WEBVTT - Interview With Steven Pinker: Masters in Business (Audio) 0:00:00.440 --> 0:00:04.440 Look ahead, imagine more, gain insight for your industry with 0:00:04.480 --> 0:00:08.480 forward thinking advice from the professionals at Cone Resnick. Is 0:00:08.480 --> 0:00:11.559 your business ready to break through? Find out more at 0:00:11.640 --> 0:00:19.279 Cone resnick dot com slash Breakthrough. This is Masters in 0:00:19.360 --> 0:00:23.680 Business with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio. This week. On 0:00:23.720 --> 0:00:29.200 the podcast, I had an absolutely fascinating and fantastic conversation 0:00:29.920 --> 0:00:36.160 with a rock star professor of neural linguistics and cognitive 0:00:36.200 --> 0:00:41.920 psychology and all sorts of other interesting uh fields of 0:00:41.960 --> 0:00:46.879 study within the world of cognition and psychology, Professor Stephen 0:00:46.920 --> 0:00:51.640 Pinker at Harvard University. This guy is a rock star. 0:00:51.880 --> 0:00:55.400 This was really one of those conversations that was just 0:00:56.160 --> 0:01:00.760 so fascinating and went in so many different directions. Uh. 0:01:00.840 --> 0:01:04.640 He's a psychologist, but he also has a really fascinating 0:01:05.360 --> 0:01:08.880 uh quantitative background, and so he's a guy that's actually 0:01:09.720 --> 0:01:13.720 especially driven by data. When you think of things like 0:01:14.040 --> 0:01:18.160 neural linguistics or or visual cognition, you don't think in 0:01:18.280 --> 0:01:22.119 terms of of how's the math behind this? But he 0:01:22.280 --> 0:01:26.520 has a mind that looks at the world very much 0:01:26.520 --> 0:01:30.960 through a quantitative filter. Uh. He he wrote a number, 0:01:31.280 --> 0:01:35.400 by the way, uh one a ton of awards at 0:01:35.480 --> 0:01:40.280 at Harvard and throughout the sciences, highly highly regarded. His 0:01:40.400 --> 0:01:45.720 books have are also really really well reviewed, very notable. 0:01:46.440 --> 0:01:50.640 Uh the book Better Better Nature of Our Angels, why 0:01:50.800 --> 0:01:54.800 violence has decreased around the world and indeed when you 0:01:54.800 --> 0:01:58.280 look at it quantitatively, violence and war and crime or 0:01:58.320 --> 0:02:01.200 at record low levels. I know it doesn't look that 0:02:01.240 --> 0:02:04.680 way when you when you see the news, but that's 0:02:04.720 --> 0:02:09.600 a fascinating conversation. It's I love that sort of counterintuitive. 0:02:09.600 --> 0:02:12.960 Here's what everybody believes, it's all wrong, here's the data 0:02:12.960 --> 0:02:16.919 and proving it. Uh. And and he brings that approach 0:02:17.000 --> 0:02:21.840 to everything he touches. His His work on how the 0:02:22.280 --> 0:02:28.519 mind works is really fascinating. How children acquire language skills 0:02:29.000 --> 0:02:33.240 and why that is a significant evolutionary development amongst humans 0:02:33.800 --> 0:02:39.679 is really, you know, groundbreaking, fascinating stuff. Um. You may 0:02:39.720 --> 0:02:42.799 not think that there's an immediate application to the world 0:02:42.919 --> 0:02:47.040 of investing, but he's just one of these people who 0:02:47.120 --> 0:02:51.880 are so interesting and so knowledgeable and has such an 0:02:51.919 --> 0:02:57.320 interesting model in his mind for how to approach thinking 0:02:57.360 --> 0:03:00.880 about the world that I can't help but think that 0:03:00.919 --> 0:03:04.600 there are lessons for investors in this. So a little 0:03:04.639 --> 0:03:09.000 off the beaten path, but absolutely fascinating. Here is my 0:03:09.160 --> 0:03:16.880 conversation with Professor Steven Pinker. This is Masters in Business 0:03:16.960 --> 0:03:21.280 with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today 0:03:21.320 --> 0:03:25.240 is Professor Steven Pinker. He is a rock star professor 0:03:25.320 --> 0:03:29.280 of cognitive science and psychology at Harvard, where he holds 0:03:29.280 --> 0:03:33.760 the title of Johnstone Family Professor in the psych Department. 0:03:34.120 --> 0:03:39.640 He is a psychologist, linguist, and popular science author, specializing 0:03:39.680 --> 0:03:43.320 in visual cognition and psycho linguistics. I think you can 0:03:43.400 --> 0:03:47.160 find a lot of what we talked about today absolutely fascinating. 