed
Speaker 1: yourself to reason. Reason is just the It's the water
Speaker 1: we swim in, it's the air we breathe. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: But the key part of that sentence that I asked
Speaker 1: you is the everything we do. So I do, I
Speaker 1: must ask? Must we always follow reason? Do I need
Speaker 1: a rational argument? For a while? I should fall in love,
Speaker 1: cherish my children, enjoy the pleasures of life. Isn't it
Speaker 1: sometimes okay to go crazy, to go wild the silly,
Speaker 1: to stop making sense? Absolutely, and there is a false
Speaker 1: dichotomy between reason and goals, motivation, emotion. But as thinkers
Speaker 1: going back at least to David Hume, have noted reason
Speaker 1: as a means to an end. It's a way of
Speaker 1: achieving a goal using knowledge. It can't tell you what
Speaker 1: the goal is. If you enjoy pain, if you enjoy
Speaker 1: being miserable and hungry and cold. Well, reason can help
Speaker 1: you accomplish that if that's what you want to accomplish,
Speaker 1: and it isn't going to tell you that that's not
Speaker 1: something you ought to accomplish. But whatever it is you
Speaker 1: want to accomplish, reason is the way you gain it.
Speaker 1: But the goals are not part of reason per se.
Speaker 1: Although I'm going to add an asterisk there. One still
Speaker 1: can rationally talk about goals, such as what happens when
Speaker 1: two or more of your goals come into conflict, such
Speaker 1: as having fun now versus being comfortable and respected in
Speaker 1: the future. And there are also rational arguments to be
Speaker 1: had when one person's goals clash or another, and that
Speaker 1: brings us into the domain of morality. But there's nothing
Speaker 1: irrational about falling in love or dancing and partying or nothing.
Speaker 1: There's nothing irrational about them rationality. You know, I want
Speaker 1: to just talk about a second what is rationality? Because
Speaker 1: I'm a big fan of Keith Stanovitch's work, and I
Speaker 1: was really excited to see that you quoted him in
Speaker 1: your book. He often distinguishes between two types of rationality,
Speaker 1: and his work it is between instrumental rationality and epistemic rationality.
Speaker 1: Your definition of rationality seems to be the murderer, but
Speaker 1: it's like the pithy condensing of both. So you define
Speaker 1: rationalities the ability to use knowledge to attain goals. It
Speaker 1: kind of combines both instru mental and episte in a way. Yes,
Speaker 1: and that is a fundamental distinction sometimes frames the distinction
Speaker 1: between what is true and what to do, or pure
Speaker 1: reason and practical reason. The reason that I merged them
Speaker 1: in my own attempt at a definition, namely the use
Speaker 1: of knowledge to attain goals, is that even when it
Speaker 1: comes to epistemic rationality, what is true, we don't really
Speaker 1: consider someone rational who's just say, spitting out the digits
Speaker 1: of pie till for all eternity, or just stating using
Speaker 1: logic to state true but useless facts like either Paris
Speaker 1: is the capital of France, or unicorns exist. Either Paris
Speaker 1: is the capital of France, or the moon is made
Speaker 1: of cheese. I mean, those are all true, but we
Speaker 1: tend not to consider it to be particularly rational just
Speaker 1: to say true stuff. We even in epistemic rationality, we
Speaker 1: have some goal of understanding the world, expanding our knowledge base.
Speaker 1: We have goals for which truths we prioritize, So that's
Speaker 1: why I merge them. But you're you're right that there
Speaker 1: is one could say that there is a logical distinction
Speaker 1: between them and at its base, I mean, rationality helps
Speaker 1: you get the things that you want. And it's very interesting,
Speaker 1: you know that the goal conflict thing. I'm not over
Speaker 1: that yet because I think that I think about that
Speaker 1: all the time because we can have two long term
Speaker 1: goals that conflict within ourselves. Right, It's not always like
Speaker 1: a goal conflict is some short term one weighing it
Speaker 1: against a long term it can be you know, we
Speaker 1: can have two long term goals. And what is like
Speaker 1: the is there like a system in the brain, like
Speaker 1: a meta rationality system that like can help us adjudicate
Speaker 1: two rational potential avenues we could take be taking that
Speaker 1: makes it great? Oh, it makes complete sense. But the
Speaker 1: way I would put it is rationality is itself meta.
Speaker 1: That is, you know, if you had a meta rationality,
Speaker 1: then you say, well, gee, do we have to get
Speaker 1: another part of the brain for the meta meta rationality?
Speaker 1: But taking a leaf turtle and turtles all the way
Speaker 1: down or all the way up. But take taking a
Speaker 1: leaf from the field of linguistics and cognitive science, which
Speaker 1: going back at least to Non Chomsky and George Miller,
Speaker 1: emphasized the uh the power of recursive computation and recursive representation. Namely,
Speaker 1: an idea can contain an idea, including an example of itself.
Speaker 1: A reason reasoning process can step back and consider its
Speaker 1: own shortcomings or flaws, and we can then in turn
Speaker 1: step up a level and criticize the criticism of our reasoning.
Speaker 1: And there's as long as you have the computational power
Speaker 1: to embed a proposition in a proposition, or have a
Speaker 1: routine call an instance of itself that automatically makes it
Speaker 1: meta for as many levels as you want, until you,
Speaker 1: of course, your the mind boggles because it just gets
Speaker 1: too complicated to keep track of them. But it is essential,
Speaker 1: and I'm glad you mentioned this that not only when
Speaker 1: it comes to adjudicating among long term goals much harder.
Speaker 1: I mean, we all of course are faced with the
Speaker 1: tension between immediate gratification and longer term satisfaction. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's just kind of the stuff of self control, of maturity.
Speaker 1: But you're right that we often have long term goals
Speaker 1: that come into conflict. And I thought consider in talking
Speaker 1: about reasoning about goals, I can think of adjudicating among
Speaker 1: goals within a person to be kind of what we
Speaker 1: mean when we talk about wisdom and judicating among goals
Speaker 1: from different people, kind of what we mean when we
Speaker 1: talk about ethics and morality. But yeah, there's no obviously
Speaker 1: league correct answer to how should I trade off creating
Speaker 1: my masterpiece with spending time with my kids? Both of
Speaker 1: them are long term goals at least developed building a
Speaker 1: satisfying relationship with your kids, And it is part of
Speaker 1: the agony of being a mature adult that one has
Speaker 1: to grapple with these conflicts and there's no single correct answer. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a question I want to ask you, and it's
Speaker 1: opening up a can of worms, and what is truth?
Speaker 1: Because I mean, I've heard other very smart people attempt
Speaker 1: to discuss such a topic and it can go in
Speaker 1: a very long, you know, conversation direction. But I feel
Speaker 1: like that's kind of the elfin in the room we
Speaker 1: took a rationality. Truth is a very important part of rationality.
Speaker 1: You want to use correct knowledge, right, two tangles you
Speaker 1: don't want to use you know, your definition the ability
Speaker 1: to use knowledge to tangles The inference. There is that
Speaker 1: the ability to use correct knowledge. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: knowledge going around these days. According to one some fairly
Speaker 1: well known characterization of knowledge borrowed from the fill of philosophy,
Speaker 1: knowledge is sometimes defined as justified true belief. So by definition,
Speaker 1: knowledge is true. If it isn't, we don't call it knowledge,
Speaker 1: We call it belief. We don't say John knows the
Speaker 1: moon is made of cheese, although we could say John
Speaker 1: believes the moon is made of cheese. When you use
Speaker 1: Noah knowledge, you're kind of committing yourself to truth behind
Speaker 1: the scenes. Then you're right. It does raise the question
Speaker 1: of what do we mean by truth? And again this
Speaker 1: is a question much discussed in the field of philosophy,
Speaker 1: and in many ways above my pay grade. A famous
Speaker 1: definition of truth from Tarski is that to say that
Speaker 1: X is true is to say X. Now that for
Speaker 1: many people that's not particularly satisfying. Or truth is what
Speaker 1: is the case. But it's like reason, it's a It
Speaker 1: doesn't submit to a conventional definition because it's deeper than that.
