World Renowned Thinker and Harvard Professor Steven Pinker: Human Action Can Improve the World (#68)

Welcome to the Three Takeaways podcast, which features short, memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, scientists, and other newsmakers. Each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers.
And now your host and board member of schools at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, Lynn Toman. Hi, everyone.
It's Lynn Toman. Welcome to another episode.
Today, I'm excited to be with Steve Pinker. Steve is one of the world's most renowned thinkers.
Bill Gates called one of his books his new favorite book of all time, and Bill Clinton kept his book on his bedside table. Steve keeps on his phone, under the heading Politicians, a list of the two dozen or so heads of state, royalty, and other leaders who have consulted with him.
He is a Harvard professor and author of many books, including The Better Angels of Our Nature, Enlightenment Now, and most recently, Rationality. I'm excited to find out from Steve why there is so much irrationality in the world today,

including the belief in fake news, conspiracy theories, and medical quackery. And I'm also excited to find out why, despite so much fake news and negativity and partisanship, he is optimistic about the future of democracy and the world.
Welcome, Steve, and thanks so much for our conversation today. Thanks, Lynn, for having me.
Steve, what are the ideas that resonated the most with Bill Gates and Bill Clinton? That human action can improve the world. And if we analyze our problems, if we seek out solutions, if we try to apply them, we can make the world better.
The evidence being that when our predecessors tried to do that, they by and large succeeded. They, of course, did not solve problems like poverty and war and disease, but they mitigated them.
That is, there is less poverty, war and disease than there used to be. And that emboldens us to try to seek further improvements.
So we keep hearing negative news, it seems, about almost everything, including rising partisanship, anger, challenges to democracy and inequality. Are world conditions getting worse? Are we regressing on social progress? Well, it depends on what measure you look at.
By and large, we are improving, although the COVID-19 pandemic introduced a number of setbacks. But that's the way progress works.
It's not a magical process that makes everything better for everyone everywhere all the time. It often goes in fits and starts and sometimes reversals, and not everything improves.
That would be a miracle, not progress as the result of human ingenuity and activity. But taking into account the reversal from the local reversal from COVID, which the world will soon emerge from, extreme poverty has been in decline.
War deaths have been in decline. Illiteracy has been in decline.
Policies that discriminate against women and racial and ethnic minorities have been in decline. Longevity has increased.
It'll probably take a temporary hit in the past year. Not everything is improving.
Certainly carbon emissions and emission of greenhouse gases have not come down globally. And as you noted, in the United States, political polarization, including negative polarization, that is the demonization of one's opponents, has increased.
What do you see as humanity's most impressive human achievements? The more than doubling of our lifespan, from about 30 years life expectancy at birth to over 70 worldwide and more than 80 in developed countries. So humanity has made enormous progress, and yet there is also a lot of irrationality in the world.
Let's talk about that irrationality. You've used the words insanity and poppycock.
Can you give some examples of what you call insanity and poppycock? Certainly the conspiracy theories,

such as that COVID vaccines are a subterfuge to implant microchips into people's bodies

so that Bill Gates can track them.

The conspiracy theory that the 2020 election

was somehow stolen from Donald Trump,

despite there being not a shred of evidence for it.

The use of holistic and alternative and homeopathic

and other versions of snake oil in complementary and alternative medicine. Widespread belief in the paranormal, such as the existence of ESP, telepathy, clairvoyance, ghosts and spirits, crystal healing powers.
That should be enough examples to keep us busy for a while. Why is there so much of this irrationality, this what you call insanity and poppycock? There always has been.
Conspiracy theories go way back and some of them quite destructive, like the Illuminati and the protocols of the elders of Zion. Most of medicine was quackery until recently.
Paranormal phenomena are the very essence of religious belief. And so they've been with us for thousands of years, miracles and divine intervention.
What makes them all the more striking is that there is so much rationality around us. The achievements of science and technology, such as smartphones and robotics and artificial intelligence and vaccines and DNA sequencing, the application of rational methods to activities that used to be the realm of superstition and conventional wisdom and bad feelings, such as in medicine, in policing, in sports, in policy.
All of them make the lack of rationality all the more striking.

You mentioned the COVID vaccines.