0:03:47.400 --> 0:03:50.920 He's won numerous awards from the National Economy of Sciences, 0:03:51.200 --> 0:03:55.240 the Royal Institute, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. He is the 0:03:55.320 --> 0:04:00.160 author of The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, the 0:04:00.200 --> 0:04:03.320 Better Angels of Our Nature, The Stuff of Thought, and 0:04:03.400 --> 0:04:07.560 most recently The Sense of Style. He is also on 0:04:07.640 --> 0:04:12.920 the usage panel of the American Heritage dis Dictionary. Professor Pinker, 0:04:13.000 --> 0:04:15.920 welcome to Bloomberg. Thank you. First question, I have to 0:04:15.960 --> 0:04:21.120 ask you what is visual cognition and psycholinguistics? Those are 0:04:21.160 --> 0:04:24.600 two sub topics in the field of cognitive science, which 0:04:24.680 --> 0:04:27.000 is how do we think? What? What is the nature 0:04:27.000 --> 0:04:31.320 of intelligence. Visual cognition is how we um interpret what 0:04:31.360 --> 0:04:33.080 we see, or how we think about what we see. 0:04:33.160 --> 0:04:35.200 How do you recognize the face of a friend? How 0:04:35.200 --> 0:04:37.760 do you find an object when you're rummaging through a drawer? 0:04:38.160 --> 0:04:41.880 How do you imagine things that that are hypothetical, like 0:04:42.080 --> 0:04:44.560 what would my living room look like if the couch 0:04:44.680 --> 0:04:46.560 was on the other side, or what would the smalllecule 0:04:46.600 --> 0:04:50.320 look like if I rotated in three dimensions? How do 0:04:50.440 --> 0:04:55.160 we allocate attention across the visual field? How how does 0:04:55.200 --> 0:04:59.000 your airport screener look for the hidden weapon in those 0:04:59.680 --> 0:05:02.720 false colored X ray images and so on, or not 0:05:02.880 --> 0:05:07.120 find them? So we have learned indeed, so that is 0:05:07.160 --> 0:05:09.839 a problem in visual cognition. It's not vision in the 0:05:09.880 --> 0:05:13.400 sense of seeing color and motion and uh and sharp detail, 0:05:13.560 --> 0:05:15.560 but it's the next step up in the brain, namely, 0:05:15.600 --> 0:05:20.640 how do you how does the visual world um interact 0:05:20.720 --> 0:05:23.039 with what you know, what you see, what you think about. 0:05:23.400 --> 0:05:26.640 So that raises an interesting question. How much of what 0:05:26.880 --> 0:05:30.719 the average person perceives as a three hundred and sixty 0:05:30.760 --> 0:05:34.200 d Greek construct of the universe around them, how much 0:05:34.200 --> 0:05:36.279 of that is accurate and how much of that is 0:05:36.360 --> 0:05:40.680 the brain filling in projecting. I don't want to say fabricating, 0:05:40.760 --> 0:05:44.560 but filling in the blind spots and blank spaces is 0:05:44.600 --> 0:05:48.960 what we see actually there or maybe not so much. Well, 0:05:49.000 --> 0:05:51.799 when when we're not hallucinating and we're looking at something, 0:05:51.839 --> 0:05:54.080 then we can we can see things vertically, and we 0:05:54.120 --> 0:05:57.839 do it much better than any robot or artificial intelligence system. 0:05:57.960 --> 0:06:00.520 That's why it's taken Google so long to develop a 0:06:00.520 --> 0:06:03.279 self driving car. They're trying to bring it to the 0:06:03.320 --> 0:06:06.440 and exceed the level of a human visual system. On 0:06:06.440 --> 0:06:09.280 the other hand, there is an illusion that we have 0:06:09.480 --> 0:06:13.719 a wall to wall tableau of visual detail. Uh. And 0:06:13.839 --> 0:06:16.719 that is constructed by the brain because even if you 0:06:17.160 --> 0:06:21.600 if you hold your hand out maybe eight inches from 0:06:21.800 --> 0:06:24.920 the where you're looking, you can't even count the fingers 0:06:24.960 --> 0:06:28.600 your vision. The acuity of your vision falls off really dramatically, 0:06:28.920 --> 0:06:32.360 but your eyes are constantly flitting around UH. And so 0:06:32.480 --> 0:06:39.039 your brain constructs an illusion of a continuously detailed visual world. 0:06:39.040 --> 0:06:42.520 But outside the phobia, the spot that you're actually looking at, 0:06:42.920 --> 0:06:47.599 vision is surprisingly course, and we rely on expectations and memories. 