Joe Rogan & William Von Hippel - We Are Safer Than Ever

And so what I think is part of what Pinker is documenting is as the world gets safer, we start getting used to a no mayhem world. And these mayhem events stand out in our mind and so it actually self-perpetuates where the safer it gets, the safer we need it to be. Because every little thing that goes wrong stands out in sharper relief. Ah, that's a very fascinating way of looking at it. You know, what's interesting to me about Pinker's work is how much pushback he gets. And particularly about the world being a safer place. Like people want to keep pointing towards violent episodes and racism and crime and all these different things, different factors, as if it's some sort of evidence against what he's saying. When he's incorporating those current events into this large database and he's saying, yes, it's not that we don't live in utopia, but the world is vastly safer and better now than it was a thousand years ago or ten thousand years ago or even a hundred years ago. Or even fifty. But why is there so much pushback against this? Well so the thing is that I think what's going on is that people worry that it doesn't look like a problem to be solved anymore. So when you and I were kids, we both had lots of gay friends, but we didn't know it because they're not telling anybody because someone's going to kick their ass if they knew that they were gay. Now, yes, gay people are still discriminated against, but it's so much better than it was then. What you don't want to, what I think people or advocates don't want to say is, well there's no problem anymore because then you can allow them to still run into troubles in various circumstances, even though the trouble they run into today is a thousand times less than the trouble they ran into in very little. Same thing holds for racism, same thing holds for sexism. They've all gotten so much better. But and sexual violence is a perfect example. You know, if you look at, if you set, this is in Pinker's book, if you set rape and homicide to you call it both of them, whatever level they are in 1970 to a hundred and then you track them through to the early 2000s. Homicide is in the US. Homicides drop down to like 50. Rapes drop down to like 25. But if you listen to women's advocacy groups about campus sexual assault and stuff, you'd never know that. And the reason you wouldn't know it is because they, people worry, well, if you think the problem is getting better on its own, then you won't keep doing anything to help fix it. And that's a really unfortunate part of our psychology because it makes people feel like there's been no progress. And when you feel like there's no progress, then you think, well, maybe we need to completely overturn the whole system and try something new. And that's of course the point of Pinker's newest book, Enlightenment Now. No, things are going freaking great. Turn it, anarchy and all those things are really bad ideas. Voting for somebody like Trump's a really bad idea because things are actually running along really nicely. It's just that we tend to forget it because every advocacy group who's all worried about whatever their particular issue is, doesn't want the word to get out that things are a lot better than they used to be because I think at some fundamental level they think, well, 25 rapes a year isn't bad enough. We better say that there's a hundred or, you know, I'm not saying they do this consciously. But of course 25 rapes a year, whatever the number is, is bad enough, right? It doesn't have to be the numbers that it used to be when I was a child to be a problem. That all it has to be is a number above zero. Well there seems to, people develop this vested interest in promoting an idea and they want to exaggerate that idea, whatever it is, whether it's the idea that the world is a safer place than it actually is or whether it's the world as an idea of a more dangerous place than it really is. And for whatever reason, once we have it in our mind that this is the thing we're married to, we're married to this concept of polyamorous life and that this is a natural way to live, or that, you know, violence is inevitable and this is just a part of who we are, we tend to promote that and we tend to have massive confirmation bias. It's, I think it's because we personally associate ourselves with ideas. We don't look at ideas as being a thing. Like if you think that something is one way and then you're pointed towards evidence that you're incorrect, you feel like personally you've been slighted or you're being, somehow you're being diminished by your lack of being correct, by your incorrect assumptions and notions. You're absolutely right. That is a weird part of being a person. It's a very weird part of being a person. It's the hardest part about being a scientist because every good scientist is wrong all the time. I've been wrong already on your show, right? And so it's super hard to admit it because by human nature you just want, you want my immediate reactions to fight against it and not to say, well, hold on, what's Joe saying? No, he's right. I overstated that. Let's back off, right? And so there's this really lovely paper that came out in 2011 by Mercier and Dan Sperber and what they argued is I think they nailed it and they said, here's