What Everyone Knows You Know with Steven Pinker

21:30Neil deGrasse Tyson:It was the financial seduction is what that was. But they never said, this money is yours. They just put a pile of money in front of them, and they were like, so let's talk about the new rail line. Veiled bribes. Veiled threats. Veiled threats. I quote an episode from The Sopranos in which a member of the family approaches a high school acquaintance and says, hey, great to see you, Danny. I hear you're on the jury for the Soprano trial. It's an important civic responsibility that we should all take part in. You've got a wife and kids. we know you'll do the right thing. That's a veiled bribe. Now, of course, bribes are extortion is illegal.

22:08In everyday life, there are occasions where there are implicit veiled threats that you don't spell out in so many words because that establishes a relationship of dominance. And you may want to avoid that relationship while still getting the message through. Because that would completely change the dynamic. Change the dynamic. So that's what that chapter is. That doesn't happen in the black community. It's just like, I will kick your ass. It's resolved in the moment. It's resolved in the moment. What? I will kick your ass. No. Well, there are. I mean, so that's a case where the relationship of dominance is already established.

22:42Dominance.

22:43Neil deGrasse Tyson:That's the exact scene in Coming to America. Is it? Where they're at the McDowell's home and the king says, how much for your daughter? Oh, okay. And she's like, this is America, Jack. and you better stop me before I put my foot up your ass. Right. Was that John Amos? Yeah, John Amos. I forget the exact words. In the moment. Right. Because as a king and just like a rich American. Another great example. So why do cultures differ from each other? Well, if you think of the different kinds of relationships, so the basic kinds of relationships are communal sharing, warmth, intimacy. That's one model.

23:21Not America.

23:23Neil deGrasse Tyson:Well, another model is... What's mine is mine, and what's yours is mine. There's actually a twist on that. Another relationship is hierarchy, alpha male, pecking order, top dog. The third one is transactional. Where cultures differ is not across the board, but in what kind of relationships, parent-child, student-teacher, employee-boss, friend-friend, what resource, money, favors, sex, and in what context, home, school, public. If you mix and match those, that gives you all the variation from Anthro 101. And so there's certain resources. So for example, there are cultures that really openly trade brides or daughters to become brides.

24:13Ours doesn't commoditize that explicitly, but we do, say, buy and sell land, which some cultures don't do, where the land might be communal. And so if you think of all the resources, all the context, all the...

24:24Neil deGrasse Tyson:It's quite the matrix of how that can come together. That's kind of the matrix of Anthro 101. Wow. So if we look at common knowledge as a variant of culture, and different cultures prize certain common knowledge differently, how often do we get the misinterpretation of our common knowledge? We often get misinterpretations when they're cross-cultural. Exactly, yeah. And that's part of what culture shock is. You don't know what is the common knowledge in the new community that you have to deal with. and that can result in war. It could result in war. I mean, it can result in misunderstanding, sometimes comical ones, and that's used in comedy, as in coming to America, as in Borat, where you have the bumpkin from one culture using the assumptions that were native to that guy's culture, but completely inappropriate, sometimes leading to embarrassment, sometimes to shock and outrage.

25:17Yeah. And then if we look at the communication through body language or unintentional signaling. Yeah. So there's a, I have a chapter called Laughing, Crying, Blushing, Staring, Glaring about nonverbal common knowledge. Couldn't get a long title then. Laughing, Crying, Blushing, Staring, Glaring. Glaring, okay. Now we have dozens, maybe hundreds of facial expressions, smiling and frowning and grimacing and so on. But on top of that, we have some really conspicuous forms of nonverbal communication that have puzzled people for millennia, such as laughing. Why do we interrupt our speech with that staccato noise?

26:00Yes, Stephen, why? I thought you'd never ask. Because Chuck needs to pay his mortgage. That's fine.

26:06Neil deGrasse Tyson:I mean, come on. I forgot. There's a whole profession that depends on this, yes. Yes. So what I argue is that for these conspicuous displays, blushing is another one. Why should blood go to your cheeks? Crying, why should a fluid drip to your eyes? Why do you shed tears? I suggest that they are common knowledge generators. So when you're laughing, you know you're laughing because your breathing is interrupted. Other people know you're laughing because they can hear it. Other people know that you know. You know that other people know, et cetera. Blushing, you feel the heat of the blood, the inside in your cheeks, knowing that other people can see the change in color from the outside, and they know that you know that you're feeling it, all the more so when they say, you're blushing.

