Steven Pinker is a well-known academic and public intellectual in the US. I appreciate much of Pinker’s writing. He seems relatively optimistic about what we have achieved and can achieve. He is a big promoter of rationality and using rationality to combat nonsense. You might think that was what all academics are doing, but that isn’t always true.
Wandering Into Rationality Debates
In decision-making there are a number of big rifts that Pinker happily marches into. He isn’t obviously in any camp. He happily references Gigerenzer’s generous view of rationality — that we are pretty good most of the time. At the same time, Pinker acknowledges that those who find us humans sadly lacking in rationality aren’t totally wrong. Yes, we do have biases, but a lot of the time these biases play out when we don’t care about getting it right or the cost to erring one way is much lower than erring in another. Excessive fear of others can hurt society, but it doesn’t always harm those with the excessive fear too much.
We also don’t necessarily do well in unfamiliar situations. This leads Pinker happily to speak to the evolutionary psychologists who make the point that our brains can be great at things like cheater detection. This is because spotting cheats is what humans have long trained for. When presented with the same problem in formal logic we are disappointing. We might have pretty good logical intuitions but that doesn’t mean formal logic is our thing. Many blame our evolutionary ancestors. Pinker feels the need to stand up for them. They weren’t idiots. They might not do great if they appeared in a city today, but they made a lot of choices that worked for them — or else they wouldn’t be our ancestors.
The Nobel Disease
One of the things it is always worth remembering is that brilliance is often context specific. Part of the problem with massive success is (I imagine and would love to learn firsthand) is that you end up believing you are brilliant at everything. This may lead to the Nobel Disease, where Nobel prize winners — in many ways brilliant people — have some really weird ideas. Talented people get convinced that they are right even when few agree. These talented people have often bucked conventional reason and been proved right so plough on with strange beliefs even when everyone else is saying “what are you doing?”
The point is that you might be great in one field, but it doesn’t mean you will be great in another. You see this in politics a lot. Talented people think they can do anything, and they can’t, e.g., Michael Bloomberg, Elon Musk? Often, it is fun to watch the ultra-rich waste their money and sometimes it just tragic for everyone.
The lesson society could learn is to lose some deference. A person may be genuinely great at something, but they can be a complete idiot at another intellectual pursuit. Always remember it the quality of the idea that matters, not the credentials of the person.
Dormitive Properties of Academia
Pinker notes a few problems in the way we, mostly academics, speak of the world. Moliere’s play, The Imaginary Invalid, satirizes a physician but it works for many academic papers that I have seen.
… opium makes people sleepy because of its dormitive power…
Pinker, 2021, page 11
I see this as a particular risk in consumer behavior papers. (Just to show that I have criticism of all areas — see some of my negative comments on marketing strategy that are at the end of this piece). When you don’t have a consequential dependent variable — an end-result metric that someone outside academia cares about — you risk illustrating the connection between two things that aren’t really meaningfully distinct. Moliere’s physician seems to have advanced knowledge by examining opium and noting it has dormitive power, but knowledge hasn’t really advanced. Like some academic papers it tells you what you already knew but with fancier terminology.
Using Rationality To Combat Nonsense
Pinker referenced Daryl Bem’s paper in a prestigious psychology journal that “showed” the existence of psychic powers (Testing Psychic Powers). I must confess I found Bem’s paper quite fun. I couldn’t tell if it was satire or not, but it had to be. Surely it had to be???
The challenge is that despite years of free public education many people believe in nonsense.
Three quarters of Americans believe in at least one phenomenon that defies the laws of science, including psychic healing (55 percent), extrasensory perception (41 percent), haunted houses (37 percent), and ghosts (32 percent) — which also means that some people believe in houses haunted by ghosts without believing in ghosts.
Piker, 2021, page 6
Many beliefs can be pretty harmless. Some waste small amounts of money on astrologers. Some people might lose a bit of money hastily selling a house that they think is haunted. That said, most people who make up their own science don’t do themselves much harm personally. Indeed, they may even get appointed United States Secretary of Health and Human Services. The challenge is that we miss out on the chance to address problems and/or make the world better that would come if we saw the world more clearly. Better systems of government, more effective vaccines, improved farming methods, new tech doesn’t arise from talking to ghosts. Rational approaches can help to make the world better.
Pinker’s book seeks to give us a path towards using rationality to combat nonsense. It was published in 2021. Not sure things have necessarily improved too much since so we might wonder whether it worked but it has got to be worth a try.
For some criticisms of marketing strategy papers see Academics Must Do Good Work To Be Relevant, Another Total Q Mystery, What Can The Marketing-Finance Interface Tell Us About Witchcraft Trials?, and Net Promoter Score: Sadly Not As Magical As Supporters Suggest | Marketing Thought
For more by Steven Pinker see A Defense Of Enlightenment Thinking, Writing And The Curse of Knowledge and Nostalgia
For more on rationality see Rationality And Marketing Strategy | Marketing Thought, Should We Get Rid Of Irrationality? Perhaps, What Is Irrationality?, and Selfishness and Rationality
Read: Steven Pinker (2021) Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. New York, NY: Penguin.
