Steven Pinker is a latter day Enlightenment hero. Such is his versatility, his books are nearly all on different subjects but all manage the feat of being deeply scholarly yet the very opposite of dull. They are original, very entertainingly written, unfailingly rational . . . and the latest one deals with rationality itself. It is excellent throughout but one particular passage toward the end so fired me up that I wanted to reproduce it here to showcase the whole book. – Richard Dawkins
This excerpt has been extracted from Pages 312-314 from Pinker’s latest book, Rationality
Though it’s hard to steer the aircraft carrier that constitutes an entire society, particular institutions may have pressure points that savvy leaders and activists could prod. Legislatures are largely populated by lawyers, whose professional goal is victory rather than truth. Recently some scientists have begun to infiltrate the chambers, and they could try to spread the value of evidence-based problem solving among their colleagues. Advocates of any policy would be well advised not to brand it with sectarian symbolism; some climate experts, for example, lamented Al Gore becoming the face of climate change activism in the early 2000s, because that pigeonholed it as a left-wing cause, giving the right an excuse to oppose it.
Among politicians, both of the major American parties indulge in industrial-strength myside bias1, but the blame is not symmetrical. Even before the Trumpian takeover, thoughtful Republican stalwarts had disparaged their own organization as “the party of stupid” for its anti-intellectualism and hostility to science. Since then, many others have been horrified by their party’s acquiescence to Trump’s maniacal lying and trolling: his game plan, in the admiring words of onetime strategist Steve Bannon, to “flood the zone with shit.” With Trump’s defeat, rational heads on the right should seek to restore American politics to a system with two parties that differ over policy rather than over the existence of facts and truth.
We are not helpless against the onslaught of “post-truth” disinformation. Though lying is as old as language, so are defenses against being lied to; as Mercier points out, without those defenses language could never have evolved. Societies, too, protect themselves against being flooded with shit: barefaced liars are held responsible with legal and reputational sanctions. These safeguards are belatedly being deployed. In a single week in early 2021, the companies that made the voting machines and software named in Trump’s conspiracy theory sued members of his legal team for defamation; Trump was banned from Twitter for violating its policy against inciting violence; a mendacious senator who pushed the stolen-election conspiracy theory in Congress lost a major book contract; and the editor of Forbes magazine announced, “Let it be known to the business world: Hire any of Trump’s fellow fabulists, and Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie.”
Since no one can know everything, and most people know almost nothing, rationality consists of outsourcing knowledge to institutions that specialize in creating and sharing it, primarily academia, public and private research units, and the press. That trust is a precious resource which should not be squandered. Though confidence in science has remained steady for decades, confidence in universities is sinking. A major reason for the mistrust is the universities’ suffocating left-wing monoculture, with its punishment of students and professors who question dogmas on gender, race, culture, genetics, colonialism, and sexual identity and orientation. Universities have turned themselves into laughingstocks for their assaults on common sense (as when a professor was recently suspended for mentioning the Chinese pause word ne ga because it reminded some students of the racial slur). On several occasions correspondents have asked me why they should trust the scientific consensus on climate change, since it comes out of institutions that brook no dissent. That is why universities have a responsibility to secure the credibility of science and scholarship by committing themselves to viewpoint diversity, free inquiry, critical thinking, and active open-mindedness.
Learn more about Steven Pinker’s Rationality
1Thereās an excellent section on myside bias, including disturbing experimental evidence that what we believe is heavily swayed by loyalty to our team (e.g. left or right political leaning) rather than purely, as it should be, by evidence. RD.
11 comments on “Excerpt from Steven Pinker’s Rationality”
I don’t know where else in high-profile public life such an ambassador for our climate scientists as Al Gore, alerting the political class, corporate world, and the public of the peril of ‘business as usual,’ back then, could arise from.
And not now. Unless for business opportunity, now that clean energy is a thing.
And the right did, and does, resist it. Fox ‘News.’
Big Tobacco’s infamy in its unrelenting disinformation campaign, hiring sold-out scientists, and deploying aggressive, high-fee legal firms to sell even more smokes, is legendary, for those who have read the literature.
Billionaire Charles Koch is exactly the same. He’s an organiser, aggressively political, lobbyist, propagandist. Quite fanatical.
All great capitalists only labour to maintain and maximise their profits, as expected, through property, acquisition of competition, share rentierism, controlling legislation for deregulation and huge tax breaks, basically owning democracy, if they can. It’s the big impediment. They are anarcho-libertarians.