26:49I've never had that problem. That's not a black people's question.

26:53Neil deGrasse Tyson:It's a lesser thing. Okay, so maybe you can, for instance, so Darwin worried about this. Because Darwin was a big proponent of universal emotions. In fact, for him... He had a whole book on it. A whole book on it. The expression of the emotions in animals and men. Yes, yes. And in fact, he used it, in fact, as an argument against the scientific racism of his day, which said that the different races were independently... Evolved. Evolved or created. One or the other. Either one. Right. And he said that the similarity in facial expressions, in many other aspects of emotion, showed that we all descended pretty recently from a common ancestor.

27:31Wow. And his data, I mean, he was kind of an invalid, but he corresponded with colonial officers and missionaries and traders all over the world. And he gave them questionnaires to ask of their interactions with local people, which they then mailed back to him.

27:48Neil deGrasse Tyson:So just to be in context, this is before photography could capture it. Right. I'm just at the dawn of photography, what that is. In fact, his book, this book that we're talking about, was the first use of scientific photography. Although not for cross-cultural studies, because the missionaries didn't have cameras out there in the field. But he actually used it to analyze the musculature in facial expressions, including studies where they got a person in an asylum, and they shocked the different muscles to see what they did to a facial expression. Wow. That was a bit of a digression. Going back to the question, though, of...

28:25Neil deGrasse Tyson:In silence, all they ever use is electricity on you. That's what it seems like. I guess that's right. But he asked the question, do dark-skinned people blush? And is it detectable? At least the answer from him and the answer that I got from Nina Jablonski, who's an expert on skin color, is yes. It may not be... I'm not denying it. I'm just saying it's not an active referent in our comments of people's emotions. But I even cite a Ghanaian physician. Ghana? Ghanaian? Yes. Very dark-skinned. He said, well, my mother can tell when I'm blushing. It's a change in color. Anyway, the point is that it's a common knowledge generator in that you know that you're experiencing it.

29:06You know that other people can see you experiencing it. They know that you know you're experiencing it. Tears, you're looking at the world through a scrim of fluid. It blurs your vision. At the same time that other people can see the glistening or the trickle. So again, you know that you're crying. Other people know that you know that they know. And eye contact is the ultimate common knowledge generator because you're looking at the part of the person that's looking at the part of you that's looking at the part of them that's looking at the part of you ad infinitum. Although you don't have to think about it ad infinitum.

29:37Neil deGrasse Tyson:But what about this eyebrow thing? Like, why should that mean anything other than what it means? Well, Darwin dealt with that in the book, where he noted that some facial expressions are vestiges or remnants of facial postures that animals do when they are about to attack or they're defending themselves. So in the case of the fear expression, he noted that if you're likely to be a prey animal or someone who's going to be picked on by the alpha, you've got to open your eyes wide to see where threats might be coming from. If, on the other hand, you're the predator or you're the alpha... You want to focus.

30:16Exactly. And the remnants of that include... And so the furrowing your brows, which I think narrows the field of vision, that may even narrow... If the folds of skin actually intrude on the pupils, might increase depth of field. Yes, it does. Yes, optically.

30:31Neil deGrasse Tyson:Optically. That's why people, if they don't have their glasses on... They squint. And they squint. They squint, exactly. They don't even know that they're increasing their depth of field by doing so. They're not actively thinking it. They just know they see better. Going back to these nonverbal common knowledge generators, we use them to make something public that formerly was private. Within us. That's the common denominator. Yes. So in the case of eye contact, now that developed way before we were humans because among primates, eye contact is a threat signal. The dominant stares at the subordinate who looks away, which is by the way also true in humans the boss don't make eye contact people walk with their head down that was the first thing I was told when I came to New York City as a kid we were on the subway and they said whatever you do do not make eye contact yeah I said you looking at me right who are you looking at who are you looking at I had a young person walk past me yesterday evening and I'm thinking if you don't look up you are going to walk into me and it was intentional not to make any eye contact well my the anthropologist Irv DeVore used to tell his class if two human beings look into each other's eyes anywhere on earth for more than six seconds, then either they're going to have sex or one of them's going to kill the other one.

31:41That is so true.

