Reasoning itself has costs and the benefit of choosing the optimal decision always has to be created off you can't spend the rest of your life gathering data because then you're like a god You've got to at some point act on the information you have knowing that you're taking a risk but still weighing in the cost of inaction Steven Pinkett welcome to show thank you nice to be here There was a time not long ago when I thought that reading another Elliades a you koutski blog post or another chain parish mental model definition about some cognitive bias that I didn't realize that I had Who's a period where I was adamant that that was going to be the solution to all of my problems in life? And then I found out that it wasn't Why is it that I need a glossary mental models toolkit in order to be able to function has making sense of the world always been this difficult? It always has we're I think we are equipped to reason about cause and effect and about logical implications and about probability When they the problems are ones that we have dealt with all our lives when they're involved subjects that we deeply care about that And can join us but when it comes to general purpose tools we can apply across the board including to novel situations Like oh didn't occur to me. This is another example of the sunk cost fallacy or the availability bias namely reasoning from anecdote Having those tools at your fingertips as generic all-purpose cognitive Tricks that you really do need to be reminded of you need to know the names of the fallacies and how to avoid them the names of the normative models that is Rules and systems of how you ought to reason to Deal with novel situations ones that aren't abstract situations Daniel Kahneman got asked I think by Sam Harris when they did a live event about after all of this time Daniel learning about the human brain And biases has it made you any more rational and his response was basically no what's your thoughts on that?
Have you managed to make yourself any more rational? Somewhat I mean we know from the literature on biases that I'm probably not the person to ask because all of us are subject to a bias bias Namely all of us think that everyone else is biased but not us So I might be the person least equipped to spot my own biases But I tend to think so and there is research that suggests the people who are less susceptible to the classic cognitive Fallacies and biases have better outcomes in life in general. They're less likely to get into accidents to lose their jobs to Break up their relationships As always these pertain to averages certainly less likely to be scammed by psychic or medical charlatans so So applying the average to myself I would think so on average. I would hope so.
Oh smart people anymore are likely to be rational On average. Yes, there is a correlation between intelligence and rationality But it's far from a perfect one. So there are plenty of smart people who are vulnerable to cognitive biases who are Fixed in their beliefs and don't adjust them in response to changes in evidence Particularly when it comes to beliefs that are sacred values of one's own tribe one's own coalition one's own political ideology The so-called my side bias that is you steer your reasoning toward a conclusion that makes your own Tribe look good would try to be your religion your political party your Your hobby group then smart people are just as vulnerable as less smart people This is one of the conclusions from Keith Stanovich and spoke to bias that divides us Stanovich has developed what he calls a so much equally a rationality quotient as a Compliment or alternative to the intelligence quotient and they are correlated but far from perfectly Is that something that smart people should look out for in particular with regards to a rationality? Certainly the my side bias namely are you are you really?
committed to some belief that is emblematic of your politics or your theory in some academic dispute and it's you're probably susceptible to various kinds of motivated reasoning like bias dissimulation which is to say you gobble up Information that seems to support your view and you stay away from or don't read or or nitpick to death Evidence that goes against your beliefs. You try to spin doctor everything So that if there's evidence that would seem to go against one of your beliefs You try to find loopholes and ways that you don't have to believe it. And of course we all do this We're all lawyers that make the best strongest possible case for our clients, but it certainly is a way in which each one of us can be Less than optimally rational and but of course it makes it all the harder to spot those biases in yourself That's why we belong to communities where it isn't just up to you But you expose your ideas to criticism you allow them to be challenged you have a community that abides by Free speech so that any opinion can be voiced and then evaluated the way we undo our bias typically there there are some Self-aware souls no doubt who can step outside their own biases more commonly other people do it for us Yeah, it's interesting thinking about the effect socially that we have I think a lot of what we need in the modern world is the ability to be rational While there's social pressure around us. It's very difficult to exist in a vacuum now because even if you are the most Excluded isolated person working in a lighthouse in Antarctica somewhere You probably still have Facebook and Twitter and internet connection So are there things that we need to look out for when we're in a group particular biases or ways our rationality gets perturbed and Perversed when we're in a group.