Can you explain why some people, even with their lives at stake, are essentially irrational

and don't want to get the vaccines?

A lot of it is a partisan bias, sometimes called the my side bias.

Namely, we endorse the beliefs that have become, for whatever reason, sacred values within our coalitions, our political tribes, our religious sects. And because people can even gain status within their cliques by endorsing beliefs, all the better if the beliefs are implausible, because it signals your commitment if you're willing to put them forward, then people can, in a narrowly rational sense, do what it takes to earn prestige within their own community while endorsing a belief that is factually false.
That's a large part of it. And for whatever reason, vaccine resistance became a cause célèbre among certain sectors of the American libertarian and Trumpian right.
Although there are also factions that oppose vaccines out of solidarity for another ideology, namely the holistic green anti-corporate left. So most forms of irrationality can be bipartisan.
But also many of these intuitions are rooted in deeply ingrained ways of thinking that have probably been with our species for thousands of years, such as that health comes from keeping your internal essence pure and disease comes from some kind of adulterant or contaminant that is introduced into the system. And vaccines being, at least with traditional vaccines, a killed or weakened form of the very virus that makes you sick and that it's injected right into your flesh is quite unintuitive.
Now, most of us learn to discard these primitive intuitions because we trust the scientific establishment. We figure that people in the white coats must know what they're talking about.
And if they recommend it, then it's advisable. But if you're alienated from the scientific establishment, then it's easier to fall back on these primitive intuitions.
If we take a step further back to fake news in general, why do people believe in fake news and why is it so pervasive? Well, it's not clear how deeply they believe it. The beliefs say that Hillary Clinton ran a child sex ring out of a pizzeria in DC.
The people who believe that, most of them didn't call the police, which is what you would do if you really thought that children were raped in the basement of a local restaurant. But asserting that belief is a way of saying, boo Hillary, that whether she did it or not, it's the kind of thing that she's so evil she would be capable of doing.
So it's an expression of a sentiment, of an ideology more than a factual belief. And the thing is that most people are very happy to endorse beliefs where they don't care whether they're factually true or false, but they just feel that it's morally valuable.
It's uplifting, it's empowering, it's inspiring to hold that belief. Whether it's true or false is you can't know and who cares.
And many people are susceptible to that style of belief. That's what most religious faith consists of.
A lot of people who believe in God and the Savior and the resurrection, they would be hard-pressed to justify that belief, but they would insist that justifying it is beside the point, that that's not what faith is all about. It's about affirming the right values, the right narratives of inspiring people within your coalition, of perhaps demonizing its enemies.
And I suspect a lot of conspiratorial beliefs and fake news are held because of their expressive uplift power, not because people are committed to them being factually true. So interesting.
Should public policy be driven by reason? And if so, what does that look like? And can you give an example? Absolutely should be driven by reason. What else should it be driven by? We shouldn't have irrational policies because once we have settled on some aim or goal, like with safety, peace, prosperity, a clean environment, we should do the things that bring them about and not do the things that make them worse.
We can't know what they are a priori because we're not angels. We're not infallible.
We're not omniscient. And so the best way to find out is to try them in practice.
Be prepared to learn from best practices in other governments. As I think it was Madison who said that the states should be living laboratories.
Maybe it wasn't. I should fact check that before I assert it on your podcast interview.
But someone said it and they were right. We should use the world as our laboratory for which policies work and which don't, because we might be surprised.
And when there's something that's so emotional, such as the murder of George Floyd, which was seen on videos all around the world, how should public policy take that into account? I don't think we should make policy based on viral videos. I think we should look at data on what leads people to be victims of police violence and what's affected in preventing it.
How do you see the future of democracy? Well, it's certainly threatened by authoritarian populist movements in many countries. It's difficult to predict whether these populist movements will age out once younger generational cohorts who tend to be less populist come of age while the older cohorts who tend to support populism die off.
It's also unclear whether populist movements can withstand a number of long-running forces that push against it, such as the cosmopolitan processes that lead people to move to cities, to get more education, to travel, the spread of a world culture where people more and more are wearing the same clothes, listening to the same music, getting similar kinds of education, want to seek out opportunities wherever they are.

And an insular nationalism will have to fight against that tide.

and of the global problems that are going to resist any nationalist solution because they're inherently international,