31:43Neil deGrasse Tyson:There you go. Oh my gosh. What a great saying. That is true. It's true. So why is this so uncomfortable? I mean, even, like, I don't mind making eye contact, especially if the person's decent looking. Like, I've got to tell you, when somebody's unattractive, I'm, ooh, it's tough. Yeah. I'm just saying. It is rough to look at somebody who was not attractive and maintained eye contact. But prolonged eye contact, and I don't know if it's just me, but I'm just going to put it out there. I'm going to be honest. It gets a little creepy and uncomfortable. Oh, it absolutely does. Okay, and I actually write about this.

32:17So what we call eye contact in ordinary conversation is it's a bit of a misnomer. Your eyes kind of dance all over the face. Yeah, all the time. You spend a lot of time lip reading, but it's the eyeball-to-eyeball stare that's really, which is something different. Now, we're humans. We're not monkeys. We're not gorillas. And so eye contact doesn't have one meaning. I mean, it can be seduction. It can be threat. But more generally, it can be something that formerly was private knowledge is, as of this moment, common knowledge, which is why we say things like, can you look me in the eye and say that?

32:54That's great. Tell me the truth. Basically, we're trying to interpret so many different things, and that's why you get uncomfortable. And when you're embarrassed, you look down, you look away, you avoid making eye contact. So what laughter does is it makes what used to be private knowledge, common knowledge, where it's some indignity or infirmity or weakness of some butt of the joke. Now, that can be someone that you're trying to bring down. It could be someone you're trying to keep down in aggressive humor. Although it can also, there's also, of course, convivial humor, what we've all been doing.

33:30where the signaling is to reinforce the egalitarianism that's the basis of warmth and friendship. Because there's always a danger of dominance creeping in. With any two people, one of them is going to be better looking, smarter, richer, more powerful. But that's not what you want to do when you're friends. When you're friends, it's like we are all on the same level. And so by calling attention to some weakness in yourself that you could lord over people, but you don't want to lord over people, or vice versa, gentle teasing and joshing that the other person accepts, then you're reestablishing the common knowledge that the basis of our relationship is...

34:09Self-depreciation. Yes, exactly.

34:11Neil deGrasse Tyson:So what does one do for, is it whatever the number is, is it one out of 10 or one out of six of us who's on the spectrum? Where social cues do not play. Exactly. Might that be adaptive? Where now you don't know anything about me because my facial expressions are not responding, and therefore I'm not revealing my inner secrets to you. Well, there is the... That could have survival value. I suspect that's more likely used strategically as in the poker face. That is the poker face where you deliberately hide the tells in a case where you're not in a situation of cooperation but zero-sum competition.

34:54Right. Then any tell could be used to your disadvantage. That's why I don't play poker. Because I'm the worst. It's just, damn! Oh. Just kidding.

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36:49All right, to go back briefly to the animal scene. Yeah. What about the elephant in the room? You know, the emperor's new clothes scenario. So I actually opened the book with the emperor's new clothes because that's a story about common knowledge. Yes. When the little boy said the emperor was naked, he wasn't telling anyone anything they didn't already know. But he was changing their knowledge because when he blurted it out in public, now everyone knew that everyone else knew that everyone else knew. So he converted private knowledge to common knowledge. So first of all, that made a difference.

37:23That was the climax of the story. What it is that changed their relationship with the emperor from deference to ridicule and scorn. So a relationship of deference. To the emperor or to the?

37:34Neil deGrasse Tyson:To the emperor. To the tailor. Well, but to the emperor too. At least in the. No, the tailor, but the tailor fooled him. It's the tailor's fault, not the emperor's fault. Which is why I'm going to have him killed right away as if he was clinging to a boat.

37:53Neil deGrasse Tyson:Did I have a Disney-fied version of that story? I mean, the tailor is the one who should be... Yes, but at that moment in public, it was the emperor who suffered the... Yeah, the emperor suffered all of the embarrassment. Especially in the Danny Kaye version of the story where it was met with ridicule and scorn in the lyrics to the song. Okay. And deference is a matter of common knowledge. You defer to someone because you know they'll stand their ground. Why do they stand their ground? because they know that you'll defer to them. Why do you, and how do they know that? Well, because you know that they know that they'll stand their ground ad infinitum.

