Steven Pinker: Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things

This episode explores the psychology behind why intelligent individuals can sometimes hold irrational beliefs, focusing on cognitive biases and the influence of social and informational environments.

1. Intelligent people are generally resistant to cognitive illusions, except for biases that favor their in-group.
2. Misinformation persists due to human nature's preference for compelling narratives over uncomfortable truths.
3. Modern technologies, like social media, can amplify existing tendencies towards belief in conspiracy theories.
4. The enlightenment's rational and democratic ideals are unnatural and require continuous effort to maintain against human instincts towards authoritarianism and tribalism.
5. A data-driven perspective, as advocated by Pinker, can counter doom-laden discourse and promote a more accurate understanding of the world.

1: Introduction and Sponsorship

The episode opens with sponsorship messages and an introduction to Steven Pinker’s work on cognition and language. Pinker's academic background sets the stage for a deep dive into the psychology of belief. Michael Moynihan: "Today a conversation with one of the most important public intellectuals in America."

2: Misinformation and Belief

Pinker discusses why people believe in misinformation, especially concerning abstract and distant issues, comparing historical reliance on mythology to modern faith in science. Steven Pinker: "The default in human belief is to pick the best story because no one could find out before the era of science."

3: Challenges to Democracy

The discussion explores why democracy contradicts human nature, emphasizing the enlightenment challenge to traditional human thinking patterns. Steven Pinker: "Democracy is contrary to human nature, where authoritarianism and magical thinking are more intuitive."

4: Enlightenment Values

Pinker highlights the role of enlightenment values in improving global well-being, cautioning against the regression from these ideals. Steven Pinker: "Enlightenment values are always pushing uphill against natural human tendencies."

1. Challenge Your Biases: Regularly question information that aligns too perfectly with your pre-existing beliefs.
2. Seek Reliable Sources: Favor information from scientifically and historically verified sources over sensational or unverified content.
3. Educate on Cognitive Biases: Learn about cognitive biases and how they influence perception to better navigate misinformation.
4. Support Democratic Processes: Engage in and support democratic processes that emphasize rational deliberation over authoritarian impulses.
5. Promote Enlightenment Ideals: Advocate for education and policies that uphold the ideals of reason, science, and humanistic progress.

Steven Pinker is a world-renowned cognitive psychologist, and is widely regarded as one of the most important public intellectuals of our time. His work delves into the complexities of cognition, language, and social behavior, and his research offers a window into the fundamental workings of the human mind.

Pinker, who is the author of nine books including Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress and Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, approaches his work with a kind of data-driven optimism about the world that has set him apart from the chorus of doomer voices we hear so much from in our public discourse.

Today, we talk to Pinker about why smart people believe stupid things, the psychology of conspiracy theories, free speech and academic freedom, why democracy and enlightenment values are contrary to human nature, the moral panic around AI, and much more.

People

Steven Pinker, Michael Moynihan

Companies

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Books

"Enlightenment Now" by Steven Pinker

Guest Name(s):

Steven Pinker

Content Warnings:

None

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That's Shopify.com dot slash tech. I'm Michael Moynihan, and this is honestly and today a conversation with one of the most important public intellectuals in America. Steven Pinker is a cognitive psychologist whose work delves into the complexities of cognition, language, and social behavior. His research offers a window into the fundamental workings of the human mind, and his data driven optimism has set him apart from the chorus of doomer voices we hear so much from in our public discourse. Hes the author of nine books, including Enlightenment, the Case for Reason, science, humanism, and progress, and most recently, what it is, why it seems scarce, and why it matters.

Michael Moynihan
I sat down with him for a wide ranging conversation, the psychology of belief in conspiracy theories, why democracy is contrary to human nature, and the moral panic around AI. Well be right back with Steven Pinker.

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Michael Moynihan
Let's talk about misinformation. I mean, why do we believe things that are wrong and things that are demonstrably false? I would turn the question around that when it comes to things that don't impinge in our day to day lives, where, by the way, I think we don't tend not to believe things that are wrong. If there's no food in the fridge, people don't tend to hallucinate food in the fridge. They go out to the store and they buy some food.

