Joe Rogan Experience #1073 — Steven Pinker Transcript

Transcript

0:00 I can keep it in check. saying something along the lines of that you find, what was the exact quote? Something along There are people in tech. But then when people in the alt-right discover them, they feel tremendously empowered. An example is there are average differences between men and women in a lot of psychological you also come across the fact that men and women overlap in a lot of these traits,

3:10 And some people run away with, oh, men and women are totally different. that men were intellectual and women were not, and women And so if you say that there are differences between men and women, you're sending women But that's the way it kind of shook out. I mean, being fair to each other. And I think a lot of it is almost like to take away some of the potential criticism of themselves. Like it's instant claiming of the moral high ground, virtue signaling.

6:12 Yeah, well, subtle discussions, If you could bring them out in the open, then you can start to have that discussion. Yeah, and in fact, there's some hope that just what any medium is new, Flame wars. The noun aflame, the adjective flame wars, the verb to flame. people relatively speaking involved in discussion groups back then in terms of like the mass amount of people that are on social media now.

9:38 There is an art form of ritual insults like in Shakespeare and African-American snapping. Another example. Yeah, just like professional boxing or ultimate fighting or so on. at these jokes at his expense. And there's a theory that one of the reasons that he plotted Yeah. an unnatural way of communicating? Well, there is something, the anonymity is certainly unnatural

12:43 and conversely, if you do something that harms me the whole thing can unravel and you get back to what people think of as Darwinian competition, I mean, people do it, but you've got to do it very carefully. It's good for you too. Because if you're just calculating, Right. as soon as the cheating is discovered. They don't last very long. They don't actually make a lot of

16:35 Yeah. It is. Because if I have a choice between who I'm going to hang out with, who I'm going to befriend, and being the kind of person who is generous and honest enough that other people want to affiliate with them. And the reality is that all of us are probably mixtures. I mean, we're not it's so relatively recent in human history and such a small window.

19:51 but social media are even more recent than that. you know, families would never sit down together because the phone would constantly be ringing and attention spans would be disrupted because the phone could ring any time. adjustments that you were just talking about, We know what the threat is. Where's this going? You would go, wow, what kind of crazy drug is this?

22:42 I try to read articles and I try to, in some way, justify like, And then she looks at my office and sees all the books on my shelves and says, wow, Professor And, you know, I confess, I mean, I'm on Twitter, and I sometimes look at my Twitter feed, and I learn really interesting stuff from it. Yeah, I will go down a Twitter hole. Yeah, absolutely. and Tom Smith writes something horrible, like Tom Smith could get fired from his job for it. We've seen that. People will write something racist or sexist or whatever, and we'll see them get fired

24:53 Like the woman who took that trip to Africa because it's funny. LOL. Right. when they were going through some issues a couple years ago. are very flawed individuals that look to find people and attack them to take away some of the What's that? Just went nutty. to embellish these fantastic stories of how they were sexually molested first. Stalinist Soviet Union is another example and Maoist China. And that's somehow one of the

29:11 it can happen spontaneously too. It's hard to tell but you mentioned the possibility that there's been such growing Like you'd be able to say something and they would go, So you have this whole uninterrupted chunk where you could, you know, talk about, you know about fill in the blank, some celebrity or some politician or whatever, and you can define them in some really horrible, nasty way.

31:43 can't understand what the person is talking about? And I mentioned some theories. Some people think that it's academics and We're looking each other in the eye, and our eyebrows go up, and they get knitted. And that – because you have no way of determining that as you're writing because you're just sitting there tapping away. write, write, write, write, write, and it never occurs to you that the reader doesn't know your abbreviations or your jargon or can't

33:57 and you're often surprised at how often they'll say, Right. how is it that we're simultaneously in many ways getting smarter but also seem to be getting So there are a lot of fallacies. But the thing is, we as a species have done some amazing things. works, he or she has to subject themselves to peer review and let other scientists criticize been in human history. And I wonder if human beings have a need for adversity and complexity and

37:48 I think there's a certain when you're dealing with this massive pack of humans 300 plus million on a continent Peter Robinson Yes. We say that the average is 100. better nutrition, better sanitation and healthcare and so on. But a lot of it is just that ideas that It used to be you'd turn on the knob and your TV would be on. and just the sheer raw data, I mean, there's a lot of the data is are subject to today and just the sheer raw data i mean there's

