The Hidden Rules Holding Society Together: Steven Pinker on Common Knowledge

0:00So why can't people be completely honest? Complete honesty, which is common knowledge. You know what the other person knows. But you're saying and they know that and you know that? I can threaten the nature of a relationship. Oh, hi. I'm Elizabeth Koch. What's a perception box? It's this invisible mental box that each one of us lives in fun. Built from the material of our beliefs, life experiences, and the meaning we've made out of those experiences. You could think of it as a kind of reality filter that's constantly shaping how we see ourselves, other people, and the world around us. This podcast explores how, although the walls of this box are always present, they can expand in moments of curiosity, awe, and wonder or contract in response to fear, anxiety, and anger. In each episode, we invite experts to share how to create lasting shifts in our perception. I'd like to introduce our esteemed host, Heather Berlin,

1:01Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icon School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Chris Off-Coch, Chief Scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and former president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Welcome to the Science of Perception Box. This week, our guest is Dr. Stephen Pinker. We tend to think that communication is about saying what we mean, but much of it is guessing what others know, assume, expect, or intend. Stephen's work shows how much of our social world depends on this and how easily things break down when those interpretations don't align. This episode reminds us that even in ordinary moments, we're not just communicating, we're navigating each other's perception boxes. So first, we want to open up with our own stories. So, Chris Off-Coch, has there ever been an interaction that you've had where you've realized after the fact that you were in the dark about some common knowledge? Like, everybody else knew, but you didn't know.

2:03So, as you probably know, I don't own a car in a bike everywhere. And of course, as a bike, you have to be incredible at tune to the moors and the customs of interaction between cars and bikes. You have to look in the north. Is there a car giving me a north? So I can pass in front of me. I can enter the lane. So far, this is all worked out. But recently, a couple of months ago, at this incident, where there was another bike out, came into my lane. And I thought, he had given me this signal to proceed by nodding. And I accepted that by nodding back, but he didn't get that. So I knew that, he knew that I knew, but he didn't close that loop. And so he ran into each other as a consequence of not fully completing the acknowledgment of the acknowledgment. That's a great example. So, well, welcome to the podcast, Stephen. Thank you. Can you define common knowledge? Common knowledge in the technical sense from philosophy and game theory,

3:04refers to the case where I know something, you know something. I know that you know it. You know that I know it. I know that you know that I know that you know it. Add infinitums. So common knowledge in the technical sense is interesting because it's necessary for coordination, for people to be on the same page, to do things that may be arbitrary, but are advantageous that everyone does it the same way. So driving on the right versus the left, stopping at a red light, these are all paradigm cases. Excellent examples. It actually doesn't matter whether you drive on the right or the left. It doesn't matter that everyone drives on the same side, and that everyone knows that everyone else is driving on the same side. And so in general, traffic works in England, everyone does it on the left, and here we do it. I mean, everyone does it on the right, works out fine. It's often in cases where there isn't common knowledge, where you get failures to coordinate, as in Christoph's example of failure to establish common knowledge between a cyclist and a motorist. That often happens when there isn't some public signal

4:05that each one sees, knowing that the other one sees it, such as a traffic light, such as a zebra crossing, such as a stop sign. The reason that they are there is to establish these conventions that work by common knowledge. If I see the stop sign, I know that everyone else sees the stop sign, and we all know that that's the place to stop. But looking at people kind of at play sets, indeed. Partially, yes. The relevance to social relations is that I suggest that our relationships are situations of coordination, coordination games in the sense of game theory. That just as driving on the right works, because everyone knows that you drive on the right, you and I are friends because not because we signed a contract that stipulates our responsibilities, because I know that we're friends, and you know that we're friends, and I know that you know, and you know that I know, and so on. Or alternatively, relations of deference, the person who is kind of higher on the status hierarchy stands as ground because he knows that the data will give way,

