Steven Pinker’s Case for Rational Optimism
YouTube | Apple Podcast | Spotify | Buzzsprout | Website
Research shows that human beings have an inborn negativity bias: we tend to learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information. A degree of paranoia would have been useful for survival in a primitive environment full of dangers. Too much optimism might have made us take the rustling bush for a rabbit instead of a tiger, turning us into prey rather than predator real quick.
Something about modern life, however, seems to amplify this natural bent for negativity beyond its original utility.
It’s partly caused by the media industry’s classic “if it bleeds it leads” incentive, which has since metastasized into the aggressive optimizing for emotions like anger and outrage by social media algorithms.
There’s also the billions of dollars of information warfare spent by the large political parties every year. Elections are the ultimate zero-sum game: one person gets the seat, the other one doesn’t. Black and white thinking isn’t an accidental bug – it’s a feature of the two-party system.
Then there’s our sheer level of cognitive overload. The brain was never designed to process this much information. The mental overheating raises our “allostatic load” – our level of baseline stress and anxiety. Our condition points to negativity before we even start processing a particular piece of information.
Our amped up negativity response is increasingly the elephant in the room, the always-on static background onto which we create distorted cognitive experiences.
In a 21st Century filled with marvels, and more abundance than the kings of lore could imagine, we find ourselves emotionally fragile, chronically anxious, and bitterly divided.
One of the worst consequences of this state is how it interferes with our ability to think clearly and rationally in ways that move the human condition forward. The challenge is new, and the stakes are higher than ever.
In this landscape marked by constant, pervasive pessimism, Steven Pinker’s 2018 book Enlightenment, Now! came as a needed reminder of the massive progress we’ve undergone since the Enlightenment: life expectancy, peace and safety, education, wealth, democratic governance, human rights, life satisfaction – there is hardly a major area of human well-being which hasn’t been dramatically improved since the West elevated science and reason above blind belief and superstition.
And yet, ever-deeper into the 21st Century, we’re experiencing a return of our darker angels – stone-age intuitions, rampant tribalism, conspiracy thinking and default conflict – all sown-up via motivated reasoning and cognitive biases of the worst sort.
In his latest book Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, Dr. Pinker uncovers many of the forces driving this. Some are cultural - as illustrated by his dictum that “rationality is uncool”: our artists and heroes tend to be the free-spirited and impulsive, the trendy rebels who wear their raw emotions as authenticity badges proudly on their sleeves. Call it a deformation of the entertainment society – where spectacle trumps substance. This quality has been emulated by more than one political leader on their way to electoral success.
Others are more structural. Modern environments are filled with complex, formal games which must be learned and acquired as legitimate expertise. Law, software, finance – even digital marketing – disciplines like these don’t exist in nature, yet they dominate the modern landscape. Our natural, “street smart” brand of reason is quite good at making quick survival decisions in natural environments. But it’s also really good at making objective mistakes in modern ones.
Excess politicization then amplifies these mistakes, often through an emotional rejection of the requirements of logic, and jumping to false, overdrawn conclusions. Take the recent debate on “expertise” between Douglas Murray and Dave Smith on Joe Rogan as an example. No, one doesn’t need technical expertise to articulate moral values, and yes, experts not only “get it wrong” – they can also be actively biased and compromised by financial incentives and conflicts of interest.
But this doesn’t mean expertise itself is the foil. Only the incompetent expert him or herself. The solution to the doctor who commits a professional mistake isn’t the elimination of medicine or an assault against professional standards. It’s better, more accountable doctors. It’s good medicine, not no medicine.
Dr. Pinker has also prominently commented on the Trump administration’s recent war on Harvard University. He’s the first to admit that Harvard has made big mistakes, and has made pointed much criticism to it, publicly, for years. But that doesn’t mean a war against Harvard is the correct remedy. It’s still an innovation hub that produces world-leading research which helps all of mankind. “The appropriate treatment,” Pinker writes, “is to diagnose which parts need which remedies, not to cut its carotid and watch it bleed out.”
In this interview, we discussed many of the key ideas which have marked his illustrious career, including the blank slate, the rise of tribal thinking, the nature of progress, and how a commitment to reason is key to human flourishing. We also discuss his Montreal roots, why optimism can make one a buzzkill at dinner parties, and uncover the comedic strand in his work.
In the end, Dr. Pinker’s work strikes an optimistic note which may be central to a commitment to science itself: the notion, in the words of David Deutsch, that “if something is permitted by the laws of physics, then the only thing that can prevent it from being technologically possible is not knowing how.” It’s an invitation to lean in, learn better, and solve our problems practically and rationally.
You can start with this clip on why intellectuals – particularly those who self-identify as progressive – tend to hate progress: