I like Steven Pinker’s new book. Here’s why:

I first heard about Rationality, the latest book from linguist Steven Pinker, from his publisher, offering to send me a review copy. Pinker has lots of interesting things to say, so I was happy to take a look. I’ve had disagreements with him in the past, but it’s always been cordial, (see here, here, and here), and he’s always shown respect for my research—indeed, if I do what Yair calls a “Washington read” of Pinker’s new book, I find a complimentary citation to me—indeed, a bit too complimentary, in that he credits me with coining the phrase “garden of forking paths,” but all I did was steal it from Borges. Not that I’ve ever actually read that story; in the words of Daniel Craig, “I like the title.” More generally, I appreciate Pinker’s willingness to engage with criticism, and I looked forward to receiving his book and seeing what he had to say about rationality.

As with many books I’m called upon to review, this one wasn’t really written for me. This is the nature of much of nonfiction book reviewing. An author writes a general-audience book on X, you get a reviewer who’s an expert on X, and the reviewer needs to apply a sort of abstraction, considering how a general reader would react. That’s fine; it’s just the way things are.

That said, I like the book, by which I mean that I agree with its general message and I also agree with many of the claims that Pinker presents as supporting evidence.

Pinker’s big picture

I’ll quickly summarize the message here. The passage below is not a quote; rather, it’s my attempt at a summary:

Humans are rational animals. Yes, we are subject to cognitive illusions, but the importance of these illusions is in some way a demonstration of our rationality, in that we seek reasons for our beliefs and decisions. (This is the now standard Tversky-Kahneman-Giverenzer synthesis; Pinker emphasizes Gigerenzer a bit less than I would, but I agree with the general flow.) But we are not perfectly rational, and our irrationalities can cause problems. In addition to plain old irrationality, there are also people who celebrate irrationality. Many of those celebrators of irrationality are themselves rational people, and it’s important to explain to them why rationality is a good thing. If we all get together and communicate the benefits of rationality, various changes can be made in our society to reduce the spread of irrationality. This should be possible given the decrease in violent irrationality during the past thousand years. Rationality isn’t fragile, exactly, but it could use our help, and the purpose of Pinker’s book is to get his readers to support this project.

There’s a bit of hope there near the end, but some hope is fine too. It’s all about mixing hope and fear in the correct proportions.

Chapter by chapter

A few years ago, I wrote that our vision of what makes us human has changed. In the past, humans were compared to animals, and we were “the rational animal”: our rationality was our most prized attribute. But now (I wrote in 2005) the standard of comparison is the computer, we were “the irrational computer,” and it was our irrationality that was said to make us special. This seemed off to me.

Reading chapter 1 of Pinker’s book made me happy because he’s clearly on my side (or, maybe I should say, I’m on his side): we are animals, not computers, and it’s fair to say that our rationality is what makes us human. I’m not quite sure why he talks so much about cognitive illusions (the availability heuristic, etc.), but I guess that’s out of a sense of intellectual fairness on his part: He wants to make the point that we are largely rational and that’s a good thing, and so he clears the deck by giving some examples of irrationality and then explaining how this does not destroy his thesis. I like that: it’s appealing to see a writer put the evidence against his theory front and center and then discuss why he thinks the theory still holds. I guess I’d only say that some of these cognitive illusions are pretty obscure—for example I’m not convinced that the Linda paradox is so important. Why not bring in some of the big examples of irrationality in life: on the individual level, behaviors such as suicide and drug addiction; at the societal levels, decisions such as starting World War 1 and obvious misallocations of resources such as financing beach houses in hurricane zones? I see a sort of parochialism here, a focus on areas of academic psychology that the author is close to and familiar with. Such parochialism is unavoidable—I write books about political science and statistics!—but I’d still kinda like to see Pinker step back and take a bigger perspective. In saying this, I realize that Pinker gets this from both sides, as other critics will tell him to stick to his expertise in linguistics and not try to make generalizations about the social world. So no easy answer here, and I see why he wrote the chapter the way he did, but it still leaves me slightly unsatisfied despite my general agreement with his perspective.

I liked most of chapter 2 as well: here Pinker talks about the benefits of people taking a rational approach, both for themselves as individuals and for society. I don’t need much convincing here, but I appreciated seeing him make the case.

Pinker writes that “ultimately even relativists who deny the possibility of objective truth . . . lack the courage of their convictions.” I get his point, at least sometimes, for example consider the people who do double-blind randomized controlled trials of intercessory prayer—they somehow think that God has the ability to cause a statistically significant improvement among the treatment group but that He can’t just screw with the randomization. On the other hand, maybe Pinker is too optimistic. He writes that purported “relativists” would not go so far as to deny the Holocaust, climate change, and the evils of slavery—but of course lots of people we encounter on the internet are indeed relativistic enough in their attitudes to deny these things, and they appear to be happy to set aside logic and evidence and objective scholarship to hold beliefs that they want to believe (as Pinker actually notes later on in chapter 10 of his book). Sometimes it seems that the very absurdity of these beliefs is part of their appeal: defending slavery and the Confederacy, or downplaying the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc., is a kind of commitment device for various political views. I guess climate change denial (and, formerly, smoking-cancer denial) is more of a mixed bag, with some people holding these views as a part of their political identity and others going with the ambiguity of the evidence to take a particular position. Belief in intercessory prayer is a different story because, at least in this country, it’s a majority position, so if you have a generally rational outlook and you also believe in the effectiveness of intercessory prayer, it makes sense that you’d try your best to fit it into your rational view of the world, in the same sense that rational rationalizers might try to construct rationales for fear, love, and other strong emotions that aren’t particularly rational in themselves.

Elsewhere I think Pinker’s too pessimistic. I guess he doesn’t hear that complaint much, but here it is! He writes: “Modern universities—oddly enough, given that their mission is to evaluate ideas—have been at the forefront of finding ways to suppress opinions, including disinviting and drowning out speakers, removing controversial teachers from the classroom, revoking offers of jobs and support, expunging contentious articles from archives, and classifying differences of opinion as punishable harassment and discrimination.” I guess I’m lucky to be at Columbia because I don’t think they do any of that here. I’ll take Pinker at his word that these things have happened at modern universities; still I wouldn’t say that universities “at the forefront of finding ways to suppress opinions,” just because their administrations sometimes make bad decisions. If universities are at the forefront of finding ways to suppress opinions, where does that put the Soviet Union, the Cultural Revolution, and other such institutions that remain in living memory? I agree that we should fight suppression of free speech, but let’s keep things in perspective and save the doomsaying for the many places where it’s appropriate!

There was another thing in chapter 2 that didn’t ring true to me, but I’ll get to it later, as right here I don’t want these particular disagreements to get in the way of my agreement with the main message of the chapter, which is that rational thinking is generally beneficial in life and society, even beyond narrow areas such as science and business.

I have less to say about chapters 3 through 9, which cover logic, probability, Bayesian reasoning, expected utility, hypothesis testing, game theory, and causal inference. He makes some mistakes (for example, defining statistical significance as “a Bayesian likelihood: the probability of obtaining the data given the hypothesis”), but he does a pretty good job at covering a lot of material in a small amount of space, and I was happy to see him including two of my favorite examples: the hot hand fallacy fallacy explained by Miller and Sanjurjo, and Gigerenzer’s idea of expressing probabilities as natural frequencies. I’m not quite sure how well this works as a book—to me, it sits in the uncanny valley between a college text and a popular science treatment—but I’m not the target audience here, so who am I to say.

Just one thing. At one point in these chapters on statistics, Pinker talks about fallacies that have contributed to the replication crisis in science (that’s where he mentions my forking-paths work with Eric Loken). I think this treatment would be stronger if he were to admit that some of his professional colleagues have been taken in by junk science in its different guises. There was that ESP study published by one of the top journals in the field of psychology. There was the absolutely ridiculous and innumerate “critical positivity ratio” theory that, as recently as last year, was the centerpiece of a book that was endorsed by . . . Steven Pinker! There was the work of “Evilicious” disgraced primatologist Marc Hauser, who wrote a fatuous article for the Edge Foundation’s “Reality Club” . . . almost a decade before Harvard “found him guilty of scientific misconduct and he resigned” (according to wikipedia). I think that including these examples would be a freebie. Admitting that he and other prominent figures in his field were fooled would give more of a bite to these chapters. Falling for hoaxes and arguments with gaping logical holes is not just for loser Q followers on the internet; it happens to decorated Harvard professors too.

