Skeptic
The Michael Shermer Show # 547
Common knowledge is necessary for coordination, for making arbitrary but complementary choices like driving on the right, using paper currency, and coalescing behind a political leader or movement. It’s also necessary for social coordination. Humans have a sixth sense for common knowledge, and we create it with signals like laughter, tears, blushing, eye contact, and blunt speech.
But people also go to great lengths to avoid common knowledge—to ensure that even if everyone knows something, they can’t know that everyone else knows they know it. And so we get rituals like benign hypocrisy, veiled bribes and threats, sexual innuendo, and pretending not to see the elephant in the room.
Pinker shows how the hidden logic of common knowledge can make sense of many of life’s enigmas: financial bubbles and crashes, revolutions that come out of nowhere, the posturing and pretense of diplomacy, the eruption of social media shaming mobs and academic cancel culture, the awkwardness of a first date.
Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, and one of Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” He has won many prizes for his teaching, his research on language, cognition, and social relations, and his twelve books. His new book is When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life.
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When the technical details of the NORAD control room were being designed they had the option of each person having their own screen. This is shot down and a common large screen was the choice. The reason was that with a common screen every one knew everyone else was getting the same inputs. If they had gone with the individual screens you might think different people might be given different information.
Modern Monetary Theory says the US dollar has value because it's required to pay federal taxes. You no longer can pay taxes with gold or silver. Nixon Shock (1971) decoupled US currency from gold (Bretton Woods), so we no longer have "Silver Certificates", which could be turned in for Silver Dollars, and now have "Federal Reserve Notes" that are not backed by any metal.
Sometimes, research states the obvious and is counterproductive. This seems to be the case here, but I do admire and respect Stephen Pinker for his other research particularly the work that has shed light on AI.
My two fav geniuses
Excerpt from my Evidence of God:
The Bible contains many quotations that speak against oppression of all kinds (which would include slavery, since slavery is just one kind of oppression). Egs of such quotations are Proverbs 22.22, Psalm 82.3, and Zechariah 7.10. Many others can be found through Google. Additionally slavery, all those centuries ago, was simply a part of the economic system. It was a fairly benign system that was necessary for (economic) survival, at both the individual and communal levels. It was hardly anything like the systemic cruelty that we'd find in say the history of the USA.
[for the full evidence, Google "kofidan blog wordpress" (the blog is called In Search of Ideas). This should take you directly to the first post of the evidence. To see the rest, tap on "comments", which is right under the first post.]
A worrying talk about how the subjective emotional feelings of the world's population are immature when compared to patterns of academic intelligence. This appears to be a perilous combination for the survival of life on Earth. If one were to progress to the other, these superfluous laws would be unnecessary. Irrational belief/faith being for the most part the primordial cause.
It's all Greek to me🤕
Listening to Pinx makes me feel in the pink. Great guest.
USA needs the study of racial/ethnic differences because else the only explanation for why one group performs better than another or just why the outcomes(good or bad) is different between groups is explained with systemic discrimination. Which in turn leads to hatred towards the system or the group that is blamed to be holding others down etc. And if the reason of different outcomes is not discrimination then this needs to be known or else the hatred will grow and the groups will not be able to live with each other. this is how genocide is morally justified.
If the only official explanation for why so many great authors are azhkenasi jews is that they are holding every other groups down and away from the industry and not the they on average have a high verbal IQ, will eventually lead to hatred towards that group and in best case discrimination and quotas and in worst.. violence.
So the luxury of not needing to know some stuff is often only in homogeneous communities because there you can rule out many common denominators. A russian in Russia never thinks the police or a social worker that is rude to him is because of their hatred for russians, but he might think so if he was in the ukraine.
Stephen Pinker is to to Capitalism what Timothy Leary was to LSD.
22:55 Divorce lawyer ending up with all the money 😀
Hilarious
1:28:59 – 1:31:49
"Prejudice" is the act of pre-judging. When someone waits to assess the behavior or cultural patterns of another person or a group of people until after the behavior is clearly demonstrated, that is called "judging".
Wasn't he on the epstein flights?
It's somewhat comical but also off putting to me that when Steven gets to the main point of his initial explanation of why he chose to study common knowledge and it's relevance, Michael Sherman starts flipping through his notes or bookmarks to find the next thing he wants to ask Steven to talk about, completely missing the point he was trying to make that whole time.
When you start assuming you know what goes on in other people’s minds and / or what they know, you’re wrong
1:04:06 to 1:05:15 – Rebecca Tuvel actually did get canceled for her “In Defense of Transracialism” article. I wrote an article about it on my blog.
Pinker is the Master at laboriously articulating the obvious.
How do we get the slaves to recognize they don't need masters who pretend to represent them when they use violent forced unity and mass extortion and bribery with massive debt spending that destroys the faith-based currency while not keeping us safe from crime, no preserving our rights, not following the text of the Constitution, and literally destroying so many lives and property via never-ending wars?
I keep seeing Pinker described as a conservative. Is that right?
"Please pass the salt" works for me and doesn't sound like you are a silly person.
Why pick on hyperinflation when inflation alone means every dollar loses value thanks to theft by the rulers and $37 trillion in debt.
I've read all of Pinker's books and used to idolize him. Then he blocked me on x for a snarky comment, lol. Since then I've become a conservative, ironically it was him mentioning Thomas Sowell in one of his books that made me seek out the arguments from the Right. But I still like to hear from all sides.
Great talk! You're my fav podcast, Shermer. I look forward to the book
1:29:07
“Maybe there are some things better left unresearched.”
Assuming such information is well researched and affirmed, what knowledge should we be forbidden from knowing for the sole sake of capitulating to political correctness?