5:09the data gives way because he knows the alpha will stand as ground, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Or transactional relationships, or romantic relationships. That's just that each one of those is a coordination game and that they are ratified or upended by certain common knowledge generator signals that each one perceives knowing that the other one is proceeding at two, language being the most efficient way of generating common knowledge. So in the case of Christoph mentioned that eye contact can often generate common knowledge. That is eye contact we know, even from the ethylological literature in animal communication is a very potent signal because you're looking at the part of the person that's looking at the part of you, that's looking at the part of them, that's looking at the part of you. And so eye contact can generate common knowledge. It often resolves these ambiguities in say, a car stopping and pedestrian crossing, establishing eye contact would be a way

6:10of generating that common knowledge. Or two cars merging on a three wheel, I'd be the other guy to sort of breathe the nags. Exactly, go ahead. And in fact, I was tickled to see a sign in San Francisco airport parking lot, which actually photographed and included in the book. And it has a cartoon of a pedestrian driver and a dashed line joining their eyes. And it says make eye contact before crossing. There it is, yes. That's great. But in a way, I mean, this common knowledge is a way to have, what you're saying, why it's important, it's for social, it's for coordination among groups of people. But what happens when people get it wrong? I'm thinking about, when you all pull up to a four way stop and nobody knows who where to go and you're both waving to go. But I mean, that's a smaller example. Like, is there other disagreements? I think, you know, you know something that you might think I know something different or we don't agree on what is common knowledge? Oh, you bet.

7:10And the, in the traffic case, we do a collision. That's the ultimate miscoordination. In social interactions, can we do the situation we call awkwardness? Or if it is deliberate and protracted outrage? For example, if two people have a platonic relationship and one says, we'd say to the other, hey, do you want to have sex? That could be really awkward. I wish as wide we have the phenomena of euphemism in a window, to come up and watch my, watching Netflix. Or Netflix, yes. And I suggest that all of the rituals of Gentile, hypocrisy, politeness, consist in avoiding the common knowledge that might threaten a relationship while still slipping the information in. The idea is that there's private knowledge that can even be reciprocal knowledge, but not necessarily the common knowledge that would threaten a relationship.

8:11So just to be more concrete, if he says, do I want to come up for Netflix and show? And she says, no. I mean, she's grown up. She knows what come up for Netflix and show means. So she knows what he intended. And he's a grown-up. He knows that she knows. But does he know that she knows that he knows? She knows that he knows that she knows. Innihabilia didn't, right? Well, it's not even so much the deniability of the proposition because, you know, then she's no fool. She can't be found. But he could always say, oh, I just meant watching and movie, I didn't intend anything else. Well, I think what is the deniability of the common knowledge that is she could possibly think, well, maybe he thinks I'm naive. Maybe he thinks that it went over my head. And he could think, well, maybe she thinks I'm dense. And I don't realize that she knows that I know. And that higher order deniability allows them to preserve the relationship of platonic friends or colleagues or come up with an even more fraught situation, supervisor and supervisee.

9:12Whereas blurting out, do you want to have sex? Violet. Direct speech generates common knowledge. Common knowledge would contradict the tacit understanding of the platonic friendship or the collegial relationship. I couldn't go back to the, you can't go back to the situation that before. Exactly. And again, because common knowledge is what submits particular kinds of relationships and direct speech generates common knowledge. In UNDO, euphemism, lightness leads to private knowledge but not common knowledge. You can maintain the fiction of a platonic friendship. As a therapist, I'm advising people on relationships and I'm often telling them, be open, be honest. Tell a person how you really feel. But that's not always. Probably not. Some everyone. No. Sometimes, yeah, I mean, no, and clearly, so therapy, especially couples therapy, Barrettol counseling, family counseling, consists of encouraging people to make something

10:15common knowledge that was previously private knowledge in the case that there was something dysfunctional about that equilibrium, about the relationship that they'd been locked into. But in other circumstances, if the equilibrium is working out, you're best off not saying everything that's on your mind. This is what we call, we have names for this, knowing when to keep things out of common knowledge. We call it tact, Savoirfare, social skill. That's what social skill often consists of. It's the ordinary civility that we try to implement in human relationships. I mean, a simple example is just ordinary politeness. If you could pass the salt, that would be great. Now, literally, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It's counterfactual, hypothetical. Why are you using it about possible worlds at the dinner table? But what you're doing is you're avoiding treating the other person like a servant by saying, give me the salt. Right. And that respect for the relationships that are in force.