The final two chapters of the book return to the larger theme of the benefits of rationality. Chapter 10 leads off with a review of covid science denial, fake news, and irrational beliefs. Apparently 32% of Americans say they believe in ghosts and 21% say they believe in witches. The witches thing is just silly, but covid denial has killed people, and climate change denial has potentially huge consequences. How to reconcile this with the attitude that people are generally rational? Pinker’s answer is motivated reasoning—basically, people believe what they want—and that most of these beliefs are in what he calls “the mythology zone,” beliefs such as ghosts and witches that have no impact on most people’s lives. He argues that “the arc of knowledge is a long one, and it bends toward rationality.” I don’t know, though. I feel like the missing piece in his story is politics. The problem with covid denial is not individual irrationality; it’s the support of this denialism by prominent political institutions. In the 1960s and again in recent years, there’s been widespread concern about lawlessness in American politics. When observers said that the world was out of control in the 1960s, or when they say now that today’s mass politics are reminiscent of the 1930s, the issue is not the percentage of people holding irrational beliefs; it’s the inability of traditional institutions to contain these attitudes.

Getting to details: A couple places in his book, Pinker refers to the irrationality of assuming that different groups of people are identical on average in “socially significant variables” such as “test scores, vocational interests, social trust, income, marriage rates, life habits, rates of different types of violence.” As Woody Guthrie sang, “Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen.” Fine. I get it. Denying group differences is irrational. But it’s funny that Pinker doesn’t mention irrationality in traditional racism and sexism, the belief that women or ethnic minorities just can’t do X, Y, or Z. These sorts of prejudices are among the most famous examples of irrational thinking. Irrationalities bounce off each other, and one irrationality can be a correction for another. Covid denialism and climate change denialism, as unfortunate and irrational as they are, can be seen as reactions to the earlier irrationality of blind trust in our scientific overlords, with these reactions stirred up by various political and media figures.

At one point Pinker writes, “Rationality is disinterested. It is the same for everyone everywhere, with a direction and momentum of its own.” I see the appeal of this Karenina-esque statement, but I don’t buy it. Rationality is a mode of thinking, but the details of rationality change. For example, nowadays we have Bayesian reasoning and the scientific method. Aristotle, rational as he may have been, didn’t have these tools. In his concluding chapter, Pinker seems to get this, as he talks about the ever-expanding bounds of rationality during the past several centuries. I guess the challenge is that people may be more rational than they used to be, but in the meantime our irrationality can cause more damage. Technology is such that we can do more damage than ever before. What’s relevant is not irrationality, but its consequences.

Now that I’ve read the whole book, let me try to summarize the sweep of Pinker’s argument. It goes something like this:

Chapter 1. It is our nature as humans for our beliefs and attitudes to have a mix of rationality and irrationality. We’re all subject to cognitive illusions while at the same time capable of rational reasoning.

Chapter 2. Rationality, to the extent we use it, is a benefit to individuals and society.

Chapters 3-9. Rationality ain’t easy. To be fully rational you should study logic, game theory, probability, and statistics.

Chapter 10. We’re irrational because of motivated reasoning.

Chapter 11. Things are getting better. Rationality is on the rise.

The challenge is to reconcile chapter 1 (irrationality is human nature) with chapters 3-8 (rationality ain’t easy) and 10 (rationality is on the rise). Pinker’s resolution, I think, is that science is progressing (that’s all the stuff in chapters 3-8 that can help the readers of his book become more rational in their lives and understand the irrationality of themselves and others) and society is improving. Regarding that last point, he could be right; at the same time, he never really gives a good reason for his confidence that we don’t have to be concerned about the social and environmental costs of increasing political polarization, beyond a vague assurance that “The new media of every era open up a Wild West of apocrypha and intellectual property theft until truth-serving counteremasures are put into place” and then some general recommendations regarding social media companies, pundits, and deliberative democracy, with the statement (which I agree with) that rationality “is not just a cognitive virtue but a moral one.” As the book concludes, Pinker alternates between saying that we’re in trouble and we need rationality to save us, and that progress is the way of the world. This is a free-will paradox that is common in the writings of social reformers: everything is getting better, but only because we put in the work to make it so. The Kingdom of Heaven has been foretold, but it is we, the Elect, who must create it. Or, to put it in a political context, We will win, but only with your support. This does not mean that Pinker’s story is wrong: it may well be that rationality will prevail (in some sense) due to the effort of Pinker and the rest of us; I’m just saying that his argument has a certain threading-the-needle aspect.

Still and all, I like Pinker’s general theme of the complexity and importance of rationality, even if I think he focuses a bit too much on the psychological aspect of the problem and not enough on the political.

Parochialism and taboo

One unfortunate feature of the book is a sort of parochialism that privileges recent academic work in psychology and related fields. For example this on page 62: “Can certain thoughts be not just strategically compromising but evil to think? This is the phenomenon called taboo, from a Polynesian word for ‘forbidden.’ The psychologist Philip Tetlock has shown that taboos are not just customs of South Sea islanders but active in all of us.” And then there’s a footnote to research articles from 2000 and 2003.

That’s all well and good, but:

1. No way that Tetlock or anybody else has shown that an attitude is “active in all of us.” At best these sorts of studies can only tell us about the people in the studies themselves, but, also, this evidence is almost always statistical, with the result being that average behavior is different under condition A than under condition B. I can’t think of any study of this sort that would claim that something occurs 100% of the time. Beyond this, there do seem to be some people who are not subject to taboos. Jeffrey Epstein, for example.

2. If we weaken the claim from “taboos are active in all of us” to “taboos are a general phenomenon, not limited to some small number of faraway societies,” then it seems odd to attribute this to someone writing in the year 2000. The idea of taboos being universal and worth studying rationally is at least as old as Freud. Or, if you don’t want to cite Freud, lots of anthropology since then. Nothing wrong with bringing in Tetlock’s research, but it seems a bit off, when introducing taboos, to focus on obscure issues such as “forbidden base rates” or attitudes on the sale of kidneys rather than the biggies such as taboos against incest, torture, etc.

I’ve disagreed with Pinker before about taboos, and I think my key point of disagreement that sometimes he labels something a “taboo” that I would just call a bad or immoral idea. For example, a few years ago Pinker wrote, “In every age, taboo questions raise our blood pressure and threaten moral panic. But we cannot be afraid to answer them.” One of his questions was, “Would damage from terrorism be reduced if the police could torture suspects in special circumstances?” I don’t think it’s “moral panic” to be opposed to torture; indeed, I don’t think it’s “moral panic” for the question of torture to be taken completely off the table. I support free speech, including the right of people to defend Jerry Sandusky, Jeffrey Epstein, John Yoo, etc etc., and, hey, who knows, someone might come up with a good argument in favor of their behavior—but until such an argument appears, I feel no obligation to seriously consider these people’s actions as moral. Pinker might call that a taboo on my part; I’d call this a necessary simplification of life, the same sort of shortcut that allows me to assume, until I’m shown otherwise, that dishes when dropped off the table will fall down to the floor rather than up to the ceiling. Again, Pinker’s free to hold is own view on this—I understand that since making the above-quoted statement he’s changed his position and is now firmly anti-torture—; my point is that labeling an attitude as “taboo” can itself be a strong statement.

Another example is that Pinker describes it as “a handicap in mental freedom” to refuse to answer the question, “For how much money would you sell your child?” Here he seems to be missing the contextual nature of psychology. Many people will sell their children—if they’re poor enough. I doubt many readers of Pinker’s book are in that particular socioeconomic bracket; indeed, in his previous paragraph he asks you to “try playing this game at your next dinner party.” I think it’s safe to say that if you’re reading Pinker’s book and attending dinner parties, that there’s no amount of money for which you’d sell your child. So the question isn’t so much offensive as silly. My guess is that if someone asks this at such a party, the response would not be offense but some sort of hypothetical conversation, similar to if you were asked whether you’d prefer invisibility or the power of flight. Or maybe Pinker hangs out with a much more easily-offended crowd than I do. On the other hand, what about people who actually sold their children, or the equivalent, to Jeffrey Epstein? Pinker’s on record as saying this is reprehensible. How does this line up with his belief that it’s “a handicap in mental freedom” to not consider for how much money you would sell your child?