0:06:48.200 --> 0:06:51.080 I could picture hundreds of listeners holding their arms out 0:06:51.120 --> 0:06:53.400 and saying, you know, I can't count how many fingers 0:06:53.440 --> 0:06:55.560 I have, And it doesn't have to be in the 0:06:55.600 --> 0:06:57.279 in your peripheral vision. It just has to be a 0:06:57.320 --> 0:06:59.760 few inches away from the direction of your gaze. So, 0:07:00.000 --> 0:07:03.360 and people talk about tunnel vision or hyper focus. Really 0:07:03.560 --> 0:07:05.680 that's the normal state of there's a sense in which 0:07:05.680 --> 0:07:07.520 we all have tunnel vision. We don't realize it because 0:07:07.520 --> 0:07:10.720 our eyeballs move around so quickly. And then psycho linguistics, 0:07:10.760 --> 0:07:12.920 that was the second half of your question. That's another 0:07:12.960 --> 0:07:16.520 topic in cognitive science, and that is the psychology of language. 0:07:16.600 --> 0:07:19.600 How do we understand speech, how do we produce speech, 0:07:19.720 --> 0:07:23.680 how do children learn their mother tongue? Where does language 0:07:24.000 --> 0:07:26.520 come from, who decides what the rules are, how does 0:07:26.560 --> 0:07:30.000 it change over time? How do we read? All of 0:07:30.040 --> 0:07:34.000 those are topics in psycho linguistics, the psychology of language. So, 0:07:34.040 --> 0:07:35.880 I don't remember which book it was. It might have 0:07:36.000 --> 0:07:38.360 been the Stuff of Thought, or it might have been 0:07:39.200 --> 0:07:43.640 um How the mind works. You talked about how words 0:07:43.680 --> 0:07:46.400 sometimes are aunt amount of poetic, and it just made 0:07:46.440 --> 0:07:50.080 me think of the mel Brooks call Rehner routine the 0:07:50.120 --> 0:07:53.160 two thousand year Old Man, where they discuss how egg 0:07:53.440 --> 0:07:56.760 and shower are automoto poetic and I won't spoil it. 0:07:56.800 --> 0:07:59.320 People should go find it on YouTube. It's hilarious. But 0:07:59.440 --> 0:08:04.120 how much of actual language is because things sound like 0:08:04.720 --> 0:08:09.000 the way they are a bit uh, and so it's 0:08:09.040 --> 0:08:14.200 not a complete coincidence that, say, the word malefluous solus 0:08:14.280 --> 0:08:17.680 and the word cantankerous reminds you of a person with 0:08:17.720 --> 0:08:20.480 a lot of sharp edges. On the other hand, that 0:08:20.600 --> 0:08:23.120 only goes so far, because if you could really predict 0:08:23.160 --> 0:08:25.280 what a word meant by what it sounded like, then 0:08:25.400 --> 0:08:27.640 you wouldn't have to go through the laborious process of 0:08:27.720 --> 0:08:30.760 learning another second language. All the words would would be 0:08:31.000 --> 0:08:33.560 the meetings would be obvious. So most of the language 0:08:33.600 --> 0:08:36.480 is arbitrary, but there is a little bit of correlation 0:08:36.520 --> 0:08:39.280 between sound and meaning. So I just got back from Europe, 0:08:39.280 --> 0:08:41.920 and I know most of what you've worked on has 0:08:42.040 --> 0:08:45.520 come out of the English language. But why is it 0:08:45.640 --> 0:08:49.360 that when a non speaker of let's say, French or 0:08:49.400 --> 0:08:53.559 Italian listens, it sounds so melodic, or if you listen 0:08:53.640 --> 0:08:56.920 to German it sounds so harsh and guttural. What is 0:08:56.920 --> 0:09:02.719 it about those languages that give those things that that sensation. Well, 0:09:02.760 --> 0:09:06.599 it's a component of language called phonology, the the the 0:09:07.240 --> 0:09:11.480 sound pattern of the language, and that includes the set 0:09:11.480 --> 0:09:13.959 of vowels and consonants that you're allowed to use. We 0:09:14.000 --> 0:09:16.559 don't have in English, but you have it in Hebrew 0:09:16.640 --> 0:09:21.240 and in uh German. Uh. It also includes the melody 0:09:21.280 --> 0:09:25.120 and rhythm of speech, what's called prosody. Prosody, yes, so 0:09:25.160 --> 0:09:27.480 that that's kind of the aspect of language that you 0:09:27.480 --> 0:09:31.320 can hear behind a closed door, and you can often 0:09:31.360 --> 0:09:35.320 recognize a language just from its prosody. I'm Barry RIDHLTZ. 