Steven Pinker: evaluation

Transcript context

…They help make some things common knowledge. If there are things that are not common knowledge, some anonymous poster will say it. There’ll also be misinformation. Is that a clue that maybe at the margin, we have too much common knowledge rather than too little? It’s a good question. The way you posed the question is, on average, is it better or worse? It’s kind of a matter of counting up the cases where it is a little boy saying the emperor was naked and, unlike the story, using anonymity to be able to escape reprisals, punishment for generating the common knowledge. You’d have to count up the number of cases where that happens compared to all of the misinformation, trolling, hiding behind reprisals as a way of being aggressive. I think a lot of the shaming mobs, a lot of the trolling, a lot of the degradation of discourse in social media comes because of that anonymity. Is it worth it because sometimes it is a little boy saying the emperor’s naked? That would be harder to tell. 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?…

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