This example points to a sort of inner contradiction of Pinker’s reasoning. On one hand, he’s saying we all have taboos. I guess that includes him too! He’s also saying that we live in a society where there are all sorts of things we can’t talk about, not just torture and the selling of children and the operation of a private island for sex with underage women, but also organ donation, decisions of hospital administrators, and budgetary decisions. On the other hand, he’s writing for an audience of readers who, if they don’t already agree with him, are at least possibly receptive to his ideas—so they’re not subject to these taboos, or at least maybe not. This gets back to the question of what Pinker’s dinner parties are like: is it a bunch of people sitting around the table talking about the potential benefits of torture, subsidized jury duty, and an open market in kidneys; or a bunch of people all wanting to talk about these things but being afraid to say so; or a bunch of people whose taboos are so internalized that they refuse to even entertain these forbidden ideas? You can see how this loops back to my first point above about that phrase “active in all of us.” Later on, Pinker says, “It’s wicked to treat an individual according to that person’s race, sex, or ethnicity.” “Wicked,” huh? That seems pretty strong! Torture or selling your child are OK conversation topics, but treating men different than women is wicked? I honestly can’t figure out where he draws the line. That’s ok—there’s no reason to believe we’re rational in what bothers us—but then maybe he could be a bit more understanding about those of us think that torture is “wicked,” rather than just “taboo.”

Also I don’t quite get when Pinker writes that advertisers of life insurance “describe the policy as a breadwinner protecting a family rather than one spouse betting the other will die.” This just seems perverse on his part. When I bought life insurance, I was indeed doing it to protect my family in the event that I die young. I get it that you could say that mathematically this is equivalent to my wife betting that I would die, but really that makes no sense, given that I was the one paying for the insurance (so she’s not “betting” anything) and, more importantly, the purpose of the insurance was not to gamble but to reduce uncertainty. It would make more sense to say I was “hedging” against the possibility that I would die young. Here it seems that Pinker wants to anti-euphemize, to replace an accurate description (buying life insurance to protect one’s family) by an inaccurate wording whose only virtue is harshness.

Had I written this book, I would’ve emphasized slightly different things. As noted above, it seems strange to me that, when talking about irrationality, Pinker focuses so much on irrational beliefs rather than on irrational actions. At one level, I understand: the belief is father to the action. But it’s the actions that matter, no? I guess one reason I say this is my political science background. For example, the irrational action of funding housing construction in flood zones can be explained in part through various political deals and subsidies. Spreading better understanding of climate change should help, but it’s not clear that individual irrationality is the biggest problem here, and I’m concerned that Pinker is falling into an individualistic trap when studying society. To take a more positive example, cigarette smoking rates are much lower than they were a half-century ago. I would attribute this not to an increase in rationality or Odyssean self-control but rather to notions of fashion and coolness of which Pinker seems so dismissive. Smoking used to be cool, it’s no longer. I remember 20 years ago when NYC banned smoking in restaurants and bars; various pundits and lobbying organizations declared that this was a horrible infringement on liberty, that the people would rise up, etc. . . none of those things happened. They banned smoking and people just stopped smoking indoors. I guess that did induce some Odyssean self-control among smokers, so I’m not saying these individualistic behavioral concepts are useless, just that they’re not the whole story, and indeed sometimes they don’t seem to be the most important part of the story.

But that’s not really a criticism of Pinker’s book, that I would’ve written something different. It’s a limitation of his story, but all stories have limitations.

Big hair

One thing I found charming about the book, but others might find annoying, is the datedness of some of its references and perspectives. Chapter 1 reads as if it was written in the 1980s, back when the work of Tversky, Kahneman, and Gigerenzer was new. (I was going to say “new and exciting,” but that would be misleading: yes, their work was new and exciting in the 1980s, but it remains exciting even now, long after it was new.) Chapter 2 begins, “Rationality is uncool. To describe someone with a slang word for the cerebral, like nerd, wonk, geek, or brainaic, is to imply they are terminally challenged in hipness. I guess there’s always the possibility that he’s kidding, but . . . things have changed in the past 40 years, dude! In recent years, lots of people have been proud to be called nerds, wonks, or geeks; if anything, it’s “hipsters” who are not considered to be so cool. Pinker supports his point with quotes from Talking Heads, Prince, and . . . Zorba the Greek? That’s a movie from 1964! Later he refers to Peter, Paul and Mary (or, as he calls them, “Peter, Paul, and Mary”—prescriptive linguist that he is). When it comes to basketball, his go-to example is Vinnie Johnson from the 1980s Pistons. OK, I get it, he’s a boomer. That’s cool. You be you, Steve. But it might be worth not just updating your cultural references but considering that the culture has changed in some ways in the past half-century. In that same paragraph as the one with Zorba, Pinker describes “postmodernism” and “critical theory” as “fashionable academic movements.” I’m sure that there are professors still teaching these things, but no way that postmodernism and critical theory are “fashionable.” It’s been close to 40 years since they were making the headlines! You might as well label suspenders, big hair, and cocaine as fashionable. I half-expected to hear him talk about “yuppies” and slip in an Alex P. Keaton reference.

Review of reviews

After reading Pinker’s book, I did some googling and read some reviews. Given the title of the book, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that reason.com liked it! Other reviews were mixed, with The Economist’s “Steven Pinker’s new defence of reason is impassioned but flawed” catching the general attitude that he had some things to say but had bitten off more than he could chew.

The New York Times review argues that Pinker gets things wrong in the details (for example, Pinker pointing to the irrationality of “half of Americans nearing retirement age who have saved nothing for retirement” without recognizing that “the median income for those non-saving households is $26,000, which isn’t enough money to pay for living expenses, let alone save for retirement”), while the Economist reviewer is OK with the details but is concerned about the big picture, reminding us that rationality can be deadly: “Rationality involves people knowing they are right. And from the French revolution on, being right has been used to justify appalling crimes. Mr Pinker would no doubt call the Terror a perversion of reason, just as Catholics brand the Inquisition a denial of God’s love. It didn’t always seem that way at the time.” Good point. This is an argument that Pinker should’ve addressed in his book: violence can come from purported rationality (for example, the Soviets) as well as from open irrationality (for example, the Nazis).

The published review whose perspective is closest to mine comes from Nick Romeo in the Washington Post, who characterizes the review as “a pragmatic dose of measured optimism, presenting rationality as a fragile but achievable ideal in personal and civic life,” offering “the welcome prospect of a return to sanity.” Like me, Romeo suggests that Pinker’s individualist argument could be improved by making more connections to politics (in his case, “the political economy of journalism — its funding structures, ownership concentration and increasing reliance on social media shares”). Ultimately, though, I think we have to judge a book by what it is, not what it is not. Pinker is a psychology professor so it makes sense that, when writing about rationality, he focuses on its psychological aspects.

81 thoughts on “I like Steven Pinker’s new book. Here’s why:

  1. “… the phrase “garden of forking paths,” but all I did was steal it from Borges. Not that I’ve ever actually read that story …”

    There is not much excuse for not having read it. It is short (8 pages or so), like most of Borges’ work, and an easy read, at least at a superficial level. And it’s good!

  2. Andrew –

    I look forward to digging into your review in detail later.

    I just listened to a podcast interview of Pinker in discussion with Robert Wright. I’m guessing you might not listen to podcasts but they had a discussion related to “fundamental attribution error” (as a cognitive bias) – which touches on some comments we exchanged downstairs.

    Pinker offers an alternative frame to,
    “cognitive empathy” or “scout VS. soldier” or “charitable reading,” Three perspectives: victim perspective, aggressor’s perspective, .analytics/neutral scientists perspective.

    A good way to sum it up: “Try to think of Hitler’s perspective.”

    Also… Pinker (and Wright) argues for a kind of evolutionary psychology carve-out process that leads us to be better at logic (more rational) in certain contexts versus others. Essentially he says that a more scientific or decontextualized logical reasoning is less available than logical reasoning in an area where the subject matter is more familiar to us. Thus, he argues (via Leda Cosmides) that ev psych creates facility with logical reasoning for “sniffing out cheaters.”