Steven Pinker
But when it comes to things that are grander, more abstract, more cosmic, who really makes decisions in corporate boardrooms, in the White House? What is the ultimate cause of fortune and misfortune and suffering? What is the origin of life? What is the origin of the planet? What is the history of this country?

People's beliefs don't affect the conduct of their lives. For most of human history, you couldn't know. And so what we contented ourselves with was mythology, uplifting tales, morality tales that single out of villain that glorify our heroes, that get the kids to believe in morally salubrious values and beliefs. The default in human belief for this zone, outside of what impinges on them, is you pick the best story because no one could find out. There was no science.

There's no historical archives, there's no responsible journalism. So we have grown up in an era since the enlightenment where we expect that you can find out these things, that there is a truth to be found. That's why we have science. That's why we have investigative journalism. That's why we have professional historians.

But it's just not the natural human way of thinking. And so I would flip the question around is how do you get people to the mindset that presumably you and I share, that no, you can't believe anything you want. Some things are true and it really is virtuous to believe things that are true by our best lights. But is that something that's been static over the years? Are we in a worse place or a better place now?

Michael Moynihan
I mean, you have a number of people that point to technology and say, this is screwing everything up, and then you look backwards and say, well, you know, we've always had conspiracy theorists, we've had the John Birch society, we've had these things for years. Is it just that more people have access to this now because the Internet and social media, or are we better off than we were previously? So I try to base answers to questions like that and other questions of have things gotten better or worse on? Do we actually have datasets that could lead to an informed answer to the question? The only one I know of is a researcher named Joseph Ushinsky, looked at letters to the New York times and I think other papers over 100 year span and found no change in the proportion of conspiracy theories.

Steven Pinker
However, I think his investigation ended in 2010 prior to the explosion of social media. So we dont know if things have gotten worse there. Why are antisemitic conspiracy theories so persistent? Yeah, its a good question. I think its because Jews are a distributed community.

Theyre in many countries as minorities that at least in the past have been distinctive. They also have had outsize influence compared to their numbers, because societies that have a niche for literacy and numeracy and entrepreneurship provide opportunities for certain minorities to fill those niches. And so I think Jews are a conspicuous target. They're not the majority. They're not just in this country.

They have more influence than you'd predict based on their base rate in the population. And that can get the conspiracy theory going. But conspiracy theories, let's stick on that for 1 second. Obviously we saw a huge rise. And again, this is not data.

Michael Moynihan
This is my hunch during Covid-19 which makes a certain amount of sense, right? We're all stuck at home. A pandemic that we don't understand, scientists don't understand it. And there was an effort by a lot of people to say, the truth is static from the very beginning, and we don't want people going outside of that. And let's take them off of YouTube, demonetize them, take them off of twitter, and just in some ways just kind of shame some of these people.

Is that an effective way? I mean, I suspect that people have less trust in science now. I think that's right. I don't even think that was the most egregious instance. Probably the most egregious was telling people that you should not get together in crowds for maga rallies.

Steven Pinker
But it's okay to get in crowds for Black Lives Matter rallies because the cause is so much more just. I remember the person that defended this who said it is a type of pandemic racism. Yes, right. Okay. So, I mean, that is a way of blaring that the public health establishment is a house organ of the political left.

But you're right that the demonetization, the deplatforming was wrong for a couple of reasons, just wrong as a precedent. But even worse, we now realize that some of the so called misinformation may have been closer to the truth than the advisories from the public health establishment. Now, this doesn't mean that the public health establishment was corrupt or conspiratorial. It just means everyone is fallible. But everything.

We start out in a state of ignorance. The rationale for free speech is that's how we learn stuff. And we now realize that many of the advisories of make your own cloth. Mask or don't wear a mask initially. Yeah, don't wear a mask.

Save them for the surgeons. Or many of the social distancing restrictions, closing down beaches, keeping kids. That was a wild one. Beaches and playgrounds. Yeah.

Reasonably thought what they're trying to do is exert control when something that is patently has no redeeming purpose in terms of public health. But it's a tribal thing in the sense that when I saw people, and still do, wearing masks outside, it's usually in a social class and in an area. I spent a year in Berkeley on sabbatical, and there you see people on bicycles with a mask and no helmet. Yeah. So getting it exactly backwards, getting the.

