Steven Pinker: Cognitive Psychologist, Linguist, and Author

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I'm Geica Osaki and this is remarkable people. It's April 2020 and these are going to be some difficult times. I hope that you and your loved ones are safe and healthy. Remember to wash your hands and and maintain a good distance from people. By the way, six feet may not be far enough. Based on a Mythbusters video that I watched Google mythbusters flu to find it. My theory is that if you're near someone who sneezes or coughs, hold your breath and get away. I'm over 65, so I am even more careful. I have been in voluntary quarantine for 20 days now. This episode's guest is Dr. Steven Pinker, and he is a Harvard professor with expertise in visual cognition and psycholinguistics. He is also an author and a speaker. Recall my interview of Dr. Steven Wolfram a few weeks ago. Steven Pinker is to social science what Steven Wolfram is to math and physics. In other words, off the scale, insightfulness and intelligence. My interpretation of Stephen is that he's all about science and facts. Politics, religion, tribalism, nostalgia and wishful thinking do not influence, much less cloud, his judgment. If only more people in leadership positions were like him. Which is to say that to Stephen, the sky is neither falling nor cloudless and blue. It is what it is. Keep listening if you want to learn about the most important tools for an informed and intelligent electorate. I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is remarkable people. And now here's Dr. Steven Pinker.

I want to go down a little bit of a rat hole. I heard a lecture of yours and I'm curious because I have Meniere's, which involves hearing loss. How would you test hearing? You basically condemned how hearing is tested.

There are a number of techniques that have been developed by perception psychologists to separate sensitivity from response bias. The problem I was alluding to is that in the traditional hearing test, if you present a series of beeps that are increasing in volume and you have the person raise their finger when they start to hear it, then you've got this zone in the middle where people are asking themselves, well, I kind of think I hear it. Should I say yes, should I not? And what you're picking up there is as much personality and confidence and willingness to raise your finger and say yes as you are. The sensitivity of the auditory system. It's a problem that was solved more than 100 years ago in perception research. And I was stunned to see that my doctor was still using that test. But even something as simple as you hear the tone in the first second or the second as you make it a forced choice, so that you always have to give a response, and the subjective aspect of when do I go out on a limb and say I've heard it? Is eliminated.

So let us dive in. Because of your background and about rationality and nostalgia and reasoning and all that, I really want to know your analysis of the reactions and actions we're taking to the coronavirus.

Well, it's been said many times, and far better than I could say it, that the response of the President of the United States is quite extraordinarily incompetent and irresponsible. Given the, the magnitude of the potential threat, we have no idea how it will play out, but we know that because of exponential growth, it could overwhelm our medical defenses more quickly than we would like. The beginning of a pandemic makes it incumbent on us to act aggressively and quickly, because exponential growth can overwhelm anything. And by seeing this challenge in terms of Donald Trump's own command of the world, that is, whether good things or bad things are happening on his watch, trying to minimize the seriousness, he is putting the nation and indeed the world at risk in downplaying it simply because he thinks it reflects badly on him. This, of course, has been the pathology of the entire Trump presidency, is that his own ego supersedes his fiduciary responsibility to the well being of the country that he's presiding over. And we're seeing it in an extreme form in the response to the first major domestic emergency of his presidency.

And how would you describe this syndrome of what he's doing?

Well, it is a form of pathological narcissism, of combination of a grandiosity that is, everything reflects on him. The lack of empathy, there doesn't seem to be any particular benevolent concern for the potential hundreds of thousands of victims. The need for admiration and affirmation that crowds out all other motives. So we're seeing, and again, I'm hardly original in pointing this out. But the malignant narcissism that characterizes Donald Trump, his personality is, as everyone feared, manifesting itself in impairing his decision making.

What about when you hear an analysis like people saying 60,000 people a year die from the flu, only a few dozen have died from this. What's the big deal? Why are we so concerned about this? And why don't we take the same kind of reactions with the flu?

Because of the possibility of exponential growth. This is far more deadly than the flu. We don't have a vaccine for it. And because things that grow exponentially can overwhelm any finite limit, even look to history. The Spanish flu created a major reversal in the overall trend of increasing lifespan. You look at a curve for global life expectancy, it shows a huge dip around the time of the Spanish flu. So epidemics, pandemics have the potential of causing massive death, and much depends on how quickly they're nipped in the bud.