Speaker 1: You can't have a definition of reason unless you know
Speaker 1: how to reason. You can't talk about truth unless you
Speaker 1: already are grounded in some tacit commitment to truth. Otherwise
Speaker 1: nothing that you say would be in a sense worth saying.
Speaker 1: It'd be oh, I'll take it or leave it. I'm
Speaker 1: I'm just making noise in my mouth. I'm not making
Speaker 1: a claim to anything that is factually accurate or worthy
Speaker 1: of your belief. So kind of committed to truth even
Speaker 1: when we start to persuade, explain, And I think you know,
Speaker 1: one way of parsing this somewhat enigmatic definition of truth
Speaker 1: that to say X is true is to say X
Speaker 1: is that it's just kind of what we mean when
Speaker 1: we say stuff in the first place. And so there
Speaker 1: is something almost superflulous about saying differentiating between the you know,
Speaker 1: the the the world is round is true and the
Speaker 1: world is round. I mean, this just raises the question,
Speaker 1: can it be rational in certain instances to be completely
Speaker 1: deluded delusional as well about something, but in a way
Speaker 1: that delusion in its if it in itself is what
Speaker 1: gets you to attain your goal, then would that be
Speaker 1: the more rational thing to have incorrect knowledge? Well, it
Speaker 1: could be. Well, then say that it be. We relativize
Speaker 1: it and say that it is a rational way to
Speaker 1: attain a particular goal. I don't think we would call it.
Speaker 1: And again, I'm especially as someone who is very interested
Speaker 1: in words, I know that it's not up to me
Speaker 1: to legislate the meaning of words. When I answer a
Speaker 1: question of this, does the word apply, I'm kind of
Speaker 1: tapping into are the community's intuitions of when it's natural
Speaker 1: to use the word. So, uh, the word means what
Speaker 1: people understand the word to me, and I think most
Speaker 1: so the answer to your question is it rational? Is
Speaker 1: it really? Would most people use the word rational in
Speaker 1: describing that. I think most people would not, unless you
Speaker 1: narrow it and say, is this a rational way of
Speaker 1: doing whatever he wants to do? But is it rational
Speaker 1: to believe things that we standing outside that person know
Speaker 1: to be false? I think no. The answer is no,
Speaker 1: and my own admittedly someonat makeshift definition of rationality, namely
Speaker 1: the use of knowledge to attain goals. Well, packed into
Speaker 1: that is knowledge, And as we spoke about just a
Speaker 1: couple of minutes ago, the conventional understanding of knowledge is
Speaker 1: justified true belief, and so true is packed into that.
Speaker 1: So in a sense, in the most general sense, no,
Speaker 1: you can't be rational if you believe things that are
Speaker 1: not true. At least if there are reasons for you
Speaker 1: to know that it's not true or reasons for us
Speaker 1: to know that it's not true. Yeah, Stephen, this is
Speaker 1: really this is really interesting. I mean, you're really this
Speaker 1: is really interesting. So you distinguished between logic and reasoning.
Speaker 1: Can you can you be completely illogical about something but
Speaker 1: still make a rational decision about it. I don't think
Speaker 1: you can be illogical, but you can. You have to
Speaker 1: apply a lot more than logic, because the problem about
Speaker 1: logic is that it basically just expands what is already
Speaker 1: in the premises. If something is true, that it tells
Speaker 1: you you know, some other things that are true and
Speaker 1: some things that aren't that aren't true, in some things
Speaker 1: that might or might not be true. But because rationality
Speaker 1: involves the pursuit of some goal, even if the goal
Speaker 1: is understanding something more deeply or more accurately, logic doesn't
Speaker 1: get you there. You've got to They're just they're just
Speaker 1: too many things you can prove. You can prove all
Speaker 1: kinds of you know, crazy but irrelevant things. If P
Speaker 1: is Q, then p or q true, and so is
Speaker 1: p or Q or R or p or q or
Speaker 1: rrs And you could spin out all kinds of useless
Speaker 1: true statements indefinitely, so logic isn't enough. Moreover, there are
Speaker 1: if you are applying nothing but logic, there's a sense
Speaker 1: in which that can be irrational, in the sense that
Speaker 1: you are deliberately foregoing the use of possibly relevant knowledge.
Speaker 1: The point about logic is it's formal, in the sense
Speaker 1: that logic actually doesn't even care about the content of sentences.
Speaker 1: It cares only about their form, about how propositions, predicates
Speaker 1: and arguments are joined by hands and ores and ifs
Speaker 1: and nots and hals and necessary and possible, but really
Speaker 1: kind of doesn't care what those sentences are about, whether
Speaker 1: they're about the moon being made of cheese or little
Speaker 1: green men emerging from flying saucers. Predicate is a predicate,
Speaker 1: and then logic allows you to apply predicate to new sentences,
Speaker 1: uh in real life. And oh and not only is that,
Speaker 1: what is that what logic is all about? But if
Speaker 1: you're really being a logician, you may not make inferences
Speaker 1: that aren't licensed by the premises and the conclusions. You
Speaker 1: may not kind of drag in your your knowledge, your beliefs,
Speaker 1: your conjectures. And that's kind of a crazy thing to
Speaker 1: do so. For example, you know, if you're a geometry
Speaker 1: student and you're asked to prove that the in an
Speaker 1: Isosceles triangle the two angles are equal. Now a perfectly
Speaker 1: rational thing to do. Pull it up a tractor and
Speaker 1: measure one angle and measure the other angle, and say, hey,
Speaker 1: they're they're they're the same. It's best I can tell. Now,
Speaker 1: you don't get credit on a geometry test if you
Speaker 1: do that, even though in real life that's exactly what
Speaker 1: you might do, but you're not using the rules of
Speaker 1: the system, namely the rules in this case of Euclidian geometry,
Speaker 1: which allow a certain number of axioms and rules of infra.
Speaker 1: You have to stick to those. You can't pull out
Speaker 1: your ruler and your protector. That's not very rational, but
Speaker 1: that's what logic, strict logic demands, and likewise, in all
Speaker 1: kinds of reasoning, and it's many experiments are shown show
Speaker 1: that people are in this sense illogical but rational, or
Speaker 1: at least non logical but rational. They can't help but
Speaker 1: mixing logic in with their real world knowledge, even though
Speaker 1: strictly speaking, logic doesn't care about real world knowledge. So
Speaker 1: if you say, for example, all all all plant matter
Speaker 1: is healthy. Tobacco is plant matter. Therefore tobacco is healthy.
Speaker 1: Is that a valid inference? And the answer is yes,
Speaker 1: it's a valid inference. If you know all X is
Speaker 1: y and P is x and p is y. That's
Speaker 1: what the rules tell you. Now you give that to
Speaker 1: people and you say that's solveless, just as a logic problem,
Speaker 1: and they like, they won't do it. They can't block
Speaker 1: out of their heads an idea talk, Oh, that's really
Speaker 1: toxic substance. What are you talking about, Is that it's healthy?