Michael Moynihan
Probability thing in the rationality book. Right? Yeah. Right. Is there a rationality to conspiracy theories sometimes?

I mean, do people get pushed towards conspiracy because the public health establishment, or any establishment does a series of things that invite suspicion, and the average person is just going to be like, you know, I imagine there's some big kind of apparatus that's trying to screw me over. Is there a slight rationality to conspiracy theory? Sometimes depends on the conspiracy theory. I mean, if it's just like two government officials both trying to hide something, well, that happens all the time. But if 911 was faked, the so called truther movement, the conspiracies are preposterous on the face of them in terms of how many things would have to go perfectly for the conspiracy both to succeed and be undetected since is pretty unlikely.

That's what I got from the rationality book, is that as you expand the number of things involved, well, the better. The story, the less likely it is, because a good story has lots of detail fleshing it out. And of course, every detail you add multiplies the probability. Now, the added absurdity to most conspiracy theories, in addition to the number of things that have to go right for the conspiracy to have succeeded, is that usually part of this conspiracy is a massive attempt to suppress the truth. It's an odd thing.

I mean, if you really want to ruin a dinner party, which I really enjoy doing, you can say something that sounds pretty inoffensive, that Lee Harvey Oswald shot John F. Kennedy, that you're the crazy one in the room. Right? Yes. Right.

And it's like, unless you're having dinner with Michael Shermer or something. Posner, who I just had dinner with. Yes, right. It is very hard. I mean, that is a conspiracy theory that is believed, I think, by 75% of Americans in the power of an Oliver Stone movie or just the popular culture can really make people forget about probability and say that all of these things that would have to happen.

It's nearly impossible. When Lee Harvey Oswald, who had previously, two months before, tried to kill General Walker in one of the heads of the John Birch Society, seems pretty obvious. Well, it's true. They really just show the difference between our thirst for accurate truth and our thirst for a good story. Because the thing is that the Kennedy sashing, it's a crummy story.

Steven Pinker
I mean, some pathetic schmuck kills the leader of the free world, much beloved. What kind of stupid story is that? Now, of course, the fact that it's true often just doesn't register. I'd rather believe the story that they're nefarious forces, that Alex Jones posted this. Video, someone said to me that halfway through is you're told that the Jews killed JFK.

Michael Moynihan
And my response was, the only jew involved in that story killed JFK's assassin. Yes, right. Jack Ruby. Jack Ruby. He was the heroes of this story.

So why do people believe these things? I mean, why do smart people believe these things? I mean, smart people believe very stupid things. Everybody knows the George Orwell quote, something so dumb, only an intellectual could believe it. What is that what is the instinct that makes people believe stupid things in.

Steven Pinker
General, smart people tend to be more resistant to cognitive illusions, fallacies and biases, one exception being the my side bias, namely, you give a pass to errors in an argument that makes your own coalition look good and makes the other coalition look stupid and evil. And there people on the left and right are equally susceptible, and it is more or less independent of intelligence. It goes back to the artificiality of the moment, which we think we're living in, at least, or we'd like to live in, namely, that you can determine the truth about who killed JFK. That is, there's forensics, there's arguments, like Gerald Posner, pretty convincing. But for most of history, the documentary record, the forensics, the ballistics, the Zapruder film, none of that was available.

And so it almost was, as we would say, kind of an academic exercise. What really happened? No one could know. If no one could know, then should you believe anything? No.

You believe the story that serves the greater moral purpose, whether the moral purpose is exposing the corrupt, powerful forces that dominate us or expose the nefarious conspiracy or that teach the young the right moral values. The question is, why don't intelligent people trust what you and I would call more credible sources, like a journalist like Gerald Posner, like the Warren commission, as flawed as it may have been, but still, they probably came to the right conclusion. Like science when science is functioning properly, like academia when it's functioning as it ought to function. The problem, of course, and the reason that academic freedom for me is such a vital issue is universities are squandering the trust that would lead to accepting beliefs that are likelier to be true, as are many journalistic outlets. Yeah, I mean, journalism is a particular problem these days.

