1. Steven Pinker: "I Manage My Controversy Portfolio Carefully”

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0:56Edward Jones, member SIPC. For most of human history, there are whole spheres where we just don't really insist on knowing what's true or what's false. We want morally uplifting, dramatically compelling narratives. Given that our species has transformed the world and discovered the secrets of life and the universe, built amazing things, how do we do it despite these cognitive infirmities, and how can we make ourselves smarter?

1:30I first met Steve Pinker 15 years ago, and I had one lunch with him, and it was such a fabulous conversation that I've been thinking about that lunch ever since. Welcome to People I Mostly Admire with Steve Levitt. He's an amazing thinker. He's a Harvard psychologist. He's the kind of person who can bring insight to any subject that comes up. And I'd say my favorite research is the work he's done just documenting the amazing progress that humankind has created over the last 200 years. And look, I know it doesn't feel like it right now. We're in the middle of the COVID doldrums. But I think it's important that we keep in mind that we are on a positive track, even though right now it's not the best time.

2:17Wow, such a pleasure to get to talk today with Steven Pinker, not only one of the most widely admired public intellectuals, but also a path-breaking linguist and a brain scientist. So I've met a lot of brilliant people, but what makes you seem really special to me is that it's so rare, I think, in brilliant people to have any common sense. Would you agree with me that common sense is one of your best attributes? I'm probably not the person to judge. I know from my own field of psychology that we are all apt to overestimate our talents. And so if I were to say I had a lot of common sense, that would probably not be an exercise of common sense.

2:56Here's what I mean by common sense. So you've had this academic career and you do like super complicated linguistic things, and yet you've come to write these incredibly readable books that are loaded with really simple statistics and sensible logic that just, it's really hard to disagree with your conclusion. So let's just take an example. Your latest book is Enlightenment Now, The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Could you just give us the one-minute version of that book for people who haven't read it? Yes, it argues that we ought to deal with our problems by increasing our knowledge, trying to figure out how the world works through the use of reason and what I consider to be simply the application of reason to the physical world, namely science, that we should do so with a goal of making as many people as well-off as possible, and that if we do that, we can succeed.

3:47Namely, progress is a fact. It comes about as the result of people applying their ingenuity to reduce human suffering and increase human flourishing, supported by data suggesting that progress actually has taken place. our lives are longer and healthier and richer and better educated and happier than they were in the past. So I have to say, while I agree with literally every sentence in that book, I personally never would have written such a book because it seems so completely, totally, obviously true. I mean, any economist in the world would tell you that that's true, but clearly people don't seem to know these facts and don't seem to understand.

4:25I know you've had a lot of people disagree, and What do they even disagree with, do you think? It is interesting that economists, for all of the cliches about the dismal profession, do tend to have a more positive view because they are aware of one of the greatest facts in human history, namely that prosperity has skyrocketed since the Industrial Revolution. And the data-oriented mindset leads economists, like many data-oriented people, to have a different view of the world than you would get from journalism. And I think there's a systematic reason why, and that is that journalism presents a systematically biased sample of world experience.

5:03Namely, by covering things that happen, especially things that happen suddenly, there's a built-in bias to cover things that go wrong, because things can fall apart very, very quickly. Whereas improvement creeps up a few percentage points a year, which can then compound and transform our lives. But there's never a Thursday in October which it happens suddenly. So you never read about it. But you do read about all the wars and the pandemics and the riots and the terrorist attacks. So unless you are nerdy enough to get your view of the world from graphs and data, you can miss the spectacular improvements that have taken place.

5:40So I can understand how someone would disagree with you before they've read your book because they're biased by the media. But what surprises me is that some people are still not convinced by your book, even even if they read it. Because I know there's like a lot of noise around your book from both the left and the right. Both find all sorts of things they don't like about it. But reading it, I'm not sure what they complain about. Indeed. And of course, the left and the right both have grievances about modern institutions. The grievances differ. But for those on the hard left who believe that the modern neoliberal establishment is fundamentally corrupt, to say that, well, things are better than they were 30 years ago or 100 years ago or 150 years ago is a kind of heresy.

6:22In parallel, there are big currents in the right that believe the Enlightenment was a terrible mistake. We were better off when we submitted to an authority higher than ourselves, mainly the church, but established social norms and institutions like the monarchy and the class system. So there's a kind of ideologized pessimism on both sides. Yeah, so you are an optimist and you focus on progress, and yet you're clearly very thoughtful about the fact that most people most of the time don't make much sense and suffer from the sorts of psychological biases that people think about. So I know you're interested in rationality.