what it is. Our brain actually, we evolved our logical processing abilities not to find out the truth of the world, but to convince you of my point of view. And so our logical abilities evolved in service of persuasion, not in service of seeking out the truth. Because of course, if I can persuade you that the world is the way it would, in a way that benefits Bill, that the world is, you know, something about the way Bill wants the world to be is true, then the world's going to be a little kinder to me. It'll fit my worldview and others will give me the things I want. And so I go through life trying to persuade you of my worldview rather than trying to find out what's actually out there. And so that's why you'd think, oh, well, smart people aren't going to fall for that. So smart, it doesn't matter how smart you are. You're using whatever brain power you have not to define the truth, but rather to find evidence for your particular point of view. Well, I think I think it's also a byproduct of ignorance because for the longest time, you could tell me something and there was very little way that I could find out whether or not you're right or not. I really couldn't know you're correct unless I went and started doing research and read some books. And whereas now I could just pull up my phone and say, hey, Bill just said this, is that right? And you go, no, there's been a hundred different studies that show that. And you go, oh, look, motherfucker, I got the stats. I Google this shit. That's true. And that definitely matters a lot. It's this awesome democratization of knowledge. But if that really were all that it was, then everybody would agree on their politics. Everybody would agree that the fake news was fake and the real news was real. Not necessarily because this is a fairly recent invention. But what I'm getting at is that I think that the ability to be deceptive was perhaps there was an evolutionary advantage. Oh, absolutely. So that's one of the very first things that happens when you have theory of mind. Because as soon as I realize the contents of your mind differ from the contents of my own, I say, oh, I can plant something in Joe's mind that'll help me. That ain't true. But if he believes it is, life will be better for me. And so as soon as kids learn theory of mind at age four, they start to lie. And prior to theory of mind, they tell the truth when it's like, where are you? You know, plain hindsight. I'm right here, dad. You're like, don't you? You're supposed to keep it quiet. But they can't because they don't understand that you don't know the same things they know. Right. And they also understand that they could perhaps change the way you feel about them by manipulating the truth. Manipulating information. Yeah. What's weird is having kids and seeing kids that grow up in troubled homes. One thing you see almost universally is that those kids lie a lot. You know, because you're in the no choice condition. Yeah, you're in a bad spot. And like one of my daughter's little friends is constantly lying. But you know, she has a broken home and the situation is not good. And it's just it's unfortunate. But this little kid is tormented because of it. She's always making stuff up. And all the other little girls roll their eyes and they know she's a liar. And it's sad. But the ability to be deceptive, I feel like that, you know, this is there's some sort of idea that we cling to that if you can deceive someone about certain particular aspects of your mind or your past or what you what you've accomplished or what you're capable of doing, that you will have a better place in the social chain. No, that's absolutely right. And so the way I think about it is think about the difference between conspecific conflicts, conflicts between members of the same species and conflicts between predator and prey. So every time predator and prey interact, eventually one of them is going to die. Predators are going to starve, prey is going to get eaten, right? Yeah. But when conspecifics members of the same species interact and we're competing over something, even if it's a very subtle level of competition, we don't want to come to blows. Because if I'm trying to size you up, be it physical blows or mental blows, there's suffering on both sides if we have to duke it out. And so I want to sell myself as being a little more than I really am. I want to be billed plus 20%. And you want to sell yourself as a little more than you really are because we know that we're not fully going to test each other because there's negative consequences for testing. And whenever there's negative consequences, even for the winner for testing, there's a lot of posturing that's going to go on. And that posturing is something that's literally built into our psyche. And we go through life trying to self-inflate on average, not everybody does this, but on average trying to self-inflate as much as we can in order to gain the things in life that we might not get if we are brutally honest about what our capabilities actually are. That is so fascinating that we cling to all of these ancient structures that are in place when it comes to the way we interact with each other and how important it is, like the social exchanges that we have. And I think this is one of the reasons why we cling to ideas so much.