11:15Are we how intimate are we, how formal are we? Is it hierarchical, is it communal? Those are things that are cemented by common knowledge. And when we don't want to upset them, we avoid the common knowledge of threats to that basis of those relationships. To what extent are those consciously represented and done initiated consciously? So for instance, the example of past myth of salt, that's just something that's a habit. You've cultivated the entire life. You just blurred it out. That's not consciously intended to. So to what extent is common knowledge consciously? Yeah. So in cases like that where it's pro forma, where it's become a self, the indirect request is itself become a convention. Very little of it is unconsciousness. It's just what you do. In novel situations where you don't know where you stand with a person, you're thrust into a unique unprecedented situation.

12:16Then I think it can be conscious like, oh, how do I put it? How do I state this? I have to criticize them, but I don't want to seem to be superior. In those cases, I think it can be conscious. How will they react to this? But in many cases, it's simply the conscious correlate of common knowledge is not, I think, the she thinks that I think the she thinks. I think we can do that up to a certain levels of, a certain number of levels of embedding. More commonly, it's a sense that some things are out there, they're public, they're self-evident, they're conspicuous, they're salient, you can't take it back because it's out there. And we refer to that feeling using idioms for a visible event or object, like the elephant in the room, or it was in your face or it's out there. So I think that's more commonly the subjective feeling. So you point out the remarkable consequence of this that I was unaware of. So this is, maybe you can tell us a little bit

13:17about Robert Alman's agreement theorem. And the remarkable conclusion from him this morning and in E.N.L. I knew a new version of his proof. So this is a famous theorem published 50 years ago, exactly known as the agree-to-disagree theorem. A short version is, rational people cannot agree to disagree. More technically, rational agents with the same priors, that is understanding of the world, who make their posterior common knowledge, that is each one knows the other assessment of the strength of the evidence for some proposition. Their post-series must be the same. So just to back up a bit, priors from my base theorem, first background understanding of the world, posterior means your degree of belief in some proposition, having looked at the evidence. Was there a second shooter, JFK assassination? Did the SARS-CoV-2 virus escape from a lab in Wuhan?

14:20So if you assign a probability to that, I think 40% sure that it was a lab leak that led to COVID. So if you have two rational agents and they both start off with the same understanding of the world, they each one examines the evidence. They don't share the evidence. They just share their conclusions. Their conclusions are common knowledge that is not only do they share them, but each one knows that the other one knows. Because they may also have private knowledge, asymmetric, they may be asymmetric knowledge. I'd like some agents know some of that. So the evidence is private, that each one looks at is private. When they come to a conclusion, which they state with a degree of probability, they each tells the other publicly, then they must converge. They cannot be different. That's the theorem. And so, so, so, incidentally, I only discovered recently, almonds, the professor at Hebrew University, is actually cousin of all of their sacks. Yes, that's right. And the two remarkable facts about almond theorem,

15:24one, maybe you can talk a little bit how it applies to a game, the game that most of us play, which is financial market, stock market, right? We all have invested our money for our retirement, and that depends on this little theorem. It's a way in which, I mean, it first, it seems preposterous. That is, well, for one thing, just agreeing to disagree seems like, you know, a virtue. It seems like the ultimate in civility. And, and he, which is what we encourage students with, and he's saying, that's not how they agree to disagree. Yes, and he's saying this is irrational. Under the, of course, like all mathematical theorems, it's true to the extent that the idealizations of the theorem are true. But on the financial market, it's the distal to a certain extent. The financial market is true, and it corresponds to the advice from just about every honest financial expert, don't try to time the market, don't try to outsmart the market, don't speculate by a boring basket of securities and index fund like the S&P 500 and be content to partake of the increase