41:35 And I've just got to assume that the amount of information that comes to a person in 2018 That's why he put black people in Africa and yellow people in Asia and white people Right. idiotic statement that we kind of forget that you see that a lot of things really are getting better gradually, but that kind of accumulates over time. And one of the things with the flow of information, we are actually getting more,

44:25 Debate over whether gay people should be allowed to be teachers. I mean, kind of modest form of progress. And that kind of tends to happen over the long run. indications of that is go and look at media representations of life from the 1950s and 1960s. wait till your father gets home. And then dad comes home and he pulls the belt out of his pants It's like forcing human beings to reassess the way they

47:53 Not all infractions are the same. or in terms of intimacy of understanding who they are, knowing their name, knowing things about them. I mean, it's, I don't know what, how many times more information you're getting, but because even though we all learn through our lives, technology has changed so much since the 80s and 70s. Like when I first learned to program a

51:21 the technology adapted so that we could feel comfortable using it. And see if you can find that. I'm not surprised. And I'm wondering if we're not experiencing, when you're talking about these steady rise of IQs, obviously it's not just the Internet. What are we going to be looking at? And then that can reach limits. And have you experienced it at all?

55:15 I think my friend Duncan Trussell had one two or three years ago that I used. They just consume food and water and figure out a way to feed themselves and spend most of their time locked into a helmet living in some fantastic artificial environment that people have created. But people do like reality, too. to have a more rose-colored view of the world

58:03 or at least we've reduced So that was the message. And it is a thing that we, is it because we have this concern, like we have to recognize Where's all this shit happening? Our minds are attracted to possibilities of death and danger and so on. gravitate to the negative. And there are actually studies that show this. You give editors two I suspect it is, but I don't know the answer for sure.

1:02:14 Part of it is also that there is an ethic of journalism that to be responsible is to point because there's never a particular day in which the 138,000 people dangers. There's a possibility of nuclear war. There's a possibility of catastrophic climate That's right. all modern societies and all of the ones that did collapse, namely that after the Enlightenment, we developed a kind of a scientific network and community.

1:05:40 together i mean if you look at how many different countries have been around that, just how many, you know, dominant cultures, Rome, for instance, like just now it's just Italy. It's just normal. I mean, there are colonies that achieved independence. Not 100% of the time. On the other hand, as you mentioned, there's another sense in which we have this global community that transcends borders.

1:08:58 And there's a desire among people to be able to move to wherever the opportunities are best. didn't like about it was the idea that this is a regressive move and that the The real tragedy is not that they've done it to Paris. a dollar an hour because it's just like living in Los Angeles or just like But not in the short term. more people are going, or the same number of people are doing the reverse migration from the U.S. back to Mexico

1:12:13 in what used to be called the third world, the developing world, where if you look at And what is causing that? We have governments that are no longer communist or like really heavy-handed forms of socialism where everything is defined by the bureaucrats occurred to him in the middle of the night, he would force on hundreds of millions of people And maybe perhaps it's by our standards that their lives are better.

1:15:20 and doing what they had normally done for thousands and thousands of years getting bitten by disease-carrying bugs. But for women, being able to move from a village to a city often means a liberation, that they can factory had been there. because we say, well, how come they don't have to pay these Mexican folks minimum wage Do you anticipate a time where there is no third world and there is no like a massive economic disparity?

1:18:49 I have an anecdote in the book, in Enlightenment Now, of my ex-mother-in-law who grew up in Singapore. But in large parts of the world, there's been a huge increase in the standard of living. You talked recently about the dangers of overly politically correct thinking, in the social sciences. And to say the obvious fact that capitalism is better than communism,

1:20:54 first time, then you can get the extreme right-wing position that any amount of regulation is bad, some of the countries with the strongest social safety nets also are the ones with the most economic freedom. So that argument that I've just given you right now just doesn't take place That's the argument that I made. What's the origin of that thought process in academia? Like, why has capitalism been demonized and socialism been praised, despite all the

1:23:23 but people make things, look for buyers, they set the price where people will buy them. Here we are speaking in English, and no committee ever designed it. So according to Sowell's theory, I think he was influenced by Hayek, Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist, But in academia, for whatever reason, looking at things in terms of from a socialist standpoint,

1:25:39 And also competition, that competition is fueled by reward. And I discuss this in my book, The Blank Slate, where I also discuss the politics of gender. everyone else to advance. and some people have more discipline and more self-control. But it also doesn't mean that you have the opposite extreme where if the poor people die, It's not good. It's to kind of enhance the fan experience.