Speaker 1: Say no, no, forget what you know about tobacco. Just
Speaker 1: pay attention to be they all and the is and
Speaker 1: ordinary people have a lot of trouble doing that. And
Speaker 1: so is that irrational? Well not in everyday life, but
Speaker 1: it is illogical in the sense that in the you
Speaker 1: the actual application of the rules of logic, you're you're
Speaker 1: breaking the rules of the game. Now, there are some
Speaker 1: pass in fact, we don't want people to be so rational,
Speaker 1: we want them to be logical. So, for example, if
Speaker 1: we have a moral principle, you may not prejudge someone
Speaker 1: by their their race or religion. If you're screening for terrorists,
Speaker 1: for example, even if you have statistical data that say
Speaker 1: that people of one religion are more likely to be
Speaker 1: suicide terroristsan people of another religion, and there's a sense
Speaker 1: in which it would be more rational to scrutinize them more.
Speaker 1: We decide on moral grounds, No, you can't do it.
Speaker 1: You've got to follow the rule all people have equal rights,
Speaker 1: so the ability to be at least sometimes turn on
Speaker 1: our logic and ignore what we know. Likewise, in the courtroom,
Speaker 1: there may be evidence that's highly relevant to the case,
Speaker 1: but if it was illegally obtained, if it was inadmissible
Speaker 1: because it referred to the person's criminal record or racial statistics,
Speaker 1: we say we're going to follow this strict logical rule system.
Speaker 1: You must throw out what you, as an ordinary person know,
Speaker 1: so it's there. Sometimes when it's actually good that we're not,
Speaker 1: so that we can turn off the totality of our
Speaker 1: rationality and apply rules exactly. Or another example is there
Speaker 1: is a there's a dolphin, a fish, or a mammal. Well,
Speaker 1: if we apply everything where you know, well, fish they swim,
Speaker 1: they're streamlined, you know, they live in the ocean, you'd say, yeah,
Speaker 1: dolphins of fish. When we apply kind of the strict
Speaker 1: logic of science. Namely, a fish belongs to one class
Speaker 1: and mammals to another. And if you are warm blooded
Speaker 1: and suckle your you're young and have further than you're
Speaker 1: a mammal, even if you look like a fish. Well there,
Speaker 1: then again we're turning off our knowledge, applying strict definitions
Speaker 1: and rules in a more logical mode of thinking. And
Speaker 1: that's what makes science possible. You know, does that contradict
Speaker 1: your idea that rests now ought to be the old
Speaker 1: star for everything we think can do. Didn't that just
Speaker 1: kind ofdict that Well, there's a kind of net it's
Speaker 1: a good, good question, and there's a kind of meta
Speaker 1: rationality where we can decide, depending on our goals, what
Speaker 1: tools of rationtionality to apply and which ones to sideline.
Speaker 1: So if our goal, if our goal is justice, that's
Speaker 1: not the same goal as say efficiency or the best
Speaker 1: actuarial statistics, and we might decide, well, justice is more important.
Speaker 1: Let's turn off our statistical reasoning. Let's apply this ironclad rule.
Speaker 1: And if your higher level goal is justice, then again, week,
Speaker 1: since rationality is always in pursuit of a goal, you
Speaker 1: might decide that one kind of rational thinking must be
Speaker 1: disabled and another kind deployed. You make a point in
Speaker 1: your in your book that there can be no trade
Speaker 1: off between rationality and social justice or any other moral
Speaker 1: or political cause. That's a that's a heavy statement. I
Speaker 1: really want to unpack that for our listeners because I
Speaker 1: think that people's intuitions is that they is not that.
Speaker 1: I don't think a lot of people that. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so can you unpack what you mean by that, and
Speaker 1: maybe and then we can get into into your into
Speaker 1: the essential features of morality as you do in your book. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you believe that social justice can be itself be justified,
Speaker 1: there are reasons to pursue it. It's not just a
Speaker 1: battle between our side and the bad guys. Now, admittedly,
Speaker 1: a lot of people who claim to pursue social justice
Speaker 1: are doing that, but you know, in which case they've
Speaker 1: got to live with the possibility that the other side
Speaker 1: might be stronger than them and crush them. But if
Speaker 1: they're hoping to persuade open minded third parties, if they're
Speaker 1: hoping to have reasons for what they do, then you've
Speaker 1: got to follow the laws of reason, including factual accuracy.
Speaker 1: Is it the case that, for example, African Americans are
Speaker 1: disadvantaged relative to white people. There a lot of people
Speaker 1: on the right who would say, no, it's the other
Speaker 1: way around. It's white people who are oppressed, white working
Speaker 1: class people. Well, if you think they're wrong, you better
Speaker 1: have reasons to have a show why they're wrong. If
Speaker 1: you think that particular measures such as reparations, such as
Speaker 1: compensatory policies are morally justified, well either they are they aren't.
Speaker 1: If they are, then you should be able to provide
Speaker 1: those reasons. If you can't, then well maybe you should
Speaker 1: rethink them. But you're certainly not going to recruit others,
Speaker 1: or at least you're not going to recruit others who
Speaker 1: are open minded. Aren't just joining a mob for the
Speaker 1: fun of being part of a mob. Now you could
Speaker 1: concede that it's all about mob rule. Our mob is
Speaker 1: bigger than their mob. But again, if you do that,
Speaker 1: then say goodbye to recruiting, hitherto unaffiliated people, and say
Speaker 1: goodbye to claiming that that you're right when the other
Speaker 1: side happens to be stronger than you are. Do you
Speaker 1: feel like you're you're ever misunderstood? Oh, you might say
Speaker 1: that answer honestly, yes, I read an article this comes
Speaker 1: up in my head because I read an article a
Speaker 1: Christism of you, but it was framed in like, why
Speaker 1: is Stephen Pinker far right? Now all of a sudden
Speaker 1: and now I don't get the sense that you're you've
Speaker 1: suddenly become a far right, you know, in terms of
Speaker 1: Paul Understatement time on record as the I think I'm
Speaker 1: the second largest contributor to the Democratic Party among Harvard faculty.
Speaker 1: So let's get that on the record. Let's get that
Speaker 1: on the record. You know, as I sometimes say that,
Speaker 1: you know, a lot of academics and intellectuals live at
Speaker 1: a hypothetical place that I call the left pole. So
Speaker 1: you know, when you're at the when you're at the
Speaker 1: north pole, all directions are south. When you're at the
Speaker 1: left pole, all directions are are right. And if you
Speaker 1: when you're sitting at a left pole, anything that diverges
Speaker 1: from a pretty rigid set of orthodox is considered, you know,
Speaker 1: on the right. I consider that to be a pathology
Speaker 1: of some of the leftism in academia and journalism that
Speaker 1: there's it is so rigid, it's such a a catechism,
Speaker 1: like religious catechism. There's just no room for dissent and
Speaker 1: just like anyone who doubts the trinity is a heretic.