Yeah, certainly to be open to Sources of information other than the one that's going to ratify your your sides beliefs So not just to read you know the guardian or the telegraph but to dip into the source that you don't habitually read to seek out sources that have themselves cultivated a reputation for Objectivity and accuracy you mentioned a prominent member of their irrationality community Elisa Yacowski although also in that community is Scott Alexander writing under the in the blog astral codex 10 and he does often will do literature reviews Stoddishly thorough and astonishingly quickly where it's pretty clear the outset that he has not made up his mind And he does his best to say whether whether lockdown policies are effective at stemming the spread of covid a highly politicized issue But when he did a literature review he said he concluded there's a number of months ago that yes they are Somewhat effective better than not having them but only after looking at both sides of the issue and all of the Extent studies that he can find did you see that you got married the week? I did I did see that yesterday. I just got the notice yesterday. Although I knew that I'm in the The Bay Area this year so I had dinner with him a couple of months ago and I met his fiance Amazing.
Yeah, I saw the photo. I'm on the mailing list rasal codex 10 It's like it's so strange after years and years of him writing under this anonymous pseudonym and just being this person Well, you have a relationship with the words, but not with them. Yes, so bizarre to now see a face to the words It is indeed and for many months until I met him. I did wonder What was the actual physical body behind this this brilliant intellect?
It's so strange how we we do attach that sort of embodied sense to someone, you know The sud in image that the internet ford and there's a lot of talk at the moment as well about sud in ominous Soo whatever it is Thank you for walking me through that word Those sorts of accounts increasingly zero hb Lovecraft is one of those I think it's like orange tree is another one We have a bunch of different people online that are deploying information but hiding behind because they don't necessarily want to put themselves out there And it's interesting to think that scott was doing that whatever 10 or 15 years ago Well indeed in his particular case, he's protective of his full name because he is a practicing psychiatrist and he wanted his patients not to Be aware of the affected by his other identity as a blogger and commentator Talk to me about basing basing reasoning because it's a term that i've come up against previously And yet i've never really understood how to use the principle of basing reasoning to apply it to my own life on a day to day basis Yes, so this is one of the kind of signifiers or identifiers or identity badges for being a member of the so called rationality community Do you think that every person should understand baserall and that's it's almost a membership requirement that you You understand it and endorse it It's the eponymous rule of the reverent Thomas base from the 18th century and it's actually it is an algebraic formula But it's actually pretty simple and it's already Still doper into our everyday language in the common term priors. What are your priors? That is actually taken right out of a base rule the rule is simply the purpose of the rule is how should I calibrate my degree of credence in a hypothesis Depending on the strength of the evidence so the idea is you don't just believe it or disbelieve it You've got a degree of belief from zero to one and the key insight is as soon as you take that conceptual leap Then you can apply the arithmetic of probability to the problem of how to calibrate your belief to the evidence and so the The idea is that both the output the deliverable the point of base rule is what's called a posterior probability Posterior just means after you've looked at the evidence so when all is said and done how much should I believe that say Masks stop the spread of covid or to what degree should I think that I have prostate cancer if I get a positive prostate specific antibody test reading Now so how do you figure that out? Well, there's three numbers according to base rule first is the prior that is before you even look at the evidence The symptoms of the patient the test result the the data and the literature how credible is it to begin with?
What is the sort of accumulated weight of evidence and plausibility before you before you look at a single data point? That's the prior now admittedly there's some subjectivity that goes into that For disease usually take the base rate of the population what percentage of men have prostate cancer It reads the question of you know, well, do you get 65 year old men? Do you care whether it's white men or black men? But let's just say that you that you start off with some kind of prior Then you multiply that by the likelihood and in the lingo of a Basal likelihood means if the hypothesis is true What are the chances that you would see the data that you are now seeing?
