On the other hand, Pinker devotes seven pages to the famous Monty Hall Problem. Instead, Pinker observes, the truly rational thing to do is to shout to the workers: Get off the tracks, there’s a trolley coming! For example, should you shove a fat man to his death to stop a runaway trolley from running over five workers on the tracks? Sometimes, Pinker is amusingly impatient with time-worn conundrums. But, as Pinker points out in discussing the replicability crisis that has embarrassed much of psychology (other than IQ researchers, as he bravely pointed out in 2015):Īs the physicist John Ziman noted in 1978: “The physics of undergraduate text-books is 90% true the contents of the primary research journals of physics is 90% false.” It’s a reminder that Bayesian reasoning recommends against the common practice of using “textbook” as an insult and “scientific revolution” as a compliment. So, much of Rationality won’t be wholly novel to people who, say, had read the classic blogs of the early 2000s. Thus, Rationality is more Pinker in his educator mode than in his polemicist mode (in contrast to his argumentative last book, Enlightenment Now). Rationality is his guide to how to think, a fun textbook version of Pinker’s popular Harvard class General Education 1066: Rationality.
Since the 1990s, Pinker has been a leading spokesman for a sort of ultra-sophisticated common sense. In Steven Pinker’s latest book, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, the best-selling cognitive scientist comes out, perhaps unsurprisingly, in favor of rationality. From my new book review in Taki’s Magazine: He conducts research on language, cognition, and social relations writes for publications such as the New York Times, The Guardian, Time, and The Atlantic and is the author of twelve books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Stuff of Thought, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Sense of Style, Enlightenment Now, and Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matter s. Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Listen to the conversation and find out what happens when an expert on the human mind sits down to discuss intelligence in machines with two data scientists! Do we think rising platforms like ChatGPT are going to be running the world anytime soon? Does technology not only have the ability to be intelligent, but also rational? In this episode we get the pleasure of discussing these issues with Steven Pinker, an experimental cognitive psychologist and a popular writer on language, mind, and human nature.
This month, we are diving into the important and currently hot topic of artificial intelligence.
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