    I suggest a related but somewhat different explanation for that mechanism: Our brains tend to shut down when we feel anxiety regarding an abstracted, or unfamiliar context. I’ve seen that all the time with students when they get self conscious if you ask them a question in a challenging area, and they can’t answer even when you know they know the actual answer if they just resin it through. You see that glaze-over look in their eyes. They can’t even access their thinking because they’re removed from the moment, and thinking about being judged for not giving the correct answer rather than thinking about the task at hand.

    Thus, familiarity is a kind of mediator between the impact of anxiety and our ability to reason logically.

    This relates to the findings of people like Dan Kahan, who report that people who perform better on cognitive tests – on questions that require thinking like conditional probability – are more “motivated” in their reasoning (as seen on issues like climate change) because, putatively, they’re better at making logical arguments.

    But ask someone, who does poorly on that cognitive assessment test, a question like the GOAT, LeBron or MJ, and they’ll likely display conditional probability in spades.

    In other words, our logic is often a function of our emotional state, which in turn interacts with our familiarity with the topic. It isn’t that our actual logical ability is stronger, due to evolution, related to some topics versus others.

    That theory looks to me like more “Just-so” storification based in reverse engineering from observable phenomena to find a basis in evolutionary psychology (i.e,, confirmation bias!)
    .

    • Joshua:

      That’s interesting. Regarding “think from the other person’s perspective”: Yes, I try to do this all the time. But sometimes people don’t like it; they think it’s insulting or “patronizing”! For example, what if I tried to think from the perspective of Satoshi Kanazawa, the author of the research on sex ratios that I’ve criticized many times. I don’t know Kanazawa; my only direct experience with him was a polite email exchange. What would it mean to think from his perspective? I could ask, from his perspective, questions such as: (1) how did he come up with the hypotheses that he studied, (2) how did he think that his data provided strong evidence in favor of these hypotheses, (3) why did he continue acting as if his data provided strong evidence etc. despite the clear statistical arguments showing where he went wrong? Answers to question 1 will be fine, answers to question 2 will make him look misinformed, and answers to question 3 will make him look bad. That’s all fine; I guess my point is that “think from the other person’s perspective” is different from “avoid saying negative things about the other person.” Sometimes people talk about the virtues of kindness, but I’m not always clear what this means, as being kind to the person we are discussing will not necessarily be the same as being kind to other people, and it’s not clear to me that people who make big mistakes should be the main recipients of kindness. Kindness isn’t a zero-sum game, exactly, but it can involve tradeoffs. An obv example is publication in a top journal: publishing a bad paper by author X can result in a good paper by paper Y not being published.

    • “Our brains tend to shut down when we feel anxiety regarding an abstracted, or unfamiliar context. ”

      Isn’t this already well known? As I recall brain activity studies show that, when presented with a problem to solve – say an algebra problem – people who know how to solve the problem solve it quickly with little brain activity; while for people who don’t know how to solve the problem, the entire brain lights up but they can’t solve the problem.

      In the case of your students that you say know how to reason through a problem but can’t manage it when put on the spot, the likely reality is that they really **don’t know** how to reason through the problem – at least not without help or coaching. They may have an intuitive knowledge of similar problems in some specific circumstances, but they don’t know how to generalize that intuition to apply it to other contexts.

      Consequently, they’re not really facing a problem they’ve “seen” before, because they did *not see* the general form of the problem. Someone may have an intuitive idea that the speed of a ball rolling down an inclined plane is a function of the angle of the plane and the friction on the surface of the plane. That doesn’t mean they’ll get that the same rules apply to slabs of oceanic crust sliding off mid-ocean ridges.

      • MJ –

        > In the case of your students that you say know how to reason through a problem but can’t manage it when put on the spot, the likely reality is that they really **don’t know** how to reason through the problem – at least not without help or coaching.

        The phenomenon I’m describing happens even with relatively simple problems that the student has worked though in the past. Like I said, they become removed from the moment; they start thinking about the feeling (panic in a way) of seeming foolish, if what it would mean if they can’t answer. The worst thing you could do in that situation is to the the student “Really, it’s a simple, very basic problem – it isn’t hard to solve at all.”

        > They may have an intuitive knowledge of similar problems in some specific circumstances, but they don’t know how to generalize that intuition to apply it to other contexts.

        Well yes. I agree. But if you listen to the pod, Pinker describes how we don’t learn these heuristics in some abstracted form – but applied with ease when the context is familiar. He gives one a example that’s more abstract that almost no one solves and another problem that’s essentially exactly the same logical construction that everyone gets. Interestingly, the same juxtaposition is described in “The Overstory.”

        Described here – with reference to Leda Cismides also:

        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task

        I agree with him in that sense. Where I disagree is whether the context-specific aspect is a function of evolution as opposed to (in my view) underlying psychological/emotional components.)

        > Consequently, they’re not really facing a problem they’ve “seen” before, because they did *not see* the general form of the problem.

        Yes, I agree. The context is unfamiliar to them even if in some abstracted form the problem could be seen as familiar.

  3. > Another example is that Pinker describes it as “a handicap in mental freedom” to refuse to answer the question, “For how much money would you sell your child?”

    This kinda goes into one of my big issues with this sort of thinking – what is the rational justification to avoiding taboos and such handicaps in mental freedom? There seems to be this implicit theory that “mental freedom” is an inherent good, and I just don’t buy it. Taboos serve a purpose in that they provide a societal rule of thumb, a way to avoid pointless discussions that in themselves can cause harm.

    What, after all, is the usefulness of discussing the sale price of children? Are we supposed to believe such transactions could usefully happen at dinner parties and such like? Is it not more significant that the real effect of such discussions would be, for example, feelings of abandonment from the children involved, outrage from parents, the promotion of the idea of people as property, so on and so forth? And where does the discussion of torture bring on? From the early 2000s, it seems the answer is endlessly fetishisation of implausible ticking-time-bomb situations that are used to justify a shift in societal attitudes that allow exactly the irrational, retribution based tortures of Bad People Who Deserve It that Pinker decries. It seems in holywood for a while, torture was not taboo at all – it was what cool, grim-faced heros gotta do to seem ruthless and badass.

    Ultimately societies have to decide where the finite energies of rational debate are best spent, and some discussions are in fact not worth having. It’s not a handicap, it’s about boundaries.

    • To add, I’m not saying all taboos are good. But I think it’s instructive that in such discussions, the examples of taboo pointed out are the ones that are more titillatingly offensive to think about, and not actually ones that are being proposed as being useful and important to talk about.

      • It may be worse than that. I suspect that some people are labelling opposition to things a moral person would find disgusting as “taboo” because they actually want to do those things.

        Another thought is that the world looks different living in Japan, which doesn’t have the problem that 1/3 the population is completely batsh@t crazy.

  4. Zhou Fang writes: “Ultimately societies have to decide where the finite energies of rational debate are best spent, and some discussions are in fact not worth having. It’s not a handicap, it’s about boundaries.”

    +1 I think Pinker’s problem is that he doesn’t have a clear concept of what rationality is or rather he adopts a Cartesian view of rationality uncritically, i.e., the view that we have self-evident foundations upon which we can reason to reach further conclusions. We have known that this view is not coherent since David Hume. We have evidence and logic neither of which is assailable. This view leads to lots of these contradictions. In reality, there are no unassailable foundations. We have to make choices about what hypotheses to investigate and what methods and logical rules to follow. And of course, we make these decisions on the basis of the prejudices and biases that we already have. As C.S. Peirce put it, we cannot doubt what we actually believe. We cannot start from Decartes total skepticism. Thus, we always start from with a set of beliefs, biases, and prejudices. Not acknowledging this limitation to “rationality” is a major danger. This is especially so in areas of collective decision making, where some advocates of “rationality” want experts making decisions based on “science.”

  5. I don’t understand what you’re saying about torture. I think the focus on the word ‘taboo’ is maybe a bit silly, but I do think that in certain circles one is expected to be opposed to torture in all circumstances, and that this leads some people to avoid even considering whether a strict anti-torture stance makes sense in the context of the full value system. If there was a nuclear weapon set to go off somewhere in Manhattan in two hours, and I had someone who knew where it was but refused to tell me, I’d sure as hell _consider_ torturing him. I’m not necessarily saying torturing the guy is morally required, but if someone says torture should be ‘taken off the table’ and it’s morally wrong to even think about it, well, what can I say, I disagree.

    I’m going to digress quite a bit from my point, but bring this back to Pinker’s point, by pointing out that Pinker’s question is not “should torture be allowed”, or “is torture ever justified”; it’s “would damage from terrorism be reduced if the police could torture suspects in special circumstances?” Those are very different questions.

