Stephen Pinker on What Has Happened to Being Rational

Your book, the new book is Rationality? Rationality. What it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters. It is kind of scarce. It certainly seems scarce. What has happened to us? Well it's... I think that there's a lot of rationality inequality. Yeah. Because you know at the top end we've never been more rational. Right. Why do we have this mind-boggling technology in terms of mRNA vaccines and smartphones and 3D printing and artificial intelligence. We have rationality applied to areas of life that formerly were just a matter of, you know, seat of the pants guesswork and hunches and you rely on experts. So we have things like, you know, Moneyball where some genius thought, well if you make decisions in sports like drafting and strategy based on data instead of the hunches of some old general manager you could actually have an advantage. And so the Oakland A's went all the way with a fairly small budget for players because they applied data. Now every team has a statistician. Data driven policing. One of the reasons that the crime rate in the U.S. fell by more than half in the 1990s wasn't that all of a sudden guns were taken off the street. It wasn't that, you know, racism vanished or inequality vanished. Part of it was that police got smarter since a lot of violence happens in a few small areas of a city often by a few hotheads, few perpetrators. If you concentrate police on where the crime hotspots are you can control a lot of crime without that much manpower. We were just having a conversation. So medicine, you know, evidence based policy and governance. So there are areas in which we've applied rationality in areas that formerly were just gut feelings and hunches. I'll give you one other example, effective altruism, a movement that I'm kind of loosely connected with. Where do your charitable dollars save the most lives? Should you buy malaria bed nets? Should you buy seeing eye dogs for blind people? It makes a big difference. So charity now is becoming more rational. So all of these areas, policing and sports and charity and government are becoming more rational. But of course at the same time, you've got, you know, chemtrail, conspiracy theorists, you've got the idea that COVID vaccines are a way for Bill Gates to implant microchips in people's... The knobs? Don't they make you magnetic? Yeah, right. What's interesting to me is that there's a thing that goes along with irrational thought where you have irrational thought that is confined to your party lines, right? Oh, yes. Like if you are... I mean, this is just a blanket statement, but if you are right wing, you are more likely to dismiss the worries of climate change. Yeah, absolutely. In fact, that is the main predictor of whether you dismiss climate change. And I know you do a scientific literacy. A lot of my fellow scientists say, oh, the fact that there's so much denial of manmade climate change means we need better science education in the schools, we need scientists becoming more popular and making the climate science more accessible. Turns out that whether you accept humanmade climate change or not has nothing to do with how much science, you know? And a lot of the people who do accept it know diddly about the science. They often will think, well, yeah, climate change, isn't that because of the hole in the ozone layer and toxic waste dumps and plastic straws in the oceans? Right. A lot of them are out to lunch. Whereas some of the climate deniers, they are like well prepared litigators. They can find every loophole, they know every study, a good lawyer can argue against anything. What does predict your acceptance of climate change is just where you are in the political spectrum. The farther to the right, the more denial. So that's what you said is absolutely right. It's not just more denial, but this willingness to instantaneously argue it. The subject came up oddly enough in jujitsu, where after class we're just getting dressed and putting stuff away. And someone said, man, it's just a fact of life that is getting hotter every year. And this guy jumped in immediately with this defense of this idea that climate change is nonsense. Like, listen, it's a cycle, it's always been going on like this. I'm like, how much research have you done? You don't think people affect it at all? I'm like, yeah, it is a cycle, right? If you go back and look at core samples and you look at the ice ages and you look at all the various times and the history of the earth, the climate has moved. I mean, we were actually just talking about this yesterday. I had someone on who was an expert in ancient civilizations and all these archaeological mysteries that they've found. And one of the things we were talking about was the Sahara Desert, that the Sahara Desert goes for this period of every 20,000 years or so where it's green and then it becomes a desert again and then it becomes green again. And it goes back and forth. And 5,000 plus years ago, it was very green. And now it's an inhospitable desert. And this guy just had this right wing talking point. Instead of arguing with him, I said, how much research have you done? I'm like, what do you think is happening? It's just a cycle. It's definitely a cycle, but don't you think it's extraordinary the amount of CO2 we put in the atmosphere? Yeah, but there can be superimposed trends that can be recycled. And on top of that, that can be the forcing that we're doing. It's both things. It's clearly, the earth varies. It has varied forever in terms of the climate shifting back and forth. But clearly, if you look at any Mexico City is a great example. I flew into Mexico City once and I took photos because I couldn't believe there wasn't a fire. I'm like, I can't believe this. When you live in Los Angeles, you're used to smoky skies when there's forest fires and wildfires. But Mexico City, there was no fire. It was just pollution. These poor fucking people, they have to live in this shit every day. This is crazy. No, that's true. Actually what surprised me the most of all the places I've been is Africa, Tanzania and Uganda where there is a brown haze everywhere. And that's because people burn wood and charcoal. Oh, that's a thing that people need to realize too. Well, they heat up wood to make the charcoal, and they burn the charcoal, and there is a haze over the landscape. Like nothing I've seen. A lot of the worst, unhealthiest air pollution is people cooking with open fires in their own houses. Isn't that wild? Which is wild, yeah. But you would never think that burning wood outside would have a significant impact on the environment, but it really does. Yeah, I mean it isn't forcing climate change. It's a different kind of problem. It's another problem. It's a different kind of pollution. But going back to what we were talking about, one of the big conclusions of rationality is that a lot of what we deplore now as just crazy stuff, conspiracy theories and fake news and a lot of it comes from one bias, the my side