So in the case of the medical test of all the people say who do have prostate cancer What percentage of them does the test correctly pick that up? It's the sensitivity of the test in the kind of lingo of testing So that is technically probability of the data given the hypothesis that is you know, we still don't know whether it's true or not But if it was true how likely is it that we would get those those results those symptoms those test test data You just divide that by how common the evidence is across the board if if the symptoms or the test results occur a lot That is it is a high false positive rate together with a true positive rate That goes into the denominator and as we all know from elementary school if the denominator gets bigger the whole fraction gets smaller And so it's just the prior times the likelihood divided by the commonness And it is kind of intuitive. We all know that if a symptom of a disease for example occurs For a lot of diseases, you know fatigue Then just because I don't know Rocky Mountain spotted fever has the symptom of fatigue You don't conclude you have Rocky Mountain spotted fever just fatigue and a couple of lots of things That's the commonest the data in the denominator. Likewise, if something is really going around a lot like omochron Then you have some of the symptoms that would be the prior you say well, uh, you know, I'm feeling a bit a key omochron doesn't seem like a implausible Explanation and likelihood two is kind of intuitive namely if it were true If you do have say omochron, are you gonna have sore throat most people with omochron do have a sore throat?
I have a sore throat well that ups my Greetings that I have omochron Anyway, that's these rule people are not very good at kind of applying it to novel situations Especially when the numbers are presented in a little bit the way that you and I have in terms of numbers between zero and one If on the other hand you presented in terms of frequencies that is there are a thousand men in the population 10 of them have prostate cancer of the 990 who don't 10 of those will test positive of the 10 who do 9 will test positive you test positive do you have prostate cancer people are pretty good at saying well Basically, it's got 5050 isn't it? If I give you the same numbers the same information in terms of the chance that you have prostate cancer is 0.01 then all that people Blow off the base rate. They just think oh my god positive test I must have the disease and then they're according to classic research by Kahneman and Tursky people neglect the base rates They reason kind of by stereotype by anecdote and then they're not so good So that's kind of the base the base story and anyone who's just heard it as all of a sudden become much more rational I'm not going to use Scott Alexander for every example here But he does a thing at the beginning of the year where he makes predictions for the forthcoming year by the end of it Is most of that do you think that that's an attempt at Bayesian reasoning? Yes, so forecasting rational forecasting does use Bayesian reasoning as one of its essential ingredients Yes So for just to give you a concrete example, this is based on the work of philate luck and barber melers and Well who run forecasting tournaments?
They have become more popular through Prediction markets where you can actually get skid in the game put money in the line. What is the chance that that Russia will invade Ukraine? What is the chance that inflation will exceed 10 percent this year and you You bet against other people but the way the basic reason comes in is a good forecaster And good forecasters tend not to be your name brand pundits We tend to have a pretty crummy track record because they are always pushing their political ideology And it blinds them to the specific situation But the way Bayesian reasoning enters into accurate forecasting is the first thing you start off with is the base rate They're the prior So for example, will there be a terrorist attack this year that will kill more than 10 people? Well, the first thing that a rational forecaster would do is go to Wikipedia Look at the number of terrorist attacks that have taken place every year for the last 10 years in that part of the world And say well, let me start with that as my first guess And then I'll bump it up or down depending on the specifics of what's happening this year Likewise for Putin invading Ukraine, they might start off with well.
How many invasions have one country by another have we seen? That's where I that's my starting point now. Let me increment or decrement it And that's not typically the way people do forecasting which is why they're not particularly good at forecasting They're not Bayesian enough Isn't it that betting websites are usually the most accurate ones when it comes to upcoming elections? I don't know if that's a myth that I've seen on the internet or if that's actually correct So I think that the so-called super forecasters in tech lock and melon's tournaments outperform prediction markets But prediction markets outperform just about anything else.