Well, as we saw with NPR, which cultivated a reputation for being politically neutral, for being reliable, now we see that its CEO is a flaming woke fanatic and a fanatic and woke bot. I could care less if the CEO of NPR was a, I would expect them to be a card carrying Democrat, maybe a Clinton Democrat sort of thing back in the nineties. I would expect that from. But this kind of stuff was really off the reservation, unless it's the problem. When you see things like, oh, you're a heterodox thinker, when you look at the numbers, you and I probably agree on a lot of things.

Michael Moynihan
We're right there in the middle of what the american people think. I mean, if you're somebody who says, I don't know if this Leah Thomas should be swimming with women, that's about where America is. I would question that sort of thing when it comes to affirmative action, always been more negative, even amongst black respondents. So being heterodox in that way that's true, is sort of measuring it against the elite, for lack of a better. That is true, isn't it?

Steven Pinker
And that is an irony. I speak of academia being at the left pole. This is the mythical spot where all directions are, right. Just like when you're at the North Pole, no matter which way you turn, it's south. So academia's at the left pole.

What we recognize to be the mainstream american opinion by the standards of academia and elite media, crazy right wing beliefs. When people say, we have to combat this, I mean, I wince a little bit because I kind of like the market to combat it in a way. And there usually seems to be some ideological component to the combating of misinformation. I think we've seen that in the fact that a lot of COVID misinformation turns out to be, if not truth, not obviously false. What do you make of the argument that it was misinformation that allowed Donald Trump to win the election in 2016, allowed his supporters to be deluded about the election that he lost in 2020, etcetera?

It's an empirical question. There are analyses such as by Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist, that, in fact, the impact of fake news was negligible, that it didn't get to that many people. And the people that, you know, Pope Francis endorses Donald Trump. So how many people saw that and how many people believed it, other than people who are kind of cuckoo Trump fanatics in the first place? And so there may have been something of a moral panic over disinformation or misinformation in 2016.

The certainly stop the steal is based on. Actually, I think it's probably doing it too much service to call it misinformation. It's just a lie. I used to have this conversation with people about people like Alex Jones. They would presume that, oh, this Alex Jones video had 2 million views.

Michael Moynihan
Are those 2 million people who agreed with Alex Jones, or are they like me, who watched it and said, this guy's out of his mind? The presumption is that people watch that. And they agree with it, and also that the people who tune in and watch it would have had their minds changed by him as opposed to having those beliefs in the first place. We do have filters for credibility of the source corroboration by other sources. Now, if you're a true believer, you choose not to exercise those, those filters.

Steven Pinker
But most of us weren't born yesterday, and I don't think language would have evolved in the first place if it was that vulnerable to spreading misinformation. That is, if anything someone said immediately got implanted in your brain, in your belief box, and from then on, you believed it. We just would not listen to anyone because we'd be too easily manipulated. And as a reason to not panic about deepfakes, they could be misused at the margins. But since they've become fairly widely available, there are very few cases in which they've swayed any opinion in any direction simply because people don't automatically believe them.

Michael Moynihan
And they're very quickly debunked. They're very quickly debunked. Yeah. And sources do exercise some discretion. Let's hope they continue to.

Steven Pinker
A lot of the stuff that they publish may not turn out to be true, but still, you're better off believing them than Alex Jones's website, for example. Where are we as a world? It's a big question, but, I mean, I view in some ways the enlightenment book as an accidentally anti maga book in the sense that there's a lot of stuff about free trade in there. I mean, you look at these enormous precipitous declines in poverty, the increases in life expectancy, and you say, wow, this is a miracle. And then you realize that it's, along with countries opening up, I mean, Vietnam, China, India, et cetera.

Michael Moynihan
And those previously closed economies pulled a lot of people out of poverty. But we're in a moment that both Democrats and Republicans are in a protectionist, mercantilist kind of mindset. And, you know, all this stuff has done such great things for the world, it seems like we're trying to double back on that now. Since I wrote enlightenment now, it went to press in 2017, I still try to keep track of trends, and some have gotten a bit worse. Homicide rates have gotten worse.

