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A Rational Look at Irrationality: Steven Pinker

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Renowned cognitive scientist and author Steven Pinker explains the link between rationality and progress, and reminds us how we can take advantage of the powerful tools of reasoning that our species has discovered over the millennia

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46 thoughts on “A Rational Look at Irrationality: Steven Pinker”

  3. In today's India, there are extreme right wing historians and left wing Biased historians, very less amount of Scientist and abundance of pseudoscientist , major influencers and even government record keepers are biased , nasty politics , unbound spreading on pseudoscience and fake news everywhere, I'm very worried 😢 , people like S. Pinker are like the suns in our society 🙏

  10. Most rationalists have know idea how to intrepret metaphor or what someone is pointing at in the world with their myth, "conspiracy, etc. rationally the "gods" are hyper objects and are actually quite useful.
    Just like the flat earth argument i love! Most Rationalists have know idea how to proof the world is round and get so upset that they have to rely on blind faith in an authority! Hahah i love it.

    Climate change as with any hyperobject/ public discourse is all over the place. The problem is professional managegerial class believes the stupidence solutions and actually makes things worse with their half baked psuedo-rational arrogance seems to have no end to their hubris! Pizza gate is wrong but laughing at those beleifs juxtaposing to ones own is not productive – worse the amount of "rational" people over totalizing the amount of people who believe and how they believe and basically make a synecdoche out of anyone who even murmurs pizza wearing a maga hat,! 😅

  11. Well the cabal of elite pedophiles was real. Epstein was ringleader. Why do people still act like this is a Conspiracy Theory. Hollywood did it too for generations.

  16. Wikipedia's biggest weakness is articles concerning anything related to products and services for sale are skewed by the entities that sale them.

  17. BTW conspiracies do exit, as snowden, wiki leaks and many more, which came to light.
    And recognising conspiracy and propaganda it totally rational because its based the very logic that these things will benefit the top rich people. ✌️✌️

  18. If I were to introduce someone to Pinker's wisdom, this is the lecture I'd choose. It should be mandatory viewing for everyone on the planet. The modern complement to The Sermon on the Mount.

  21. Mr Pinker is wrong. We are rational (thinking) and also (feeling} beings. The feeling part is often described as non-rational but imagine a person without feelings. Society labels such persons as sociopaths. A person without feeling, operating from reason alone, can behave as a Frankenstein, something society definitely does not want. What Mr. Pinker should address is not the supremacy of reason but the necessity of a balance between reason and feeling in all our actions. We have lived through the Age of Reason, the environment is almost destroyed and our continued existence is even in question. When are those who give talks going to get this, instead of continuing to perpetuate a point of view which is unbalanced and unhelpful in our current predicament and instead educate people on the full use of the faculties we have been given rather than emphasis on one faculty alone, which is both limiting and dangerous in our present situation.

  22. I'm full on with evolution. Blanc slatism is a near ubiquitous shibboleth and plain wrong. Climate alarmism and the push for net zero, is utterly unwarrented, pernicious, dangerous tosh.

    It was obvious with the Wuhan flu, that a lab leak was, back in early 2020, and is still now, easily the most parsimonious explanation.

    There is an existential problem with woke capture of acedemia and our institutions. Together with woke authoritarianism. This and all too many powerful 'experts' that plain lie, directly and by omission to promulgate narrative.

  26. I came to this video from another Steve did which was brilliant. The thing that scares me the most is the possibility of peasants with pitchforks and torches burning down civilization. What scares me almost as much is a video like this one. What hear Steve say here is whatever I don't have evidence for doesn't exist and there is something wrong with anyone who disagrees. If you want to incite a mob to riot just stand up in front of them and try that line of reasoning.
    My father was an engineer. I was to be an engineer. But about half way through my studies I had the first of four we are not in Kansas anymore Toto experiences that broke my certainty of how things are. So I know how badly a person needs their world view to be right. It is unbelievable painful to be set adrift in that way. You are asking the peasants to make that kind of shift. Not going to happen that way.
    I am fascinated by near death experiences lately. My question to you is this: what is acceptable evidence? If many hundreds people say to you I had this experience and many of them can report to their doctors what the doctors were doing while the patient was flat lined, what do you do? Throw it all out because it doesn't fit what you are sure is true?
    A little bit of openness and humility might make it easier to have the conversations needed to lower the risk of collapse from ignorance.

  28. Group think , intentional ignorance, fanatical stupidity, We think this, We think that, Us versus the other , religion, secular believers, all of this describes lazy thinking stupid people.

  29. First time I took homeopathic medicine I felt terribly deceived…well because it was expensive in the first place… but they had such convincing theories 😅… I've never looked back since. Science is good value for your money

  30. I’m constantly amazed by how little insight Steven Pinker shows. And his pro-right political bias is flat out absurd!

    Pinker is a cognitive psychologist, which is a truly critical course of study. It’s too bad that he seems to have stopped studying a generation ago. When it comes to the persistent irrationality of the human animal, many discoveries have been made over the last 20 years that can help. Just one example: more than a decade ago I saw the neurophysiologist VS Ramachandran speak at the New York Academy of Science. In his presentation, he relays truly shocking research that indicates that without emotions humans can’t think effectively. Emotions can help us filter the vast amount of information that flows over us in any given day. They do so by helping us feel what’s important. Unfortunately, that opens us up to our cognitive biases. So it’s critical that we become aware that our gut sense should always be confirmed! (For a tremendous read about that topic, check out Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow.) If Pinker had a better grasp of that fundamental insight, he wouldn’t go off the rails as often as he does. I think that’s why he reeks of intellectual hubris, IMHO.