0:09:35.320 --> 0:09:38.480 You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My 0:09:38.559 --> 0:09:42.480 special guest today is Professor Stephen pinker Uh. He teaches 0:09:42.520 --> 0:09:48.280 at Harvard in the Psychology Department, studying cognition and psycholinguistics. 0:09:48.720 --> 0:09:50.839 One of your more recent books was called The Bitter 0:09:50.920 --> 0:09:54.800 Angels of Our Nature, How violence has declines, And when 0:09:54.840 --> 0:09:59.600 you see the data on this, it's pretty it's pretty astonishing. 0:09:59.600 --> 0:10:02.600 In the pres reference to Better Angels, you say the 0:10:02.679 --> 0:10:05.880 present day we are blessed by an unprecedented level of 0:10:05.960 --> 0:10:10.520 peaceful coexistence, but that seems to be contradicted by the 0:10:10.559 --> 0:10:13.800 news headlines we see every day. How do you reconcile 0:10:13.920 --> 0:10:17.160 the two because you can't get an accurate picture of 0:10:17.200 --> 0:10:20.320 the world by looking at the headlines. The headlines are 0:10:20.320 --> 0:10:22.720 about things that happen, they're not about things that don't happen. 0:10:22.880 --> 0:10:24.800 And as long as the rate of violence hasn't fallen 0:10:24.840 --> 0:10:27.920 to zero, they're always going to be enough violent incidents 0:10:27.960 --> 0:10:30.920 to fill the news. And we can lose sight of 0:10:31.000 --> 0:10:35.679 the vast amounts of the world that that are at peace. Currently. 0:10:35.760 --> 0:10:37.920 The there's a there is a zone of war that 0:10:38.160 --> 0:10:43.280 stretches pretty much from Nigeria through um Sub Saharan Africa, 0:10:43.360 --> 0:10:46.440 into the Middle East and then down into Pakistan. But 0:10:46.600 --> 0:10:49.679 five six of the world is at peace. And areas 0:10:49.679 --> 0:10:53.000 of the world that had were torn by war for 0:10:53.280 --> 0:10:57.440 centuries haven't had a war in in decades. Western Europe 0:10:57.480 --> 0:11:00.600 one of the most historically violent part so the world, 0:11:00.880 --> 0:11:04.600 hasn't had a war in in seventy years. Southeast Asia, 0:11:04.920 --> 0:11:07.680 those of us who grew up remembering the war in Vietnam, Yes, 0:11:07.800 --> 0:11:09.720 and and there has not been a war in Southeast 0:11:09.720 --> 0:11:13.200 Asia and since a small skirmish between China and Vietnam 0:11:13.200 --> 0:11:16.800 in the late eighties. Uh then, and it isn't just war, 0:11:16.960 --> 0:11:20.079 it's also one on one crime, which actually kills more 0:11:20.120 --> 0:11:23.040 people than wars in most years, other than in world wars. 0:11:23.920 --> 0:11:26.920 But the rate of crime has gone down. Everyone knows 0:11:26.960 --> 0:11:28.560 that it's gone down in the United States, but it 0:11:28.559 --> 0:11:31.080 seems to have gone down globally as well, especially if 0:11:31.120 --> 0:11:33.000 you look at even earlier periods in the history the 0:11:33.000 --> 0:11:36.960 Middle Ages, the rate of homicide was about thirty five 0:11:37.040 --> 0:11:40.360 times what it is today. So there was that wasn't 0:11:40.360 --> 0:11:42.720 even more dramatic decline, and it's homicides that killed the 0:11:42.760 --> 0:11:46.440 majority of people. So you mentioned the Middle Ages in 0:11:46.520 --> 0:11:50.480 the book you described the six major historical clients of violence. 0:11:51.200 --> 0:11:53.760 Let's skip ahead too. I think it was the third 0:11:53.840 --> 0:11:57.040 or fourth decline, which was the the invention of the 0:11:57.040 --> 0:12:00.880 printing press and the spread of literal Why is that 0:12:01.000 --> 0:12:05.160 someonepactful on reducing violence. Well, it's a conjecture. The the 0:12:05.160 --> 0:12:08.600 phenomenon we're trying to explain is why there was a 0:12:08.640 --> 0:12:12.480 cascade of humanitarian reforms around the time of the European 0:12:12.559 --> 0:12:15.600 Enlightenment the second half of the eighteenth century. Also, of 0:12:15.600 --> 0:12:19.720 course the time of the American Declaration of Independence and 0:12:19.760 --> 0:12:22.080 Bill of Rights, which was a kind of product of 0:12:22.120 --> 0:12:24.599 the Enlightenment. Why why did people wake up in the 0:12:24.640 --> 0:12:27.520 eighteenth century