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  • all right.

  • I have the distinct pleasure today of being able to sit down and talk to Dr Steven Pinker, Harvard University, who's just written a new book, May.

  • He's written many books, but this is the newest one.

  • It's called Enlightenment now, and it's Ah, New York Times bestseller for seven weeks.

  • So that's a great accomplishment.

  • And Dr Baker is indicated to me that it's doing its this.

  • It's doing better than his other books have, and and and they've also done very well.

  • So that's really something.

  • So Steven Baker is the Harvard College professor of psychology at Harvard University.

  • He's a two time Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of many awards for his research.

  • Teaching and Books is being named one of times 100 most influential people on one of foreign policies, 100 leading global fakers.

  • His books include The Stuff of Thought, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Blank Slate and The Sense of Style.

  • And so I'm welcoming Dr Baker, obviously, and I'd like him to start telling us to start by telling us about the book itself, and then we'll talk about broader issues and about the other books.

  • He's written and not sort of thing.

  • Well, the book's subtitle is The Case or Reason.

  • Science, Humanism and Progress.

  • I'll begin with the progress because that was the epiphany that, more than anything inspired the book I did in a previous book, The Better Angels of Our Nature.

  • When I was surprised to come across data sets showing that many measures of violence, it declined.

  • Over the course of history, I was stunned to see a graph that showed the rates of homicide from England and other Western European countries from the 13 hundreds to the 20th century showing a decline of anywhere from 35 to 50 in the chances of getting murdered.

  • When I, uh, called attention to this fact in a block post, I then got correspondents from historians from international relations.

  • Scholars from sociologists say you could have mentioned other declines.

  • Another decline of violence and one war scholar should be that the greater death of war have plummeted.

  • Another showed me that rates of domestic violence have gone down.

  • Still another that rates of child abuse is going down, and I realized at the time that it was important story here that was, uh, that had to be told that these different declines of violence ought to be presented to the world in between a single pair of covers just because it didn't seem to be something of a pattern and as a psychologist had opened up the challenge of how to explain it.

  • First of all, how do you explain the fact that there's been there is so much violence security affairs, but also the fact that it can be brought down?

  • We'll have a similar set of epiphanies that led to the writing of enlightenment.

  • Now, when, after they're angels published, I started to come across data showing that other aspects of human well being approved.

  • The rate of extreme poverty had plummeted by about 50% just in three decades and now stands less than 10%.

  • Life expectancy has been increasing all over the world, including the poorest parts of the world.

  • Uh, the number of kids going to school has increased, including girls.

  • More than 90% of people under the age of 25 on the planet are literate.

  • Now we have more leisure time.

  • We're safer in measure after measure.

  • Life has been getting better, and it's not the kind of development that you could learn about reading the papers.

  • Quite the contrary, because journalism covers what goes wrong, not what goes right.

  • You could easily come away with the impression that the world is getting worse and worse as a kind of statistical illusion of feeding a cognitive bias on DDE.

  • Not realize until you looked at data sets.

  • How many ways in which life has I improved, including measures like war and crime, which would when my guests are going in the wrong direction is supposed to be the right direction that combined that.

  • The other motivation for the book was a set of attacks on the application of science, to the traditional domains of the humanities, to history, to the arts, to morality, to language.

  • Ah, an effort that I I think is quite salubrious.

  • The fact that that scientific insights are being brought to bear on, um on human affairs and how could they not given the art society are, in a sense, products of our psychology products of human nature.

  • But I'm in a lot of intellectual life.

  • There's bitter resentment to any application of scientific ideas or the scientific mind set to human affairs.

  • This was first noted by C.

  • P.

  • Snow in this famous lectures and accuracy of the early rate fifties early 19 sixties, but the conflict is very much with us.

  • I wrote an essay called Science Is Not Your Enemy, which were published The New Republican, which went viral.

  • That was the immediate kickoff for the proposal that ended up dedicated like now I was involved in something of, ah, literary spat with with Leon Wieseltier and editor of The New Republic.

  • But I quickly realized that two guys having an argument is not enoughto plump out a book.

  • And so I had the centerpiece of the book Just be the documentation of a fact that most people are unaware off.

  • Namely, that in most measures, life has gotten better over time.

  • Now, as with the better angels of our nature, I didn't want to just present Ah, bunch of grants alike did present many grafts, but I wanted to explain them.

  • It seemed to me that if we if there was any overarching explanation as to why life get got better, it's that people in the past thought that by understanding how the world works, putting ourselves we could try to solve problems.