    • Phil –

      > If there was a nuclear weapon set to go off somewhere in Manhattan in two hours, and I had someone who knew where it was but refused to tell me, I’d sure as hell _consider_ torturing him. I’m not necessarily saying torturing the guy is morally required, but if someone says torture should be ‘taken off the table’ and it’s morally wrong to even think about it, well, what can I say, I disagree.

      Well, many (knowledgeable) people argue that torture is as a general rule a less effective way to get information (than other techniques) under that scenario. And that more often than not you’re going to only elicit unproductive information that only worsens your problem.

      And weighing probabilities, in such a heightened circumstance, relying on torture thinking its more likely a productive approach should then be ruled out (unless you have some way of knowing the specifics exclude your scenario from the generally more probable outcomes).

      That’s a different question about whether even considering torture should be ruled out on a moral basis. I think there’s an argument, there, that allowing it as a consideration does open up a morally dubious discussion in a way that opens us up for harmful moral equivocation. I’m not saying I necessarily buy that thinking but neither do I dismiss it out of hand.

      It’s reminds me of the talk about “freedom of speech” that assumes it’s never a reasonable question to ask whether or not there is potential harm from a blanket rule that limitations on speech are never acceptable.

      Imo, there are resonable arguments on both sides. There is potential harm from a rule that torture should never even be considered just as there is pofe risk harm from saying the consideration should always be in the table. There is no free lunch.

      • Joshua, you say “Well, many (knowledgeable) people argue that torture is as a general rule a less effective way to get information (than other techniques) under that scenario.” I doubt there are any other techniques that can work in an hour or two. If there are, hey, let’s use them! That’s great! A bit of good-cop/bad cop, give the guy a donut and some milk, get him on your side. Good luck! And if I were in charge, maybe I’d try that too. But once we’re down to the last fifteen minutes, hand me the pliers.

        Andrew, I agree with you about “moral panic” being a ridiculous framing — there doesn’t have to be any “panic” involved at all. Still, your attitude on torture seems odd to me. For instance, you say ” Pinker says, “It’s wicked to treat an individual according to that person’s race, sex, or ethnicity.” “Wicked,” huh? That seems pretty strong! Torture or selling your child are OK conversation topics, but treating men different than women is wicked? I honestly can’t figure out where he draws the line.” You seem to be suggesting that treating women badly is not as bad as _discussing_ torture. Hey, I discussed torture right here in this blog comment, do you really think this is not an OK conversation topic, or that it’s worse to have this discussion than to mistreat women? I don’t think you think that, but if you don’t think that then why do you complain that Pinker thinks it’s OK to discuss torture but not to treat women badly? I don’t get it.

        • Phil:

          Nobody said anything about treating women badly. The statement was “treating men different than women.” This includes, for example, all-women short lists as a way of countering past discrimination.

        • OK but this _almost_ completely misses my point. My point is that I’m mystified by your attitude that merely discussing the use of torture is such a bad thing. It’s hard for me to believe you really believe that.

        • I guess I’m misinterpreting “Torture or selling your child are OK conversation topics, but treating men different than women is wicked? I honestly can’t figure out where he draws the line.” To me you seemed to be saying torture is _not_ an OK conversation topic, but I guess that’s not what you were saying. Which brings me back to the start: I’m don’t understand what you’re saying about torture. But that’s OK, at this point the text box I’m typing in is only about fifteen characters wide, that’s as far as I’m willing to go!

        • Phil:

          It’s not a logical contradiction on Pinker’s part. It’s just . . . when the topic is torture or the selling of children he brings up “moral panic” and “a handicap in mental freedom.” It seems to really bother him that people aren’t going around considering when the cops should torture people, or actively considering how much money they would charge for selling their kids. But then when it comes to whether to “treat an individual according to that person’s race, sex, or ethnicity,” he unleashes the word “wicked.” Is it really so wicked as all that? I think all-women shortlists have their place, and I also don’t think it’s a problem if people prefer to marry within their ethnic group—or if they’d prefer to marry outside their ethnic group. Even if Pinker personally disapproves of all-women shortlists or ethnic marriage preferences, it seems over-the-top for him to call them “wicked.”

          Anyway, it’s fine that Pinker has different attitudes on these things than I do. It just seemed that his main view on torture and child sale was that people were too quick to dismiss these ideas out of hand without even discussing them first, but then he was dismissing out of hand the idea of treating an individual according to that person’s race, sex, or ethnicity. But maybe you’re right that I’m missing the point that he’s bringing up these different examples in different contexts.

        • If he said that even _discussing_ whether there should be affirmative action, or if it’s OK if prostate exams are given only to men, or whatever, then I think the parallel would be much stronger. It seems that he has reached his own conclusions on these things, but it doesn’t seem (from that quote anyway) that he would necessarily conclude that other people shouldn’t even discuss them.

        • Phil –

          > .” I doubt there are any other techniques that can work in an hour or two. If there are, hey, let’s use them! That’s great! A bit of good-cop/bad cop, give the guy a donut and some milk, get him on your side. Good luck! And if I were in charge, maybe I’d try that too. But once we’re down to the last fifteen minutes, hand me the pliers.

          I think part of the argument is that information you get with the pliers is totally unreliable. The person being tortured will tell you snhtbk g to get you to stop. And that would include giving you an amswe when they actually don’t even know the answer you’re seeking.

          I suppose if you ad some foolproof way of determining that this person actually knows the answer, and some foolproof way of verifying the answer they gave you, then maybe you’re better off with the pliers than other techniques within a constrained time frame and with a ticking gone bomb.

          But then the problem becomes why are you discussing a hypothetical that’s so incredibly contrived with so many highly unlikely parameters? And the question becomes is there some downside to spending time speculating about such contrived and highly unlikely hypothetical scenarios where you might be able to justify torture on strategic grounds but without addressing the moral questions in play?

        • Besides, a torture victim will be able to hold out for 15 minutes. Or give you an inaccurate location. Besides on what basis would you be sure that the victim actually knows anyway? Maybe he lied from the start and knows nothing and is just wasting your time. Maybe you nabbed completely the wrong person and this guy will never be able to tell you what you want to know. Maybe he even pretended that he knows about an upcoming bombing because he was scared you were going to torture him and wanted to appear useful to you.

          These are in fact much more realistic scenarios than the classic ticking time bomb.

        • Well, I initially said 2 hours for exactly this reason. But make it 4 hours if you like.

          And yes, maybe this, maybe that, maybe the other. But in this hypothetical situation we are talking about the death of hundreds of thousands of people; I think there’s at least an argument for trying to get some information out of the guy somehow. And if you think anyone could hold out against torture for an hour or two, then he could also hold out against polite questioning or whatever else you are proposing.

          Perhaps the correct answer is — no matter how much time is involved and what the possible consequences are — that we should simply ignore the guy: why have one or more people question him, by whatever means, when they could be out there directing traffic on the George Washington Bridge approaches or whatever. I’m not eager to say torture is the right approach. But I think that before taking it off the table it’s worth considering exactly the kinds of issues you guys are raising, which I note are practical rather than moral: on what timescale would we expect it to work, what’s the chance we would get accurate information, and so on.

        • Phil –

          > . But I think that before taking it off the table it’s worth considering exactly the kinds of issues you guys are raising,

          My point is basically that there can be a downside to merely considering torture as a viable option. I’m not necessarily saying that it necessarily isn’t. But there can be a cost to just asking questions.

          > which I note are practical rather than moral:

          Part of what I’m arguing is that heere are potential costs in the moral domian – allowing for a kind of harmful moral equivocation.

        • > But I think that before taking it off the table it’s worth considering exactly the kinds of issues you guys are raising

          But who are you to say that these issues have not in fact been already considered? Remember that we are not at a point where torture is some new invention. Rather in the history of the world, we began from a starting point where torture is prevalent and banal, where it is only over time and after long discussion and debate that torture became abhorrent (at least in some contexts, see Jack Bauer tv series and grim and gritty videogames).

          None of these issues and discussions are new inventions, there are no new facts being presented. Thus, why re-open this discussion? What has changed to make torture recently a good idea? What will it take to close it for good?