and say, well, maybe we should stop burning heretics, 0:12:28.120 --> 0:12:32.200 or maybe we should stop executing people for stealing a cabbage. Uh, 0:12:32.360 --> 0:12:35.400 maybe slavery isn't such a great idea when you come 0:12:35.400 --> 0:12:38.120 down and try to justify it. Maybe we should stop 0:12:38.120 --> 0:12:41.240 watching animals tear each other apart for entertainment. Maybe we 0:12:41.240 --> 0:12:44.880 should stop throwing debtors in in prison. So all of 0:12:44.880 --> 0:12:48.280 these reforms concentrated in a in a few decades, and 0:12:48.360 --> 0:12:51.200 we have to ask why, then, why did it take 0:12:51.240 --> 0:12:53.840 people millennia to figure out that might be something a 0:12:53.880 --> 0:12:58.120 wee bit wrong with slavery, and so one the first 0:12:58.160 --> 0:13:02.000 hypothesis is, well, maybe people got richer, and uh, if 0:13:02.040 --> 0:13:07.600 your life is more pleasant, then you value life more generally, 0:13:07.640 --> 0:13:09.600 and so you value the lives of others. But the 0:13:09.640 --> 0:13:12.520 timing doesn't work because people only started to get rich 0:13:12.600 --> 0:13:15.880 other than the kings and aristocrats in the nineteenth century, 0:13:16.320 --> 0:13:19.800 and these reforms were really products of the eighteenth century. 0:13:19.840 --> 0:13:23.319 So I suggested that maybe it's the rise of literacy 0:13:23.520 --> 0:13:26.560 and printing in the exchange of ideas, and that was 0:13:26.600 --> 0:13:30.720 the only technology that showed an increase in productivity prior 0:13:30.760 --> 0:13:33.880 to the Industrial Revolution. The cost of printing a book 0:13:34.280 --> 0:13:37.760 plunged in the seventeenth and eighteen centuries. There was kind 0:13:37.800 --> 0:13:39.760 of an early version of Moore's law if you look 0:13:39.800 --> 0:13:42.720 at the cost of producing a book. More and more 0:13:42.720 --> 0:13:46.000 people were reading. They were best sellers. There were novels. 0:13:46.120 --> 0:13:49.240 They're also pamphlets in the first newspapers. So the world 0:13:49.280 --> 0:13:53.200 got more connected. People could exchange ideas, bad ideas could 0:13:53.200 --> 0:13:57.400 be criticized. People would get together in also in cities, 0:13:57.559 --> 0:14:03.520 in uh coffee houses and pubs and saloons to exchange ideas, 0:14:04.080 --> 0:14:06.960 and it's possible that first of all, that could increase 0:14:07.040 --> 0:14:10.560 your your circle of empathy. It's harder to dehumanize people 0:14:10.600 --> 0:14:14.400 when you read their words, when you see what life 0:14:14.480 --> 0:14:17.400 was like from their point of view. And also when 0:14:17.400 --> 0:14:20.880 you have ideas being brought together and people debating them 0:14:20.880 --> 0:14:24.400 and arguing them over them, then bad ideas tend to 0:14:24.400 --> 0:14:26.800 be filtered out. So the idea that the reason that 0:14:26.840 --> 0:14:30.560 there was a crop failure is because of witchcraft, for example, 0:14:30.600 --> 0:14:33.160 the reason that there was an epidemic is because the 0:14:33.240 --> 0:14:36.440 Jews poisoned the wells. Slavery is a good thing because 0:14:36.480 --> 0:14:39.200 Africans can't do anything but be slaves. All of these 0:14:39.280 --> 0:14:42.720 toxic ideas could start to seem ridiculous when you know 0:14:42.880 --> 0:14:47.120 more about the world, and that was conceivably accelerated by 0:14:47.200 --> 0:14:52.040 the exchange of printed matter. So education helps reduce violence 0:14:52.120 --> 0:14:56.800 by making people less likely to believe silliness and nonsense 0:14:56.840 --> 0:15:00.560 and more likely to understand basic science and the logic 0:15:00.680 --> 0:15:06.160 of This causes that not witchcraft on average over the 0:15:06.200 --> 0:15:08.640 long run, not in every case, because there have been 0:15:08.640 --> 0:15:14.480 toxic ideas that have been advanced by intellectuals. Uh Communism, 0:15:14.520 --> 0:15:18.200 for example, responsible for massive numbers of deaths, was an 0:15:18.200 --> 0:15:21.960 intellectual movement, and Nazism there were plenty of Nazi professors. 