Joe Rogan Experience #1743 — Steven Pinker Transcript

Transcript

0:00 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! And it was about the size of this Yeah. I think it used Yeah. Yes. I use a tripod when I can. So it combines my love of gadgets with my love of visual cognition. scene that changes as you move around even as you shift your head from side to side, as you look at the even if it was just like an abstract rectangle That's when you have two lenses, like we have two eyes.

4:43 the American West, the Grand Canyon. between the left and right photo with a regular camera. But ordinarily, because your eyes both kind of converge and diverge in and out, Then when you try to get it into focus, now your brain's thinking, well, something is You can just focus at infinity, You know, like Android, because it's such an open source thing,

7:29 I want to say it was like eight or nine years ago. So you block the left eye, and then the screen shows the image that goes to the right eye. Then you block the right eye, and the screen shows the It's a Samsung phone. That's what I'm thinking of. Where you look at the thing correctly and it was supposed to show I don't even know what it is. You bought that big

9:21 And there you have the two pictures. But I remember them as when I was a kid, often with cheesy cartoons or Jesus or Santa Claus. We sure do. There haven't been that many. with better versions of nuclear power whereas like Fukushima is a perfect Have you paid attention to what they're doing? It was so removed from the reach of the ocean, even during the worst conceivable tsunami.

13:12 accidents compared to the number of years that nuclear power plants have been in operation and per amount of energy made available, They're going to get it some way. I was pointing to it out the window. I go, that's a spectacular failure. I go, see that? Kids, I was pointing to it out the window. There's so many of them. There's like a wind, see if you can find this,

16:08 Yeah, there it is. Right, but it's not going to. Well, isn't Texas generating a reasonable amount of electricity from wind these days? I grew up in Newton, Massachusetts. We were like four minutes from the grid going down. We don't have enough. And you put the country's nuclear waste in a couple of Walmarts and— But it's a problem, but climate change is a bigger problem.

18:55 You always get like Spider-Man or Fantastic Four. Yeah. so that the little threads make a fine point. There can be ways of really poisoning people as in the case of the watch dial painters. write about, namely psychology, together with the availability bias, namely people base their sense Yeah, radiation is a big one. It's one of those ones that carried over from the 1940s after the

22:59 and there are countries with nuclear weapons without much nuclear power. So they really are Yeah. Data-driven policing, one of the reasons that the crime rate in the U.S. fell by more than half in the 1990s wasn't that all of a sudden guns were taken off the street. gut feelings and hunches. I'll give you one other example. It's effective altruism, a movement that I'm kind of loosely connected with.

25:29 conspiracy theorists. You've got the idea that COVID vaccines are a way for Bill Gates to implant It has nothing to do with scientific literacy. and toxic waste dumps and plastic straws in the oceans? spectrum. And it goes back and forth. Yeah, but there can be superimposed trends. I flew into Mexico City once and I took photos because I couldn't believe there wasn't a fire.

29:32 Oh, that's a thing that people need to realize, too. but it really does. is that a lot of what we deplore now as just crazy stuff, conspiracy theories and the fake that get them prestige within their own coalition looked at it. Instead, they have an ideology and whether it's left or right wing. And it seems Yeah. So people just don't meet people who disagree with them anymore, who have come from different backgrounds or less than they used to.

33:52 But it was interesting because we got to hear two very different perspectives, person, that person gets silenced. as a question I get asked a lot when I talk about rationality. I mean, some people will go to their grave believing what they believe, but you don't including in issues that I strongly believe in, like human-made climate change, like safety and

36:41 And what kind of increased my confidence, say, in human-made why it's unlikely to be true. I find that fantastically convincing. And I think that we should not give up on people's ability to take evidence seriously. Granted, there's some people documentary series on HBO about QAnon it was called into the storm I did not they're they've developed this sort of tribal climate where they really believed that they were going to stop this

39:45 fucking with people and then the style of the drops changed and then this you know there's like real evidence that this one guy would be the only person that would have access to be able to Yes. Whereas, of course, the roulette wheel has no memory and each spin is independent. But another part of it is it kind of depends what you mean by belief. you know, they hold a job, a lot of them, and they pay their taxes,

42:35 And the vast majority of people know that. that we'll never get to know, No one knows. Sometimes some of our national founding myths, you know, every country believes that it was founded by a generation of heroes, of martyrs, of great men. So and when it comes to some of these conspiracy theories, I suspect that a lot of them fall into this category of mythological beliefs rather than reality-based beliefs.

