Top Quotes: “Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters” — Steven Pinker
“For all the deadly effectiveness of the San’s technology, they have survived in an unforgiving desert for more than a hundred thousand years without exterminating the animals they depend on. During a drought, they think ahead to what would happen if they killed the last plant or animal of its kind, and they spare the members of the threatened species. They tailor their conservation plans to the different vulnerabilities of plants, which cannot migrate but recover quickly when the rains return, and animals, which can survive a drought but build back their numbers slowly. And they enforce these conservation efforts against the constant temptation of poaching (everyone feeling they should exploit the scarce species, because if they don’t, everyone else will) with an extension of the norms of reciprocity and collective well-being that govern all their resources. It is unthinkable for a San hunter not to share meat with an empty-handed bandmate, or to exclude a neighboring band driven from their drought-stricken territory, since they know that memories are long and some day fortunes may reverse.”
“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.”
“Some of today’s florid outbursts of irrationality may be understood as the rational pursuit of goals other than an objective understanding of the world.”
“People are prone to affirming the consequent, confusing “p implies Q” with “Q implies P.” That’s why in the Wason selection task, so many people who were asked to verify “If D then 3” turn over the 3 card. It’s why conservative politicians encourage voters to slide from “If someone is a socialist, he probably is a Democrat” to “If someone is a Democrat, he probably is a socialist.” It’s why crackpots proclaim that all of history’s great geniuses were laughed at in their era, forgetting that “If genius, then laughed at” does not imply “If laughed at, then genius.””
“As the economist Max Roser points out, news sites could have run the headline 137,000 PEOPLE ESCAPED EXTREME POVERTY YESTERDAY every day for the past twenty-five years. But they never ran the headline, because there was never a Thursday in October in which it suddenly happened. So one of the greatest developments in human history — a billion and a quarter people escaping from squalor — has gone unnoticed.”
“The notorious replication failures come from studies that attracted attention because their findings were so counterintuitive. Holding a warm mug makes you friendlier. (“Warm”-get it?) Seeing fast-food logos makes you impatient. Holding a pen between your teeth makes cartoons seem funnier, because it forces your lips into a little smile. People who are asked to lie in writing have positive feelings about hand soap; people who are asked to lie aloud have positive feelings about mouthwash. Any reader of popular science knows of other cute findings which turned out to be suitable for the satirical Journal of Irreproducible Results.”
“Another problem with using a base rate as the prior is that base rates can change, and sometimes quickly. Forty years ago around a tenth of veterinary students were women; today it’s closer to nine tenths.”
“A bored law student, Tyler Vigen, wrote a program that scrapes the web for datasets with meaningless correlations just to show how prevalent they are. The number of murders by steam or hot objects, for example, correlates highly with the age of the reigning Miss America. And the divorce rate in Maine closely tracks national consumption of margarine.”
“People’s attention gets drawn to an event because it is unusual and they fail to anticipate that anything associated with that event will probably not be quite as unusual as that event was. Instead, they come up with fallacious causal explanations for what in fact is a statistical inevitability.
A tragic example is the illusion that criticism works better than praise, and punishment better than reward. We criticize students when they perform badly. But whatever bad luck cursed that performance is unlikely to be repeated in the next attempt, so they’re bound to improve, tricking us into thinking that punishment works. We praise them when they do well, but lightning doesn’t strike twice, so they’re unlikely to match that feat the next time, fooling us into thinking that praise is counterproductive.”
“Equally meaninglessly, a slumping team will improve after the coach is fired. After a spree of horrific crimes is splashed across the papers, politicians intervene with SWAT teams, military equipment, Neighborhood Watch signs, and other gimmicks, and sure enough, the following month they congratulate themselves because the crime rate is not as high. Psychotherapists, too, regardless of their flavor of talking cure, can declare unearned victory after treating a patient who comes in with a bout of severe anxiety or depression.”
“Does Fox News make people more conservative, or do conservatives gravitate to Fox News? When Fox News debuted in 1996, different cable companies added it to their lineups haphazardly over the next five years. Economists took advantage of the happenstance during the half decade and found that towns with Fox News in their cable lineups voted 0.4 to 0.7 points more Republican than towns that had to watch something else. That’s a big enough difference to swing a close election.”
“In a comparison across cable markets, the lower the channel number of Fox News relative to other news networks, the larger the Republican vote.”
“If you don’t suffer a stressful event, your genes barely matter: regardless of your genome, the chance of a depressive episode is less than one percent. But if you do suffer a stressful event. your genes matter a lot: a full dose of genes associated with escaping depression keeps the risk of getting depressed at 6 percent (lowest line); a full dose of genes associated with suffering depression more than doubles the risk to 14 percent (highest line). The interaction tells us not only that both genes and environment are important but that they seem to have their effects on the same link in the causal chain. The genes that these twins share to different degrees are not genes for depression per se; they are genes for vulnerability or resilience to stressful experiences.”
“Many superstitions originate in overinterpreting coincidences, failing to calibrate evidence against priors, overgeneralizing from anecdotes, and leaping from correlation to causation. A prime example is the misconception that vaccines cause autism, reinforced by the observation that autistic symptoms appear, co-incidentally, around the age at which children are first inoculated. And all of them represent failures of critical thinking and of the grounding of belief in evidence; that’s what entitles us to say they’re false in the first place. Yet nothing from the cognitive psychology lab could have predicted QAnon, nor are its adherents likely to be disabused by a tutorial in logic or probability.