  • Remember what works?

  • Drop, drop, the failures.

  • And as we accumulate our cultural knowledge, we can improve our well being.

  • And I attribute that mindset to the Enlightenment, the idea that we can use knowledge to improve human well being that I've met that might sound almost too banal and that try to be worth defending.

  • No, I don't think it does.

  • Said so.

  • I thought that those ideals very much needed a defense.

  • Yeah.

  • Okay, so you're leaving a number of things together.

  • So the first is your discovery that if you look at the data that things were getting better at a rate that's so remarkable, that is really nothing short of miraculous.

  • And you've produced dozens of graphs showing that in enlightenment.

  • Now, I noticed the same thing about three years ago when I was working for a U.

  • N.

  • Panel on economic sustainability theory.

  • You for that?

  • For the secretary General, the original narrative was extremely pessimistic detail how we were despoiling the planet and how everything was getting works and how we were at a teach others throats.

  • And I started to read extremely widely, and I found that on measure after measure, with some notable exceptions, like ocean oceanic overfishing, we have being doing so staggeringly much better in the last 150 years that you can't believe it on almost every on almost every measure you can imagine.

  • Which is exactly what your detail.

  • Oh, enlightenment Now and and then no, that's a secret.

  • Let's say people don't know about it and and that's strange.

  • And then you also associate it with a critique of the of the Enlightenment and scientific rationality.

  • And it seems to me that you're implying.

  • Or perhaps you're stating explicitly that you're stating explicitly that there's a connection between the pessimism and the lack of knowledge.

  • Both this and the critique of the Enlightenment and rationality, because there's a question here if things were getting so much better.

  • And if the news is overwhelming on that front, I mean, some of the things you outlined are like the or that the deeper decreases in starvation, I suppose of the most remarkable and the provision of bountiful food on less and less far, but which is not something that people know.

  • Like if all this is happening, why don't we know about it.

  • And how is late to the How do you think if if it all, it's late to the critique of enlightenment rationality.

  • Yeah, One of the reasons is untrue.

  • Action between the nature of journalism and the nature of cognition, namely, news is about what happens, not what doesn't happened.

  • And a lot of the very beneficial developments consists of things that don't happen.

  • Countries that are at peace, that used to be, Oh, I move you kids who are not starving terrorist attacks that do not happen.

  • You never see a journalist saying I'm reporting live from a country that's been apiece for 40 years.

  • But if a war breaks out, you could be sure that we'll hear about it all the more.

  • So now that that a majority of humanity consists of on the spot video journalists, thanks to smart phones.

  • Also, uh, bad things could happen quickly.

  • Things could blow up worse.

  • Come start, A massacre could happen.

  • But good things aren't built in a day, and they often consist of incremental improvements a few percentage points a year that the compound that accumulate.

  • But that can never make the news because I've never happened.

  • All of a sentence on a Thursday together without the cognitive impediments to understanding the state of the world.

  • The fact that news reports memorable events and we know from the study of the cognition of risk and probability from Daniel complimented me, Mr Ski, that we tend to assess probability and risk I ah, a shortcut called the availability heuristic namely, the easier it is to I've dreaded up an example for memory, the more likely we think something is.

  • So people think that tornadoes kill a lot of people, but they don't realize that falling off ladders kills far more people.

  • I just saw someone falls off a ladder.

  • It doesn't make the news.

  • But when there's a tornado, guys, do you know that solar power kills more people than nuclear power every year?

  • I didn't did not know that, but it doesn't surprise me because nuclear power kills.

  • No one supposes installers fall off from That's exactly right.

  • Installers full off roofs.

  • Yeah, Okay.

  • So for example Yeah, exactly.

  • And well, so that's interesting.

  • So you could imagine that.

  • So good news or bad news, his son, it's dramatic.

  • We're tilted towards the processing of negative information in any case that way don't naturally computer ratio between occurrences and non occurrences, which is, of course, one goes into probability and rational assessment of risk and probability.

  • So there's that.

  • But it's It's more than that in that, because in intellectual life, in large parts of academia, in in, uh, commentary, taters and pundits, there is an ideology of of decline goes back to the 19th century, part of the counter and light that arose in as a reaction to enlightenment, hopes for for progress and rationality.

  • That said that that the holes that society is is Western civilization is teetering on the brink, or it's circling on circling the drain, and it's gonna collapse any any time now.