From an academic standpoint, the phenomena of saying that the flu is worse than this, so what's the big deal? Is an act of pure ignorance or denial or lack of the depth of analysis.

All of those, yes. It's a failure to appreciate a basic feature of the replication of pathogens, namely that it can be exponential.

Using this as a case study, let's say someone watches the news. How does one discern that, oh, this person, Donald Trump is saying, no big.

Deal, we have it under control.

This person says pandemic exponential growth. How do people decide what to believe?

Well, it's certainly reasonable to trust people who, one thing, don't have a vested interest in minimizing it, but whose interests are aligned with objective understanding and with public welfare. And of course, people who have expertise in the subject matter, that is, epidemiologists ought to be given greater credence than politicians, unless they take the advice of the most informed epidemiologists in general.

Are you saying consider the source? I mean, that's for the layperson.

Absolutely. Considered the source. Now, of course, this doesn't mean putting one's trust in anyone who wears a white coat and calls himself or herself an expert. On the other hand, if people have the legitimate credentials of understanding a problem, namely, they have spent their lives on it, they've been trained in it, they published it, they're on top of the latest data. If, in addition, they don't have any particular vested interest in either minimizing or maximizing it, but their own interests are aligned with the truth and with public welfare, they're the ones that have earned the most credence.

I've wondered this more and more because of Trump and virus. Could it be that we truly are living in a simulation and someone is just playing with us and said, well, let's inject a narcissistic leader and see what happens. Now let's inject the flu and see what happens?

No, I don't think we're in a simulation. These things can happen. In reality, there's no reason, there's nothing that would prevent them. There is an enormous combinatorial space of possibilities for how events can unfold in the real world. And there's no reason to think that surprises can't happen. There are just so many ways that surprises can happen. It would be the most surprising thing of all, would be if there were no surprises. There's just lots of things that can happen. We know that there are lots of ways in which an election can be influenced. There are chaotic processes in terms of when a pathogen can acquire greater virulence, the population dynamics of what leads a pathogen to, as we say, go viral in the original sense. We know that precious and difficult to understand initial conditions can make the difference between a disease becoming a pandemic or not, that this is quintessentially the kind of process that can go out of control. We shouldn't be shocked if every once in a while it doesn't go out of control, and it certainly doesn't mean we're living in a simulation. It's. It's all too real.

Switching to the topic of nostalgia, I think you're saying that nostalgia is usually overrated. Were there any significant periods where the past truly was better across the board?

Probably not. If you ask the question of if I was to be incarnated as a randomly selected person on Earth, there's no better time than the present. That is, if you ask the question originally posed by John Rawls, of what kind of world would you want? If you were deciding behind a veil of ignorance as who you would be? You didn't know if you'd be born in Africa or Asia or Europe, whether you'd be rich or poor or male or female, then playing the odds, you're better off now because people live longer. Fewer people starve to death, fewer people die of infectious disease. More people are literate now. There are particular aspects of the world that were better in the past, such as ecological diversity, the abundance of fish in waters, the number of species, the quaintness of towns. There are certain things that you can point to, but anything you can measure Quantitatively, just about is better now than in the past, pretty much at any time in the past.

How did nostalgia come to be overrated?

There are features of human nature that make us nostalgic, such as that when it comes to our own memory, we often tend to forget how bad things were while we were living through them. We tend, for example, people remember the smaller degree of inequality in the 1970s, but they tend to forget the shortages of meat and coffee and sugar. They tend to forget the lines around the block to get gasoline. They forget the fear of running out of heating oil and natural gas. They forget about what was called the misery index, that is the combination of the inflation rate and the unemployment rate, both of which were in double digits at the same time. There are facts that people forget. But even in our own autobiographies, when we think back on what it was like to live through those eras, those of us who did live through them, we are inherently rose colored. We forget how much anxiety there was over the fact that even if you could pay the rent this month, you don't know if the rent was going to go up next month faster than your paycheck would. We tend to forget that kind of anxiety. That's one reason there's also a an incentive for people to denigrate the present and romanticize the past, which is a form of social competition. As Hobbes put it, men contend with the living, not with the dead. To criticize the present is a way of criticizing your rivals.

Let's suppose that we come to the understanding that nostalgia is overrated. Can that lead to present day denial? So in the sense that we could say, well, we're not lynching black people anymore, so what's the big deal about stop and frisk? Stop and frisk is so much better than lynching black people. Let it go.