An Al Gore is not going to emerge out of the wealth establishment.
It seems Steven Pinker is unfavourable toward ‘affirmative action,’ the policy and program of reduced fees to candidates from low socio-economic backgrounds to Ivy League universities.
Might Steven think, “Rich or poor, you deserve your status?” That is the libertarian meritocratic ethos, or credo, simply put. I don’t know.
I also don’t know his position on Critical Race Theory. I’m always reading about the experience for Blacks, Latinos, Indigenous and LBBTIQ+ Ā people, myself.
Not just in the Guardian and such outlets.Ā Elon’s Twitter is full of it. He likely doesn’t like it there.
Steven felt he finally had to writeĀ The Blank SlateĀ to redress progressivist extremism in the social sciences, giving example/s of women raising a boy as a girl, on the doctrine that gender is a social construct, which of course proved only harmful to the victim of the heretic experimenters.
The book does a very good job of establishing ‘Nature trumps Nurture.’ Again, he has done thorough study. I read all his other books.
But ‘nurture’ is not to be discounted. Pinker did mention that. Because it’s hardly sound.
Even Donald Trump, such an obvious grandiose narcissist by wiring, was affected and shaped by his horrible parents and their malign parenting. It actualised his nature.
And yet might he possibly have to some degree, turned out otherwise, growing up in a sane, empathic, educated household? Steven might shake his head. Probably right.
But we are coming to accept that, concerning gender, the bell curve is somewhat flatter than we had been given to believe, or permitted to, when I was growing up, and it ever was thus.Ā
This is the civilising process. It allows progress. We just need to promote fairness as against meanness.
It’s never done. The spectre of fascism is not a 20th century phenomenon.
Richard Wrangham’s The Goodness Paradox concurs with biological determinism.
Strato
Did you come across this in the bookĀ Rationality? I read the book a while back just after it was published so I can’t remember if Pinker took a stand on affirmative action there. I don’t own the book. I borrowed it from the library at that time. But if his stance is not fromĀ RationalityĀ then where are you seeing it?
When I hear people ranting about the evil affirmative action I inevitably discover that they don’t know that it only applies to harmed groups and is not meant to be permanent.
If Pinker has rejected this very basic view of affirmative action then let’s sort that out!
If Pinker rejects affirmative action then let it stand and I’d be very interested to know his reason for doing so. The thing is – Pinker self-labels as a humanist. Humanists use ethics as a source of right and wrong, good and bad, valuable and not valuable, so affirmative action as a remedy for past injustice is a solid principle in ethics. There are conditions to be weighed as we always expect in ethics but the standard case is that affirmative action applies to a harmed group and will last until the situation is rectified. For example- in a corporation, the goal would be to have the same level of diversity that we see in the ambient culture. Hopefully there is a substantial diversity in the educational or training pipeline that feeds into the industry that is under an affirmative action program.Ā
The fact that in America we have an inadequate educational and training “pipeline” that supplies jobs, careers and higher education is the problem that I see here. Or should I say that the pipeline is perfectly adequate for the middle class white kids but nonexistent for our minorities. With our public education system being funded by the towns and cities taxpayer money there is a serious discrepancy in the quality of schools from one town or city to the next. I’m not sure if educational goals are consistent but even if they are, lower economic class towns struggle to keep kids in school and struggle to hire good teachers and inevitably turn out graduates with minimal qualifications to advance their financial situation in life.
In America, parents with money and resources and the time it takes to boost their kids into the best schools they can manage and also to provide access to expensive enrichment activities are living in a very different country than the working poor who struggle to pay for the bare necessities of life with nothing left at the end of a grueling week to spend and nothing left of themselves to give to their kids because of exhaustion and stress.
So here we have our dilemma – An inadequate pipeline that should supply qualified candidates for jobs and access to our schools and universities and there’s no progress being made on rectifying the situation that I can see.Ā Minorities are agitating for a bigger piece of the American pie (as they should) so how can they work around the perceived hopelessness of the broken pipeline? Lower the standards!Ā
This is where you are seeing pushback from career academics and some of the general public who know about it. It could be that Pinker doesn’t support dropping academic standards as a remedy for the dearth of qualified applicants to university and jobs and careers with the goal of increasing diversity.
Strato, if this is his view (I’m not sure!) is he wrong?
