Steven Pinker: belief

Transcript context

…When Tyler argues about the power of reason, usually I’m taking your view, but when I was sitting in the front row and looking at the titles of your books, I was particularly thinking about The Blank Slate. It seems like it’s an entire book about how really smart people are really wrong about something. Many of your other books I think also could be described in that way. The smartest people in the world who think about the subjects the most are just deeply misguided. What do you think is going wrong there, and more generally, what is wrong with academia that there’s so few Steven Pinkers out there? [laughter] I won’t answer the last question, not in those terms. I think that there is an intellectual equivalent of tribalism. Jon Haidt writes about it. You’ve written about it. We tend to think of intellectual disagreements like the Red Sox versus the Yankees. It’s deeply pleasurable to read arguments that support a view that you already hold. It’s really annoying to read something that calls one of your beliefs into question. Ideally, what we want is an arena in which the rules of the game make it so that no matter how emotionally tied you are to your belief, if it’s wrong, it’ll be shown to be wrong and it’ll just be too embarrassing to hold on to it or at least for other people to hold on to it indefinitely. That’s what I consider to be the ideal of what science is all about, and intellectual discourse in general. When it works, how to make it work better, are really good questions. Certainly, there are disturbing signs that the process in some ways is getting worse. I see Greg Lukianoff is here, the director of Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which does a brilliant job in combating some of the restrictions on free speech that we’re seeing in university campuses, which would be a paradigm case of going in the wrong direction in terms of setting up rules that allow the truth to come out in the long term. I’m hoping that naming and shaming and arguments will give free speech a greater foothold in academia. The fact that academia is not the only arena in which debates are held, that we also have think tanks and we also have a press. We also have the Internet. How we could set up the rules so that despite all of the quirks of human nature — such as intellectual tribalism — are overcome in our collective arena of discourses is, I think, an absolutely vital question, and I just don’t know the answer because we’re seeing at the same time — there was the hope 20 years ago that the Internet would break down the institutional barriers to the best ideas emerging. It hasn’t worked out that way so far because we have the festering of conspiracy theories and all kinds of kooky beliefs that somehow the Internet has not driven out, but if anything has created space for. How we as a broader culture can tilt the rules or the norms of the expectations so that if you believe something that’s false, eventually you’ll be embarrassed about it, I wish I knew. But that’s obviously what we ought to be striving for. And your next book?…

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