Speaker 1: Anyone who doubts certain sets of axioms on the hard
Speaker 1: left is considered to be on the right. But no,
Speaker 1: there's no certainly the right doesn't consider me to be
Speaker 1: on the right. Yeah, you know, this is it is
Speaker 1: interesting because it does seem like something has changed in
Speaker 1: the last ten years or so five ten years, where
Speaker 1: you know, maybe twenty years ago, if you published something
Speaker 1: a scientific finding and the finding had like a it
Speaker 1: didn't it wasn't automatically politicized, It didn't automatically make you
Speaker 1: think the author must be on a certain pot of
Speaker 1: because they're presenting a certain form of knowledge. But there's
Speaker 1: something these days about where knowledge is so the knowledge
Speaker 1: that you present is so inecrably intertwined with perceptions of
Speaker 1: your political personal political stance. I just haven't seen that
Speaker 1: so tied together in my past. But it's so interesting, like,
Speaker 1: you know, you could just just make a point about
Speaker 1: something where you think the evidence is suggesting, like I
Speaker 1: think there might be some progress. You know, when when
Speaker 1: you look at data and then they're like, oh, he's
Speaker 1: on the far right, you know, because he it's but
Speaker 1: I feel like this is something new, like do you
Speaker 1: know what I mean? It's not brand new, and I
Speaker 1: can recall, you know, strange that you know, way back
Speaker 1: when I was a college student, when there was the
Speaker 1: you know, the Marxist Leninist, social Socialist United Workers Party,
Speaker 1: uh and among the popular among students. You're right to
Speaker 1: have perceived a change. And I think things got really
Speaker 1: took a lurch around, you know, three four years ago.
Speaker 1: And John Height has written about this as well, where
Speaker 1: I think I think he fingered twenty sixteen as the
Speaker 1: turning point. Now. I don't know if it's that Donald
Speaker 1: Trump suddenly polarized the whole country. I don't I don't
Speaker 1: think so, I don't know didn't help. I don't know
Speaker 1: if it's social media led to mutually reinforcing clacks and
Speaker 1: cheerleading squads, or if there was just just sometimes there
Speaker 1: are social trends that, for chaotic and unpredictable reasons, gained momentum,
Speaker 1: that have a energy of their own. It's a good question. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just it's a fascinating like psychological Yes, yeah, you
Speaker 1: you asked the question. It's funny. I would rereading your
Speaker 1: book and then I would like think a question to myself,
Speaker 1: and then the next page you'd asked that question. I
Speaker 1: guess you tried to think through what people would come up,
Speaker 1: so you ask, is knowledge always power? Sometimes it really
Speaker 1: is rational to pull your ears with wax. Ignorance can
Speaker 1: be bliss, and sometimes what you don't know can't hurt you.
Speaker 1: So can we riff off off that idea a little bit?
Speaker 1: It Actually it is related to an earlier point I
Speaker 1: made about can you have irrational methods? Yeah? Yeah, you're
Speaker 1: absolutely right there I can here. I was influenced by
Speaker 1: the great political theorist Thomas Shelling, who way back sixty
Speaker 1: years ago it was a book The Strategy of Conflict,
Speaker 1: explained a lot of puzzles and paradoxes of negotiation and
Speaker 1: bargaining and threats and promises, and articulately It's something that
Speaker 1: I think people have known for probably for millennia, as
Speaker 1: long as there can be a strategic advantage to being ignorant, irrational,
Speaker 1: out of control. A simple example. You know that the
Speaker 1: Brinks truck that goes to the bank and picks up
Speaker 1: the sacks of money at the end of every day,
Speaker 1: and there's a sticker on the side of the truck
Speaker 1: that says, driver does not know combination of safe, So
Speaker 1: it's kind of flaunting his ignorance to his advantage, because
Speaker 1: if he doesn't know the combination, then you can't. Then
Speaker 1: the robber can't put a gun to his head and
Speaker 1: say open the safer, all blow your brains out, and
Speaker 1: he can credibly say I just don't know the combination,
Speaker 1: and so it's useless to blow his brains out. So
Speaker 1: there are cases in which ignorance is a strategic advantage.
Speaker 1: There are cases in which powerlessness is a strategic advantage.
Speaker 1: If protesters lie in front of the on the railroad tracks,
Speaker 1: then the conductor, the engineer of the train could just
Speaker 1: keep going, knowing that they'll have to scramble if they
Speaker 1: want to save their own lives. And if they handcuff
Speaker 1: themselves to the tracks, then the engineer has got to
Speaker 1: stop the train. Likewise, the suicide terrorist who is has
Speaker 1: the explosives attached to his body to go off, with
Speaker 1: the slaves jostling out of his control, he can't be
Speaker 1: persuaded to uh uh, you know, to to to run
Speaker 1: away or it can't be it can't be attacked, And
Speaker 1: then they're also a case in which irrationality can be
Speaker 1: a strategic advantage. Namely, if someone can't be threatened, if
Speaker 1: they if their own self interest means nothing to them,
Speaker 1: then you can't credibly threaten them, because they can threaten
Speaker 1: you right back by refusing to comply. In fact, they
Speaker 1: don't even have to threaten. In fact, they just have
Speaker 1: to be so crazy that it's uh, there's no point.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's sometimes sometimes just called the in the
Speaker 1: context of international relations, the Madman theory UH, named after
Speaker 1: the alleged tactic that Richard Nixon deployed during the Vietnam War,
Speaker 1: flying nuclear armed bombers alarmingly close to the Soviet border,
Speaker 1: allegedly to make the Soviets think that he was so
Speaker 1: unbalanced that they better not mess with them. And if
Speaker 1: they knew it was good with them, they better pressure
Speaker 1: their North Vietnamese clients to make concessions like that guy's crazy.
Speaker 1: Don't don't deal with them, or don't these don't don't
Speaker 1: try to push him, because who knows what he might do.
Speaker 1: He might even do something that's crazy for himself. And
Speaker 1: you know, in our interpersonal relations, you know, we've we've
Speaker 1: many of us had experience with you know, high maintenance,
Speaker 1: romantic partners and hot heads and uh, you know, and
Speaker 1: and borderlines and people who kind of get what they
Speaker 1: want because there's no reasoning with them. So now the problem,
Speaker 1: of course with these paradoxical tactics, uh, is that since
Speaker 1: you have taken yourself out of the game of persuasion
Speaker 1: and reason, you've kind of left the other guy no
Speaker 1: choice but to kind of take you out if they
Speaker 1: ever have the opportunity, because there's no reasoning with you.