Admission to American universities is a very different picture than the one I faced with my applications decades ago. Even as a privileged middle class white kid back then, my grades in the public school system were of top priority and my college entrance exam scores were of equal importance. But college entrance exams are on the way out here and demonstrable devotion to diversity is of great importance at the current time.
I don’t know his position on this either but how do you feel about Critical Race Theory?
Is it an ideology? Does it come to us through indoctrination? Does it require one to believe certain things? To behave in certain ways? Is there a persecution complex involved?
Is acceptance of critical race theory a requirement of being a good decent fair minded person in our culture?
LaurieB #2. Ā I agree with you. Ā Itās been some time since I read the book, but I donāt recall Pinker being anti-affirmative action. Ā I just went to my copy of the book and did a brief search. Ā The only reference I found ā again keeping in mind that itās been some time since I read it ā was a discussion about evaluating syllogisms. Ā
Maybe Iām missing something here but I donāt think that quote is a refutation of affirmative action. Ā Since I have the book, Iād be happy to dig further if I could be pointed in the right direction. Ā I remember the book being more about how to reason rather than about any particular political orientation.
Michael 100
I definitely agree. Perhaps Pinker would be more inclined to discuss affirmative action inĀ Enlightenment Now.Ā Ā I have that on my shelves.Ā I’ll have a look.
From WEIT:
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/01/10/pinker-clarifies-issues-about-his-interview/
This is from Chapter 15 of Enlightenment Now:
Pinker was always keen that we understand his message to be that we cannot take our hands off the wheel in making these improvements.Ā
I agree here. This is increasingly a process in our conscious control as Mutualists struggle to stay ahead of the Parasitists whose actions equally are deliberative rather than automatic behaviours. Progress is an arms race between Mutualists and Parasites. However the survival of all requires that the the Mutualists win more. Win too much and surplusses are created and the Parasitists get itchy fingered or panicky that others will get their own imagined deserts. (“Selfishness” is more complex than we often allow.)
Particularly difficult is the Mutualist task of pushing towards benign surplusses, ones that consist only of energy and pre-existing stuff (e.g. mental effort!). Parasites clearly are literalists about value and need the reassurance of the material and, critically power over such.
What I’m seeking to demonstrate in the books I’m slowly crafting is that genetics utterly controls our neuro-cognitive equipment, but the increasing diversityĀ of those equipmentsĀ was the basis for an explosively rich and capable culture of the diverse, glued togetherĀ by rich metaphorical language.
Wrangham totally takes the genetic bequest but also kicks off this whole new vector with sub-cultures and sophisticated enough language to power acts of self breeding.
Phil # 7.Ā
Does that mean you are writing one or more books? Ā If so, I hope youāll be able to let us know when theyāre available āat fine bookstores everywhere.ā Ā They would be at the very top of my list.
Ā
Also, I read your recent review of Pinkerās book that you posted in the Book Club. Ā One day soon, Iāll read it with an eye to your critique.
Michael #8.
Sadly I have been writing exactly two books for the longest time. I think I might have succeeded in getting something out if the they didn’t go through their own process of endosymbiosis, gobbling up other material.
Ā OriginallyĀ the two books were “The Evolution of Thinking” and the “Evolution of Thoughts”, the first taking you through neural evolution through the neuro-constructivist lens and how that begs new and interesting questions and the second taking those questions into what I was to term neo -memetics. (Memes cant exist as initially portrayed, as Scott Atran demonstrated and Dawkins acknowledged, so… what can exist?)
The books by rights should have been split off into offspring as they expanded to explain more and more related things.Ā
Then they/it made the prokaryote to eukaryote transition, bit off way more than it could chew, and choked for a couple of years. What emerged from the same material was an understanding of how (exceptional!) sapiens could happen at all. Like eukaryotes suddenly capable of a variety of modes, this well-tooled mammal didn’t speciate as normally happened when faced with an energetic dilemma, (this skill or this other skill? We can’t afford both.)
Maybe, I need to learn this lesson myself and make it a single tome, the story of the new multi-mode-mammal, accommodating neural diversities at the cost of mental illness, but falling into a new Cambrian Explosion of newly enabled forms founded on a new substrate for evolution.