    • Andrew writes: “Another example is that Pinker describes it as “a handicap in mental freedom” to refuse to answer the question, “For how much money would you sell your child?” Here he seems to be missing the contextual nature of psychology. Many people will sell their children—if they’re poor enough.”
      I don’t know if Andrew is correct, but he argues that Pinker is contradicting himself. Pinker is saying both that every question should be considered, and then says certain things are “wicked.” Which is it? Of course, this is not a straitforward contradiction. Pinker could just say, “well, the things I said were wicked, I considered before coming to that conclusion.” But, if that is his response, why can’t the rest of us just say, “we thought about selling child and decided it was wicked.” Why are we less rational because we don’t want to revisit the issue of trafficking children, but you get to declare discrimination wicked?

      • Steve, Phil:

        There’s not necessarily a contradiction in Pinker’s position: he can think that selling children is wicked but still think it’s worth raising the question. Indeed, I expect he’d argue that if you really think that something’s wicked, then it’s especially worth discussing the issue dispassionately and giving rational arguments against it. My disagreement with Pinker is discussed in my linked post from several years ago where I reacted to his descriptions of taboo questions such as torture as “threatening moral panic.” I guess my problem is with “panic.” If people are being tortured, maybe that is the time to panic!

    • > If there was a nuclear weapon set to go off somewhere in Manhattan in two hours, and I had someone who knew where it was but refused to tell me

      That’s the thing though. The load-bearing element in that argument is the implausible scenario you cooked up. You can cook up any sort of scenario to justify any sort of thing. But the fact that you can says little about the actual subject of the discussion (torture) and is in fact a semantic argument about what “on the table” actually means!

      “Is child abuse sometimes justified? Well, what if you had a super soldier child who is vulnerable only to sexual abuse and he’s holding the entire world hostage! Ah-ha, I guess you must concede that sometimes this in fact actually is justified”

      The ticking time bomb scenario just doesn’t come up. What – and this is not a rhetorical question – is the purpose of debating it?

      • “what if you had a super soldier child who is vulnerable only to sexual abuse and he’s holding the entire world hostage” gimme a break.

        I disagree that it is ‘implausible’ that a terrorist group could create or obtain a nuclear weapon and get it to Manhattan, and of course the specificity of ‘Manhattan’ is not a salient feature of the hypothetical example. A dirty bomb is considered much more likely than a genuine nuclear weapon, I grant you, but even the latter is not considered (by experts) to be impossible. Here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_terrorism#Organizations_to_Combat_Nuclear_Terrorism is some discussion. I think the mere fact that there is a Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism shows that this is a genuine concern; there is more specific information there too. I agree that the scenario I’ve outlined — a nuclear weapon known or strongly believed to be in a specific city, to go off at a specific time — is extremely unlikely. But then, I also think the circumstances in which torture should even be seriously considered are extremely rare.

        Perhaps you would never even consider using torture in any circumstance you believe could possibly occur. It’s not clear to me whether that’s entirely due to a different evaluation of what could possibly occur, or whether you find the use of torture to obtain information even more abhorrent than I do.

        • The implausible and critical part of the situation is that you know for sure that your prisoner knows where the nuke is. If you don’t know that for sure, torture is useless and whatever information you get is as good as a guess. For exactly that reason, terrorist organizations make sure individual actors are on a strictly need to know basis, or even give different actors conflicting irrelevant information. So the efficacy of torture is limited to a situation where you have an unrealistic amount of knowledge to begin with, and only need a very specific piece.

          Furthermore, suppose the prisoner lies to you just to stop the torture, and the nuke goes off anyways. Do you now go back and torture the prisoner as punishment? If you can’t convince the prisoner that you would, as well as that you won’t go back and torture or kill them anyways, then torture is also useless. Otherwise, they have no incentive to tell the truth rather than lie.

          Getting useful information out of torture is actually very hard in practice.

        • I don’t disagree with anything you said here. But in the unlikely event that someone captures the mastermind behind a nuclear plot that has been uncovered too late to stop the weapon from being placed, and in which there is firm intelligence as to the time of the attack, what do you suggest? Play pinochle with him until the bomb goes off? (Does anyone even play pinochle anymore? Two hours might be about right to explain the rules and have a game. May as well!)

          At any rate, as I said elsewhere, it might indeed be provably useless to use torture in a case like this, in which case I’d agree that it shouldn’t be done. There is a part of me that would want to make the guy’s last two hours as painful as possible because hey, it’s the only punishment he’s going to get for killing hundreds of thousands of people, but if someone says ‘we’ should be better than that then I’ll agree with them.

          But if there’s even a chance of extracting information that would kill hundreds of thousands of people by torturing someone then I think it should be considered. The morality of it is questionable but, in my opinion, not easily decided, if there is a chance it would actually work. Certainly I think it’s an OK subject for discussion.

        • I don’t think torture is a priori too taboo to be discussed in all situations or as a philosophical debate, but people usually frame it as a purely moral question, like it’s a lever we could always pull as a last resort if only we were willing to. That framing makes us vulnerable to nonsense tough guy talk like Trump’s where he claims “torture works, people,” so I always want the preconditions for the moral debate to be abundantly clear.

          The remaining trouble in the scenario you’ve proposed is that torture can produce results that are actually worse than nothing at all if the mastermind lies and you send resources off on a wild goose chase. That said, if you can convince the mastermind of a credible threat that you will torture them more after the bomb goes off if they lie, to no benefit other than punishment, then yes I would say torture as a reasonable attempt to save millions of lives would be justified there.

        • > But in the unlikely event that someone captures the mastermind behind a nuclear plot that has been uncovered too late to stop the weapon from being placed, and in which there is firm intelligence as to the time of the attack, what do you suggest?

          In the unlikely event that there’s this invincible child soldier, what do you suggest?

          The scenario you are specifying has literally never come up. Perhaps instead of considering such a scenario, you might consider the alternative of *preventing said scenario from ever happening*, by for instance encouraging people to cooperate and provide better intelligence through holding the moral high ground and *not torturing people*. Because that’s the thing – in consideration of such scenarios, you have stacked the deck such that you only see the positive impacts of torture, you do not see any of the negative aspects.

          What about the scenario where the mastermind, who could have been persuaded to tell you all sorts of useful things, instead kills himself to avoid being tortured? Unlike your ticking time bomb scenario, this has actually happened.

        • Phil:

          Torture usually isn’t used because it doesn’t work. People will say anything to stop the torture and there is no guarantee that what they say is true. This presents a problem for your two hour scenario – do you “go” on the first thing the person says? What if it turns out to be a lie? Then what do you do? How much time do you have left? How do you determine the truth of their claim?

          Under the scenario you proposed, I have no moral objection to torture: presumably the person knows how to stop XXX people from being killed, so torturing the person to prevent XXX deaths or harms isn’t immoral. The problem is determining whether the information obtained through torture is accurate.

        • Sure, but whaddyagonnado, you’ve gotta try something to prevent hundreds of thousands of people from dying. I’m sure you can think of some ruses to try to get the truth out of the guy; at any rate I can. They might not work but it might be better than just sitting around playing dominoes while waiting for the bomb to go off. Or maybe it wouldn’t; I genuinely don’t know and I’m not advocating it (I was not serious with my ‘hand me the pliers’ comment in an earlier thread…or, at least, I don’t know if I was serious or not, I’m not arguing for it but also wouldn’t take it off the table).

          I think the reasons for not using torture in a case like this might be based on the practicalities of it rather than the morality of it. I certainly don’t think it’s immoral to discuss the use of torture in this kind of situation.

          I think one of the reasons torture is seen as taboo, if that is indeed the right word, is its association with things like “torture to elicit a confession” or “torture as a form of punishment”. Personally, I do think I would take those off the table on moral grounds. But “torture to save a hundred thousand lives”, well, to me that is a different discussion.

        • > I think one of the reasons torture is seen as taboo, if that is indeed the right word, is its association with things like “torture to elicit a confession” or “torture as a form of punishment”. Personally, I do think I would take those off the table on moral grounds. But “torture to save a hundred thousand lives”, well, to me that is a different discussion.

          The problem is that when you open up to creating scenarios for the use of torture, and you make it an allowable practice for state-sanctioned law enforcement, you lower your moral status. You open the door, by saying it’s allowable under scenario A, why not A-, or B? If you say it’s OK when the bomb is about to go off in 4 hours then what about 6 hours, or two days, or maybe there’s a bomb that might go off in 6 days and the person you’re torturing might have an idea where it is?