0:15:22.400 --> 0:15:24.680 But I think that when you have freedom of speech, 0:15:24.720 --> 0:15:27.240 freedom of expression, so you don't get thrown in jail 0:15:27.400 --> 0:15:30.920 by criticizing a bad idea, then it's more likely that 0:15:31.000 --> 0:15:33.160 the bad ideas will be exposed. And it's not a 0:15:33.160 --> 0:15:38.400 coincidence that repressive regimes are also repressive in um clapping 0:15:38.400 --> 0:15:42.320 down on free speech. So we've seen a huge decrease 0:15:42.320 --> 0:15:44.640 in crime and violence in the United States over the 0:15:44.640 --> 0:15:48.960 past thirty years. Some people have attributed it to things 0:15:49.000 --> 0:15:52.880 like the ending of lead paper and apartments. Other people 0:15:52.960 --> 0:15:57.440 have looked at the removal of various outlives to gasoline 0:15:57.440 --> 0:16:01.320 taking the lead out of gasoline. UH. The guys from 0:16:01.320 --> 0:16:04.120 Freakonomics even have gone so far as to suggest Roe v. 0:16:04.280 --> 0:16:09.000 Wade is a factor. Why the huge fall off just 0:16:09.080 --> 0:16:14.200 in the most recent few decades. Yes, so, starting there 0:16:14.360 --> 0:16:17.520 was an eight year decline of violent crime in the 0:16:17.560 --> 0:16:20.360 United States, which brought it down to almost half of 0:16:20.400 --> 0:16:24.560 its peak UH. And then surprisingly around O seven oh eight, 0:16:24.560 --> 0:16:27.480 there was a second decline which no one predicted. Everyone said, well, 0:16:27.480 --> 0:16:30.040 we have great recession, unemployment, crime is going to go up, 0:16:30.080 --> 0:16:32.880 in equality UH and and crime went down instead of 0:16:32.920 --> 0:16:35.680 going up. H. The honest answer is, no one really 0:16:35.680 --> 0:16:39.360 knows what all the causes were. Probably the cute theories 0:16:39.640 --> 0:16:44.000 like lead in the gasoline abortion are are wrong um 0:16:44.200 --> 0:16:46.960 the AUH. And it may be that a number of 0:16:47.000 --> 0:16:50.480 things went right around the same time. Among them were 0:16:51.240 --> 0:16:53.440 an increase in the number of police in a change 0:16:53.440 --> 0:16:58.120 in police tactics of policing got smarter nationwide, The homicide 0:16:58.200 --> 0:17:00.880 rate absolutely plunged. In rates of other types of crime 0:17:00.920 --> 0:17:03.920 like rape and assault and UH and robbery also went down. 0:17:04.359 --> 0:17:06.359 And then there are also changes that no one really 0:17:06.440 --> 0:17:09.880 can completely explain in the culture because there you also 0:17:09.920 --> 0:17:14.200 had a decline in teenage pregnancy, decline in insurance fraud, 0:17:14.240 --> 0:17:18.040 a decline in drug use. So somehow people got a 0:17:18.080 --> 0:17:20.640 little bit more civilized starting in the nineties on top 0:17:20.680 --> 0:17:25.360 of these other changes. So last question. You've noted that 0:17:25.440 --> 0:17:31.399 the economic benefits of affluence, really a post nineteenth century phenomena, 0:17:31.640 --> 0:17:35.520 did not have a big impact on on violent crime. Well, 0:17:35.560 --> 0:17:37.680 what why do you imagine that is? Well, it didn't 0:17:37.680 --> 0:17:43.840 have an impact on institutionalized violence, on slavery, on grizzly 0:17:43.920 --> 0:17:47.480 torture as a form of criminal punishment like breaking on 0:17:47.520 --> 0:17:51.320 the wheel and burning on this, on the stake um, 0:17:51.760 --> 0:17:55.320 on hundreds of capital crimes on the lawbooks, so it's 0:17:55.359 --> 0:17:58.199 really meaning crimes that there was a death penalty for 0:17:58.880 --> 0:18:02.600 but did not involve homicide exactly. That's right, criticizing the 0:18:02.680 --> 0:18:08.119 Royal garden being in the company. Listen, I understand some 0:18:08.200 --> 0:18:09.880 of these other things, but if you're going to criticize 0:18:09.880 --> 0:18:16.919 the royal that's it. That's amazing that a capital It 0:18:17.000 --> 0:18:20.439 is amazing. England had four capital crimes on the books 0:18:20.440 --> 0:18:25.040 and the prior to the nineteenth century, So the affluence 0:18:25.359 --> 0:18:29.680 didn't didn't institution I think affluence does affect certain kinds 0:18:29.680 --> 0:18:33.080 of violence. So, for example, countries that are at the 0:18:33.200 --> 0:18:35.840 rock bottom end of the poverty