    In terms of his political bias, he’s a perfect example of the problem he highlights. He embraces the enlightenment ideal of pure rationality, but his “purely rational“ pontifications somehow always have a conservative slant! If you doubt me, look at the last minute or so of this presentation where he makes a gratuitous swipe against intellectuals who provoke right wing extremists. Talk about projection! The illiberal right wing extremists are on the verge of destroying our democracy and he blames the left! This would be laughable on its face, but he pretends to be the sole arbiter of what is purely rational, thus giving cover to a right wing, who still pines for a monarchy.

    As he does again and again and again in other speeches, he always sides with the right wing, blaming the left for many of our problems. By doing so, he embodies the very point that he makes earlier, which is we need to be purely rational. But in this gratuitous comment, he proves that his “purely rational,“ holier than thou point of view is absurdly biased!

    Net-net: This guy is hurting more than he’s helping.

  31. I have been reading "The Gilded Age" by Mark Twain. Distrust in institutions of government, science, and journalism was them, and is now well earned. I didn't think you can address this distrust without reviewing the studies history of governments, media corporations and business interests in lying for profit. For example, big tobacco, 3M and PFAS, the Gulf of Tonkin, etc. etc. etc.

  34. Where can you find these biases, is there a book to learn logic? I found one with some sort of circles. Is that it? I found no biases there.

  35. Pinker makes three completely irrational assertions at the beginning of his talk on (ir)rationality. He claims that we (meaning rational, scientific humanity) “have figured out … the origins of the universe, the nature of life and the functioning of the mind.” None of these assertions stands up to scientific scrutiny. The Big Bang theory explains how the universe probably evolved from an undefined something but reveals nothing about its origins. “Science” can tell us a lot about the functioning of biological entities but it does not even have stable consensus on the definition of life, let alone an explanation for its nature. There is a similar situation concerning the brain (lots of new info) and the hard-to-define mind/consciousness: lots of unproven hypotheses and no scientifically sound, falsifiable theory according to Popper. I am always amazed how some scientists (Naturwissenschaftler) can totally ignore the epistemological basis of science (Wissenschaft) and choose irrational starting points to fight what they perceive as irrationality. (The German terms make the much needed differentiation and help to clarify the picture. If you don’t know them, look them up.)

  36. I was actively involved with trying to bring Critical Thinking classes into K-12 public schools in the '80's. Initial successes always went down the same path. Local parents first were very interested in getting their kids taught how to think rationally and logically. Until little Johnny or Janie came home and started asking those embarrassing questions about long held family beliefs, religion, authority, …. Then the classes were as quickly shut down. You don't even hear about such efforts anymore!

  37. Pinker: "Those people who deny the consensus of science, ie. creationists and climate deniers".

    There are plenty of examples of scientific consensus being totally wrong and you don’t have to go back to the Middle Ages and the persecution of Galileo (for ‘heresy’) to find them. The miasma theory for diseases such as cholera was one such: as was the Phlogiston Theory of Combustion. Similarly the theory of continental drift was roundly ridiculed by groupthink as was the bacterial infection cause for stomach ulcers (it was supposed to be excess acid). More recently we had the pernicious and nonsensical eugenics movement and Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift which was ridiculed until the 1960s. There was also the famous ‘100 authors against Einstein’. As the great man said “If I’m wrong it would only take one paper to prove it”. Einstein knew that gravity is not a force: that there cannot be such thing as a force that acts at a distance – it was the distortion of space/time in the proximity of large mass.

    Science does not work on the basic of consensus at all. As Nobel prizewinner Richard Feynman said, "It works on the basis of whether or not it agrees with experiment, observations, data. If not it’s wrong." Aristotle said over 2,000 years ago that argument from consensus is a species of feeble-mindedness known as a logical fallacy, one of the commonest logical fallacies in all of human discourse. And right now, following this ludicrous consensus policy, we’re at the point where we’re alleged to have an immediate and existential climate crisis on our hands.

  38. Pinker appeals to a claim of complete realism which he calls rationality. So for example a writer writes a fictional book, then that is not completely real. How does one account for such non-real efforts? Certainly religion falls into such a claim. But the larger issue can we completely be real? In science the point of research is to explore the unknown and given evidence theorize real meaning. Rationality is a kind of guess about what works but is obviously limited and dependent upon claims to guessing what's there. Which in most cases is only slightly different from 'irrationality'. So Pinker is caught in a cycle of ignorance about the completeness of realism. He'll dance around that problem by making claims such as innateness to combat John Locke's blank slate conjecture. He uses rules we are born with to wave his hands as answers to the agency and authenticity of false consciousness, and out of reality issues amongst human beings.

  44. Steven Pinker supported legal defense of Epstein. Nothing more needs to be said.

    I wonder if this comment will be removed. Maybe my comments are already invisible for everyone else.

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