38:27And what about the mutuality of respect? I mean, that's the flip side of that. Sometimes there's a matter of deference because you truly respect the person. They understand that you truly respect them and they respect that, you know? Yeah, there are different flavors of the hierarchical relationship. It could be dominance, which basically means, I could hurt you if I wanted to. There can be status. I could help you if I wanted to. There can be expertise. You all have a common interest in the decisions being made by someone who knows what they're talking about. Or even sometimes if everyone's going and the expression hurting cats, even if no one has a particular reason to be the decider, it's best for everyone if there is a decider.

39:13And that can give you a hierarchical relationship. But we do use metaphors like saving face out there. And the elephant in the room is obviously something that everyone can see and that you can't ignore. It makes sense.

39:27Neil deGrasse Tyson:So the elephant in the room is the emperor's new clothes because no one is talking about it. That's right. Even though everyone knows that it's there. Which is why the saying always is, let's acknowledge the elephant in the room. In other words, like we all see it. Now let's talk about it. Listening to you so far, I get the feeling that there's a kind of a logic to common knowledge and maybe even like a code. And that might then culturally vary. Yes. So I think the phenomenon of common knowledge and things that generate it like blunt speech, like eye contact is universal. But then what are the relationships that are negotiated with common knowledge or ratified by common knowledge?

40:04That is, what can friends share? What can a boss demand of an employee? How is sex treated? Can it be transactional or is it only intimate? All of these mixing and matching of resources, relationship models, and context, that's what makes cultures differ from one another. But in each case, there is some kind of common knowledge that holds the relationship in place, that sets out what you're allowed to exchange, what you're allowed to hoard, what you're allowed to demand, and that's what it means to be a competent member of a culture, to master that. Each one of them being a matter of common knowledge.

40:40Neil deGrasse Tyson:So, Stephen, I try to know what is common knowledge so that I can access it as an educator. I can tap it into it. I can add to it because I don't have to train people to know things that represent common knowledge. Comedians, your joke does not work unless everybody knows what you're talking about. The more universal, the better. And by universal, I mean— You mean earth, right? I'm sorry. You're an astrophysicist here. Correct yourself. Okay. The more commonly accepted, the better. The more earth-wide. Right. The more earth-wide, the better. But really, it's about experiential knowledge. Even if you've never been through what I am talking about, if I can put you there, then you will laugh with me.

41:28There are many people, many comedians that talk about marriage, and people who are single laugh because they have observed somebody. else in a relationship that they understand what this comedian is talking about.

41:41Neil deGrasse Tyson:That broadens your access points to the person. For instance, when Stephen was talking about the lost couple and the woman was going to a bookstore and the man was going to a camera shop, the first thing that popped into my head was, well, listen, if you know what's good for you, you better go to that damn bookstore because every husband knows that if I don't show up at the bookstore, I'm in trouble. And that's the first thing that popped into my head. This is an important point because what humor often does is it establishes common knowledge. That is, if you get the joke, then what has just been made public is something that you privately knew along.

42:20And so you get that feeling of solidarity with the other person. If you're laughing at the same thing, then what was unstated that makes the joke funny is something that you have in common. That's why humor is such an important bonding agent for, in dating, one of the main criteria in accepting a mate is a sense of humor. Sense of humor.

42:39Neil deGrasse Tyson:I never thought deeply about that fact. I just thought it would be more entertaining, but it's more bonding. What it means is that you share a lot of common ground, common knowledge. That is, you can't get the joke unless there is some hidden unstated premise that makes it work. and that can bond people. It can also be a devastating put-down and an intolerable insult. I give the famous example of the roast at the national press correspondence dinner during the Obama presidency where Donald Trump was in the audience and Obama made a number of jokes at Trump's expense. Ordinarily, people are expected to be a good sport and to accept the barbs, showing that they have commonality, common ground with everyone in the room.

43:25But Trump took it personally. He was visibly fuming and scowling at a joke like, well, it would be good if Donald Trump was president because he could accomplish things like closing Guantanamo because he has a history of running waterfront real estate into the ground. That's a great joke. Trump didn't think so. No. It's a terrible joke. The point is that everyone who laughed, first of all, knew that Trump, despite his boasts of being a business genius, had a string of failures, which made it all the more painful for Trump for that to be brought out into the open. According to some stories, that's what led him to run in the first place.

44:04Yeah, for revenge. And they're all now being investigated by my Justice Department. It was a hoax, Obama and his jokes.