Steven Pinker
War deaths have gotten a bit worse. Democracies have gotten a bit worse. Global trade as a proportion of gross world product has gotten a little worse. Assuming that trade is a good thing, it hasn't undone the progress. Part of the argument of enlightenment now and before that, better angels of our nature is that over the course of history, what we might call enlightenment values have increased, that is, human rights and democracy and open economies, and that the rise of those values has had benefits to the world, such as disease and child mortality and maternal mortality and extreme poverty going down and war.

Those are two different arguments. One of them is that enlightenment values increase. And the other is that enlightenment values cause the world to be better. There's no law that says they have to keep increasing. And we know that there are the values.

That is the whole. Enlightenment ideals in some ways does go against features of human nature like tribalism, authoritarianism, puritanism, magical thinking, primitive intuitions, essentialism. Authoritarianism is, you think, sort of part of human nature. I mean, that's our general instinct. Deference to what people think of as a legitimate authority is probably one of the ways in which we moralize the world.

How do you solve our problems? Well, lets entrust a strong leader. So were vulnerable to that. The whole concept of democracy is, no, its not that a strong leader just has the wisdom and strength to solve problems. Its that we need to agree upon someone to temporarily preside over the council, a president, not a king, and that that person wields power only for the betterment of the people that he or she is governing.

That's the whole concept of democracy is not particularly intuitive. I think it's intuitive to challenge a leader who's arrogated too much power to take him out. But the whole idea of consent of the governed, freedom of speech, is completely unintuitive. So enlightenment values, I think, are always pushing uphill and have a natural tendency to slide back. If I'm right, and I don't have the data to demonstrate this empirically, but the idea would be, as the world retreats from enlightenment values, so too measures of global well being will go backwards.

And there's individual stories that make that plausible, such as Vladimir Putin is not an enlightenment guy. Universal human well being. Thats kind of not his thing. His thing is aggrandizement of the greatness of the russian people and empire. And of course, his own infallibility and power.

To the extent that he gets to do what he wants, then youll have the data on war go in the wrong direction, namely more of it. I mean, Russia is one of the great examples of this, isnt it? I mean, 1989 to 90 comes and say, well, thats the end of the soviet empire. It's gone, the evil empire from 1917 to now. I can't believe it lasted that long.

Michael Moynihan
And we're going to have flourishing capitalism. And then 2000, after a very shaky time with Yeltsin, Putin takes over, and Russia succumbs yet again to inauthoritarianism that it's been used to through its entire history. And people are shocked by this. Yeah, I mean, I was shocked by it. Yeah, me too.

Steven Pinker
I invoked features of human nature that when things go south, we're apt to empower a strong leader. That's natural. Democratic mechanisms are not so natural. But on top of that, it may be that some cultures, because of their history, are more receptive than others. And the fact that Russia had tsars, then the Soviets, then Putin, there may be some historical continuity there, but there's.

Michael Moynihan
Always the thing in these countries that they feel like they have to go through the motions of democracy. Saddam Hussein used to have elections, and it wasn't even plausible. 98% of the people. Well, that's true. There's things like the Democratic Korean Republic and the German Democratic Republic.

Yeah, I've always said if it has democratic in the title, run the other direction, it's not going to be democratic. You know it's not. Yes.

We'Re going to take a break. Up next, the promise and perils of artificial intelligence. We'll be right back with Stephen Pinker.

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That's spelled sapir Journal.org newsletter. You won't regret it. You've written a bit about AI. Yeah, this is the latest moral panic. Give me the broad sense, should I be worried about this?

Michael Moynihan
Because we see these things with wonder. I cannot believe this. It's answering me in these fluid answers in chat. GPT but oh lord, this could go horribly wrong, couldn't it? Am I being too pessimistic about that?

Steven Pinker
Yeah, I think so. I mean, there clearly could be harms with AI, as there are harms with any technology, but I don't think that the doomers have made a good case. That is the idea that AI will try to take over, and therefore it will extinguish us the way we did other species, the way we indigenous peoples. So it's not a jobs argument like. This will be separate.

I think we should be so lucky. We'd have to figure out how people can pay for food and rent. But if there's that much abundance, then that strikes me as a kind of a smaller problem. In fact, it has to be a net huge benefit. People don't have to do boring, dangerous jobs, and instead stuff gets produced.