Yeah, that's right. Well, because you got a lot of people with You know who are highly motivated to Learn about the the situation. It's not just that they toss off some opinion. Yeah, it's unlimited skin in the game That's right.
And the what ultimately counts is not reputation But are you right or wrong? And so it's not like plugging the ideology making your side look good. The proof of the pudding is in the eating Yeah, what about measuring risk and reward for people as they go through their life? That's another chapter in my book rationality It pertains to what's sometimes called expected utility theory or rational choice theory one of the uh less popular theories people often blame it for The whole homo economicus rational man It's basically the idea that you should when you're faced with an option under A risky option you should multiply the probability of each outcome by its cost or benefit It's reward or its penalty Adam up and choose the option with the highest Highest expected utility that is probability times payoff now and there's a literature from It goes back 50 or 60 years settled though.
The prizes have gone to economists and game theorists who've shown cases where people don't seem to abide by the axioms of Expected utility theory, but by large isn't a bad guideline to start with. I mean obviously we often live under not Risk where we know the probabilities but uncertainty where we don't even know the probabilities as a Donald Rumsfeld famously put it unknown unknowns as opposed to known unknowns But still if you think through what is a chance that something will happen how good or bad will it be it? Probably would lead to some wisdom like You know if I if I step on the on the accelerator to get home faster because I really don't want to be late for dinner I missed the first minute of a show And you know, what's the benefit of that now? I am taking a slightly greater chance of getting killed in a car accident How much value do I place on my life?
If you started to think that way, or should I wear a bicycle helmet? Should I fasten my seat belts? You'd probably make a lot a bunch of wiser decisions Or even more mundane ones like I just bought an appliance should I also buy the Additional extended warranty now that costs typically about 25% of the price of the product itself the salespeople will push it aggressively And the reason is the expected utility calculation works out in favor of the the store and not the customer namely You buy something Unless it's one out of four of those products is going to break paying a quarter of the price for a warranty does not make any sense It'd be much better off just occasionally absorbing the price of the repair or replacement and you're going to be ahead I mean does it really does not make sense to buy a lichen insurance policy for your toaster But every I was gonna say every insurance company would be bankrupt if that wasn't the case Well, the thing is that for insurance makes sense for catastrophic losses that you can't recover from replace your house for most people your car the livelihood of a breadwinner But for things where you really could replace it even though you know it'd be really annoyed if you had to buy a new toaster The month after you bought one you probably could afford it and it doesn't make sense to keep forking over money for every single appliance that you buy So their self insurance makes a lot more sense Do you think about balancing rationality with a more sort of intuitive natural flow just generally to life? So rather than a lot of the time when I find myself thinking a lot about the mental models and the biases that I use as I move through my day I often find myself getting in my own heads and I don't find as much ease or flow or intuition with the way that I go about Do you think there's a tension there pulling between those two?
There is a phenomenon of as we call it overthinking But you know about 20 years ago as a result of a bestseller by Malcolm Gladwell called Blink There was the popular idea people in business love it that you should go with your gut Your first intuition is going to be wiser than overthinking It's probably not true in general that the There are rare cases in which they got feeling is more accurate than than reaching out, but by and large you're probably better Thinking twice Granted a lot of times you don't have the information no one has stated the probability it's not like buying a lottery ticket where you can look Up the odds or a casino gambling And so we have no choice but to make intuitive guesses But you know in general not acting on impulse is You know, it's probably the way with the wise philosophy of life The problem that we have is that we're not privy to the codes behind whatever the odds are of whatever it is that we're considering Right and we can kid ourselves into believing you know It's for covid masking or for the prostate cancer rate for men of your age in your area of your particular genetic heritage There are some things but most of the decisions that we make on a daily basis about whether to stay with a partner or leave about whether to go to a new city or not Where would you even begin to try and do that? I suppose that this is where Those more messy and emotional decisions are where people are hoping that rationality will give them a lifeline out of it And then ultimately a lot of the time end up coming back to something that was quite intuitive in the first place in any case Sometimes yes, and indeed it is true that often that those critical probabilities, you know, no one knows and you can't find out The life with life is uncertain, but here's there is a bit of advice that i'm going to credit to my colleague Daniel gilbert and the psychology department at harvard Which is that when people try to uh imagine how they will feel in the future They're often not very good at it That we we probably give too much credence to our own powers of imagination And then often you're better off looking for someone at someone else who has faced that decision and to look how it turned out for them Uh, and uh, they've actually because then you're not relying on imagination now granted. No two people are are interchangeable So maybe their situation is different mirrors. Maybe the world has changed.