44:16So what happens when the humorist just twists the common knowledge? And I think you've got, you touch this in the book, toilet paper shortage. Oh, yes. And the origin of that story. So there's some viral fads and phenomena, which can be really significant. So common knowledge is a kind of virulent property. It can be, yes, exactly. So in the case of, say, a bank run, where a rumor starts that the bank might be in trouble. Now, of course, banks don't have enough cash on hand to redeem all their deposits. But if you worry that other people worry, that still other people worry, that other people worry that the bank might be insolvent, then everyone rushes to the bank to withdraw their savings, which can actually cause the bank to fail, even if it was sound.

45:00And that can bring down an entire economy. That was in part the cause of the Great Depression. And so when Roosevelt said, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, this was a theorem of common knowledge. It wasn't just a feel-good bromide, but he was accurately diagnosing the situation. which is why financial leaders...

45:18Neil deGrasse Tyson:That's Roosevelt speaking to flat earthers. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Oh, my God. How long have you been waiting for that? Oh, my God. No. That's a good one. Is fear itself. It's so bad, I'm laughing at it. It's good. Oh, dear. It's totally good. You got your dad joke out, haven't you? That was a dad joke. That's a joke. And, of course, the run on the bank... It got me, though, I got to say. The run on the bank in Mary Poppins was caused by a little child. Yes. where they took his coin, he had some kind of pence or something. A shilling. Yeah, to start an account, but the boy didn't want him to do that.

45:53Neil deGrasse Tyson:He said, give me back my money. And then this permeated the halls of the nation. Two older ladies overhearing the conversation. They overhear, oh, they're not giving him his money. I want my money. And then there was a run on the bank. That's so funny. That's great. So once again, something that is public can then set off cycles of thinking about what other people are thinking about what other people are thinking. That's the virulence you're talking about. Because it just fires through. And a similar phenomenon might be why there was a toilet paper shortage during the COVID pandemic. There actually wasn't a toilet paper shortage until people thought there was this toilet paper shortage.

46:29So they hoarded because they thought other people were hoarding. When stores started posting maximum three rolls per customer, that didn't so much throttle the demand as it reassured everyone that other people wouldn't be able to strip the shelves bare. So they didn't have to worry about stripping the shelves bare. I only need three rolls, but I'm only going to ask for three rolls because none of the other people can buy more than three rolls either. Right. And so that kind of... It's a level setter. It's a level setter. It's a level setter. So who is the originator of this? By the way, I still have toilet paper from the pandemic.

47:02I hate to admit it. According to one story, it came from a big common knowledge generator in the day, namely Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. So in the old era of three networks, Johnny Carson was the king of late night. He hosted The Tonight Show for many decades. When you were watching it, you had a good reason to think that the rest of the country was watching it and knew that the rest of the country was watching it. In the early 70s, after the oil embargo, when there was an oil shortage, he made the joke one night, you know, we have shortages of everything these days. There's a shortage of gasoline, there's a shortage of meat, there's a shortage of coffee.

47:37But did you hear the latest? I read it in the papers. There's a shortage of toilet paper. Now, it turns out there wasn't a shortage of toilet paper. It was just a joke. But as soon as he made the joke, there was a shortage of toilet paper as everyone started to hoard toilet paper. So fulfilling. And according to at least one theory, ever since then, whenever there is a hurricane or a blizzard, people think that toilet paper is the thing you've got to stock up on because everyone else is going to start hoarding it.

48:02Neil deGrasse Tyson:There was this episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where someone was revealed to have an entire closet full of toilet paper. Oh, yes, during the pandemic. That's right. The entire closet. But how much ass wiping do you think you need to do? How big is your ass? By the way, in a hurricane, when your home floods, that toilet paper is not going to be worth anything. Wet toilet paper really isn't so much fun, I'm saying. Well, in the other direction, you can also get speculative bubbles. You buy crypto because you think other people are buying crypto, or at least will want to buy crypto tomorrow, so it'll pay more for it tomorrow than you paid today.

48:33And they're buying it tomorrow because I think they'll sell it to someone who wants to buy it the day after tomorrow. The hot potato. Yes, or the greater fool. The greater fool. And that goes back to John Maynard Keynes, who in the 1920s compared speculative investing. So this is investing not because of the return that you expect on the asset, that is the profits that the manufacturer will make selling widgets or the farmer selling food, but you think you can unload the security at a profit on someone else. Right. And he said it's like a beauty contest where instead of picking the prettiest face, The object is to pick the face that the most other people pick where they're picking the face with the same goal, that is, trying to figure out what everyone else is picking.