Things happen for free. I mean, it's amazing, especially with a population that's likely to decline. But granted, if we don't come up with new policies, whether it's a universal basic income or a negative income tax, or finding new uses for human capital, there could be some rough times, but it's not the end of the human species. Are we on the precipice of those times? I mean, there seems to be a lot of change coming.

There is. I don't think it's going to be that fast. So we still do not have cars that can go from point a to point b and allow you to read a magazine, even though those have been predicted for a long time. I mean, my car yells at me when I drive. I have a Tesla.

Michael Moynihan
I take my eyes off the road and I'm like, it's spying on me. It's yelling at me too. Yes, it says pay attention. I'm like, no, you made this technology so I could read. Stop it.

Steven Pinker
I've gone through the same experience. It's the Stasi car. But the fact that you can't read a magazine and let your Tesla drive you to work shows that these problems can. Can be really hard. And the reason that they're hard, even when they work a lot of the time, is that it's not good enough to work a lot of the time.

It's the times that they don't work that you worry about that require human common sense. Like construction worker holding up a hand painted construction sign, telling you about a detour, and you got to be able to read the sign. And Tesla can't read. As far as I know, all those edge cases, as they say, mean that it's really harder than we think to build infallible technologies. Can you steel man a case that AI is going to produce some negative outcomes and some harm that we're not really prepared for?

Oh, it'll certainly produce negative outcomes and harms that we won't prepare for, because all technologies do. So that I don't even have to steal, man. I'll just say it. It's really the dumer case, that is. What is the dumer case?

The dumer case. There's two versions of it. One of them is that just as we dominated other species, sometimes to the point of extinction, certainly to the point of exploitation, as we did to many indigenous peoples, well, AI is to homo sapiens, as homo sapiens is to the passenger pigeon. The other doomer argument is that the values of AI may not be aligned with human values. So that if a hypothetical AI is given some goal to pursue, such as eliminate cancer, then since exterminating every last human would be a way of making cancer go away, it will kill us all as collateral damage on its way to eliminating cancer or war.

Or you give an AI a goal of regulating the water level behind a dam and it floods a city, because that's one way to keep the water level as specified. Maybe that could happen now. That could happen now. Yeah. Technology can screw up quite a bit.

Michael Moynihan
You see what happened with airbuses and things like this? I mean, this is a common thing, right? Yeah, I would imagine being more precise. Well, it'd be more precise. And then to extend the argument, the singularity could happen where AI would recursively improve its own intelligence.

Steven Pinker
It would be so smart that among the things that it could do is figure out how to get smarter and which would make it figure out how to get still smarter. And that would include disabling all human efforts to disable it. It could include brainwashing, or bribing or manipulating humans to do its bidding when it has not been empowered by being connected to the grid or the net or actual machinery. And so it could recruit armies of people to pursue its goals. And those goals may come at the expense of human well being.

Michael Moynihan
Is that. I mean, this is dystopian science fiction, but is that possible? Could that ever happen? Well, the thing is, if you think that the singularity is coherent, that recursively improving one's own intelligence is coherent, then maybe. I think it's not coherent, because I think it is extrapolating from smarter to infallible and omniscient.

Steven Pinker
I think there are a number of things wrong with the arguments. One of them is that just because you're smarter doesn't necessarily mean that you have an urge to dominate. In homo sapiens, intelligence comes bundled with aggression and dominance and all the other nasty traits that we came saddled with, because we're the product of a competitive process, natural selection. But if something is designed, there's no reason that it should want anything. It wants what we tell it to want.

That wanting something and being smart enough to know how to get it are two completely different things. And as I put it, we know that there are creatures that are capable of advanced high intelligence without the urge to dominate and conquer. They're called women. So, as one example, or those old enough to remember Al Capps schmooze, the cartoon figures who had extraordinary powers, but they were also extraordinarily altruistic. So they would barbecue themselves for the pleasure of human diners.

They would just bring about a utopia that is no more or less plausible than an AI conquistador or megalomaniacs. That's one thing. Another is that the scenarios of giving a system a single goal and not occurring to you, that there could be side effects, is just so patently idiotic that I'm just not worried about people accidentally doing it. Engineering consists of carrying out multiple conflicting goals. You got a car with an engine that makes it go as fast as possible, and you also put in brakes and a steering wheel and catalytic converter and all the rest.