  • And it's up to the intellectuals and commentators and, uh, Thio point out how decadent degenerate society is, and people like that musical progress comes on.

  • So is an affront.

  • The reaction is, hey, week, and we've been warning all of you about how society is on the verge of collapse.

  • Don't come around and tell us that everything is going going fine.

  • What are we gonna do now?

  • And you identify a lot of that with the romantic types like Russo.

  • And when I was reading, I wondered, too, the There's a powerful Marxist narrative that's run its course for about 130 years, to that's predicated on the idea that there is a oppressed class and an oppressor class.

  • And that narrative seems also to thrive on or to be affronted by, the idea that the current the current system might be producing benefits across the board.

  • I think you do, in fact, in one part of the book asked about whether or not these benefits are only accruing, for example, to the rich.

  • And that doesn't seem to be the case.

  • A ce faras As far as the data indicate that affair no, quite the contrary.

  • The most dramatic improvements have Bennett be at the bottom among re extreme poor, where the proportion of the world's population living in extreme poverty is falling over the last couple of centuries, from probably around 90% to less than 10% and the United Nations that sends one of its millennia element goals to eliminate extreme poverty everywhere.

  • Five year 2030.

  • That's funny, too optimistic, but the fact that it could be set as a a SZ a plausible aspiration is itself astonishing.

  • Well, I know the U.

  • N had said, as one of its millennial calls, the having of absolute poverty between 4015 and that was accomplished by 2012.

  • Ahead of schedule, yes, be headline every Marxism has.

  • Ah, a complicated relationship to progress because Marxist doctrine actually does lay out a halfway to progress.

  • Unfortunately, that pathway consists of violet class conflict I It isn't the enlightenment ideal of progress through three problem solving from the prosaic the belief that nature throws problems at us and that if we apply brainpower, weaken gradually chip away at your mantra.

  • Mentally of progress is is quite different.

  • And you're right that there is a a strong that their critiques of progress both from the left and from the right.

  • But from from the left there is a kind of contempt for institutions like uh like markets like liberal democracy that deserve a lot of the credit for the progress that we've made in that Me to Lisa in the academic left a ah despising of the very idea of progress, and I found that the only political faction is actually sympathetic to progress of libertarians have been a number of rational optimists books in the last decade by people like Matt Ridley and Ron Bailey and Johan Norberg that, uh, that do have overlapping addition to the one that I took on light but now nearly documenting progress.

  • But both from the the academic left and from the political right, there has been a, uh, ah, contempt for the notion of progress or for their different reasons in academia.

  • It goes back to the romantics to Russo, as you mentioned, but also to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, the existentialists, the critical theorists of Frankfurt school, large swaths of the academic humanity's actually to test the Enlightenment.

  • Ironically enough, not now, by no means all of us.

  • But there's a significant faction.

  • Yeah, well, question there.

  • I guess in part is why I mean, one of the things that really struck me as I've gone through this material over the last years is that this is really good news, particularly it doesn't really matter with your on the left or the right if you're on the left.

  • You think that the fact that this the poorest of the poor are being lifted out of their abject, absolute, abject mystery and rate.

  • It's just, I don't think you could hope for a faster improvement, no matter how optimistic you were.

  • And then on the right.

  • Of course, the fact that the benefits of liberal democracy, let's say and free markets are driving this in large part, you think would also be a cause for celebration.

  • So Thursday you talked about the availability heuristic and some of the role that the press might be playing the fact that negative events stand out.

  • We can also see naked events all over the world now so and we can't fake of all over the world.

  • Whenever you hear about a negative event, it is if it's happening next door is and is a threat.

  • So are the rest of our news is exaggerated and the coverage is exaggerated.

  • But there still seems to me to be this this mystery at the bottom of all this, which is in the face of sex, radically good news.

  • Why is there such an insistence that the system is corrupt, that we're going to hell in a handbasket than that?

  • You know, human beings are a cancer on the planet and everything is heading towards the apocalypse.

  • It's It's so it's so deep and it doesn't seem to be moved by the facts much.

  • I kind of think sometimes that it's a hangover from the Cold War.

  • You know, that was so deeply pessimistic for so long.

  • I it goes back before the Cold War.

  • Certainly as a psychological syndrome, it goes back at least of the Old Testament prophets who combined a social criticism with foretelling, ah, apocalyptic disaster that's let that syndrome.

  • That combination of moral schooling with predictions of doom, um, is something that our species quite naturally falls into.