49:17So it's sometimes called a Keynesian beauty contest. Don't we have that in primaries, elections? And in elections are Keynesian beauty contests. That is, in a primary election, there may be a field of a dozen candidates and no one wants to waste their vote in just deciding who's going to come in at seventh place as opposed to eighth place.

49:35Neil deGrasse Tyson:This is what ranked choice voting is trying to resolve. That's why, yes, that's exactly what it's trying to resolve. And so people are hyper aware for any signs that someone has momentum, that they're in the lead because they want to vote to determine who comes in first, not who comes in sixth. I don't want to waste a vote. That's what they say. I don't want to waste a vote. And so during the coverage, any various trivial gaffes and lapses or boosts can sometimes shoot a candidate to the top or sink their candidacy. Like when a few years ago when Howard Dean was running for president. Hi-ya! And everyone knew you can't vote for Dean now because his victory scream means that everyone knew that he had a silly victory scream.

50:14And that ended his candidacy. Can you imagine? Seriously? No, I'm just. Don't make fun of us. No, no, no. You're not some weird politics yourself. By the way, a highly qualified candidate who was not able to continue his candidacy because he was like, and then we're going to go to New Hampshire, and then we're going to go to Vermont, and then we're going to go to— And he did that, and everybody was like, oh, dude, you can't be president, not acting like that. And then years later, we're just like, you know, you can grab him by—you can grab him by the whatever. You can just grab him anywhere you want.

50:52And they're sometimes like, you do it because of fame. And we're like, yeah, that's the guy. That's the guy right there. We got to let that guy. All right, moving on. The Trump phenomenon is interesting because what he did, he's done repeatedly, is that he has flouted norms that everyone thought were inviolable. They were inviolable only because people thought they were inviolable. And they existed as common expectation, common knowledge. And as soon as he flouted them and did not pay the price, they no longer existed as norms, which is why they're, I think, being copied by people like Elon Musk, also a troll, a liar, a braggart, that things that would be unthinkable for a president, for a CEO, as soon as they're thinkable, they're thinkable.

51:34So is this the fracturing of common knowledge that is partly behind the polarity of society right now, where people are just refusing and disinterested mainly to find a common ground? Yeah, so common knowledge always is defined relative to a network of sharing of information. It could be two people in some of the examples we've discussed. It could be the entire country. And there has been a segregation into two separate pools of common knowledge. Everyone blames social media, and that probably has something to do with it. But I think it's also cable news, Fox News, prior to social media had that effect.

52:12You weren't watching Walter Cronkite at the same time as everyone else was watching Walter Cronkite or Johnny Carson. And residential segregation, When you had educated people flocking to cities, leaving behind the less educated, when you had a decline in organizations that brought people together across the socioeconomic divides, like the army in the era of the draft, like churches, like service organizations, like the Lions Club, like bowling clubs, you stopped rubbing shoulders with people from different social classes. Each one then hung out with people like them, and then the common knowledge that they shared started to grow disjoint.

52:54Neil deGrasse Tyson:So it feeds divisiveness because, I mean, it's the same issue, as you said, multiculturally, right? Except now it's within the same culture, but now people are dividing with the same motive. Different cultures within the same country. Within the same country. Yeah. That makes me feel like it's exacerbated by what I'll call the vituperative disposition of leadership right now. I don't know what that word means. I'm sorry. What does that word mean? Vituperative? Vituperative. It's very SAT. Is it? Oh, totally. It means like mean and nasty, like a viper. so when we're siloed into these different camps like this it becomes very easy then to point fingers and say that's your enemy that's your enemy that's your enemy and then it's okay to be mean and nasty towards those people and it seems like that's exactly where we are Nazi Germany took that all the way through I wasn't even thinking along those lines but absolutely yes that's how it went down norms of civility things you just don't say you might disagree with someone and you might even not think highly of them, but you don't insult them to their face.

54:04I mean, you do on the playground, but there was a norm in politics, in corporations, in the media, that you pretend that you like them even if you don't. And those are some of the norms that are shattered. You don't lie blatantly. Now, everyone lies somewhat. All is probably tell two lies a day. But you don't blatantly lie. You don't show a contempt for the truth. You at least try to pretend that you're honest.