That's what engineering is. The system that was smart enough to figure out that one way of eliminating cancer is eliminating humans. For one thing, that's not artificial intelligence. That's artificial stupidity. Because bringing about a multiple, simultaneous goals is what intelligence is.

If you single mindedly pursue one goal at the expense of everything else. That is idiocy. It's not intelligence, it's double idiocy, because the system would be idiotic, and any engineer who would build a system like that would be more idiotic. It requires human input. Who's giving it the goal?

Yeah, exactly. And who would be moronic enough to both empower and direct an system? So here's AI safety. Don't let them have access to the grid. Okay, so AI is not going to destroy us, but we are going to destroy ourselves.

Michael Moynihan
That is the argument that I hear a lot from a lot of people. You mean like nuclear war? Nuclear war. We're on the precipice of nuclear war or environmental disaster, so let's not worry about the robots. Let's worry about ourselves.

Steven Pinker
Well, I think worrying about ourselves should be a higher priority, like making nuclear weapons harder to deploy accidentally, making leaders less empowered to wield the nuclear arsenal capriciously or impulsively. I think those are very worthy goals, and I think an even longer term worthy goal is getting rid of them. And this was an argument against your book, which caused a lot of controversy. The better angels of our nature, which basically says wars are less frequent, less deadly than they've been at any time, despite the fact that you think otherwise. Some of the counterarguments, one of which is just that.

Michael Moynihan
Yeah. Might be fewer of them, but we have nuclear weapons everywhere, and we could have one and destroy everything in one go. What do you make of that argument? Well, that is possible, and in that sense, that's a new risk that we didn't have more than 75 years ago, and it's a risk that we should do something about. You don't think that sort of invalidates the argument in any way?

Steven Pinker
Well, no, it's a different argument. That is, there's a war that might happen, and the wars that do happen happen less often and are less deadly. A war that could happen could be worse. So do you want to combine those into one statement? I think it's kind of apples and oranges.

They're both true, and we got to figure out how to make sense of both of them. I think there's evidence of the thesis of your book when you see young people who have seen nothing in life, but they're smart enough to get into very august institutions telling me that genocide is happening with a small number of people relative to, say, Syria, where 600, 500, 600,000 people died. Is that because people just don't have a sense of what war has been in the past? It's a case where the my side bias, where just the drive to moralize just obliterates rational consideration, not only in terms of magnitude. Was Syria much way worse than Gaza?

Gaza, by the standards of measuring war, Gaza, at least so far, is what you call a small war. That is, it's killed in the tens of thousands. Now, that's horrible. And each one of those deaths is a tragedy. But there have been wars that killed in the hundreds of thousands, such as the syrian civil war in the millions, and then the world war is killed in the tens of millions.

So there's that dimension. But in addition, there is a huge difference between people getting killed in the course of a war designed to achieve other objectives and people being targeted for murder in order to murder those people. As a group, yes, as a group, which is really what genocide means. The application of the word genocide to refer to tens of thousands of war deaths. I think it is a kind of blood libel.

Its trying to import the moral opprobrium that we associate with genocide to a designated enemy, in this case, Israel. I alluded to my side bias, the sides in this case being the sides that a lot of hard left critical theory has defined, namely white oppressors against. Everyone else's victims, which ignores the Mizrahi majority population in Israel. But among other things. Yeah, among other things.

Michael Moynihan
But I mean, is this. I mean, you say it's a blood libel. I mean, it's pretty strong to say this is like a blood libel. Well, it is a blood libel in the sense that it is an accusation of deliberate murder. And one could disagree with Israel's campaign against Gaza.

Steven Pinker
One could say that this is not justifiable, it's not a just war. It's still different from deliberately murdering as many people as possible, as in. And we know there have been genocides. And I wish that maybe people were making this argument, realize that the state of Israel, its foundation, if you trace it back, is because of blood libels. 1880 in Russia, the Mendel Bellas affair, all these things create the zionist movement in so many ways because of these pogroms and blood libel.