scale and make less 0:18:35.840 --> 0:18:40.240 than less than fift dollars GDP per capita are much 0:18:40.280 --> 0:18:44.280 more likely to have civil wars, although once you climb 0:18:44.359 --> 0:18:47.320 above that level then there isn't a clear relationship between 0:18:47.359 --> 0:18:50.639 civil war and affluence. But certainly rock bottom poverty is 0:18:50.640 --> 0:18:55.159 a contributor to civil war um in general, but not 0:18:55.160 --> 0:18:58.720 not always. It's the poorer sectors of psycho of society 0:18:58.800 --> 0:19:01.040 that are more crime prone. So there is there is 0:19:01.040 --> 0:19:03.879 some relationship, but it's not a not a perfect relationship. 0:19:03.960 --> 0:19:06.919 I'm Barry rit Halt. You're listening to Masters in Business 0:19:07.000 --> 0:19:11.400 on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today is Professor Stephen Pinker. 0:19:11.760 --> 0:19:15.640 He is professor of cognitive science and psychology at Harvard, 0:19:16.320 --> 0:19:20.480 author of numerous books, winner of numerous awards. His most 0:19:20.560 --> 0:19:24.480 recent book is Sense of Style. And let's talk a 0:19:24.560 --> 0:19:28.359 little bit about the way people communicate today with the 0:19:28.400 --> 0:19:33.560 written word. What's the impact of the digital realm on writing? 0:19:34.800 --> 0:19:36.880 I don't think there's a simple answer to that, because 0:19:36.880 --> 0:19:40.000 there isn't one thing called writing. And when people it's 0:19:40.000 --> 0:19:42.080 a question, I get a lot. Well, now that people 0:19:42.080 --> 0:19:44.960 are writing a hundred forty characters for Twitter and instant 0:19:44.960 --> 0:19:49.240 messages and emails, isn't the language going to deteriorate? And 0:19:49.359 --> 0:19:52.679 the answer is no, because we don't just write in 0:19:53.160 --> 0:19:57.840 tweets or in instant messages. We all command of variety 0:19:58.119 --> 0:20:01.600 of styles for different formats. We don't speak the same 0:20:01.600 --> 0:20:05.959 way when giving a lecture as we do um speaking 0:20:05.960 --> 0:20:09.320 to our family across the dinner table. Uh. Text message 0:20:09.359 --> 0:20:11.800 is going to be different from a funeral ooration. And 0:20:11.840 --> 0:20:14.720 so just looking at one kind of writing and saying well, 0:20:14.800 --> 0:20:16.840 that's what's going to happen to the language in general 0:20:17.000 --> 0:20:21.280 just isn't valid because we tailor our our language to 0:20:21.320 --> 0:20:25.040 the medium. What about technologies like power point and the 0:20:25.160 --> 0:20:30.679 tendency for people to try and communicate by numbered bullet points. 0:20:31.600 --> 0:20:35.560 There there's good power point, there's bad power point. Uh. 0:20:35.680 --> 0:20:40.840 In science of scientific presentations are done in power point. Um. 0:20:40.920 --> 0:20:44.880 Science has not shut down or or even slow down. It's, 0:20:45.119 --> 0:20:48.840 if anything, accelerating, and power Point by mixing text and 0:20:49.040 --> 0:20:53.480 images can be and video and audio can be remarkably powerful. 0:20:54.119 --> 0:20:58.280 We've all sat through horrific power point presentations where just 0:20:58.359 --> 0:21:01.919 binalities are are broken up into bullets. Uh so, but 0:21:01.960 --> 0:21:03.840 it's like it's like writing and saying, like, what does 0:21:04.000 --> 0:21:06.560 what does print do to the language? Well, there's there's 0:21:06.520 --> 0:21:08.400 a lot of drivell that people write down, and there's 0:21:08.400 --> 0:21:10.720 a lot of brilliance that people write down, but they 0:21:10.840 --> 0:21:15.400 met PowerPoint medium opens up huge possibilities. Sturgeon's law applies 0:21:15.440 --> 0:21:19.600 to everything. In other words, exactly. Um So, so let's 0:21:19.640 --> 0:21:22.760 talk a little bit about how vocabulary and grammar of 0:21:22.840 --> 0:21:27.240 English have changed, what drives these changes, and how much 0:21:27.280 --> 0:21:32.040 has the English language changed just over the past century. Uh, 0:21:32.160 --> 0:21:36.480 it hasn't changed so much that you can't understand uh 0:21:36.840 --> 0:21:39.399 writing that was set down a hundred years ago. You know, 0:21:39.440 --> 0:21:41.359 if you have a look at a copy of the 0:21:41.359 --> 0:21:44.639 New York Times from and we can understand pretty much 0:21:44.680 --> 0:21:47.560 all of it. But it feels different. The style was 0:21:47.600 --> 0:21:51.880 more formal. There's been an informalization of style that might 0:21:51.960 --> 0:21:55.600 parallel the informalization of everything else. The fact that gentlemen 0:21:55.640 --> 0:22:00.560 don't wear ties everywhere, and that women don't wear white gloves, us, 0:22:00.600 --> 0:22:03.359 the fact that we refer to each other on a 0:22:03.400 --> 0:22:06.359 first name basis instead of Mr. And Mrs So and 0:22:06.400 --> 0:22:08.880 so all the time, and writing has gotten more casual 0:22:08.920 --> 0:22:12.960 as society has gotten more democratic, or at least the 0:22:13.280 --> 0:22:18.120 look and feel is more democratized. Uh, And vocabulary definitely 0:22:18.119 --> 0:22:22.600 turns over. If you look at an episode of contemporary 0:22:23.040 --> 0:22:25.800 show that was set in the past, like Downton Abbey, 0:22:26.160 --> 0:22:28.800 linguists of often had a field day at flagging all 0:22:28.840 --> 0:22:31.120 of the idioms and figures of speech that just didn't 0:22:31.160 --> 0:22:34.880 exist in the nineteen teens that the writers, UH kind 0:22:34.880 --> 0:22:37.760 of anachronistically put in. There's all there's a lot of turnover. 0:22:37.800 --> 0:22:40.439 A lot of it is. It is kind of random. 0:22:40.600 --> 0:22:44.040 There's drift in and out. People an old saying will 0:22:44.080 --> 0:22:47.760 will just sound fusty and old fashioned, and younger people 0:22:48.280 --> 0:22:50.959 stop using it, and they'll introduce new figures of speech. 0:22:51.320 --> 0:22:53.719 And so there's a constant turnover, which is why if 0:22:53.720 --> 0:22:55.720 you go back more than a hundred years, so you 0:22:55.760 --> 0:22:59.000 go back to Shakespeare, it's not often not that easy 0:22:59.080 --> 0:23:03.879 to understand what the references were because the vocabulary is obsolete. 0:23:05.040 --> 0:23:07.280 One of the things you you wrote in the book 0:23:07.280 --> 0:23:10.960 that I thought was quite interesting, many of the alleged 0:23:11.040 --> 0:23:15.359 rules of writing are actually superstitions. Explain what that means. 0:23:15.720 --> 0:23:18.840 So many of us have been under the impression that 0:23:18.880 --> 0:23:21.600 you wouldn't ought not to split an infinitive. So instead 0:23:21.640 --> 0:23:24.639 of saying um, as Captain Cricket did, too boldly go 0:23:24.760 --> 0:23:26.879 where no man has gone before, you should say to 0:23:27.200 --> 0:23:30.480 go boldly where no man has gone before. That's a 0:23:30.520 --> 0:23:35.160 perfect example of a superstition. There's absolutely no reason to 0:23:35.240 --> 0:23:39.200 avoid a split infinitive. The whole rule came from a 0:23:39.280 --> 0:23:42.200 kind of thick witted analogy to Latin, where you can't 0:23:42.240 --> 0:23:45.399 split an infinitive. But there's abolutely no reason to avoid 0:23:45.400 --> 0:23:50.800 spending with the proposition. Exactly so Shakespeare wrote, we are 0:23:51.160 --> 0:23:53.240 such stuff as dreams are made on. You're gonna go 0:23:53.280 --> 0:23:57.080 tell Shakespeare that he made a grammatical error. Absolutely not. 0:23:57.800 --> 0:24:00.439 I'm Barry rid Helts. You're listening to Man Sessters in 0:24:00.480 --> 0:24:04.159 Business on Bloomberg Radio. My guest today is Professor Stephen 0:24:04.200 --> 0:24:08.719 pinker Uh, professor of psychology and linguistics at Harvard University. 0:24:09.400 --> 0:24:12.880 Let's jump into some of the really fascinating things that 0:24:12.960 --> 0:24:17.760 you have written about. There's there's one that really struck me. 0:24:18.240 --> 0:24:22.520 Let's go start right off on the wonky linguistical things. 0:24:22.560 --> 0:24:27.720 What's the difference between common knowledge and shared knowledge? Because 0:24:27.720 --> 0:24:31.199 they seem so similar. Yeah. Shared knowledge is when you 0:24:31.240 --> 0:24:34.800 know something and I know something. Common knowledge is a 0:24:34.960 --> 0:24:39.359 term from game theory and logic is when I know something, 0:24:39.440 --> 0:24:41.359