The Dish Podcast:
“Rationality In Our Tribal Times”1:07:28Ā
Ā
Andrew Sullivan interviews Steven Pinker on themes in his new book,Ā Ā ‘Rationality, What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters,’ Oct 31, 2021
It’s really quite excellent
Steven Pinker is working on a new book
Laurie B Ā #2,
I do think that what has hitherto been an academic subject central to African American Studies, in universities offering the course, and was then picked up on by Tea Party Republicans and vehemently and increasingly remonstrated against, for pretty obvious reasons, is indeed important to know, and not least because Florida Governor Ron DeSantis intends to ban teaching or even mentioning historical Black oppression in schools statewide.
“Don’t say gay!” He’s original. Maybe it was Casey’s idea.
He has enforced an aggressive book ban.
The Catholic church prosecuted theĀ index expurgatorum.
The Nazis burned books.Ā
Rewriting history is what totalitarian regimes always do.
The Ministry of Truth.
This wiki entry on the insidious and concerted historical practice of RedliningĀ does not make for light reading, and has some length, necessarily.
It goes to the heart of Critical Race Theory (CRT).
This is what informed Black Americans have been referring to probably since the the 60s, in describing themselves, as “woke.”
One never takes having such vast knowledge and understandings available now, for granted.
DeSantis could well become president in November 2024, along with his rather hands-on wife, Casey.Ā
The man is simply a fascist.
I really think he ideates about liquidating Disney World. Do an Old Testament job on them, as Yahweh is given to have commanded the Israelites do on all the neighbouring tribes, as so graphically described.
I prefer the Old King James version.
I do empathise with Steven Pinker, who as he freely declares, deems himself so fortunate to have tenure at an elite university, in his grievance for some fellow academics who don’t have that security, and whom have been punished or ‘let go of’ for voicing views which offend contemporary progressive zealots for orthodoxy, who have inherited, or appropriatedĀ the appellation, “woke.”
And in turn have been branded “woke” like the mark of Cain.
Pinker has made defining clear thinking and how it impacts action, liberalism and democracy, his pursuit as a thinker and writer of importance and renown. Which he earns.
As he says, the contemporary culture wars are of some moment.Ā
MAGA Republicans have declared war on everything comprehended by the term, “woke.”
They are of course reactionary, against decades of liberal progress.
They remonstrate against ‘cancel culture,’ as does Steven.
I’m sure Steven Pinker doesn’t in any way mean to be implicated in legitimating, and enabling them.
He withdrew from Austin University, to his credit, I say.
In a very recent interview which I just watched, Australian conservative Nationals politician John Anderson was flattering Pinker and endeavouring to draw him on the anti-woke theme.
Steven affirmed it but also did deflect, and resumed talking about rationality and bias, ‘my-sideism.’
Anderson advocated against the ‘yes’ vote in the public referendum on marriage equality. He lost, to Australia’s credit.
Now he has taken the stance against the upcoming ‘Voice’ referendum, on whether Australia’s Indigenous people are to be granted a representational placement in parliament. and it written into the Constitution.
We have compulsory voting. Hence our Democracy is healthy.
I deplore being accorded authority to decide how I vote on rights which people have been historically denied.
Men got to vote on women’s enfranchisement. How does that work?
Previous rightwing PM Scott Morrison, evangelical, buffoon, kept pressing for a ‘religious discrimination bill.’
It didn’t get up. It would have merely vexed the courts.
“The less people know, the more certainly they know it.”
That violence is bad is axiomatic.
And so guns, in America.
The right tend to be the gun lovers. Ours aren’t. And the NRA is trying to get our rightwing politicians to legislate the right to bear arms, funding them, insofar as they can.Ā
They assert that we’re not free. Vaccinated, unarmed sheeple lol.
We need guns like a hole in the head.
Governor Greg Abbott (R) Texas et al like to believe, and aggressively promulgate the dogma that guns are yet the solution to the school shootings, which the whole world is watching, ongoing.
Abbott, along with scores of Republican state governors have passed laws for permitless open carry of hand guns.
How rational.
I have read quite a lot about the guy, in the Guardian, on wiki. A Catholic puritan.
But DeSantis is the worry. And his mate Hitlon Muskler.
That trillionaire is into influence bigly. Toxic to America, democracy and the world. An admirer of OrbĆ n, and worse.
Because Trump might possibly be going on a holiday upstate.
Musk and Trump are on a mutual vendetta.
In their defence, it’s probably just biological determinism.
But I think in the end Pinker’s ‘civilising process’ will prevail and Biden-Harris will win.