Speaker 1: So that it does come with that disadvantage. And of
Speaker 1: course both sides play it as in a game of chicken,
Speaker 1: where as it's often been noted, how do you win
Speaker 1: at chicken? Well, if you put a you know, if
Speaker 1: you put a club on your steering wheel and then
Speaker 1: climb into the back seat and a brick on the accelerator,
Speaker 1: so the car's no longer in your control, then the
Speaker 1: other guy's got to swerve. On the other hand, if
Speaker 1: it occurs to both teenagers to try that at the
Speaker 1: same moment, it can be a recipe for disaster. So
Speaker 1: even the rationality of the strategic rationality of irrationality can
Speaker 1: have its limits. Sounds like you're describing most celebrity relationships,
Speaker 1: as described in that's look good to both of them
Speaker 1: are the paradoxical rationality of irrational emotion. That's the technical
Speaker 1: term of this paradise. Yes, indeed, and to add to
Speaker 1: the uh sometimes mind dizzying implications, we can also sometimes
Speaker 1: deploy them against ourselves, the most famous example being Odysseus,
Speaker 1: who was able to hear the sirens' songs without steering
Speaker 1: his ship onto the rocks because he had his sailors
Speaker 1: plug their ears with wax and tie him to the mast,
Speaker 1: so he was incapable of ordering them to sail toward
Speaker 1: the sirens. They were not tempted by the sirens, So
Speaker 1: the voluntary incapacitation and the voluntary ignorance in the case
Speaker 1: of Odysseus and his sailors respectively, was a higher order
Speaker 1: advantage in his own self control. And we, you know,
Speaker 1: we often do that. In fact, it's often considered the
Speaker 1: most effective means of self control, rather than just exerting
Speaker 1: brute will power, which is kind of beyond most of
Speaker 1: our powers. If you just make it impossible for you
Speaker 1: to succumb to temptation later, that is, you know, don't
Speaker 1: buy the brownies in the first place. Then when you
Speaker 1: get hungry at midnight, you won't be tempted to eat them,
Speaker 1: or if you are tempt to eat them, all maddics,
Speaker 1: they're not there totally. I've been meaning to buy one
Speaker 1: of these jars that you put your iPhone in at
Speaker 1: night and you set a timer. It won't open it
Speaker 1: up for you, exactly. It's sometimes called odissi and self
Speaker 1: control after the after the honesty makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1: Is it irrational to think taboo thoughts? And then my
Speaker 1: follow up question, is it rational to condemn someone merely
Speaker 1: for the thinking of their thoughts? Yeah, another fascinating topic
Speaker 1: on the possible you know, the boundary conditions for rationality
Speaker 1: where and this is work by Philip Tetlock and some
Speaker 1: collaborators on the psychological phenomenon that we do tend to
Speaker 1: deem certain thoughts evil to think, even though one might
Speaker 1: reason that you no harm, no foul, What goes on
Speaker 1: in the privacy of your head is no one else's business.
Speaker 1: That's often not the way we think, or that discussing,
Speaker 1: even discussing some things as hypothetical possibilities, can be morally compromising,
Speaker 1: and Tetlog gives examples like the taboo trade off. How
Speaker 1: much money should we spend to save a little girl's life? Now,
Speaker 1: you can't avoid making that decision, at least implicitly, because
Speaker 1: the hospital can't drain its entire budget to provide the
Speaker 1: absolute cutting edge medical treatment for one sick child at
Speaker 1: the expense of all the other sick children. How much
Speaker 1: should we spend to preserve the environment, to save an
Speaker 1: endangered species? It seems kind of dirty to put a
Speaker 1: price on these things, you know, In a sense, we
Speaker 1: don't have a choice, and often it's done kind of
Speaker 1: in the shadows, so that we do it but we
Speaker 1: don't talk about it. Or another example is the heretical counterfactual.
Speaker 1: This is what got Selomon rushed you into trouble for
Speaker 1: merely depicting an alternative life history of Muhammad in which
Speaker 1: he was tempted by the devil instead of by God,
Speaker 1: and he nearly paid with his life when when a
Speaker 1: fat wall was imposed on him by the Iatola Halmani.
Speaker 1: Or that's not a little exotic. So I actually came
Speaker 1: up with a real life example that affects all of us.
Speaker 1: This is a true story that I heard of a
Speaker 1: party game that people played after dinner where they said
Speaker 1: the game was of course, none of us around this
Speaker 1: table are the least bit racist or bigoted or prejudiced.
Speaker 1: But let's just say hypothetically that you were, which ethnic
Speaker 1: group would you be prenticed against? And that's the kind
Speaker 1: of a game you really don't want to play. Even
Speaker 1: though you're not confessing to racism. There's something about confessing
Speaker 1: to hypothetical racism. It's almost as bad as confessing to
Speaker 1: the real thing, if you're even allowing in mind to
Speaker 1: go there. I saw a movie where they did that
Speaker 1: the dinner and the and the wife broke up with
Speaker 1: the guy based on his answer. She said, you would
Speaker 1: I came from there was a movie. I'm gonna trying
Speaker 1: to remember what the movie was. Remember my family dumbed
Speaker 1: her boyfriend when when he answered Jews. Yeah. And then
Speaker 1: there's the ah. What was the The third type of
Speaker 1: trade off is the theoretical counterfactual, the taboo trade off
Speaker 1: and the forbidden base rate ah. If you are actually
Speaker 1: we even touched on this earlier in the conversation. If
Speaker 1: you're screening at the airport for terrorists, are you allowed
Speaker 1: to consider the statistics of whether you know Buddhists, Catholics, Jews, Muslims,
Speaker 1: and Protestants. They're they're base rate of committing terrorism. If
Speaker 1: you're a good Baysian reasoner, that's exactly what you should
Speaker 1: do in admitting someone to university, in judging them in
Speaker 1: a criminal courtroom. If you wanted the statistically cutting edge
Speaker 1: state of the art most a current possible prediction of
Speaker 1: how well they would do, then you should throw into
Speaker 1: the equation their gender and their race and their religion.
Speaker 1: But that is to say that that's kind of emotionally icky,
Speaker 1: would be an understatement to say nothing but politically inflammatory,
Speaker 1: and so certain base rates we considered to be kind
Speaker 1: of immoral to to think about now. And as Teloc emphasizes,
Speaker 1: this is not completely irrational because in our social lives
Speaker 1: we pick our friends and our allies not just by
Speaker 1: what they do, but by who they are. Namely, has
Speaker 1: this potential friend not just has he treated me well
Speaker 1: so far, but if the chips were down, and if
Speaker 1: you were ever tempted to stab me in the back
Speaker 1: when my back was turned, or to sell me down
Speaker 1: the river, would he? And of course when we pick
Speaker 1: our allies, our friends, we want to peer into their
Speaker 1: soul and know what they're capable of, not just what
Speaker 1: they've done so far, and which thoughts they're capable of
Speaker 1: thinking is very much relevant to that judgment. You know,
Speaker 1: if you were if someone said for how much money
Speaker 1: would you sell your child or betray your spouse or
Speaker 1: be unfaithful to your spouses? In the movie in Decent Proposal,
Speaker 1: the correct answer is not, well, what are you offering?
Speaker 1: The correct answer is I've offended you asked that question.
Speaker 1: That is, you're indicating that there's certain relationships that are sacred.
Speaker 1: The problem being that what's rational in the realm of
Speaker 1: choosing our friends and allies is not so rational when
Speaker 1: we are setting policy for an entire society, when we're
Speaker 1: doing science, where we might really want to have the
Speaker 1: most accurate calculation of costs and benefits, and not project
Speaker 1: our friendships and our romantic relationships onto running a government
Speaker 1: or doing science. But why do in our heads we
Speaker 1: let off the hook fiction writers? I don't think anyone
Speaker 1: looks at Stephen King. You read his books, you see
Speaker 1: what he's capable of thinking in But I don't feel
Speaker 1: like we project that onto him. You know, we like
Speaker 1: Stephen King, We're like, oh, he's probably a good guy.
Speaker 1: I don't think people. It's a great question. And actually,
Speaker 1: I mean I don't know if anyone. I would love
Speaker 1: to see someone explore this. I'll just toss off some ideas. Now,
Speaker 1: it's not probably this inocuous as in the case of
Speaker 1: Solomon Rushdy. I mean, it worked with Stephen King and
Speaker 1: we uh it did not. It didn't work so well
Speaker 1: for for Solomon Rushdi uh. And even in the case
Speaker 1: of our culture, there have been novelists who have been condemned.
Speaker 1: I think it was Brett Easton Ellis who depicted scenes
Speaker 1: of female sexual torture and mutilation that were a little
Speaker 1: too close for comfort, and there was, at least at
Speaker 1: the time, some of this lack of forgiveness that we do.