You know that was then this is now still probably a lot of the time You're better off at trying out as we might put in kind of gather data real world data for how it turned out And it's it's particularly poignant for me because he told me this many years ago when um over dinner When I was at MIT at the time I had a job offer from harvard. I was agonizing over whether to take it or not Uh, we had dinner and uh granted he had an interest in the answer because he was recruiting me to be his colleague at harvard But he said he said you know most people when faced with an agonizing decision rely too much on their own power of imagination And you're you're better off finding out how it really did turn out for someone who was faced with that decision who went one way or another Sure enough i asked two of my i was in a unusual position perhaps that two of my colleagues from MIT had made the exact jump They had switched to harvard they had been poached and i asked them Are you do you regret your decision or did it turn out? Well if they both said it turned out well and and um, you know that that uh that decided me So I decided to uh to accept the offer and I have been happy ever since I'm pretty sure that the some evidence that shows people who make changes in their life on average are happier That simply making a change if you have a choice between staying where you are and making or making an alteration that on average people tend to be more happy What's the new i mean to the extent that that's true it would say that I didn't necessarily choose wisely other than To make to make a move but i'm i'm perfectly prepared to believe that not least because uh once you have made a choice You tend to because of cognitive dissonance that is uh congress' reduction rationalization Uh, you know, we we don't want to look like idiots for having made the wrong the wrong choice So we do tend to uh find uh after the fact what made it the best choice and make the best of it Not everyone there are people who are constantly you know blaming their misfortune on uh on some regret Uh, but that is interesting. I was not aware of that.
Yeah, I think a lot about people that say it was meant to be that they use that or um Yeah, they they go through perhaps some sort of hardship and then come out the other side And they say it was meant to be because look at the situation that I got myself into and it always feels to me like that person's completely destroyed Their own input into the good things that they made out of a tough situation Let's say that you've got in some accident or some sort of injury and then you end up on the other side of that finding a calling in life that really speaks to you And I think well saying it was meant to be takes away the agency that you had from overcoming what was a pretty shitty situation You did this it wasn't meant to be you made the best of a bad uh bad environment Well, and that's it's even more pernicious when it's done in advance and you and you say well Yeah, it's faded. Uh, uh, you know, I'm going to get covid or I'm not there's nothing I can do about it I'm going to get lung cancer or not And so that you actually avoid making Reason decisions because you're fatalistic and people with who believe in fate tend to have certainly worse predictors one of the one of the uh ingredients of successful prediction is believing in um contingency that things could have turned out different that Things are not faded or in the stars And I'm not sure if this is specifically been looked at by being willing to bet that people who don't believe in some sort of predestination Who actually uh attribute some sort of agency to themselves probably have better outcomes in life I think the goal is is to have sufficient thinking that you can Make your decisions appropriately, but not so much that it slows you down because I definitely have some friends And I've worked with some people as well who are uh Overthinkers that make me look like I'm the most rash like playboy in town Yes, no, and that is that is an important point. It's sometimes called in the literature bounded rationality from pervert assignment The idea that reasoning itself has costs namely time Information that you have to gather Computational resources memory and data and so on and the benefit Choosing the optimal decision always has to be uh traded off against the the costs of the actual reasoning You know, you can't spend the rest of your life gathering data because then you know your life is gone You've got to at some point act on the information you have knowing that you're taking a risk but still weighing in the cost of inaction he sometimes he who hesitates is lost Uh, it doesn't mean doesn't guarantee you that the best outcome but it sometimes means that uh the acting money perfect information is uh, well always essential Unavoidable. I think it was is it set Stephen's divider which that wrote algorithms to live by you familiar with that?