          I generally don’t like slippery-slope arguments because basically you can create them to defend pretty much anything, but I’m introducing that concept to again underline that there may be a reason to have a taboo about torture – a reason why you’re better off just having a blanket rule and not even considering its use.

          It becomes even more of a problem, IMO, when to create a hypothetical model where torture is worthy of discussion you put together a scenario that’s so contrived and unlikely.

          There can be a strategic as well as moral reason to simply say that the US (or whomever) simply rules out torture under any circumstance, as we way to distinguish ourselves from others who do engage in such acts. I think that was largely the position of (at least some members) of the American intelligence community when the Bush administration was busily trying to create strategic and legal justifications for the use of torture.

  6. I don’t have anything useful to add, not having read the book (yet), but I thought I’d point out that Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature” is wonderful. We’d be better off if it were required reading for every high school senior / college freshman.

    • “We’d be better off if it were required reading for every high school senior / college freshman.”

      Same goes for “Enlightenment Now”. I don’t agree with every detail but overall it’s an excellent book, well written and well reasoned. Andrew also gets a hat tip in this book.

      • I’ve read several other Pinker books. They’re all excellent – some even a bit too thick. He kind of missed the gig with the idea that there is “innate grammar” but still a well-reasoned argument supported with a ton of interesting evidence.

        • I’m not sure what Pinker thinks now but as I recall in his earlier books he endorsed the idea that there is a kind of “innate” grammar in the human brain – kind of an evolutionary pre-adaptation – based on the “deep grammar” that occurs across all languages. I think Deacon – and probably others – pointed out that this isn’t necessary, as grammar is self-selecting: that is, it can’t be structured any other way and still function. It expresses the relationships observed in the real world.

          I’ve been listening to a book on the evolution of physics from the Greeks to Quantum. In response to relativists the author took pains to insist that the laws of physics that we know today were *discovered*, not created. They exist whether humans know them or not. In line with Deacon, it seems reasonable that “deep grammar” – the logic by which language functions – is the same: it was *discovered* by humans, not created by us. It reflects the realities of the physical world in which we live and doesn’t require any pre-adaptation in the brain to emerge: just an accurate perception of the world we live in.

        • Jim –

          I usually associate the idea of “innate grammar” with Chomsky.

          Seems to me the issue is too complex with too many disagreements to conclude that Pinker missed the gig in that issue.

        • “Seems to me the issue is too complex … to conclude that Pinker missed the gig in that issue.”

          I read several of his early books in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He was strong on Chomsky. Perhaps I’m forgetting some subtleties but generally that’s where he was. It’s not a major criticism. The stuff about deep grammar was super interesting. They were great books. He convinced me that “innate grammar” was a serious possibility. It just turned out to be wrong.

        • Thanks for the link. Yes I agree with the majority of mathematicians who believe they “discover” rather than “create”. I guess that goes along with the unnatural efficacy of mathematics as a model of nature. They also seem to be headed to what I noted above: language, and the relationships it expresses, are intrinsic to the way the world works – so maybe Pinker got there a long time before I did :)

          FYI, is this the Robert Wright who wrote “The Evolution of God”? Killer book! Best non-fiction book ever.

        • Jim –

          > FYI, is this the Robert Wright who wrote “The Evolution of God”? Killer book! Best non-fiction book ever..

          Yes. One and the same. I often like his podcast – even if he leans too heavily into evo psych for mytaste (as oes Pi nker).

    • I once picked “The Better Angels of our Nature” up and opened it at random. I saw woodcut prints labeled MARS and SATURN which he glossed as showing that people in “the middle ages” were crude and violent. I threw it down and shuddered because it was clear that they had not even had an English major fact-check it (hints: is printing a characteristic medieval European technology? what did Mars and Saturn mean in the late 15th or early 16th century, and which aspects of human life were they associated with? could he find creative art from the 21st century, say a poster for the Saw films and a poster objecting to factory farms, which also shows violence and crudity?)

      I am pretty sure DuckDuckGo will show you a takedown of the book page by page and footnote by footnote.

      • I am pretty sure DuckDuckGo will show you a takedown of the book page by page and footnote by footnote.

        Well not quite at that detail but Spenser McDaniel has pointed out a few problems in Pinker’s history. I rather liked this:

        In other words, of the three people Pinker lists as having supposedly been burned alive by the Spanish Inquisition during the Middle Ages, only two of them were actually burned alive at all, only one of them was executed by an Inquisition, none of them were executed by the Spanish Inquisition, none of them were executed in the Middle Ages, and none of them were executed for the reason he gives.

        Steven Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature” Debunked

        • > He does not specifically say that they were burned alive by the Spanish Inquisition during the Middle Ages, but the context certainly makes it sound like this is what he means
          > In reality, Tyndale was not burned alive at all; instead, he was strangled and his body was burned once he was already dead.
          > In reality, Bruno was not executed by the Spanish Inquisition or during the Middle Ages; he was actually burned alive by the Roman Inquisition on 17 February 1600 in the Campo de’ Fiori.

          This feels like a level of quibbling that seems rather grasping at straws to me…

        • its very important because one of the standard tropes of quack medievalism is to take a thing you don’t like which was introduced after 1500 (eg. witch hunts) and call it “medieval.” Most first-year courses in medieval studies will cover that fallacy, and Pinker is writing a book about quantitative change over time so dates are central to his argument.

          Europe got very authoritarian in the 16th and 17th century, in part because they were reading =ancient= Roman law codes and taking them literally and not as an exercise in worldbuilding that judges politely ignored.

          Pinker also uses Matthew White’s figures for atrocities, and they are an omnium gatherum. Another basic principle of historical research is that “sources are weighed not counted” because people, including historians, often repeat a number in an authority (or modify it) without ever checking it empirically. There are a few pages in my PhD thesis on this topic but see also https://doi.org/10.21237/C7clio10142345

        • Sean:

          I’m guessing that Pinker would argue that even though he got the details wrong, his general point is correct. I do think, though, that even if Pinker’s general claims are correct, if he got these details wrong he should issue some sort of correction, perhaps in discussing the importance of rationality he could also say how learning from one’s mistakes is an important aspect of rational behavior. That said, I haven’t followed any of the details on this medieval stuff; I guess you and Pinker can sort that out and maybe he can respond in this comment thread regarding whether he agrees that this statement in his earlier book was a mistake.

        • I would be pleasantly surprised if Pinker came out with a second edition written in collaboration with someone skilled in using historical evidence.

          Your Pinker-simulation seems to be doing the two-step which you have complained about before: people report a social science experiment as if every word of the conclusion is true, then when people show flaws in the methods and the structure of the argument they retreat to “well, this is suggestive … it inspires …” But the whole point of experiments is that they can show things which are not common sense, or decide between contradictory bits of common sense. But your Pinker-simulation is not the person and I don’t know how Pinker-the-person responds to criticisms of the evidence and logic of “The Better Angels of our Nature.”

        • Sean:

          Yeah, I have no idea. I sent Pinker and his publisher a link to this post; I haven’t heard back from them, but I assume they’ll be happy with the positive review and maybe they’ll even read through to the comments, in which case maybe they’ll get here!

        • Archaeologist Michael E. Smith also has some articles and blog posts on the problem of people taking numbers as unchallenged authorities rather than as claims which deserve the same skeptical reading as any other claims about the past https://publishingarchaeology.blogspot.com/2018/12/when-big-data-are-bad-data.html He is open to quantitative approaches to the premodern world but thinks that both the people creating numbers and the people using numbers need to be more responsible.

  7. “Chapter 11. Things are getting better. Rationality is on the rise.”

    How should we square that with attitudes toward Covid-19 vaccines and the 2020 election?

    • “How should we square that with attitudes toward Covid-19 vaccines and the 2020 election?”

      In “Enlightentment Now” Pinker address this extensively. The statement isn’t meant to apply to moment by moment variation. It’s a statement about the long term trajectory of humanity. The trend is noisy but strong.

    • Actually, “rationality” has been steadily decreasing. It is inverse to the gradual replacement of science with NHST (an irrational kind of “bizarro science” that essentially measures the power/wealth-weighted collective opinion) since WWII. We may be nearing peak irrationality right now. Or maybe we are only about halfway there.