Speaker 1: You're right extend us to Stephen King. It Partly it's
Speaker 1: I'm gonna riff here. I don't know the answer, but
Speaker 1: I think it's a fascinating question. Partly, there may be
Speaker 1: certain conventions where because the convention already exists, someone working
Speaker 1: within that convention is giving given a pass. And the
Speaker 1: Murder Mystery is a classic example. The you know, the
Speaker 1: Agatha Christie and that whole genre of are ones where
Speaker 1: we as a culture have anointed it as an acceptable
Speaker 1: cultural form and we don't think the worse for the
Speaker 1: writers who operate within that genre. And it may be
Speaker 1: that for certain genres of horror there can be changing
Speaker 1: more's so that we do conventionalize them as an acceptable
Speaker 1: as an acceptable genre or form, although there are sometimes
Speaker 1: tensions at the boundaries, like where you do have some
Speaker 1: guardians blue noses saying that violent entertainment Quentin Tarantino comics
Speaker 1: in the nineteen fifties, certain kinds of violent movies. And indeed,
Speaker 1: different constituencies do make different moral arguments, such as the
Speaker 1: arguments against pornography or against sexualized violence against women, where
Speaker 1: someone who the genre itself may be deemed dangerous and
Speaker 1: the people who do think those thoughts might be morally condemned.
Speaker 1: But anyway, it's an into Maybe there's a PhD thesis
Speaker 1: for some brilliant English literature student in that. For sure,
Speaker 1: someone needs to analyze American horror story the TV series,
Speaker 1: because that is as extreme as can be. But I
Speaker 1: don't think the writers of it get in trouble be
Speaker 1: interesting to for someone to go over the history of
Speaker 1: popular fiction. And I think they're probably at every historical area,
Speaker 1: there probably are debates and moral condemnation at the boundaries,
Speaker 1: and then the culture itself can sometimes change the boundaries. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess this is just another one of examples where
Speaker 1: context is everything. You know. You you if you're on
Speaker 1: a day and you share the fact that you have fantasies,
Speaker 1: you know, and have conjured up ideas of you know,
Speaker 1: a serial killer and in a small town with supernatural elements,
Speaker 1: your date's going to run for the hills. But if
Speaker 1: you're a sci fi convention you talk about your new
Speaker 1: plot for a story, people are like, oh, that's really
Speaker 1: clever and creative. So this is indeed one of those
Speaker 1: cases of context. Yeah. Yeah, So why is rationality so
Speaker 1: in cool? Yeah, people do. First of all, there is
Speaker 1: the confusion that we talked about before between rationality and coldness, joylessness, dourness.
Speaker 1: That's just that's just if you're pardon the expression, that's
Speaker 1: just irrational, it's a it's a non secutor. Uh uh.
Speaker 1: There is and there always has been a always since
Speaker 1: the since the nineteenth century, there has been a Romantic
Speaker 1: movement that valorizes spontaneity, authenticity and so and of course
Speaker 1: the romantics have all the great art, so uh that
Speaker 1: has has led to the cool uh connection. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: do you do you think you're making it cool? I
Speaker 1: would love to. I think it's probably beyond my powers.
Speaker 1: But if if that were an outcome, I would be delighted,
Speaker 1: I think, and I probably way. I do think you
Speaker 1: are to a certain extent, But I think that you
Speaker 1: need to, like if your book launch, you know, you
Speaker 1: need to like pair with like Snoop Dogg and like
Speaker 1: I'm not you know, I'm like serious and get him
Speaker 1: like being like I will this new book, you know,
Speaker 1: on rationality and why it matters, you know, while we're
Speaker 1: smoking a joint or something, and you know, like I
Speaker 1: feel like, well there is I mean, there are certain
Speaker 1: you comedians who are who work in that venue, like
Speaker 1: like Bill Maher. Also there is there is this kind
Speaker 1: of eccentric culture called the rationality community that I think
Speaker 1: probably unsuccessfully tries to make rationality cool, although they at
Speaker 1: least they make it a thing. And you know, as
Speaker 1: I say, and there are people who are associated with it.
Speaker 1: Scott Alexander, Julia Gailiff, Elliott yed Kowski to some extent,
Speaker 1: Robin Hanson's Scott Aronson. The problem being there a couple
Speaker 1: of problems. One of them is, like any community, clubs
Speaker 1: develop their own internal culture very quickly, as we know
Speaker 1: as psychologists, throw a bunch of eleven year olds together
Speaker 1: and pretty soon they have their own lingo, their own
Speaker 1: their own habits, and that's true of any community. The
Speaker 1: other being that, you know, ultimately having a club for
Speaker 1: rationality kind of misses the point. It's like everyone should
Speaker 1: be rational. It shouldn't be a niche like you know,
Speaker 1: stamp collecting or or or cosplay. Of course, I think
Speaker 1: may be the first to agree, and I give them
Speaker 1: credit for trying to put it on the on the
Speaker 1: radar as something that is at least potentially cool and
Speaker 1: that ought to be cooler. Yeah, it shouldn't be geeky,
Speaker 1: should be geek rational. I agree, And look, I think
Speaker 1: that part of the blame is the Spock character. But
Speaker 1: the more that I read your book and really understand
Speaker 1: what you're saying, I feel like Spock was more logical
Speaker 1: than rational, you know, because like to be rational, there's
Speaker 1: this like what do use? What does a person want?
Speaker 1: There's a very human dimension of it in the way
Speaker 1: that you describe. Indeed, that perhaps indeed, and of course warmth, love, friendship,
Speaker 1: our being social animals and emotional animals. There's nothing irrational
Speaker 1: about that, you know, except when we it conflicts with
Speaker 1: other goals or it conflicts with someone else's goals for
Speaker 1: and pleasure and warmth and social connection. Yeah, yeah, agreed, agreed. Well,
Speaker 1: there's so much for its content your book. I'm trying
Speaker 1: to like think through, like, Okay, where do I want
Speaker 1: to go next? Here's what let's talk about the tragedy,
Speaker 1: the tragic trade off between hits and false arms, oh yes,
Speaker 1: or miss and correct rejections. What's a rational observer today? Right?
Speaker 1: You know, this is one of the motivations for writing
Speaker 1: this book is an intuition that I think many people
Speaker 1: in our field sometimes have. Mainly, they're just some tools
Speaker 1: that we use to understand phenomena that really ought to
Speaker 1: be part of conventional wisdom. And one of them is
Speaker 1: the tool that that that you and I and and
Speaker 1: and our students and fellows academics learned in perception class.
Speaker 1: It's called signal detection theory, originally applied at least in
Speaker 1: our field, applied to the human subject in the booths
Speaker 1: with the headphones pressing button. Whenever he hears a sound
Speaker 1: and has he heard it, hasn't he Well, there's no
Speaker 1: answer to that question. When the sound is just the
Speaker 1: very threshold of hearing, he can either say, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess I heard it or I'm not sure that
Speaker 1: I heard it. A lot depends on whether you pay
Speaker 1: him for correct detections hits, whether you penalize him for
Speaker 1: false alarms. And there's a mathematics as to how the
Speaker 1: ideal observer ought to respond in cases where they're detecting
Speaker 1: something under conditions of noise, they may detect it, they
Speaker 1: may not, And there's a you can predict what as
Speaker 1: they set their trade off they're cut off. I mean
Speaker 1: between being trigger happy or yea saying you know, saying
Speaker 1: yes in the slightest hint, being much more conservative, being
Speaker 1: gun shy, nay saying defaulting to know unless they're really positive.