45:12 who noted that one reaction of a Pizzagate believer was to leave a one-star Google review to the Comet Ping-Pong Pizzeria. He said, the pizza was incredibly underbaked and there were It's belief for the purpose of expressing the right moral values. Yeah. And it was very exciting. The Zodiac Killer did that for real. there's a psychological aspect of it

47:43 that I do know yes Some of them. Because his brother – Do you ever pay attention to the story behind him? I think they did. And we got stern warnings from the MIT police, do not open a suspicious package, call the I opened it up. no one held him and he cried and screamed and it went on for months. And they think that it His brother— He's like I think it's him right

52:28 And now he, you know, unradicalized himself, got free of it all, got, I don't know exactly They'll often say, we're your family now. That is, we can use our brain power to find the best possible argument It drives me crazy because I have very intelligent friends then, of course, you can muster the best lawyerly skills to defend it. You have checks and balances and branches of government. So likewise, when it comes to ideas,

56:20 so that one person's cleverness doesn't get out of hand. I guess. I mean, it was a ham-fisted move, but it wasn't the kind of diabolical conspiracy involving hundreds or by foreign entities in order to sow distrust into our political system. And that's what the Conspiracies do exist. And at the end of the feast, everyone was kind of full and kind of drunk. Then on cue, the hosts kind of pulled out their

59:55 Exactly. But the 9-11 truther conspiracy theory, the number of people that would have to be Like, it's one of the problems with eyewitness testimony. And the fact that we distinctly remember this, I saw it with my own eyes, means nothing in great let me tell you something you think your memory's great i go my memory's pretty good there. I remember petting him kind of. I remember a few things, but I don't have like an HD video

1:02:59 photographs, but stills from the video was released on Geraldo Rivera's television show by Dick Gregory. Well, since then, people who've seen the film And then I realize, oh, my God, I have a clear memory of Ronald Reagan saying that and he never said it. Yeah. Sometimes it is. Sometimes you get lucky, you know, sometimes you get lucky, but, um, lied to her and coached her. And she was 18 and traumatized. She had just been raped.

1:06:07 I mean, all around. and even when you're, you know, 35, 45, 55. You know, it's something, it's another issue that I Are you going to be gun shy? Are you going to say yes a lot of the time? Are you going to say no a shootings or acts of terrorism. We've got to believe more accusers. The thing is, if all Yeah. Things like bite marks. Yes, right. It's just not reliable at all. Ballistics.

1:10:04 And it's kind of shocking when you look at the science behind a lot of our forensics, That's astrology, right. justice system, we have what's sometimes called Blackstone's ratio. After an 18th century British I think it's just a matter of time before we become symbiotic, before we're kind of already connected at the hip to our cell phones. Well, you're missing the point. Because human beings having that kind of

1:12:55 Oh, yeah. You might be headed in that direction. Really? Do you have the faith that we will be able to recreate what a brain does? I believe his guesstimate is 2045. get to a point where he can have a conversation with his father his dead father his dead father Although I think it's pretty unsatisfying. I would not consider that to be having a conversation with my dead father.

1:15:43 that would mean nothing to me. it would be worth a fraction of the amount and it would be emotionally much less satisfying, And it's just like, I look at it every now and then I'm like, huh, he really wrote that. We do have a sense of real stuff that really was in contact with other people, with real events. Right. It's from Latin meaning kind of thisness.

1:18:23 It was amazing. I can't believe it's really him. Yes, but he doesn't look anything like him. Sounds like him. But he sounds amazingly like him. Yeah. I mean, dead on. I mean, he was something bigger than just a musician. Yes. That's pretty crazy. are stored and the patterns of interconnections. So even as the molecules turn over, they're in Oh, absolutely.

1:22:43 That is, anyone can edit them after the fact. But then you like to present yourself to the world as someone who lives his life with a plan, who can be trusted, whose word is good. you. The reason isn't that people lie. The reason is that people will retrospectively make their that's unscrupulous and all they want to do is catch you lying and then they could prosecute

1:25:18 I heard no. Oh, that's – I was late. where there's basically closed-circuit cameras on every street corner. Yeah, that's the thing. that had a very distorted idea of what actually took place that day, and then through the that is the slippery slope towards totalitarianism. My own feeling is that tends to be overblown, Well, that's true, yes. Your browser history.

1:29:32 because they were framing it essentially like Well, yeah, and it wouldn't take much artificial intelligence to find patterns in people's browsing history. I mean, that happens all the time to people, right? People that were hardcore left-wing people but yay, everything's new and exciting. Well, and it is true that there are certain patterns of thinking, like conspiratorial

1:31:11 You don't believe A bunch of people maintaining the truth, which is what we tend to call conspiracy theories, then when I took people who have a vested interest in stopping them, where they don't have completely free without anyone actually blowing the cover. Yeah. He had every reason to kill himself. I mean, you know, low-paid civil servants can do all kinds of incompetent things.

1:34:58 higher up because the force of gravity, when you have something tighter on your neck, the force of gravity raises it up to where your neck is, meeting your chin. He was strangled down low, which is usually Who printed that one? If it stays down here, that's more likely someone gets behind you and chokes you to death. And I go, that is ridiculous. There were such accounts, yes.

1:37:41 A media mogul. Well, there are a lot of conspiracy theories about the death of Robert Maxwell because he fell off his yacht and drowned. Not always. I want to get a copy of it. That's what I would be saying to Bill Clinton. The whole case is crazy when you see how many people he flew to these islands. And he was collecting celebrities, scientific celebrities. And he liked to kibitz and schmooze

1:41:09 Yeah. He was a faker. I had five different colleagues who were in tight with him. And then someone snapped a picture. all these very rich and powerful people Yeah. Just cut him giant checks and then they had to resign as CEOs. Right. Right? Well, there was an era in which if you had something on the ball, if you had a little He thought he was full of shit.