54:28Neil deGrasse Tyson:I'll give you an example. So I befriended a, I have a sort of Republican confidant who's in Congress for like 25 years. You can tell them that it's me, Neil. He was in through Reagan and beyond. And then I was talking to Al Gore. And I was saying I was friends with this guy. But I had to work it because we come from different places. And you know what he said? He didn't say anything bad. He just said, yeah, he's an acquired taste. And I thought that was pretty politic. That is a very politic. Right? He didn't insult. He just said, you know, you got to work it. And then as any acquired taste would be.

55:09Neil deGrasse Tyson:So that's an example. You don't hear that today. Yeah. Or like when Winston Churchill was asked, maybe the reason you lost the election to Clement Attlee is that people thought that Attlee was more modest. He said, well, Mr. Attlee has much to be modest about. He did have a good turn of phrase. Let me ask you before we have to wrap this up. Yeah, we got to start wrapping. What plays out if society remains unchecked where the common knowledge is distorted or the common knowledge is dictated by the loudest voice, no matter what that voice is saying? Yeah, by nefarious forces. Yeah. Influencing. Yeah, well, we're seeing some of it.

55:49We're seeing the polarization, particularly the negative polarization that is not just disagreeing but thinking that the other side is stupid or evil. I don't have an algorithm for reversing that, but the kind of norms that we should spread would be ones of civil disagreement, epistemic humility, charity, things that go against human nature where we tend to think of argument as a competition, as a war. I attacked his arguments, he defended them, but then I demolished them. We use the metaphors of war in talking about argument. And in one of the chapters, I talk about a different model for argument, coming out of a mathematical theorem, claiming that we rational agents should not agree to disagree.

56:33Neil deGrasse Tyson:That's how I feel, by the way. Well, there's actually some, it's a proof by the Israeli mathematician Robert Allman that depends on common knowledge. I don't have time to go through it now. But it does set a kind of alternative paradigm for argument that instead of two people beating each other up and the one left standing wins, that's not how you discover the truth. Or even bargaining and negotiating and you come to some compromise. You think about why should the truth just happen to lie halfway in between two opinionated guys. But rather, it's kind of a random walk where when two people exchange information, they might go all over the map until they converge on a common conclusion.

57:18Neil deGrasse Tyson:That's precisely how I feel. I mean, otherwise you just... Well, you would as a scientist. That is kind of like your whole field. If we disagree, it's because there's insufficient data to create the agreement. It's not, let's go have a beer and invent the experiment that will resolve this... There you have it. So that would be the kind of norm, it goes against human nature. I think the progress of science shows it's the best way to do things. And even, of course, scientists are not immune to pissing contests, dominance contests. And at least we acknowledge it's a bad thing. For that norm to spread in journalism, in politics, in the court system would be a good thing.

57:58It would be transformative. More truth, less flitubation. Once again, science saves the day.

58:05Neil deGrasse Tyson:Science! And he said vitruparation. He doubled down on you. There it is. I see what he did there. Yeah, I think we got to call it quits there. Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. That's a great conversation, man. Let me see if I can take us out with a quick cosmic perspective. All right. With your permission. If you're feeling it, do it, man. Yeah. Yeah. I spent my life studying the universe, which is a huge, complex place. All the laws of physics I learned in physics class are applied in some place, in some way, at some time in the unfolding universe. Also the laws of chemistry and our search for life in the universe.

58:41There's the biology that we bring with us.

58:44Neil deGrasse Tyson:All of this. And every time I reflect on that, I think to myself, this is not the hardest thing we can think about out there. You know what the hardest thing is? The human mind. What's going on inside there? And we've got psychologists, neuroscientists. It's a whole field trying to figure ourselves out. And, you know, I'm glad I do something as easy as astrophysics relative to what they've got to worry about. And I just hope that the study of the human mind by the human mind is not the most complex thing we ever have to tackle in this universe. but if it is get ready for that ride because the human mind is not logical it's not rational only occasionally it was not only the source of everything we value and call civilization it may actually be the end of it as well if we're not careful and that's a cosmic perspective Stephen thanks for joining us thank you so much it's been a great pleasure it was great Stephen Pinker's latest book Give me the title again.

59:58When everyone knows that everyone knows dot, dot, dot. You got it. There you go. Chuck.

1:00:02Neil deGrasse Tyson:Always a pleasure. All right, Gary. Pleasure, my friend. This has been StarTalk Special Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. As always, keep looking up.

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