Looking forward to this – Pinker is a legend in this game and has insightful commentary on so many separate topics.
You don't have to be homosexual to note good looking or 'hot' males and females.
43:36 we don´t actually, as stephen just pointed out, even in the soviet union, donbas was ukrainian, there had been an attempt to settle more ethnic russians there towards the end of the ussr. but in 1991 shortly after the collapse of the soviet union there was a referendum that voted 81,6% in favor of belonging to ukraine. and interstingly enough a very large proportion of these votes came from the very same "russians" that were carted in there. for two reasons, some of them were forcefully relocated there, so the people hated the people that "banished" them there. and of the people that voluntarily settled there, they had similar reasons. they wanted to get away from the central authority and the watchful eyes of the state. moving to donbas entailed certain freedoms by soviet standards. so of course once the hated regime fell, these russians didn´t want to have anything to do with russia anymore. becasue they didn´t really trust that there wouldn´t be the next communist tsar taking power right back.
In some cases, Pinker is very shallow. For example: why would Ukranians in the Donbass nit have the right to leave Ukraine, since there is a genozide against then going on?
Here's the problem with the argument that racial differences shouldn't be studied because if so it'll produce individualised racism: If it produces individualised hate against the other group, because they are now all assumed to be guilty of racism if they get more jobs, make more discoveries etc., then all you're doing is shifting who takes the completely unjustified hate.
Instead of having a Black person walking around who deserves a job and can't get it, you have a white person walking around assumed to be guilty of racism when he isn't. You might say, oh, the dominant group can just suck it up, they have the resources, and sure, the people actually giving out the jobs can arguably take the punch. The trouble is that it bleeds out into poor people who can't take the punch, because they're "part of that system of bias which we KNOW exists since it CANNOT be the case that some races are worse at some things" and they end up taking all the punches, because nobody's going to even try to punch a CEO. It does nothing to the CEO. But that regular person can be cancelled, stripped of his livelihood, and ruined. All because of a well-intentioned lie, but still a lie.
Redistributing harm is probably fine if you can spread it around. But redistributing it for the sake of redistributing it seems wrong and wasteful.
It would be better to let people study differences and champion Affirmative Action as a societal good, rather than lie to people, if accepting the lie means we beat people to death for not directly perceiving that the lie is true.
What a wonderful world it is with Michael Shermer and Steven Pinker in it! We may not like a lot of what you criticize, but you are usually right and all of us benefit from you, because we get to re-set the clock. Both of you have been pushing back wave after wave of nonsense and ignorance dressed up as alternative facts, and my favorite quote from Michael is when he was on the late Larry King's show with Stan Fridman and other UFO researchers and Michael said something like this, 'At least someone give us a ashtray from the spacecraft you were abducted to, anything a door handle, a coffee cup!' Steven's correction of 'Begs the truth', I think is one of the corrections a lot of us made to our everyday English, except of course, British people, who say it to mean 'raises a question'!
You had to flip 8 tracks too, and they were worse than cassettes because it would stop in the middle of a song to be flipped, unlike a cassette.
Pinker knew Epstein. Talk about the break down of norms.
Pinker can hardly be called a scientist these days. He seems to think that andrea dworkin and susan brownmiller are scientific sources.
It is sad that real scientists such as Donald Dutton are ignored while weirdos who love dworkin and brownmiller such as pinker are taken seriusly.
Language models do reason, they hallucinate because we inadvertently trained them to using RLHF. Please stop listening to Gary Marcus…
So, the whole divide and conquer political strategy can be summed up by creating apparent common knowledge on both sides so nothing can even be spoken about in a productive way?
Once in college a girl asked if I wanted to come up to her room to share some chips. Years later I realized she may have been implying something else… I wonder how many more hints I've missed. I'm just a socially awkward nerd…
21:00 – If two people flip a coin to decide which of two places to go to, the chances of them meeting is 50% – not 25%.
Steven is one of those people from the 1900s that I am so glad gets to see all of the things going on right now after the lull in academic thought quality of the 90s and 2000s. We are all blessed to have a mind as fun as yours looking at all of this with us Mr Pinker.
i'm sorry. pinker just doesn't get that we are just another species of great apes who almost exclusively act on intuition/instinct. he is an elitist. his description of what goes 2 generals minds as they contemplate a joint action against a common enemy is laughable. he definitely lives on another planet from me and i would guess mine is much more highly populated than his. unfortunately mine is the plant with trump, mamdani, putin, hamas, iran, nuclear weapons all around, rising seas . . .
i agree with jeffersonideal below.
Has Pinkner written anything on, changing social convention? I mean organically and purposely?
Larga vida al rey Carlos III
Haven't read Pinker since the blank slate. Enlightenment Now really turned me off. I really felt he misjudged the situation. It seems he's moved onto a more interesting topic.
As an aside, when I was 20 I posted "agreeing to netflix and chill is consent" on social media. You wouldn't believe the replies! You'd think I kicked a bee's nest.
Not going to untangle this knot of knowledge.
No what the title it's a talk about common knowledge—totally corupt for the last 6 months, nonstop, He;s got no shame.,,, pushing a book.
very many ck podcast posts ck ck ck ck ck ck ck ck ck ck podcast posts
I am a simple man, I see Shermer and Pinker I clic
I had a dream about a guy that I worked with that I grew to hate. In the dream we were in a small boat and he fell out. My dilemma was should I help him get back in. I didn't want to help him back in but he might be able to get back in by himself. Then he would be very mad. He was very vindictive.
So these two "rationalists" end up advocating we walk away scientific analysis of human race and genetics. That tells you just how important it is.
37:19. Is this something that we’re losing as a society? I feel people are too afraid to publicly enforce these norms out of fear of cancel culture and woke backlash etc.