  • Part of it is, I think, frankly, a certain amount of inter professional competition that society has various elites.

  • Ah, there's the politicians, the business people, the military, religious elites, the academics, journalists.

  • They're always kind of competing for status.

  • And since intellectuals don't deserve a whole lot of credit for getting society to run for putting food in the stores, and that keeping the peace and, uh, protecting the streets, it's very easy to look down on other societal elites on on government, on business and to say Well, you guys are all failing and we're the ones who are morally refined enough to point it out.

  • I wouldn't put down just sheer human competitiveness.

  • I'm not the first to say this, that one of my favorite explanations of the veneration of the past of a golden age is consumed.

  • Thomas Hearts, who said Competition of Praise, inclined to a reverence of antiquity or men contend with living, not with the dead.

  • Yeah, but it also seems that the there's a certain amount of resentment that is driving that as well.

  • And that would go along with the status competition because there's anger.

  • I suppose if you're a member of any lead group to see that your paradigm, let's say, isn't leading the charge forward?

  • Uh, that's right.

  • And you talked about the astonishing decline in global poverty, and part of that story is it did not come about through massive redistribution, which, or for many people on the left, was the only route to lifting up the poor, namely took to redistribute resources.

  • Now there have been, of course, just adjustment.

  • See the chocks.

  • The fact that China and India and Bangladesh Indonesia have risen out of poverty came in part of the expense of manufacturing jobs in the United.

  • Yeah, yeah, that's not exactly what people meant by redistribution, and it literally is a redistribution of resources, although it is a shaking up of the economies of many, many nations.

  • But this massive, uh, increase in the wealth of Asian countries did not come because resources were worshipped from wealthy west to the impoverished East.

  • Right?

  • So that's also a threat to the doctor in itself, a direct threat.

  • The fact that wealth is being produced and it's being distributed to people at the low end means that implies that that redistributive philosophy is likely in error.

  • And you can understand why that might be regarded as a catastrophic threat, particularly the people on the radical left.

  • Well, certainly certainly for for radical notions of redistribution.

  • But at the same time, the Maur limited kinds of redistribution that have ah that are ubiquitous in wealthy countries.

  • I have a graph showing that the amount the proportion of GDP allocated to social spending skyrocketed in the 20th century from about 1% to about 22% in every developed country.

  • No exceptions on, and angst ID to spending on the poor on Children on the sick on the unlucky rates of absolute poverty have fallen in in now wealthy countries, so not only have has developed developing world become wealthier on not directly expensive being developed.

  • Well, But it was in the developed world, thanks to some amount of social spending.

  • I guess you could call it redistribution wth e.

  • Even as inequality has risen, poverty has not.

  • Right, right.

  • I wonder.

  • I was just reading a book by Walter Seidel called The Great Leveler.

  • Yeah, very acceptable.

  • Well, it is an excellent book, and one of the things he did was an empirical analysis of left versus right wing governments, I think across the 20th century.

  • But it might have gone farther back now to see if there is any difference in the genie coefficient across the classes of government.

  • And what he found was that there was no difference whatsoever.

  • He makes a fairly strong case that the only redistributive techniques that work are pestilence and war essentially enough because they knock everyone down to zero.

  • But you're making a different case like an incremental case in some sense, which is that governments, perhaps regardless of their ideological Proclivities in the 20th century's as they become more wealthy, they have incrementally devoted a larger part of their of the resources to incremental improvements in You might think about it as investment in the future, rather than redistribution or investment in social capital, education and health care.

  • Of those sorts of things that, well, it's published, um, is probably some combination.

  • It's a combination of investment in public goods because, of course, the whole society is better off if if everyone's educated, also, insurance people support, Ah, a safety net.

  • That's most popular euphemism for social spending because you never know whether it's gonna be you or your mother or your brother who's gonna be who's gonna be in need in the lottery of misfortune.

  • I'm part of a part of it is charity.

  • The modern conscience won't allow the little match girl to freeze to death, right?

  • Yeah, Jones thio very grandpa by the side of Route 66 on.

  • So I think social spending has been pushed along by all three.

  • It wasn't necessary in Some countries probably has reduced the Gini coefficient in western European countries, which have a more aggressive system of taxation than the United States or Canada.

  • But more important than Jenny distribution is that it's reduced the number of people living in poverty, which I are morally relevant, measuring.

  • In any case, yeah, those day things were complicated because obviously you want to raise people out of abject poverty.