Well, that doesn't follow. Because if something has decreased, that doesn't mean it's disappeared. Things could be better without being acceptable. Quite the contrary. It can empower us to try to eliminate the injustices and deprivations of the present, knowing that our predecessors succeeded when dealing with the ones they faced in the past. It means that trying to improve our lives, trying to improve society, is not romantic, it's not utopian, it's not idealistic. It can work. It has worked in the past and so it can continue to work in the present.

There's a thread, I think, in your work that some of our current behaviors is negative and dooming us. Is this because evolution isn't the straight and smooth path and we have to take a longer view. I mean, there's some things that we've evolved to that are not good right now.

Right. Evolution in the biological sense occurs slowly by human scale. It's got a speed limit measured in generations. The changes that we see around us are, virtually none of them are evolutionary. At least it changes in ourselves. The changes that we see in organisms that reproduce more rapidly, like the coronavirus, are, are significant. That's because they reproduce over a span of minutes rather than decades. And so evolution has speeded up that much more in those cases, over a span of a few generations, we're stuck with the human nature that has evolved up to this point. But on the other hand, human nature has given us a lot to work with. It's given us some rather unfortunate motives. It's given us cognitive limitations like self centeredness, self deception, overconfidence, confirmation bias, reasoning by anecdote, magical thinking. On the other hand, it's also given us an open ended, combinatorial, symbolic system of thought. We can think new thoughts. Sometimes they're analogies to old thoughts, but we can put them together in new ways. We can use mathematics to come up with new relationships that our ancestors didn't appreciate. We've got tens of thousands of words in the language which we can assemble into new sentences that convey new thoughts. So we do have the cognitive processes to pick up new solutions. We also have, together with our rather ugly emotions, our lust, our greed, our desire for revenge, we do have some better angels of our nature, as Abraham Lincoln put them. We, we have a sense of empathy, we have a capacity for self control. We have the ability to conform to moral norms, things that a decent person just doesn't do. And we can take what evolution gave us to work with mainly these cognitive and emotional faculties and make our best case for how to deploy them to solve the problems facing us. Now to share the solutions.

Can a case be made that a negativity bias helps us prepare for the worst case instead of expecting the best case? Can a negativity bias work to our benefit?

It depends on how much of a bias it is, as opposed to monitoring reality. Clearly you don't want to deny the negative. You've got to be sensitive to it, otherwise you'll wander into disaster. You need to be in touch with reality and probably some bias toward the negative is necessary, given that there are more things that can go wrong than can go right. And the things that can go wrong can hurt us far more than the things that go right can help us so it is rational to be more vigilant to threats than to windfalls. The threats can kill you, they can kill everyone else. The windfalls can benefit you somewhat, but not nearly as much as the threats can harm you. But the bias should be calibrated by the harm and the probabilities of the threats. And they shouldn't be so biased that we are mistaken about the. About the reality of the world, about how much improvement we have enjoyed. Another way of putting it is to set the bias according to the costs and benefits of action and inaction. But we shouldn't be inaccurate in terms of our best assessment of the probabilities. We can choose to take out insurance. We can choose to be cautious, to err on the side of caution. We shouldn't delude ourselves as to what the threats are or what we have accomplished so far.

Let's say that a candidate for the presidency that you approve of or support contacts you and says, Stephen, based on all you know about negativity, bias, about evolution, about social psychology and reason and rationality and nostalgia and everything you know, tell me, how do I win this election?

I would. I would cite the Peter Principle, according to which everyone rises to their level of incompetence and stays there. That would be an example of the Peter principle applying to me. Although, to be honest, I actually have been in touch with two of the former candidates for the Democratic nomination. I do know two of them personally. I have spoken to centrist politicians in other countries, in Canada, in Colombia, and I don't offer them strategic advice on how to win elections, because I don't know, and I would not venture unsubstantiated guesses. I don't offer them advice on particular policies, how best to achieve economic growth. But I do share with them a vision of what governance ought to be for those who are not Marxists, for those who are not populists, those who believe that there is a positive role for government to play in a liberal democracy, that there has been a constructive role for government both within countries and organizations of international governance like the United nations, the International Criminal Court, the OECD, and other ways in which nations cooperate and offer more of a bird's eye view that just affirms the value of a general liberal democratic vision. Something that I do think I have a role to play there. And I can back it up with saying that the structures that we have had in place have achieved amazing things like reducing extreme poverty to less than 8%, reducing illiteracy to less than 10% of people under the age of 25 to drastically reducing the rate of death in warfare to give a boost to the very idea that the democratic governance is a good thing. It's positive. It's an ideal worth defending. In an era in which liberal politicians are often just seen as wishy washy defenders of the status quo. The emotional energy tends to come from the firebrand populists on one side and the socialists veering into Marxists on the other side. And no one is willing to actually say anything good about mainstream liberal democracies. I do see a role there.