7:02What's your global take on rationality? Yes, I just completed a general education course at Harvard on rationality, which covered the tools of rationality that I tend to think that all educated people should command. Any educated person should know what Bayesian reasoning is, or statistical decision theory, namely making a decision under uncertainty in a way that trades off the harm of false alarms with the harm of misses. or how to tell correlation from causation, how to avoid logical fallacies and critical thinking fallacies. And so the question at the intersection of economics and psychology is in what ways are people rational and in what ways are they not so rational?

7:44And so it poses an interesting scientific question of, given that our species has transformed the world and discovered the secrets of life in the universe, built amazing things, how do we do it despite all of these cognitive infirmities, and how can we make ourselves smarter. So that sounds great. The question I have is, why does someone have to go to Harvard to get that class? It seems like we should teach a class like that in public high schools. I mean, you've actually hit on one of my pet peeves, which is how silly I think the math we teach to teenagers is when there's so much interesting, valuable knowledge about, you know, whether it's Bayesian calculations or about the kind of simple data you use so effectively in your books.

8:28Yes, I couldn't agree more. And I do believe that it should be part of the high school curriculum. I don't know if they still teach trigonometry. I love trigonometry, but you know, you can't teach everything. There are only so many hours in the day. And if it's a choice between trigonometry and say, you know, Bayesian reasoning or conditional probability, it's just obvious what kinds of mathematics have the greatest impact, both on our responsibilities as citizens and the decisions that we make in our everyday lives.

9:01So I suspect you have a prodigious memory. I'm going to give you a little quiz. Do you remember what I think is the only time we ever met? My memory is not what it used to be. I know that we have met, and you're going to have to fill me in. Okay. Yeah, we met once in 2005, and we had lunch. Oh, yes. So that was at TED. Was it in England? In Oxford, yeah. And I remember those days particularly vividly because it was one of the most traumatizing academic moments of my life. So I had given a TED Talk previously that had gone very, very well and everybody loved. And I thought I was such a great speaker.

9:41And so I was invited to do this second TED Talk. And I had five-year-old children at the time. So I decided that the right way to give my TED Talk would be as a fable. So I told a fable about car seats. And I actually don't think it was as terrible as it went. But what really set me up for the ultimate failure is that the speaker right before me was Richard Dawkins. And he gave the most amazing 18-minute talk about the entire universe on his own home turf to an audience that erupted with joy and applause. And I sat in the audience and I said, wait, you actually expect me to go up directly on stage now after he did that and tell my little fable?

10:23And I honestly wanted to sneak out of the room and never come back, but I dutifully got up on the stage and took complete and utter silence. For 18 minutes, I spoke and I got off the stage and I've been trying to forget those 18 minutes ever since. It was really maybe the most awful speaking experience I've ever had. I have a similar experience at a different tent. I had to speak after Hans Rosling, who later became a hero of mine as one of the people documenting human progress with creative graphics. But not only did he present just eye-dazzling animated graphics on human progress, but he ended his talk by swallowing a sword.

11:01He really swallowed a sword. That too was, as they say, a tough act to follow.

11:15So one of the areas you're talking about is the environment. And I think people are extremely pessimistic about the environment. And yet, I think you offer one of the most even-keeled, thoughtful discussions of our current climate situation that I've heard in a long time. Could you share that with us? Yeah, so it begins with acknowledging the scientific near consensus that the climate is warming, that human activity is the cause, and that things could get not only worse, but much, much worse if we fail to mitigate ongoing climate change. The reason that climate change has occurred is that it's an undesirable byproduct of something that is desirable, namely the capture of energy, which allow large parts of the world to become richer.

11:57And the advantages that we enjoy from burning fossil fuels starting with the Industrial Revolution, the rest of the world is not going to forego, particularly China, India, Indonesia, big populous countries that are getting their first taste of affluence and are just not going to go back to poverty. And the way out of poverty is the capture of energy. So given that reality, given our kind of existential situation of capturing energy or being miserably impoverished, it looks to the development of carbon-free energy, which I argue should not be completely equated with renewables like solar and wind because there is no energy economy that's scalable that can rely on solar and wind alone.

