Steven Pinker: prediction

Transcript context

…Is a Schelling point the same thing as common knowledge in your approach? A Schelling point, I think it’s more like common salience. It’s closely related. A Schelling point is a choice that people make to coordinate that has no intrinsic value other than the fact that everyone else knows that it exists. It’s something that pops out. Schelling’s original example is a couple separated in New York. This is before the era of cellphones. How do they coordinate in the absence of common knowledge? It can’t just be that each tries to guess where the other one would go, because if he knows that she likes to go to the bookstore, so he goes to the bookstore, the problem might be that she knows he likes to go to the camera store, so she might go to the camera store. He knows that, so maybe he should go to the camera store, but then she knows that he knows that she likes to go to the bookstore, so she might think, “Oh, he’s going to go to the bookstore after all, ad infinitum. ” If there’s some point in the landscape that commends itself as something that is salient enough, obvious enough, recommends itself, like in Schelling’s example, he guessed that the couple would meet at the clock in the middle of Grand Central Station at noon, even if it wasn’t where they would have been separated, simply because if you have to pick some place, what place are you going to pick? A Schelling point is something that is salient enough to enough people that they alight on it as a solution to a coordination problem in the absence of common knowledge, per se. Steven, where would you go in New York to actually meet them? I know where you’d go to meet me, Grand Central Station.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.