Steven Pinker: belief

Transcript context

…Take even the cases where the anonymous posters are right. As you and I know, there’s a lot of alt-right views out there. In general, I don’t agree with them. I think they’re quite wrong. I also think that if some of them were correct, some of the conspiracy theories, it would actually be better if we don’t all know them, that we would lose too much faith in elites. It’s better that we do not have too much common knowledge, again, if those claims were true. Do you agree? I guess you’d have to set up the hypothetical. That is, are there cases where there’s a noble lie, where we’re better off if everyone believes it? I think a somewhat different case, other than an utter lie, would be a genteel, benign hypocrisy, where you have a common pretense. Your sometime-collaborator Robin Hanson writes about that in his book with Kevin Simler, where he gives some examples, and I actually repeat them and add some of my own, of cases where it’s not an outright lie, but it’s a case where there’s some things that are true that you avoid saying. Robin Hanson gives examples like if someone drinks from a whiskey bottle in a paper bag on a park bench, the paper bag isn’t really fooling anyone, but the police may choose not to arrest him under the pretense that he’s not drinking an alcoholic beverage in public. Why would they do that? If they try to enforce the letter of the law, it would be too much like a police state. It’d be a waste of resources. On the other hand, if they fail to arrest someone who is overtly drinking, they’d be surrendering the authority of the rule of law in general. The paper bag, what it does is it allows them to say the rule of law still holds in general, even if we choose, as we say, and it’s an interesting idiom, to look the other way. There are other cases in law enforcement that work like that. Escort services. Does anyone really believe that someone’s paying only for an escort, but they get away with it? Tobacco paraphernalia, which is basically drug paraphernalia. Of course, it’s a question of where you draw the line so that the law doesn’t forfeit all of its authority. By which I mean, and going back to the top of the conversation, the common knowledge that the rule of law applies, which is necessary given that the police can’t enforce everything 24/7. Then on the international stage, things like, is Taiwan a sovereign state? Of course it is, but the official policy of the United States is that it doesn’t exist, and of pretty much every other country, as far as I know. Taiwan included, in a funny way.…

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