12:43Although it could change in the future if we have massive capacity for energy storage, but that's not going to happen anytime soon. And so it advocates nuclear power being in the mix because it is, contrary to many people's impressions, it's probably the safest source of energy that despite the highly publicized disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima, Those numbers pale in comparison to the number of people that are killed day in, day out by coal, by both accidents in mining and transport, and the disease burden from particulate matter that's emitted when coal is burned. And that the problem of storing nuclear waste is a problem, but it's actually a much more tractable problem than the massive waste that comes from coal mining and burning.

13:26To say nothing of the fact that solar panels have a finite life, just like your iPhone. You have to replace it after a few years, and so we're going to have massive quantities of rare earths and glass and silicon and metal to deal with. It really is amazing that the world turned so forcibly against nuclear power exactly at the time when climate change was becoming such a force. Germany being a great example of a very green country that did away with nuclear in order to, in the short term, import dirty coal from the United States. It's really puzzling, isn't it? Well, to a psychologist, it's not because all the things that distort our assessment of risk, such as highly salient newsworthy examples, intuitions of contamination, the desire to completely eliminate one danger as opposed to reducing the aggregate danger from all risks combined.

14:20All of these are kind of a perfect storm that turned the world away from nuclear, probably starting with Three Mile Island in 1979. I know a celebrity who says that he blames climate change on Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt, and the Doobie Brothers for their excellent concert called No Nukes that turned the baby boomer generation against nuclear. Joshua Goldstein and I argue that the millennials and Generation Z should reject the baby boomer consensus and form their own climate policy that's more in touch with the statistical reality. But anyway, just to complete the thought, because you asked me about climate change, So I think part of it has to be technological, not just the adoption of every energy technology that provides abundant, scalable energy without carbon emissions, but better still, the development of new technologies.

15:08And the great thing about technological solutions to climate change is that they can't be reversed by populist presidents. So we can have a president that withdraws from the Paris Accord, but you can't have a president that undoes a technological discovery. Moreover, if there's a technology that makes clean energy cheaper than dirty energy, then no one has to be persuaded. It's not politicized. Absolutely. And the other side of the equation is how do we take the carbon that's there out of the air or in other ways, do engineering, figure out how to cool the earth. And, you know, I believe deeply in markets and I think they work well, but it seems to me there's a complete failure of our market right now in that dimension.

15:50So there are, I don't know, a dozen, 30 entrepreneurial scientists who are jealously guarding their intellectual capital and working independently to try to come up with a solution that will work out carbon capture. And they'll be able to capture themselves all of the money that comes with solving that problem. But in an existential crisis like climate change, it seems like a terrible model for science. It seems like something much more like the Manhattan Project, where we gather the top 300 scientists in the world together and encourage them, incentivize them to work collectively, would be a better model.

16:28What do you think of that proposal? I couldn't agree more. It's just the nature of markets. If they don't work miracles, you can be a completely committed acknowledger of the benefits of markets and say, well, but there are certain things that only governments can do. And I agree. This is one of them. Yeah. Or not even government. So I've kind of given up on the U.S. government right now. But I've pitched three or four of the richest people in the United States on this idea, and every one of them was intrigued, but not one of them was willing to pull the trigger to have the kind of resources where they can determine how to solve public goods problems.

17:01And so that seemed to me the path of least resistance. That's very interesting. But I agree, even though there's a huge backlash now against billionaire philanthropists, a number of bestsellers saying, well, the government should do it. But the problem with a democracy is that when it works, the people get what they want. And people don't always want what's best for the planet, at least not all at the same time, not all right now. And a democratically responsive government may not have the freedom to experiment, to take chances, to develop not-so-popular options.

17:40you're listening to people i mostly admire with steve levitt and his conversation with psychologist and linguist stephen pinker they'll return after this short break

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19:29So let's change gears. One thing I hadn't expected from you reading your books was how funny you can be when you turn your attention to being funny. And I think a great example comes from another one of your books called The Better Angels of Our Nature, which argues that violence is greatly decreased over time. And that doesn't strike me as being a very funny topic. But your synopsis of the Old Testament in that book made me laugh so hard that I could barely breathe. Yeah, not everyone found that passage so funny. But yes, so what I simply did is I went through the major stories of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and I just described them pretty factually.

20:09I had intended this as kind of a sanity check, because by making the argument that violence has declined over the course of history, I just wanted to remind people of how violent earlier times were, and the Hebrew Bible is a fine example. So I told the story of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel, pretty much sticking to the King James translation. Cain talked with Abel, his brother, and it came to pass when they were in the field, and Cain rose up against Abel and slew him. With a world population of exactly four, that works out to a homicide rate of 25%, which is about a thousand times higher than the equivalent rates in Western countries today.