16:26in productivity of the economy as a whole. Don't think that you've got, don't act on a stock tip. The relevance of the theorem is that, unless you are engaged in insider trading, that is you have private knowledge, if you're reading the papers, if you're following the stock market, all of that is common knowledge. The prices are common knowledge, and so priced into the value of a security is all of the common knowledge among the people who have researched it, who do know about it. If it is likely to go up, there's reason to believe that. Well, it's already factored into the process. If you know it, probably everyone else knows it, and knows it everyone else, that's the price has risen to already incorporate that anticipation. So you can't count on making a profit by buying at the current price if the price is common knowledge. And that is, and if the price is, according to Alman's theorem for rational agents,

17:27the posterior has to be the same, which means that your evaluation of the present value of the stock should be the same as everyone else's, that is what the share is currently selling for, so it's irrational to buy it on the expectation that it will rise. If there's reason to believe it will rise, the price will already reflect that, and you can't make a profit. Okay, so let's switch now from financial market, and you'll see how this is relevant to perception box, to our conscious experience of reality. So I have a perception of reality, I think we're sitting inside a studio, you have something very similar. But of course, as 200 years of research and everyday knowledge has revealed, common sense has revealed, people radical disagree. So the nicest, the simplest one that I know you also mentioned is hashtag the dress, right? So not the half of humanity sees this dress, white and yellow, and the other half sees it as blue and black. And it's not something they infer,

18:27they just look at it, and it's a spontaneous perception occurring within 150 milliseconds, and they can't change it. So it's unlike the buy stable, all woman young woman, right? It's stable. So that tells us, at least, and in this case, we think we know it has to do with your prior assumption, or background, or about background, or blackness. The light, the weather's blue, light, or indoor, outdoor light, and their brain may be something. So, since almond theorem says we should all come to the same posterior, and obviously we don't, does it mean we are all profoundly irrational in this sense in our perception of reality, social, or more physical? We're obsessed with the cases where there's a diversion belief, but there's a massive amount of conversion belief that we never comment on because it works so well that it's below the level of consciousness. So the dress was a highly exotic stimulus display, and even though we've worked in perception for decades, I was taken aback by the dress because it's very rare that you get something

19:28where there's such a sharp, as not by stable. I can't get the, I've studied it. I've written an article about it. I can't get it to flip. That's very unusual. You can't if you play with the background. I can make you flip it if I put a certain background that changes. Yeah, it's a chance to do it. The vast majority of the time, if I ask Heather, what color is that? Does that have that question? The horrific yellow? The horrific yellow. Even the horrific, but putting aside the horrific. Just the yellow, we agree. And that's how come you can order something on the internet and specify the color and you get the color that you want. So clearly people have, where it matters a lot to people, they have a lot of differences in experiencing the world. They do, and they're fascinated, but there's also amazing commonalities. I mean, captured in the story of the Tower of Babel, where people able to coordinate by the common knowledge of a single language, built a tower that's written God and the Heaven himself.

20:29And if you look around, everything aspect of our life is the result of massive coordination. So the TV camera, there's the lights, 100,000 years ago, none of that existed. It wasn't that some single genius invented them all. Clearly there was massive coordination, both of knowledge of physics and electronics and materials and people delivering things so that the components get together at the same place, systems of laws and commerce and money, massive amounts of coordination, all of which depend on common knowledge, language being an important way of generating common knowledge that gives us the world that we're living in. Now there are some differences, especially when it comes to normative questions of right and wrong and art, but that level of disagreement is overlaid on a massive amount of common knowledge that has allowed us to transform the world by working together. But that difference can have profound,