bias, which you kind of already alluded to. Namely, you believe in the sacred beliefs of your own clique, your own political party, your own coalition, your own tribe, your own sect, and you paint the other side as stupid and evil for having different beliefs. And there's a perverse kind of rationality in being a champion for your cause because you get brownie points from all your friends. And if you were to defy them, if you were to accept climate change in a hardcore right-wing circle, you'd be a pariah. You'd be social death. So there's a perverse kind of rationality in championing the beliefs of your side. It isn't so good for whole democracy when everyone is just promoting the beliefs that get them prestige within their own coalition rather than the beliefs that are actually true. Yeah, it's strangely prevalent, right? Like it's so common that people have this ideology. They subscribe to the belief system that is attached to that ideology and whatever it is, whether it's left wing or right wing, and they just adopt a conglomeration of ideas instead of having these things where they've thought them through rationally and really like looked at it. Instead, they have an ideology and whether it's left or right wing. And it seems to me, it's a real shame that we only have two choices in this country politically. Like if you look at Holland, if you look at there's a lot of countries that have many, many choices. And I think if we had many, many choices, you would have, you still have tribalism, but at least you'd probably have a more varied idea of what it is. We have very polarizing perspectives. We have a left and a right. And each side thinks the other side are morons and are ruining the country. Absolutely. There has been a rise in negative polarization. That is in the sense that the people you disagree with aren't just mistaken. They don't just have a different opinion, but they are evil and stupid. So that has risen, especially the extremes. It's still true that a majority of Americans call themselves moderate, but the extremes hate each other more. It's interesting why that's happened. The common explanations you blame it on social media, people being in filter bubbles. That might be part of it, but part of it may also be people segregate themselves in terms of where they live more so that you get kind of educated hipsters and knowledge workers in cities. And you get less educated people moving out to the outer suburbs and rural areas or staying in rural areas. So people just don't meet people who disagree with them anymore, who have come from different backgrounds or less than they used to. And then some of the organizations and institutions that used to bring people from different walks of life together, churches, service organizations like the Elks, the Rotary Club and so on are declining. So we tend to hang out more with people like ourselves. Well, even in universities, which used to be a place where people on the left and people on the right could debate. In high schools even, I remember when I was in high school, Barney Frank debated someone from the Moral Majority. And I remember watching it, I think I was 16, and we went and sat and watched this debate and watched Barney Frank trounce this guy and mock him. And it was pretty fun. But it was interesting because we got to hear two very different perspectives, but one at the time, Barney Frank, who's just better at it and had better points, was more articulate and had a better argument. And we walked away from that having heard both sides, but having heard one side argued more effectively. And you don't get that anymore. Instead now, you get one side and when someone tries to bring someone in that is of a differing opinion to debate this person, that person gets silenced. They try pulling alarms and buildings and they shout and blow horns and call everyone a Nazi. And it's unfortunate because you miss the opportunity like I got to see when I was 16, where I got to see a more articulate person with better points of view, better perspectives, argue more effectively that their perspective was more rational. Yeah. No, I think that's vital. There is some evidence that people who have really hardcore beliefs can't be talked out of them with any amount of evidence. Some people. Exactly. So people ask me, as a question I get asked a lot when I talk about rationality, they say, well, how do you convince a real QAnon believer that there isn't a cabal of Satan worshiping cannibalistic pedophiles in the Democratic Party and Hollywood? In the basement of a pizza house? In the basement of a Comet ping pong pizzeria. And the answer might be for some of them, you can't. It's kind of like the question, how do you convince the pope that Jesus was not the son of God? Well, you can't. I mean, some people will go to their grave believing what they believe, but you don't have to convince everyone. There are people who are not so committed. They may find a little plausible, but their identity isn't fused with it. It doesn't define who they are. And they might be open to argument. And of course, new babies are being born all the time and they aren't born believing in QAnon or chemtrails or 9-11 truther theories. And some of them can be peeled off by rational arguments. I think it's not tried enough, including in issues that I strongly believe in, like human-made climate change, like safety and efficacy of vaccines and on and on. I think that scientists and public health officials have not been willing enough to show their work. They've just set themselves up as priests and said, believe me, I'm a scientist. Well, that could not be farther from the way science works. The whole point of science is there is no authority. You've got to show the goods. It's data. You always might be wrong. And what made... What kind of increased my confidence, say, in human-made climate change, 25 years ago, I was a little bit open to it. But then seeing the objections, like it's all just cycles or it's just because the temperature measurements were... The cities grew. And so the weather monitoring stations used to be out in the country. Now they're in the city and cities are hotter. I actually heard this from a Nobel Prize winner. But seeing the counterarguments, where there's a site called Skeptical Science, where they take on every one of the objections to human-made climate change and they explain why... Why it's unlikely to be true. I find that fantastically convincing. And I think that we should not give up on people's ability to take evidence seriously. Granted, there's some people who won't. The people... We all, to some extent, act like lawyers. We argue a cause. If there's a counterargument, we try to... We rack our brains to figure out how we can refute the counterargument. So there is that, especially when the belief is close to your personal identity. That's not true of all beliefs for everyone. And public health officials, government officials, scientists should be prepared to show their work. This is why I believe it, not just this is the truth.