1:29:54 And people then adopt certain opinions as almost loyalty badges. I mean, they may even think, oh, it's caused by a hole in the ozone layer, Right, right. in yourself to just want more and more evidence for your belief and force yourself to be – and force other people to be as open-minded as possible. Yeah. So sometimes there can be these changes that just catch us all by surprise.

1:33:11 But you're right that a lot of opinions are just loyalty badges to a coalition. It was kind of a right-wing cause. And that kind of happens with political ideologies as well to everyone's shock. I don't know a lot about global warming. This is complex. And this is a – I talk about this phenomenon in Enlightenment now because it's a book that argues for the importance of reason and how there has been progress thanks to application of reason.

1:36:36 On the other hand, when you express an opinion in your peer group, the people you work with, How do we align beliefs more with truth and less with tribal loyalty? That's what a cool person does and only an idiot just parrots the right wing line. And when you are on the right, you must have a belief in God. There's a giant percentage of the people that are on the right that subscribe to a religious Christian mindset.

1:39:57 It's just whoever's on my side. You know, kind of quintessential, you know, left green cause. Now, that flipped. in the South, the Democrats were the right-wing kind of racist party. We have a little bit of a remnant of that. Yeah, you've seen some of that also with some Republicans have tried to disingenuously connect the Democratic Party with the KKK because of the past.

1:43:34 And we've talked about political parties, the right versus the left. I have a chapter on science. Look at sports, moneyball, where you've got kind of smarter teams that can beat richer teams. case of these great political and economic issues, we'd be better off if we thought like scientists, more pragmatic and open to evidence. But when you do deal with these issues,

1:47:32 So the natural tendency is to amass the strongest possible case for your own side. psychologist. I don't see patients, but I'm a cognitive this new government? So the connection between politics and psychology has been there for a long time. and a higher spiritual state? the sense that I had in mind first, namely the movement in the 18th century toward greater

1:51:24 You know, I don't, but I think I should. I think so. Probably, yeah. Yeah. So we both are conscious of, you know, let's get out and go for a walk. by various historians, political scientists, psychologists sort of sent me their data. how come we're less violent? We're kind of the same animals that we were a couple hundred years And I attribute it to Enlightenment ideas.

1:55:30 Always a possibility of nuclear war. Let's look at the numbers and not get fooled by the headlines. Obesity. Every day, there are something like 25 of those homicides. And so it's like a Sandy Hill massacre These are often, not always, but they're often kind of nobodies And that's just a perverse fact about the world. And so there is a suggested policy. I actually signed onto this from some criminologists that

1:59:22 and it has very little to do with the actual article itself. And one of the ways they keep up You don't want there to be governments to tell newspapers what they can publish. And, you know, that was a voluntary restraint and it was socially responsible. And they do – they have to look at themselves in the mirror. They and the clickbait factories, And you often can read things that you're not going to find necessarily in the legacy papers.

2:03:43 speech. It's like the media, when they criticize him and and anything he says goes. criticism and labeling it fake news, which is a real problem, fake news, is a genuinely the impact of these media companies. That's the idea that the United States tried to get away from. The idea is you got a As a psychologist, when you're looking at all this, You kind of want, or at least you want one product of human psychology, namely what we collectively and rationally agree upon, to be embodied in a set of rules and procedures.

2:08:25 It was just, it was very clean in a way. I'm occupying this office not to prove what a big shot I am, what a genius, what a glorious, noble, divine figure I am. person who's measured, and objective, and well thought out, and well spoken, and that when you exceptional human. I agree. And again, I think there's a greater reason behind it too. The United

2:11:09 You can call it the women's march all day, and it is a women's march, but it's also a march against the president. people deem to be hostile or silly that he says, and that there'll be some sort of a Because norms can be fragile, like what you just don't do if you're president. So those are the two possibilities. Really appreciate you being here. Yeah, it was.