21:30can need to profound consequences in the way people experience the world. So you're saying some people are color blind, some people see the world through say depression colored glasses and they have that kind of schema that they see everything through that. So there's a balance to the way we perceive the world, but there's also these commonalities. The idea is what happens when we perceive, is our personal schemas or a way that we perceive the world differently? Can we separate that out from common knowledge or is there a schism within common knowledge? There can be lots of schisms, but what makes humans humans, what makes it possible for there to be technology and science and society and even the coordination that you have in ancient agricultural civilizations, unusual among species among mammals, but made possible by the capability of our species to coordinate on a range of scales from couples to corporations, all of which is enabled by common knowledge. I just wanna say about decision making,

22:31like in terms of common knowledge and the bystander effect. And how does common knowledge affect decision making and things like the bystander effect? Yeah, so I did publish a paper on experiments on the bystander effect. This is a classic in social psychology of phenomena, inspired by a famous event of the 1960s, to try to be bogus, kitty genitals. Kitty genitals. So the headline was 32 people witnessed murder, no one calls the police. A woman in kitty genitals were turned home from work one night and was brutally attacked. This is the psychology of the Queen Queen's, that's right. And that was a symbol of alienation and enemy and apathy. Turns out the report was bogus. Actually, some people did call the police. Some people didn't because they just thought it was a fight between two drunks. A woman did come out and comfort the poor victim. Anyway, there is a phenomenon though,

23:32that the more people who witness an event where something needs to be done, the less likely that anyone will do it. That's the bystander effect. And it has been shown in social psychology experiments. I mean, coming to aid, coming to aid. So if there's a lot of people filling out a questionnaire in a lab and there's a crash and a scream and a plaintiff cry, help the cabinet fall in my foot. I can't get out. If there are 10 people filling out the questionnaire, it's likely that no one will help that if there's one person or even two people. So that's the bystander effect. You assume other people are gonna take the responsibility. Crucially, you do that only if you know that everyone knows that is if there's common knowledge. So what we showed, we didn't actually stage a real emergency, but we had people imagine themselves in a situation which someone had to do something. If you didn't know that other people knew, even if other people witnessed it, then you're more likely to spring into action. So as an example of what in game theory is called

24:32the Volunteers Dilemma, where the optimal outcome is if someone else steps in, the worst outcome is if no one steps in, in between is if you have to step in. And there's a medieval story that captures it called Who Will Bell The Cat? Where the mice are of course in danger of getting in by the cat in the house. And one of them figures out, well, only we hung a bell around the neck of the cat while it was asleep. Then when the cat approached, it would warn us, and we'd be safe. And the question is Who Will Bell The Cat? Where the mouse who volunteers to Bell The Cat is incurring some risk of waking the cat and being eaten, even though it's in the interests of all the mice, at least one mouse does it. So it's equivalent to a situation of outgassing standoff, say in soccer in a penalty kick, the kicker has to shoot left or right, the goalie has to defend left or right.

25:34Each one wants to do the opposite of what the first one does, the optimal solution is to act randomly, because any tell or predictability will be exploited by the other. And indeed, in a volunteer's dilemma, who's going to refill the communal coffee pot, who's going to go out and investigate where the screams were coming from, the in game theory, the optimal response is to kind of mentally roll the dice and act with a certain probability, which depends on how many other bystanders there are, the more bystanders, the lower the odds, which you should act. And it crucially depends on the degree of knowledge. People actually do that. Do they follow that law? And that's a ratio with which they act to a pretty close to optimal rational agents. And the reason it depends on knowledge is, if everyone knows, but let's say, you don't know that they know, then you're less likely to shirk,

26:37because if each person thinks he's the only one he knows, he'll have to step into it. If he knows that other people know that he can afford to shirk. But at that point, the more people there are, the lower the probability that he was an individual, if there's common knowledge. Yes. If any of us are wrong, then how does anybody ever decide he's going to respond? I mean, then you could get an actual real life kind of city, generally, situation. And we do. People walk by a homeless person who then the next morning has frozen to death. Each one hoping that others will act first. So there are real, even though the original report ironically was bogus. I mean, it does refer to an actual social situation. Right. So to get back to your earlier point that we live in a world-built, build on large-gill consensus and shared perception of reality, including social reality, it is true when we go back to the well-explored financial market that people rampantly, consistently, everyone speculates. Is everyone acting irrationally?