20:44I then talked about the first of many genocides in the Bible, the Noachian flood, the binding of Isaac, the selling of Dinah, Jacob's daughter, in marriage. Can you tell the Dinah story? I love the Dinah story. Yes. Isaac's son Jacob has a daughter, Dinah. Dinah is kidnapped and raped, apparently a customary form of courtship at the time, since the rapist's family then offers to purchase her from her own family as a wife for the rapist. Dinah's brothers explain that an important moral principle stands in the way of this transaction. The rapist is uncircumcised. So they make a counteroffer. If all the men in the rapist's hometown cut off their foreskins, Dinah will be theirs.

21:21While the men are incapacitated with bleeding penises, the brothers invade the city, plunder and destroy it, massacre the men, and carry off the women and children. When Jacob worries that neighboring tribes may attack them in revenge, his sons explain that it was worth the risk. Should our sister be treated like a whore? Soon afterward, they reiterate their commitment to family values by selling their brother Joseph into slavery. I mean, funny or not funny? And I grew up with the idea that historically the Hebrew Bible was what first introduced morality to the world. When I read some of the passages as an adult, it's horrifying.

21:59And that's what's in the Old Testament. It made me realize that for all of the pageantry, the community, the beauty of religious observance, it's a big mistake to think of the Bible as the source of our moral values. It's really interesting. I had never read the Bible. I was raised completely non-religiously until maybe three months ago, the first time I ever opened up the Old Testament. And I was shocked. I mean, I didn't see it even as clearly as you lay it out here, but it was really surprising to me the role of vengeance and how often humans fail. It was really surprising, and it jibed so well with what you just described as your interpretation and your caveats.

22:39Yes, I mean, the God of the Old Testament basically works by the moral code of the Corleones. Namely, you do something that insults me, and I'll murder you and your family. Blood revenge was the highest moral value. Now, I mean, this is not to cast aspersions on Jews and Christians today. Quite the opposite. The point is that we have progressed, but we view it, fortunately, through modern eyes. There's a kind of benign hypocrisy where we say we believe it, but thank goodness we don't. And this actually connects to a theme that I've been pondering more recently. We as humans have two modes of believing things.

23:20There's the things that impinge on our everyday lives, a kind of world of fact and falsehood where we really do have a commitment to truth. We really do want to know exactly what's happened. But for most of human history, and still today, there are whole spheres where we just don't really insist on knowing what's true or what's false. We want morally uplifting narratives and dramatically compelling narratives. Yeah, the Enlightenment, I think you'd argue, was the point where truth became important, even if it wasn't the truth about were your crops going to grow or not, but a broader truth. Would you agree that essentially was one of the most important features of the Enlightenment?

24:00Absolutely. That's right. And before the scientific revolution, that it's not just how to grow crops, how to keep your kids out of danger, but it's also what's happening halfway around the world, what happened thousands of years ago, what's going to happen thousands of years from now, where the same attitude that we take to our everyday lives, we should apply to everything. But one can understand why that's such a recent and exotic mindset. For most of human history, we had no way of knowing what happened. You can believe anything you want. An educated person before the scientific revolution, could very well believe that there are unicorns and werewolves, that comets and eclipses are portents of the future, that a dead man will bleed in the presence of a murder weapon or a murderer.

24:44Beliefs that now we think of as primitive, superstitious, magical, but they were the conventional understanding of the day. But once there is science, once there is journalism, once there is scholarship, once there is history, then you can expand the domain of the real to realms where common sense didn't have a place for it. It's a great reminder about how difficult it is for individuals to learn the truth. We benefit enormously, of course, from the brilliant scholars who came before us. Yeah, indeed. And that revelation that our everyday experience is not a reliable guide to the ultimate nature of reality is a major transition in thought.

25:33So you've exhibited a lot of intellectual bravery, I think, over your career. You've been willing to stand up for the things you believe to be true, and you've been willing to do it in situations where there seems, honestly, to an outsider, to be very little for you to gain. I think the one that comes to mind to me is when Larry Summers had made comments about women in math and whether those were true or false. Looking at the situation, it would seem to make a lot of sense to keep your mouth shut because it was only going to get you in trouble. But you were willing to talk. Can you tell me a little bit about your logic in that setting and why you came forward?