Speaker 1: How do you set that threshold, Well, it depends on
Speaker 1: how bad the costs are for a false alarm compared
Speaker 1: to a miss. So that's the there's mathematics on how
Speaker 1: to do that optimally. But the way of thinking, namely,
Speaker 1: often in life we just don't know the truth. We're fallible.
Speaker 1: None of us is omniscient. We have a good guess.
Speaker 1: We like to think that when we think we see something,
Speaker 1: or detect something or hear something, it's true more often
Speaker 1: than not. But it can't be true all the time.
Speaker 1: What do we do? And the answer is, well, think
Speaker 1: carefully about how bad it is to be wrong in
Speaker 1: each of those two ways, namely, you miss or you
Speaker 1: false alarm, and set you are cut off accordingly. Now,
Speaker 1: why is that relevant? It's relevant to things like medical
Speaker 1: decision making. There's a blob on a scan, is it
Speaker 1: cancer or is it a harmless cyst? First of all,
Speaker 1: in all signal detection problems, the imperative should be to
Speaker 1: increase your sensitivevity. That is, fine tune your judgment, your instruments,
Speaker 1: your forensics so that you pull apart the signal and
Speaker 1: noise and they're the fewest possible opportunities for confusion by
Speaker 1: Given that you're never going to be perfect when you set,
Speaker 1: you should set your cutoff mindful of each type of cost.
Speaker 1: In the case of the cancer, it could be how
Speaker 1: bad would it be to have painful and disfiguring surgery
Speaker 1: if I am cancer free? Versus how much of a
Speaker 1: risk am I taking with my life if I really
Speaker 1: do have cancer and I fail to operate. In the
Speaker 1: case of the judicial system, and I talk about signal
Speaker 1: detection theory, in the courtroom, there's evidence as to whether
Speaker 1: the suspect committed a crime or not. It's never perfect.
Speaker 1: A jury nonetheless has to render a verdict. We reckon
Speaker 1: the costs in that case, not in pain and suffering,
Speaker 1: not in dollars and cents, but in terms of justice.
Speaker 1: How abominable is it to send an innocent person to prison,
Speaker 1: or even worse, to send them to the gallows versus
Speaker 1: how much justice is denied if you let a guilty
Speaker 1: person go free. No correct answer, since there's never an
Speaker 1: objectively correct answer for questions of goals of costs, including
Speaker 1: moral costs, but it's good to be clear as to
Speaker 1: what costs you're willing to pay or not. Classically, the criterion,
Speaker 1: going back to just Judge Blackstone, is better to let
Speaker 1: ten guilty people go free than to falsely convict one innocent. Now,
Speaker 1: even that's not totally arbitrary. I think you can make
Speaker 1: arguments as to why that's reasonable. But as an example,
Speaker 1: the straight out of signal detection theory of figuring out
Speaker 1: the costs of the two kinds of errors and setting
Speaker 1: a cutoff accordingly, Well, this is tricky stuff. I mean
Speaker 1: there's no well, there's a trade trade. All's are always tricky, right,
Speaker 1: It's always tricky. But what's what what is always good
Speaker 1: is to know when you're faced with them. Again subject
Speaker 1: to film Tetlock's point that sometimes people don't like to
Speaker 1: think about trade offs. They might even think it's your
Speaker 1: moral to think about trade offs. We're going trade one
Speaker 1: thing off inst another, such as you know, should there
Speaker 1: be should people be allowed to sell their kidneys on eBay? Uh?
Speaker 1: You know there is an argument there that you know,
Speaker 1: everyone wins, no one's the worse off. But there's a
Speaker 1: lot of moral opposition to anything that smacks of quid
Speaker 1: pro quote when it comes to a sacred commodity, namely organs.
Speaker 1: Oh for sure. I mean there's lots of examples. We
Speaker 1: could bring up a prostitution. There's a contemporary example, sex
Speaker 1: works as we now call it, where there's a debate
Speaker 1: has been revived in older times. We forget that there
Speaker 1: was this debate that people were able to buy their
Speaker 1: way out of jury duty or out of military service.
Speaker 1: They are now able to sell their votes. So these
Speaker 1: things do change with the moral evolution of societies. I
Speaker 1: do feel like in general, though utilitarian reasoning is uncool,
Speaker 1: is not as cool. Well, yes, my heart, you don't
Speaker 1: have a heart. If you hear utilitary, I think we're
Speaker 1: often defined. I think you're right. It does see I
Speaker 1: think my colleague Joshua Green calls it nerd morality, and
Speaker 1: it is a kind of it was a cost benefit analysis.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, a lot of what we credit
Speaker 1: as our most glorious milestones of moral progress came from
Speaker 1: utilitary reasoning, Like the decriminalization of homosexuality. It's a straightforward
Speaker 1: utilitarian argument. No one's harmed, no harm, no foul, and
Speaker 1: animal writes movement that suffering is bad. It doesn't matter
Speaker 1: how smart you are. It's a question of how much
Speaker 1: you can suffer. The decriminalization decriminalization of heresy, No one's
Speaker 1: As Thomas Jefferson put it, it doesn't matter to me
Speaker 1: whether my neighbor believes in one god or ten gods.
Speaker 1: It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. That's
Speaker 1: the utilitary argument and argument for women's equality. There are many,
Speaker 1: many arguments that in fact appealed to the notion that
Speaker 1: you know, ain't no one's business if I do, if
Speaker 1: no one gets hurt, what consenting adults do in private,
Speaker 1: These are all utilitarian arguments, and so paradoxically they're they're
Speaker 1: cool in the sense that they often are on the
Speaker 1: progressive side of things, and they do overall ten to
Speaker 1: win the day. But if you laid them out as calculations,
Speaker 1: then you're right, they see uh tragically unhip. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: just the word utilitarian doesn't itself were bad branding. God
Speaker 1: was just going to say, it's got an image problem. Well,
Speaker 1: I think I think we have reached the point of
Speaker 1: our interview where we can finally discuss the pandemic of poppycock. Indeed,
Speaker 1: and I could not get away without a chapter that
Speaker 1: I call What's wrong with People? Knowing that if you
Speaker 1: bring up the topic of rationality, the first question you
Speaker 1: get is why is the world losing its mind? And
Speaker 1: there isn't a simple, a single answer to that, because
Speaker 1: there isn't a single kind of poppycock. But I think
Speaker 1: it's in part it comes from the fact that we
Speaker 1: partly motivated reasoning, namely because rationality is always in service
Speaker 1: of a goal. That goal needn't always be universal objective truth.
Speaker 1: It can be my own reputation, esteem, respect, deference. It
Speaker 1: can be the glory of my sect, my tribe, my coalition,
Speaker 1: my party, the so called my side bias, which our
Speaker 1: friend Keith Stanovitch as recently written a book about. So
Speaker 1: that's a major component. People care more about glorifying their
Speaker 1: political coalition than achieving universal objective truth. So that's one.
Speaker 1: Another is that we're all as humans vulnerable to certain
Speaker 1: kinds of deep seated intuitions. We're dualists, as Paul Bloom
Speaker 1: has argued, that we think that people have a body
Speaker 1: and a mind, and from there there it's a short
Speaker 1: step to imagining minds that aren't attached to bodies, namely
Speaker 1: souls and ghosts and spirits and hints esp and psychic powers.