27:39Well, so John Maynard Keynes wrote about this in the 1920s. He can actually analogized speculative investing to a beauty contest, but not a beauty contest where everyone tries to pick the prettiest face. A contest where the winner is the one who picks the face that the most other people pick, knowing that the other people are picking a face with the same goal. And so you buy a stock in speculation, not because the company is going to turn out widgets and you'll share on the profit. Because other people, you think other people will buy this. Exactly. No, wait, but I should have fact that that in, right? Well, it's an optimal market. Yes, but with speculation, there is the expectation that other people have an expectation, that other people have an expectation that it will rise, which makes it rise up to a point at which the market runs out of, as they call it, greater fools, who are going to even war for it than you pay for it,

28:41that can't happen indefinitely. And that's when you get a crash. You can also get a converse loop of common expectation. It's not common knowledge, because there's nothing objective to know, but it's a common belief in other people's belief. The opposite is a bank run, where people withdraw money from the bank is either they think the bank is insolvent. They don't even have to think that. They can just think that other people think the bank is insolvent, or think that other people think that other people think. That's why we ran out of toilet paper early on in COVID, and it's exactly that they're missing. And we're not going to suddenly know more toilet paper in the decentralized. The most important thing is that with the, as with bank runs, as with sometimes stock bubbles, such as meme stocks, where one influencer has a post saying, this is an interesting stock for us all to buy. Even if the fundamentals are crummy, like the GameStop video chain stores, but can mortar video game stores

29:42that were kind of doomed in terms of the fundamentals, but one influencer said, hey, let's start buying it. And people bought it because then you are the people, we're buying it because then you are the people we're buying it. Conversely, if there's, if a rumor gets out that a bank is on the sound, that can, that common knowledge, that, I should say that public conspicuous signal can generate common expectation. So that's why we care so much about what's public, what's private, why certain nationally televised events, like a presidential debate, like the Super Bowl can move the whole country. So as a nerd, I can help, but asking you say a particular threshold when you say everyone knew of course, not everyone knew because not 330 million a mark and you are. So is there a threshold when 0.25% or I mean, 25.5% has to know and then it's very unstable and then suddenly it flips. It gives you to be these tipping points, right?

30:43Where this is stable, this is stable and you can flip between the two. I don't think enough people have researched it with enough data to be able to establish the tipping point. There's not an answer, but it would be, and what we have to, the parameters would be the reach of the medium percentage of people viewing other things. It's a difficult problem, but I think a fascinating one. I think so why it's so important to have freedom of speech also is because you want to, I mean, people are thinking things, but you want to know what people are thinking. You put your finger on it. That is exactly why freedom of speech is so crucial, namely, can market transition from private knowledge to public knowledge, allowing people to act collectively in their own interests. God quote the line from the movie Gandhi, in which the eponymous character tells a British colonial officer in the end you will leave because 100,000 Englishmen simply cannot control 350 million Indians if the Indians refuse to cooperate. And what common knowledge does is it allows

31:43the 350 million Indians to refuse to cooperate. That is to coordinate their resistance. I left from one such experience when the war came down in East Berlin and abruptly, abruptly, literally, everyone abandoned the regime. They just walked over that night over from East Berlin to West Berlin and was clear to everyone. This means curtains for the common development. Now it's interesting. And I think historians have traced like what was the first domino? And I think there was a public pronouncement by a local official that he was not going to shoot the people who scaled the wall, right? Yes. And then he said, we've now granted exit visa. This is his press speaker exit visa. And then the press asked him when for how long? And then he looked down and says, well, I'm not sure, but it's tonight. And that was the night October 8th when everyone walled over and it was all over. That's a great example. Likewise, the overthrow of Chisewski in Romania.

32:46How has science revealed common knowledge that wasn't truly shared by everybody? So has there been scientific breakthroughs that have changed our people's common knowledge? Yeah. And telling me, the common knowledge that challenges can often be common knowledge of norms, including moral norms. And I think it's precisely because a scientific discovery threatens common knowledge is often repressed, punished while you get cancellations, de-platformings, social media, shaming mobs, and outright repression, like killing or imprisoning the radical scientist. My favorite example, I guess, is Darwin's theory of evolution, which was by challenging the commonly held belief in divine creation with a moral purpose by saying we just evolved from lowly apes by natural physical processes.

33:50We start to threaten that moral order. There's a famous, turns out, apocryphal quotation from one version. It's the wife of a vicar in Victorian England who, when told about Darwin's theory, exclaimed, descended from apes, my dear, let us hope it is not true, but if it is, let us hope it not become widely known. So you could have said commonly known. And the connection to common knowledge is that moral norms are matters of common knowledge. You don't do something. Why? Because it just isn't done. You know, everyone knows that everyone knows. You just don't do it. And that can be threatened if someone does it and gets away with it. Or if a commonly held belief, such as we are moral because God created us, and we have immortal souls, and all of that, if it's threatened, if people start believing it, then the fear is that they will no longer hold on to the common. We have moral norms to go along with it.

34:52Hence the recurring phenomenon of repression of scientific discoveries. We end every show with a perception box question so you can open up your own perception box. And either Christopher or I asked the question this week, I'm going to be asking the question to both of you. Are you ever concerned about how your work might be perceived or translated or used in the future by others? I am concerned, not to the point of saying things that are false or not saying things that I think properly explain would do more good than harm, especially since almost always, it's better to know the truth than to be deluded by falsehood. I don't think men and women are indistinguishable in every respect. I'm also very clear to say that it doesn't mean that discrimination or harassment are OK. They're not OK for some pretty obvious reasons

35:54that we ought to reinforce. Likewise, I think there are different innate differences in intelligence and personality. So therefore in a perfectly fair and equal society, there'll be unequal outcomes. Some people accomplish more or more than others. Some people will get in trouble with a law. Others don't. That doesn't mean that we should screw over the poor or be unconcerned with the people who earn less, again, a matter of fairness and compassion that we might want to have social protections, but we shouldn't confuse where those differences come from. Some of them might come from discrimination, racism, prejudice. Some of them might come from differences in ability. Nonetheless, even if they come from differences in ability, we ought not to be callous about the fate of anyone in society. Like, both can exist at the same time. I kind of see it as a top-down, bottom-up sort of problem. It's like sometimes you have the truth, the fundamental truth, the data, what it's showing.

36:55And it scales up. And people might not like what they think that might mean at the moral level or a societal level, but it doesn't have to translate to that. You can have a fundamental truth and still create certain societal norms. But sometimes people take what they want to be morally true and impose that on the data. Like, this data has to say this in order for my moral value to be changed. They denied that the data is objective. They say it's all about power play. There isn't any objectively out there. Again, that's true. So something's called moralistic fallacy. That is that art implies is. This is the way it would be nice if the world were, therefore, the world is that way. I mean, it's a fallacy. Right. And it's where we're subject to it. I think in general, this is a topic I took up in a previous book, Rationality of Why. And this actually goes back to our earlier discussion, Christoph Rains, if why there is so much disagreement over what would seem to be fundamental facts and a lack of common knowledge. What I suggest is that it's a feature of human psychology

37:59that when it comes to questions that are outside our immediate experience, what color is that shirt? Is there coffee on the table? There is a lot of agreement unless someone gets a frantic. But when it comes to questions like, where did our species originate? Why are there economic booms and busts? Who is responsible for a war? Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do people get sick? For most of our history, there was no way to answer them. Science is very recent. Data, large scales are recent. Objective journalism is recent. Objective history is recent. All basically, productively enlightenment and scientific revolution. And unevenly known across the species at that. When we evolved, the only you could really be sure of was your immediate experience. For these big cosmic questions, no one knew you couldn't find out.

