Steven Pinker | Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters | Talks at Google

Steven Pinker discusses his book “Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters.“ Today humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding – and also appears to be losing its mind. How can a species that doubled its lifespan, sequenced its genome, and developed vaccines for Covid-19 in less than a year produce so much fake news, quack cures, conspiracy theories, and “post-truth” rhetoric? Pinker rejects the cynical cliché that humans are simply irrational cavemen out of time saddled with biases, fallacies, and illusions. After all, we discovered the laws of nature, and set out the benchmarks for rationality itself. We actually think in ways that are sensible in the low-tech contexts in which we spend most of our lives, but fail to take advantage of the powerful tools of reasoning we’ve discovered over the millennia: logic, critical thinking, probability, correlation and causation, and optimal ways to update beliefs and commit to choices individually and with others. These tools are not a standard part of our education, and have never been presented clearly and entertainingly in a single book--until now. Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in cognition, language, and social relations. He grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard. Currently Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. Steven has won many prizes for his research, his teaching, and his books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Sense of Style, and Enlightenment Now. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Humanist of the Year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates, and one of Foreign Policy’s World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals and Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the World. He was Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and writes frequently for The New York Times, The Guardian, and other publications. Get the book here: Moderated by Brian Welle.