If Joe Biden said to you, so how do I get from here to there? What do you say?

Well, I would not, I would not offer policy advice in areas where I'm not a policy expert. That is, what is the best way to say reduce people who are out of the workforce. What are the best public health strategies to minimize the chance of future pandemics there? You'd have to ask the economists, you have to ask the epidemiologists. In the case of energy, I do have an overall set of guidelines to how to deal with the climate crisis. Namely, I do think that we ought to concentrate on making clean energy cheap so that people will work toward saving the planet while favoring their own interests. But I don't think that either calling for voluntary conspicuous sacrifices, nor denying the reality of climate change, nor demonizing fossil fuel companies are ways that will get us to where we want to be in the zero carbon economy. So I'd offer that generic advice, but whether it should be mostly nuclear, whether it should be renewables plus storage, there you'd be the experts in energy technology.

Okay, I tried to get it out of you.

Anyway.

What are the most important principles and tools that an informed electorate should learn?

One would be an open minded, evidence based mindset. That is rather than feeling in our bones that there is a policy solution, that the way to reduce school shootings is to have stronger gun control laws. Well, maybe yes, but maybe no. That they what we ought to do is foster a robust social science. The innovative ways of using bigger data sets. They try to extricate ourselves from left wing or right wing mindsets that dogmatically push one solution to problems, often just encouraged by people playing things out in their imagination. I think this would work. It makes sense to me that it would work. I can envision it working. Reality is so complicated that we ought to be prepared to be humbled. We ought to listen to people from other ideological camps, hold their feet to the fire in bringing forth evidence that supports the efficacy of their programs, but to tilt our discussion more in the direction of a scientific mindset and less from a sports mindset. Winners and losers and then teams and opponents.

But today, my perception is science is absolutely being trampled upon. I mean, the thermometer is not a liberal or conservative, but quite right.

And you know, most people agree with you. That is a majority of people in virtually every country believe, for example, except the scientific consensus, that there is climate change and that is caused by human activity. There are ultra powerful factions that deny it, but by no means do they speak for the majority of the population. So we do have a problem in democratic governance and that governments can be captured by minority factions. But we need to bring the appreciation of science that is fairly widespread. People do respect scientists more than almost any other profession and to take advantage of that to give it a greater role in our policy making and political decision making.

By any chance, did you see yesterday's press conference about the coronavirus with Trump and Pence?

I did not see it live. I read about it. My capacity for masochism only goes so far.

And my last, truly my last question. Do you know who Steve Wolfram is?

Yes, I do. I know Steve Wolfram.

Do you hold him in high regard?

Yes. I mean, I do. That doesn't mean I believe in everything that he says, but I absolutely hold him in high regard.

Yes, I asked you those two questions before I tell you this. So I interviewed him for this podcast and I can interview him once every 10 years because I need to rest between those interviews. But I offer this, therefore, because I hold him in the highest regard. I offer this to you as a closing positive. Note that in doing the research for this podcast, watching your lectures, youtubes and, and reading your books, I have come to the conclusion that you are the Steve Wolfram of social science. And there is no higher form of praise than that from me. I want to thank you for doing this and someday I hope to attend one of your lectures in person. I watched your Harvard lecture and I said to myself, that's why you didn't go to Harvard, guy, because you could not possibly understand most of that. So thank you very much, Steve.

It's really kind of you, guy. I enjoy talking to you. Thank you for having me on.

I hope you enjoyed this episode with Dr. Steven Pinker. Prepping for this interview like the one for Stephen Wolfram. Almost made my head explode. I also hope that this interview helps you approach decision making in scientific, fact based ways. That's how we'll get through these difficult times. I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is remarkable people. My thanks to Jeff C. And Peg Fitzpatrick for their awesome work in helping me deliver this podcast every week. Also, my mahalo to Sasha Andreas, quote unquote, a random French guy who introduced me to Stephen. Until next time, be safe and be healthy. This is remarkable people.