Well, my late grandmother's earliest memory was the Kishadev pogrom, the second one of 1905, which was a major impetus for Zionism. Yeah, I don't know how you deal with that on your campus, walking around and seeing these people making these arguments. I think there's a lot of it, too, that when you see the israeli flag as a swastika or say that this is genocide or a Holocaust, some people even say this. It's kind of this subconscious thing of like, you know, we've been talking about the Holocaust for so long. See, they can do it too.

Michael Moynihan
They're responsible too. They have that instinct. Also, they're not unique. They can be the perpetrators and the victims. Yeah.

Steven Pinker
And it's a sign of how people's moralizing in the service of demonizing and dichotomizing, dividing the world into good and evil can just flatten their ability to analyze and to think clearly. Now, it's often said that mental health is getting worse, particularly among young people. What do you make of that argument? I mean, what I'll say is, initially I was skeptical of the hypothesis from John Haidt and Gene Tweng that it was because of the rise of social media. So you're skeptical?

I was skeptical, although I think they've made a stronger and stronger case. I would add, though, that the routine pathologizing of ordinary human emotions, where every setback is a trauma, where every difference is a neuro atypical condition, which Haidt and Greg Lukainov have identified as the three great lies, that whatever doesn't kill you makes you weaker. Always trust your emotions, and the world can maybe divided into good and evil, which they argue is the diametric opposite to cognitive behavior therapy, it being one of the most successful forms of therapy. But that set of three great untruths may have had as much of a role as the like button on Facebook. I would add another thing.

I tend to think that the doom mongering of mainstream media, which is easier and easier when everyone on earth is an on the spot reporter, and when many media cultivate their own negativity bias to give the worst possible spin, puts a pall over the future. I sometimes joke that even though a lot of people hearing that I'm a psychologist, mistakenly believe that I'm in the process of making people mentally healthier, that's not what I do. But I may have finally earned that title by accident, because people do write to me and they say, gee, when I see those data and I see that things aren't as bad as the headlines, I found it easier to get up in bed in the morning. I'm a teacher. I find it easier to motivate my students.

You don't want to lie to people. You don't want to just say, put on a happy face. But when the best understanding of the world also happens to be less pessimistic than the headline by headline doom scroll, then we ought to promote accuracy that also is more optimistic. This is not your gig. I mean, you look at data and you look at this stuff, but I'm going to ask you to be a bit of a prognosticator because I turned on television yesterday, MSNBC, and Joe Scarborough was saying we're close to ending our democracy in America.

Michael Moynihan
Democracy is almost just about to be out the door. A lot of negative stuff, right? Negative stuff sells, clicks views, et cetera. Tell me why I should not be worried by that kind of headline bias in that things are maybe not as dire, maybe you don't think that, but do you think they're as dire as all these people who say we're very close to losing our democracy? Yeah, I mean, I think it is something to worry about because worrying about foreseeable risks as a way of making them less likely to happen, which I think we ought to do and the current prediction markets give, which I think are more reliable than polls give Trump at this point a 50 50 chance.

Steven Pinker
What we don't know is what will happen, of course, between now and election day. What will be the outcome? What will be the effects of any, say, criminal convictions? We don't know how much Trump will actually try to implement if he does get inaugurated. We dont know how much the system will push back, as it did, say, after January 6, where 60 something trials rejected the lawsuits.

The danger is that hed be undermining those very safeguards. But theres a robustness in our system that didnt exist in, say, the Weimar Republic, right? Yes, yes. Both economically, both in terms of the strength of the government. I think civil war is extraordinarily unlikely.

Civil wars tend to occur in poor countries with weak governments, were a rich country with a strong government. And for all of the distrust of institutions, people by and large trust the post office and so on. So I don't think there's enough hatred of the establishment to allow a genuine civil war to occur. But still, I think we should implement measures to prevent that from happening because they won't be stopped by themselves. And so you take prophylactic measures, but, I mean, maybe along the way, stop telling people that fascism is just about here.

Yeah. I think consider how many things would have to happen for that label to be appropriate. It's all about probability in the end, isn't it? It's all about probability. Is that the most important thing that I should take away from my conversation with you and reading your books, that probability, yeah.

Michael Moynihan
Tells you more about the past, the future, et cetera, than almost anything else. Probabilities and data from trustworthy agencies. Yes. Steven Pinker, thank you so much. Thank you.

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