I'm familiar with um It's plus but I forget whether that was his exact title. He did write a book that I wrote for which I wrote it forward called everybody lies Oh, no, no, it wasn't that one. I think actually I think algorithms to live by was um actually a guy Brian christians Christianson maybe yeah Yeah algorithms to live by algorithms to live by how the really funny way of how you should pick your partner So it's averaged out that over a hundred dates Um, you should go for I think it's go to 30 or 33 dates go out on 33 dates And then go out decide to pick the next person that is the best out of the people that you've seen and that on average Is going to be the best person that you're going to find well, though. I mean indeed that that speaks It's an old finding it.
I think it was I really learned in the context of you're driving down the highway And you want to know you want to figure out where which restaurant to stop at and you don't know where there'll be a really really good restaurant Just around the bend. Uh, I'm gonna hand you're getting hungry And so it's the mathematics is the same namely it is it is a theorem I'm not sure why it comes out this way, but yeah sample about a third of the expected number and then choose the first one That's above the average of that the third that you've measured so far So it applies in that case as well. Yeah, again, that's a really good example because it's trading off the costs of waiting indefinitely namely, you don't want to you know Marry your your perfect match at the age of 80 because it's taken that long to wait for them You know on the other hand, you don't want to propose marriage to the first good looking person you meet either. Yeah, what about conspiracies?
They seem particularly good at subverting rationality Indeed and for a number of reasons one of them is that it's they fall into a category of belief that is peculiarly unfalsifiable They are memes in the original Richard Dawkins sense of ideas that are adapted to being spread by their by their very nature and the the part of the conspiracy theory that says that the lack of evidence for the theory is proof of what a diabolical and genius conspiracy it is That makes them uniquely uh Invulnerable to refutation kind of like the other beliefs like god works in mysterious ways or if you deny that you're uh, this is racist that proves that you're a racist or So there are by their very nature some ideas are contagious simply because they kind of By their very nature. They are designed to evade our cognitive immune system. Also they conspiracy theories tend to be more realistic They are excellent examples of a my side bias But there's usually some villain and the villain is often an identifiable opponent such as the theory that Hillary Clinton ran a trial Sex ring out of a basement of Washington pizzeria now needless to say it was not members of the democratic party who believed that conspiracy theory It was people who hated Hillary and indeed a belief like that It's kind of just another way of saying boo Hillary The fact that it has Propositional content is kind of irrelevant to why people believe it and and that was one of the major epiphanies that I had on on uh in writing rationality and in dealing with these uh bizarre beliefs such as that uh Jet contrails are mind altering drugs dispersed by a secret government program Or that covid vaccines are actually a subject huge by bill gates to inject microchips into our body to surveil us And you ask me how do people believe these things and part of the answer is depends what you mean by belief That is for a lot of people factual warrant empirical evidence Just that's not why you believe things when it comes to things that don't impinge on your day-to-day life If it's going to affect whether your car is going to run out of petrol or whether there's going to be you know beer in the fridge Then people are very very attuned to reality that they can have to be when it comes to belief about uh Things that you'll never encounter in life like that pizzeria or Hillary Clinton People believe things because it expresses the right values the right moral it identifies Villains that you think are evil it identifies heroes more often villains in the case of conspiracy theories Sometimes it's an identifiable one like Hillary Clinton. Sometimes it's just a general and a hatred of the establishment of elites of institutions There's a fairly A sizable minority who just believes that the uh has kind of a need for chaos because michael bangerson put it That is they just think the whole system should should burn it's so corrupted evil and so any concentrated source of power government's corporations Scientists their public health establishment could often be figure into these conspiracy theories the theory portraying them as uniquely evil and insidious That's fascinating.