Speaker 1: We are all essentialists, as Susan Gellman and others have argued,
Speaker 1: we think that living things have an internal, invisible essence
Speaker 1: that gives them their form and their powers. And so
Speaker 1: we're subject to homeopathy. We're skeptical about vaccines. We're open
Speaker 1: to blood letting and emetics and detoxification, things that intuitively
Speaker 1: feel like ridding the body of poisons yougo. Mesia has
Speaker 1: shown that blood letting is found in many many cultures
Speaker 1: as a kind of quack cure. We're all teleologists. Deb
Speaker 1: Keleman has emphasized this so that we know that our
Speaker 1: own tools and plans and artifacts who are designed with
Speaker 1: a purpose, and it's short step to think that the
Speaker 1: world was designed for a purpose. Universe. Everything happens for
Speaker 1: a reason. So we become it's easily become creationists. They
Speaker 1: are all implanted in us because of our evolutionary history.
Speaker 1: The question isn't why people believe these things, but why
Speaker 1: some of us don't believe them. Why do we actually
Speaker 1: believe that the mind is that product or the brain?
Speaker 1: Why do believe we believe that scigns and design in
Speaker 1: a living world come from evolution. Well, it's because some
Speaker 1: of us not only have a scientific education, but we
Speaker 1: trust the scientists. There are people What they say is
Speaker 1: good enough for us. If you aren't in that social
Speaker 1: sphere of influence, then you're liable to fall back either
Speaker 1: on your own intuitions or on communities that ratify those intuitions.
Speaker 1: That might run a foul of the scientific insensus. But
Speaker 1: the scientific insensus you think of as just another another
Speaker 1: clique and other tribe. They're not my clean or my tribe.
Speaker 1: And I think there is a sense that why people
Speaker 1: believe weird things, It depends on what you mean by belief.
Speaker 1: And there's a category of belief that isn't the same
Speaker 1: as literal belief that there's there's milk in the fridge
Speaker 1: or or or gas in the car, where it's provably
Speaker 1: true or false. Robert Abeleson, the great social psychologists, differentiated
Speaker 1: between distal beliefs and uh and testable beliefs where there's
Speaker 1: a whole realm of things, like you know, does God exist,
Speaker 1: what's the origin of the universe? What are the bankers
Speaker 1: and presidents act and powerful people actually doing in secret
Speaker 1: where you can't find out if you're an ordinary person,
Speaker 1: and you don't really care because you can't you can
Speaker 1: never find out anyway, And so you believe things that
Speaker 1: are socially uplifting, that are make your side look good,
Speaker 1: make your side look bad, that are entertaining, and we
Speaker 1: all to some extent swallow these not quite true, not
Speaker 1: quite false beliefs in religion, in historical fiction, in national mythology,
Speaker 1: where you know whether they're literally true or false? Well,
Speaker 1: we just don't care that much, but we do know
Speaker 1: that they are inspiring, uplifting, entertaining. And when it comes
Speaker 1: to beliefs outside of people's personal sphere of day to
Speaker 1: day living, they whether they believe it is not a
Speaker 1: matter of whether they can show that they're true or false,
Speaker 1: but whether it is morally empowering to believe them. And
Speaker 1: I think a lot of crazy beliefs, you know, So
Speaker 1: you know it was Barack Obama a Muslim? Did Hillary
Speaker 1: Clinton run a pedophile ring out of the basement of
Speaker 1: a pizzeria? If you say you believe it, It isn't
Speaker 1: so much that you have grounds for believing it, but
Speaker 1: it's a way of saying boo Hillary. Namely, that's the
Speaker 1: kind of thing that she could be capable of. Such
Speaker 1: a bad person. Well, there was a phrase that I
Speaker 1: thought was really interesting. It's called expressive rast. Exactly Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a good way of putting it, exactly right. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that that really resonated with me. And and
Speaker 1: the distinction between these two realms, as you put it,
Speaker 1: in the disting between reality and mythology. Mythology is very powerful.
Speaker 1: I can have a very powerful effect, as many cult
Speaker 1: leaders over the years have discovered, and religious leaders and
Speaker 1: political leaders, that's all the same thing. Yeah, funny about it.
Speaker 1: And then this is played out very convincingly by Jonathan
Speaker 1: Rousch in his new book The Constitution of Knowledge. So
Speaker 1: we almost shouldn't ask the question why do people? Why
Speaker 1: do people believe weird things as much as why do
Speaker 1: at least some people some of the time believe true things?
Speaker 1: And the answer to that is it's not because they
Speaker 1: are particularly rational, they have better brains, or it's because
Speaker 1: they have embedded themselves in a community with norms and
Speaker 1: rules and institutions that are explicitly designed to read out
Speaker 1: falsehoods and to steer the entire community towards truth. Institutions
Speaker 1: like science with empirical testing, and scholarship with peer review,
Speaker 1: and journalism with fact checking, and the court system with
Speaker 1: adversarial proceedings, and government with checks and balances and free speech.
Speaker 1: And by letting one person's bias thinking bump up against
Speaker 1: another person's bias thinking, then no one gets to impose
Speaker 1: their crazy beliefs on everyone else, but the community as
Speaker 1: a whole is playing a game that will move them
Speaker 1: all toward truth. When it works, although of course it's
Speaker 1: always imperfect and it's always being corroded. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: a few of your life like a scientist, like twenty
Speaker 1: four to seven. Then don't you never have a belief
Speaker 1: right like that? That word doesn't really I wouldn't put
Speaker 1: it by way. I mean you could have a degree
Speaker 1: of credence. You could be a Baysian and say I
Speaker 1: put you know, point nine out of in a scale
Speaker 1: of zero to one credence on that belief. So that
Speaker 1: is I believe it. I might even and then going
Speaker 1: back to civil detection theory, I'm going to act on
Speaker 1: it even though I'm uncertain, because the costs of being
Speaker 1: wrong and not acting on it are worse than the
Speaker 1: costs of acting on it. If if I'm wrong and
Speaker 1: it's not really true, and you assume that the truth
Speaker 1: that there is a truth, and that you don't know it,
Speaker 1: you try, the community tries, you try to get as
Speaker 1: close as possible, always leading open the possibility that you
Speaker 1: might be mistaken. Right, So I think it makes sense
Speaker 1: to believe that there's a certain high probability that something
Speaker 1: is true, you know, in terms of probabilities. But that
Speaker 1: seems like a different state, that's right. I believe that
Speaker 1: the certain exactly, and that's the basing approach is to
Speaker 1: treat degree of credence as a probability and number is
Speaker 1: your own worm, but it is. But you're right that
Speaker 1: it's part of the commitment to epistemic humility, to fallibility,
Speaker 1: to considering the possibility that you might be mistaken. That
Speaker 1: it's inherent to science, it's inherent to democracy, it's inherent
Speaker 1: to liberalism, it's inherent to humanism. Here here you're you
Speaker 1: know you you you make this point, you say, I
Speaker 1: love this. I'm actually gonna I think I'm gonna tweet
Speaker 1: this quote of yours after our conversation. Each of us
Speaker 1: has a motive to prefer our truth, but together we're
Speaker 1: better off with the truth. I'm just going to conclude
Speaker 1: this interview by saying, in an era in which rationalities
Speaker 1: see both more threatened and more essential than ever, I
Speaker 1: do agree that your book is in affirmation of the
Speaker 1: urgency of rationality. So congratulations on the publication of the books, Stephen.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much, Scott. As always, it's been stimulating and
Speaker 1: enjoyable to speak with you. Yeah, I fel the same way.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. To this episode of The Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 1: If you'd like to react in some way to something
Speaker 1: you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion
Speaker 1: at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology podcast
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Speaker 1: the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.