38:59And so you may as well believe the most uplifting myth, the one that unites your tribe, the one that gives a good moral message to children. And the very notion that there is an objective truth about big questions like what's the cause of misfortune is quite alien to our minds. I mean, I think it's a, we ought to overcome it. We ought to teach it. We should advance the ideal that one should pursue objective truth about big questions, but it's an uphill battle. Most people are content thinking that the belief that we ought to hold is the one that's most morally uplifting. I think the gut feeling of most people is we should believe. I'm going to believe what feels good, what feels best, what I think is most morally appropriate. In including what's scary, and I discovered this personally, doing covert among scientists themselves, among academic scientists that sort of have truth written on the ban, just asking that question,

39:59what he showed you were massively biased. Well, no, that's right. But some of it called the scientific method, not that there's any one thing called the scientific method, but just the norms, the more ace of science are designed to push back against that to marginalize it. As Richard Feynman said, the most important thing in science is not to fool yourself because you're the easiest to fool. Especially in this day and age, I'd just say of where there's a lot of anti-science and disbelief in science, is that it's imperfect, but at least it's a method that we're trying to overcome our own subjective. The best method you've got to understand that. Right. That's why it's always changing. It wasn't like, oh, you said this one time, and now you change your mind. I was like, the evidence showed that it was, I had to change my theory, I had to change my perception, my perspective, because the data said otherwise. Right. There's a famous quotation attributed to John Maynard Kings, when he was, according to the story, he was challenged for changing his position. He said, when the facts change, I changed my mind. What do you do, sir? I love that. He didn't say it, but I think Paul Sandielson probably said it

41:03for first, but it's a very good idea. Yes, I like that. So given all this knowledge that we have, our understanding of common knowledge, I thought we should test our own common knowledge with a little game. So I have a list of acronyms that are in both work related and pop culture. If 30 seconds on the clock, I'm going to say what they are. You can both guess at what they are. We'll see how many you can get ready. I see why I'm I. You can't see you missed my earlier. It's okay. It's okay. It's okay. It's okay. KPI. Key knowledge. Key knowledge. KPI. Key performance indicator. Indicators. Oh, yeah. You can speak. Are you like a head of an organization? Okay. I used to be. T L semi colon dr. Too long did not read. Oh, that's good. Yeah. That obviously happens to you a lot. Or no. Okay, RFP. I know this one. The question for Paul.

42:04Yes. We both live in the academic world. S M H. Single. It's in the dating market, right? Shaking my head. Oh. That's my big creation. I guess in the, you know, textlingo. Yes. Yes. SOW. Steatman of work. Very good. You're not looking, right? You're cheating. Okay. It's good. Okay. Okay. Staying on the flake. You need to ask. So W and H. Okay. Okay. This is this one I knew. GOAT. Grease of all time. Yes. Very good. Go. Yes. P N L. Physical. P R L. P N L. Yes. Pertus. Confident loss. Yes. Very good. NSFW. Not safe for work. Very good. But I feel like I'm greedy. Like I want to have like a little chick who's going to win. E O D. N M D. C O B.

43:04Close of business. L M K. Let me know. Q A. Question and answer. Q and A. Quality assurance. Finally, POV. Point A. Point A. Yes. And we all have our own POV. You guys did a good job. Never thought I'd be doing that one. Right. Steve Pinker, Kristoff Koch. What is it? You know, shaking my head. So I'd like to thank Steve Pinker for being our guest today. Thank you very much. Thank you, Heather. Thank you, Kristoff. Thank you for coming on. It was very enjoyable. If you'd like to learn more about your own perception box, then sometime this week answering the same perception box questions that we asked your guests. And check out our other questions on the website, unlikely collaborators.com. You can also subscribe to our YouTube channel and watch the show or listen wherever you get your podcasts. This has been Science of Perception Box created by unlikely collaborators in partnership with Pod People.

44:04I am Dr. Heather Berlin. And I am Dr. Kristoff Koch. Thank you very much for watching.