      • [NHST is] an irrational kind of “bizarro science” that essentially measures the power/wealth-weighted collective opinion

        I should clarify that this is because it primarily measures how much money you get to make precise measurements, get large samples, and influence get your grants/publications through the approval process. The first two are directly a problem with NHST, while the last is more tangential. However, it feeds off the first two since “success” becomes more detached from reality the longer your field strings together NHST results to choose winners.

        This is the best paper on that topic:

        Theory-testing in psychology and physics: A methodological paradox
        Paul E. Meehl
        Philosophy of Science 34 (2):103-115 (1967)
        https://meehl.umn.edu/sites/meehl.umn.edu/files/files/074theorytestingparadox.pdf

        • Scientists being encouraged to get large samples and make precise measurements is not a problem. I don’t think you understand what the problem with NHST is.

        • You managed to completely invert the meaning of what I said, ironically like some form of bizarro reading. Read the Meehl paper.

  8. I haven’t read Pinker’s book but it seems to me that whether or not humans are rational mostly depends on one’s definition of rationality. I think it could be argued that given a set of beliefs and value judgements all deliberate human behavior is rational.

    Suppose I believe that my thoughts might be stolen by aliens and that this would be bad. Let’s also suppose I believe that wearing a tin foil hat would prevent this from happening. In that case it would be perfectly rational for me to wear a tin foil hat. If I believed this and chose not to wear a tin foil hat, some explanation of my behavior would be needed (maybe I’m unable to obtain a tin foil hat or maybe I’m willing to risk my thoughts being stolen rather than suffering the social consequences).

    I’d probably be wrong but I can’t see how my behavior would be irrational.

    The only human behavior I can think of that appears completely irrational is when we act out of habit. It is in no way rational for me to put my phone in the fridge when I put away the groceries. I still do that once in a while.

    • Hans,

      All “rationality” requires some underlying set of beliefs as a starting point. Maybe not alien mind reading, of course. It might be that our bedrock beliefs are that we can trust what our eyes and ears tell us. Or we believe in a religion or we believe in a “scientific method” or some such. But rationality is a way of proceeding from a minimal set of core beliefs and choosing actions that accord with those beliefs.

      I think a case can be made that a useful core belief, perhaps the one most important meta-belief, is the belief in self-examination to distinguish between what we believe and what we have reasoned our way into on the basis of those beliefs.

      There are plenty of people, of course, who are quite comfortable with proceeding from pure belief and who find appeals to “rationality” scary and unhelpful. But even among those who would describe themselves as living largely on a rational basis for their behavior I think a great many of them are completely unaccustomed to self-examination of their underlying belief structure.

    • “whether or not humans are rational mostly depends on one’s definition of rationality. ”

      “Rational” in that they seek to honestly understand the world how it really is and to use that knowledge to improve the conditions of humanity. This rationality according to Pinker is reflected in the steady improvement of the overall condition of humanity. On the other hand, maybe this is just capitalism, where enlightened self-interest drives people to create products and services that improve the condition of humanity. :)

  9. Appreciate your review and love the chapter-by-chapter, blow-by-blow style as usual. I’m particularly intrigued in the following chain of thought:

    “Rationality is a mode of thinking, but the details of rationality change.”

    “What’s relevant is not irrationality, but its consequences.”

    “We’re irrational because of motivated reasoning.”

    “Rationality involves people knowing they are right. And from the French revolution on, being right has been used to justify appalling crimes.”

    These lines grab me because they suggest that rationality does not constrain the solution space as much as people like to think. In statistics, we are keenly aware that different methodologies can lead to different findings, even contradictory ones. One can’t call someone’s methodology irrational just because one doesn’t like the outcome. That is motivated reasoning. But if rationality is not one mode but many modes, leading to possibly different outcomes, is rationality a well-defined quantity?

    To take this further, let’s revisit the garden of forking paths concept. One perspective is to say that anyone who does forking paths is irrational. But does this make sense? Each of the alternative analyses in the garden uses the tools of Pinker’s ch. 3-9 so individually each is a rational mode of thinking. Is forking paths a rational way of getting an irrational outcome? Is rationality about the method or about the correctness? If it’s about the method but not correctness, what is its significiance?

    About Chapter 10, is Pinker arguing that those who practice the methods of Ch. 3-9 cannot be irrational? If so, it runs counter to my experience. We always tend to question data more if the data do not reflect our intuitive or preconceived notions! That’s motivated reasoning which would make us irrational.

  10. Thanks for the review, motivates me to read the book. My comment is more related to the other comments made and probably shows I’m punching above my weight but I cannot imagine a satisfying existence without trying to be as rational as possible.
    Pursuing informed self-interest is sine qua non rule for rational action providing that best effort is made by the deciding entity to base it on known outcomes and appropriate rules of reasoning to evaluate the outcomes. Knowledge of past outcomes and rules depend on the nature and circumstance of the entity. Self-interest is subjective or relative and different standards apply to an individual vs. society. OK, too abstract, Panglossian and not often seen real life or so it seems. Why? Errors in facts, human nature? If so then maybe rational behavior can be improved by greater emphasis on knowledge and recognizing human flaws in decision making.
    If more or less true then prehistoric man was as rational as we. Suicide may well be the best choice i.e. rational for an individual. Support for a war e.g. can be seen as rational or not depending on who is deciding, nation, individual, sub-group etc. In the end we are responsible only for ourselves.

  11. > I agree that we should fight suppression of free speech

    Do you really? If so, great! As a tenured professor, you actually are well-placed to do so.

    One idea: Invite cancelled speakers to give Zoom talks to the Columbia community. (I, and others, would be happy to organize these so that they required exactly zero minutes of your time.) Such talks cost no money, but, because they are official, invited talks at Columbia, they provide cancelled speakers with welcome support. They also make clear that, at Columbia at least, free speech lives.

    It would be easy to restrict the invitees to those with Ph.D.’s from research universities. (No yahoos like Milo needed. ) Enough of them have been cancelled that there are plenty of candidates.

    • D –

      I’d like to be invited to talk also.

      Otherwise I’ll whine that my “free speech” is under attack and I’m being “censored” (like those many who are being “censored” even though they have plenty of national platforms through which they can get their views out).

      Afterall, who are those university administrators who think they have the right to decide who gets to come speak, and whose invitation they can cancel, and who to not even invite? It’s an outrage that they’d actually think they have the right to respond in line with their views of what’s in the best interests of their institutional community!

      Ok – that doesn’t quite represent my views, as I do think there are legitimate questions in play here – such as whose welfare, exactly, are university administrators prioritizing?

      And I do think there are, at some level, legitimate questions regarding tolerance of dissenting views and the potential downsides of “coddling” students by creating an echo chamber sheltering them from dissenting views.

      But I also do think that university communities, in some fashion, have the right to determine who they do and don’t want to be given a platform in their own communities.

      For me – probably the only clear line through all of this is that administrators need to at least be fully transparent in their decisions-making processes.

      But I also think there’s another line that’s almost as clear: There are many who are more than willing to exploit the complications of this issue to portray themselves as victims – for expediency in pursuing an ideological agenda – when they certainly aren’t victims (or having their “free speech” infringed upon) in any meaningful sense.

      I’d argue that exploiting “free speech” in such a fashion is in the end harmful, as it trends towards trivializing real issues of free speech.

  12. A:

    You wrote:

    > I agree that we should fight suppression of free speech

    You should correct this to:

    “I agree that others should fight suppression of free speech”

    It is perfectly fine if you have no interest in fighting the suppression of speech at universities. There are many things that I am uninterested in as well! Just don’t write “we” when you mean “other people, not me.”

    • D:

      I agree that we should fight suppression of free speech. That is not the same thing as “I will do what any blog commenter asks me to do.” I expect that Pinker also thinks we should fight suppression of free speech. That doesn’t mean he’ll do what you ask him to do either! I respect the speech of my commenters enough to often respond to them in comments, and I think that’s a free-speech-enhancing activity right there. If you want to do other things on your own, go for it.

  13. It’s a good thing you liked the book, because it’s paradoxical to critique it. In fact, your own mild criticisms of it used rationality, and are therefor self-refuting.

    “My friend & Harvard colleague Howard Gardner, offers a thoughtful critique of my book Rationality — but undermines his case, as all skeptics of rationality must do, by using rationality to make it.”

    https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/1449411182931202062?s=20

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