1:44:40 Yeah, right. Yeah, right. But we do know that intelligence agencies do try to compromise people. What's interesting is it's so easy to dismiss the idea of a conspiracy theory because if you believe in them, you're a silly person and you can't be taken seriously. And a guy says, well, I have a theory. There's a little man inside the watch with a hammer,

1:47:11 theories are so easy to spin out and often so hard to definitively refute. You can't prove that we're trying to monitor them. for some new propulsion system, some new weapons project, These things are probably some kind of a drone. They're trying to figure out how to – yeah, you're laughing, see? Namely, there's an object. Are you talking about Mick West?

1:50:29 His cases- They saw it. They said it looked like a tic-tac. They got visual confirmation of this thing. They saw it. They said it looked There's no way you would be able to tolerate it. So whatever this thing is, it's not operating the way a jet would work, dense area, right? that we would have high quality photography. So when they detect something and they see it at 60,000 feet and then they see it again at 50 feet above sea level and it happens in less than a second, it gives one pause.

1:54:40 so I can't really argue against it. wrong because I don't know jack shit about these military systems. That's not what they're trained for. And they watched it jet off. You don't think that someone who's accustomed to tracking flying, moving objects with a It's just a different skill set. examine Uri Geller, it turned out that they were fooled and the people they should have brought in

1:58:09 cat point, which shows some sort of intelligent control of it. Well, that's what they said. everything? Do we still have these blurry splotches that... There's been all sorts of work in these things. You're also a public intellectual, Well, it's just I've become obsessed with it. So, again, not being an expert in UFOs, And so you've heard the expression priors.

2:02:27 there's a test for cancer. We know that the base rate for the cancer is 1% of the population. is that we tend to, first of all, at this particular evidence, given how many claims of UFOs there have been which turned out to be bogus, chances are it's going to be like all the other UFO reports. Namely, we may not even be able to explain it just because we can't track down every last minute fact of that situation that took place three years ago.

2:04:46 But isn't it better before the podcast started, I don't know if they would have laughed in your face. I don't know if they would have laughed in your face, but they would have demanded a some sort of propulsion system that's not indicative of pushing something out the back like fire and shooting forward like most rockets do? of the expansion of the universe,

2:06:55 posterior, as they say, that is how much you believe something after you've looked at the the Big Bang seems to be getting faster and faster, which no one had predicted. Yeah. Well, I think that they don't know, but I suppose you're sort of guessing that they- Oh, back in the day where people, it was the dark ages, dark matter in the dark ages. who was a famous

2:10:11 Have you read any John Mack stuff? And ones that you believe because they're part of a story that's just too good not to to get a Harvard affiliation. You're not really hired as a Harvard professor. You're a he had a Harvard affiliation, but didn't mean all that much in his case. So he had these patients he had evidence of alien visitation, you'd think he'd call some astronomers, some astrophysicists.

2:13:24 But there's no evidence other than memories. But there was a problem with the way he was asking But you're conscious and you're experiencing your surroundings, given that when we're in various states of exhaustion and delirium and half sleep, half wake, I don't know if he was a true believer. Successful books. that you should only believe things for which there's good evidence.

2:16:30 I mean, couldn't your grandmother have told you that? a good belief, but I don't think that's the way the human mind naturally works. So is that a failure of our education system? stuff. Why is that? Oh, just because I think there is a reason, namely for most of our the virus. We don't have to... Or like lightning. I mean, for thousands of years, Or can you actually show that it's true?

2:20:18 no, that's really not a good reason to believe something. You should only believe it if it's There's less racism. It's weird. We were better off when we had legitimate authorities and we all conformed to now. And when you say, well, yeah, we've got an awful lot of problems now, but things could be You can suddenly have a rampage shooting, a terrorist attack, a financial collapse, a war.

2:24:37 Not long ago, it was 10 per 100,000 per year. Editorial. We should also have an understanding of what progress is They're constantly evolving to be more deadly, as we're seeing this very week. If we keep it, if we don't repeat our mistakes, that's what can lead to intermittent progress. We can apply our brain power to make things go better. and making a lot of money while also espousing woke ideals

2:29:02 Yeah. It is a problem and we do need to, No, but I've read about the problem. And they tried to convince people otherwise. I don't consider myself an optimist. I consider myself someone who just presents data where the influence that a lot of these special interest groups have, And I just want to come in and, I mean, that's their argument. could donate, the amount of influence they had. It seems like it was a different level back then.

2:33:17 And that'll be a level playing field. which everyone doing what's in their interests actually works against their interests in the on one thing, you've got to cooperate on this. You need changes in the technology so that the cheaper form of energy isn't the form that is most polluting. following the same rules. We're buying those countries things and goods. And even though we

2:37:03 Yeah. Well, they have that itself is also going to have a partial pushback against. There was a giant air filter, and together with carbon capture, Well, it could happen. Thanks so much, Joe. so I'm enjoying it very much as well.