That's such an interesting way to look at it It's kind of like mental lapping in a way these people do live action roleplay But bounded within their own minds one of the things that I found really fascinating about conspiratorial thinking especially recently is that Over the last two years faith in institutions has just gone through the floor We continue to see the people that were supposed to know what they were doing and be in charge Just put their foot in their mouth on live camera daily sometimes just over and over and over again We've seen whatever duplicitous purposeful neglect just idiocy play out in front of us And I think that that has enabled people to have far more belief in non typical bureaucratic What do you say? Positions of power speaking truth. We just have no we have no time for it therefore we're going to make our own truth here But increasingly now people I see a lot on the internet that people say look when you're saying conspiracy why shouldn't I believe in conspiracies? This was a conspiracy and that was a conspiracy and the definition of what a conspiracy consists of now has started to be expanded to include a lot of different things Conspiracy used to mean something that was basically totally unbelievable But now because the boundary of what is true and what isn't and our faith in institutions has been eroded that really anything Is permitted to be a part of a conspiracy?
It's no longer flat earth and beyond It's a whole host of things that come back from that the one stuff that me and you probably might even have believed Yes a couple of things one is that yes, some many conspiracy theorists say well, well look there You know the CIA really did a mountain invasion of the day of pigs in Cuba in in 1961 They the CIA really did overthrow help overthrow our bans in Guatemala and mausolek in Iran, but still there That is a unwillingness to consider just how many probabilities would have to be multiplied for something as Aladdin as that the moon landings were faked or that jet contrails are Tranquilizing drugs. Now. How many people would have to be silent how many people would have to not screw up Just how many pieces would have to fall into place that quantitative thinking of you know a conspiracy one kind of conspiracy is It can be very different from from another in fact, it's vaguely it's even stretching it to call the state of big conspiracy There was government secrecy as there always is but it doesn't mean that you know anything can happen and it's true that trusted institutions have gone down since they're Although it's important keep in mind that probably the default is that people don't trust institutions There's kind of a peak in the 60s where trusted institutions reach their high water market They've been sinking ever since but uh, and it isn't helped when the institutions themselves don't take steps to safeguard their integrity and objectivity and either When you have experts that either make pronouncements as if they were oracles They don't show their work that is explain how they arrived at their recommendations But just you know trust us we're scientists That just as you say that just sets them up for failure because no one is infallible Even our best experts are gonna make mistakes. That doesn't discredit them That's just a reflection of the fact that humans are not you know oracles with a pipeline to the truth Um, that should be made clearer that our starting position in any new phenomenon is ignorance You know stars cove two popped up and you know no no anything and that should have been clear and and should always have been that the public health instructions Should be based on the following evidence that we have so far.
This is what we recommend for the time being That least would have helped the other is uh, many of our institutions are Uh, are flagrantly politicizing themselves. They're just advertising. We are a branch of the political left They use the vocabulary the cant words the cliches and people who aren't Uh, haven't identified themselves as part of that branding that political coalition are just gonna say well Is it just another a bunch of you know, woke academics or journalists and they've kind of set themselves up to be rejected Uh, under the principle that applies to all of us that we tend to be more receptive to people from our own uh, coalition We made it. Stephen Pinker ladies and gentlemen, Stephen what are you working on next?
What can people expect? Whatever this year or next year? Well, I have for a number of years been um working on the psychology of common knowledge in the technical sense of I know something You know it. I know that you know it.
You know that I know it I know that you know that you know that I know that I know that I know it added for an item And I think we're even though that sounds like it would just make anyone dizzy to think through and it does We have an intuitive sense of common knowledge in the sense that something is kind of out there or public or you can't take it back Uh, and I've been exploring how that enters into a range of uh, psychological and economic and political Uh, phenomena and that would be the topic of my my next book the psychology of common knowledge pretty cool. I like it. Just even thank you very much Thanks for having me on