A second unpromising lead is to blame today’s irrationality on the current scapegoat for everything, social media. Conspiracy theories and viral falsehoods are probably as old as language. What are the accounts of miracles in scriptures, after all, but fake news about paranormal phenomena? For centuries Jews have been accused of conspiring to poison wells, sacrifice Christian children, control the world economy, and foment communist uprisings. At many times in history, other races, minorities, and guilds have also been credited with nefarious plots and targeted with violence. The political scientists Joseph Uscinski and Joseph Parent tracked the popularity of conspiracy theories in letters to the editor of major American newspapers from 1890 to 2010 and found no change over that period; nor did the numbers rise in the subsequent decade. As for fake news, before it was disseminated on Twitter and Facebook, outlandish episodes which happened to a friend of a friend were circulated as urban legends (the Hippie Babysitter, the Kentucky Fried Rat, Halloween Sadists) or emblazoned on the covers of supermarket tabloids (BABY BORN TALKING: DESCRIBES HEAVEN; DICK CHENEY IS A ROBOT; SURGEONS TRANSPLANT YOUNG BOY’S HEAD ONTO HIS SISTER’s BODy).”
“While people often try to get away with lame arguments for their own positions, they are quick to spot fallacies in other people’s arguments. Fortunately, this hypocrisy can be mobilized to make us more rational collectively than any of us is individually. The wisecrack circulated among veterans of committees that the IQ of a group is equal to the lowest IQ of any member of the group divided by the size of the group turns out to be exactly wrong. When people evaluate an idea in small groups with the right chemistry, which is that they don’t agree on everything but have a common interest in finding the truth, they catch on to each other’s fallacies and blind spots, and usually the truth wins. When individuals are given the Wason selection task, for example, only one in ten picks the right cards, but when they are put in groups, around seven in ten get it right. All it takes is for one member to see the correct answer, and almost always that person persuades the others.”
“Holders of weird beliefs often don’t have the courage of their convictions. Though millions of people endorsed the rumor that Hillary Clinton ran a child sex trafficking ring out of the basement of the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington (the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, a predecessor of QAnon), virtually none took steps commensurate with such an atrocity, such as calling the police. The righteous response of one of them was to leave a one-star review on Google. (“The pizza was incredibly undercooked. Suspicious professionally dressed men by the bar area that looked like regulars kept staring at my son and other kids in the place.”) It’s hardly the response most of us would have if we literally thought that children were being raped in the basement. At least Edgar Welch, the man who burst into the pizzeria with his gun blazing in a heroic attempt to rescue the children, took his beliefs seriously. The millions of others must have believed the rumor in a very different sense of “believe.”
Mercier also points out that impassioned believers in vast nefarious conspiracies, like the 9/11 Truthers and the chemtrail theorists (who hold that the water-vapor contrails left by jetliners are chemicals dispensed in a secret government program to drug the population), publish their manifestos and hold their meetings in the open, despite their belief in a brutally effective plot by an omnipotent regime to suppress brave truth-tellers like them. It’s not the strategy you see from dissidents in undeniably repressive regimes like North Korea or Saudi Arabia. Mercier, invoking a distinction made by Sperber, proposes that conspiracy theories and other weird beliefs are reflective, the result of conscious cogitation and theorizing, rather than intuitive, the convictions we feel in our bones. It’s a powerful distinction, though I draw it a bit differently, closer to the contrast that the social psychologist Robert Abelson (and the comedian George Carlin) drew between distal and testable beliefs.
People divide their worlds into two zones. One consists of the physical objects around them, the other people they deal with face to face, the memory of their interactions, and the rules and norms that regulate their lives. People have mostly accurate beliefs about this zone, and they reason rationally within it. Within this zone, they believe there’s a real world and that beliefs about it are true or false. They have no choice: that’s the only way to keep gas in the car, money in the bank, and the kids clothed and fed. Call it the reality mindset. The other zone is the world beyond immediate experience: the distant past, the unknowable future, faraway peoples and places, remote corridors of power, the microscopic, the cosmic, the counterfactual, the metaphysical. People may entertain notions about what happens in these zones, but they have no way of finding out, and anyway it makes no discernible difference to their lives.”
“The best way to inhibit the spread of dubious news is to pressure the spreaders to act on it: to call the police, rather than leaving a one-star review.”
“Farley tried to awaken people to the enormity of the damage wreaked by failures of critical thinking by listing every authenticated case he could find. From 1970 through 2009, but mostly in the last decade in that range, he documented 368,379 people killed, more than 300,000 injured, and $2.8 billion in economic damages from blunders in critical thinking. They include people killing themselves or their children by rejecting conventional medical treatments or using herbal, homeopathic, holistic, and other quack cures; mass suicides by members of apocalyptic cults; murders of witches, sorcerers, and the people they cursed; guileless victims bilked out of their savings by psychics, astrologers, and other charlatans; scofflaws and vigilantes arrested for acting on conspiratorial delusions; and economic panics from superstitions and false rumors.”