  • I mean that that's a That's a zero argument proposition, and that seems to be happening very rapidly.

  • The question after that, I suppose, is to what degree does the remaining degree of inequality that's generated by productive capitalist systems Also constitute a social threat?

  • Is there is evidence it was reviewed best in the spirit level that as inequality increases, rates of male homicide, for example, increases all sorts of other native measures.

  • So there's some weird interaction between raising absolute levels of wealth and ensuring that inequality doesn't.

  • I don't know, we exceed some hypothetical optimum if it needs to be considered in social policy and are there II sites?

  • Um, skeptical re analyses of the data.

  • And I think the spirit level and uh, probably absolute prosperity matters more than inequality in determining social health include, such as happiness, crime, other kinds of social pathologies, like drug addictions.

  • It's not easy to tempt Thio tease them apart.

  • No home, definitely in countries like Sweden are very egalitarian, but also very rich, right, Right are more lopsided, but they're also very poor.

  • And so it takes a little bit of statistical wizardry.

  • Did too tired from a part of my reading.

  • The literature is that it's actually prosperity that is more important than that Inequality.

  • But also and this is Ah, a point in the psychological literature was great, was emphasized by Christina Star Mons and Oh, Bloom, that what people sometimes think of as a sort of aversion to inequality to people having different amounts is actually an aversion to unfairness, right to injustice.

  • Yeah, that people really infuriates people.

  • So they think that the people of the top half ill gotten is right people, if they sense that the system is basically fair, that either greater effort, talent, Oregon luck.

  • Ah, result in an unequal distribution by impartial lottery, for example, that they're okay with that.

  • It's cheating.

  • That really gets on.

  • Yeah, and people are really good at remembering, cheating and recognizing it as well in states where our neighbor s O s.

  • Okay, so there is something we could talk about for a minute because you know, there's a the is political.

  • What he call rumblings about the fact that I think a lot of this is generated by the radical left types, particularly on the campus, is that the system is raped and then it's an oppressive patriarchy and that the reason that people are at the talk is because they played power games and you know, it's this.

  • My sense is that taken stroll is that were were ethnic or racial or gender groups, and we're competing in the Marxist matter, and those who win have won because of oppression.

  • But I know the literature on the relationship between individual individual differences and long term life successes in the West world, and the literature is actually very clear.

  • So intelligence seems to account for about 20% of the various in long term life success, and then trade conscientiousness accounts for perhaps another, maybe 10 to 15%.

  • And then they're smaller contributions off emotional stability and also of trade openness, which seems to be a good predictor of entrepreneurial ability.

  • So it looks like in the West that you can attribute about 40 to 50% of the various Maybe that's a little high, but it's it's not.

  • It's not a radical overestimate to the sorts of individual differences that are associated with productivity, because increases in I Q hierarchy you at higher conscientiousness definitely make you more productive.

  • It seems to me that you can use that as an index off the, um of the of the genuinely meritocratic nature of a culture and also as an index of its willingness to engage in fair play because you'd expect if if your culture is aimed at productivity and it turns out that those were the most of it turns out that the most productive people are in fact differential rewarded.

  • It seems to me to be a reasonable index of the success of this society.

  • Now that Dad is still leaves 50 to 60% of the variance unexplained, and so you can.

  • In there, you could include racism and prejudice and the tyranny of the system and blind luck and physical health, and all the arbitrary and random events that make up that determine whether someone is successful or fails in life.

  • But it does seem to me to provided metric saying that not only is our society crazily productive and reasonably and reasonably good at district distributing the spoils, even though there's still some inequality but a fair bit of the inequalities actually generated as a consequence of differences in genuine productivity that seem reasonable to you.

  • Yeah, it ought to be your obvious and banal, except for the fact that in a lot of intellectual life, the assumption is that the correlation between psychological traits and success zero.

  • So the fact that it's let's say it's 40% less in and saves 33%.

  • That's a lot higher than most people are willing to acknowledge.

  • And what you said is exactly right.

  • That leaves more than half of the variance not to be Corley with individual differences and, of course, on various inequities could go into that 50 or 60%.

  • And they're not mutually exclusive.

  • It seems hard.

  • We know that there's a lot of gaming of the system, particularly in the United States, by by the wealthy on DDE that should obviously be eliminated.

  • It's not meritocratic, it's not fair.

  • It's not productive.

  • We could also ask.

  • Another question is whether the rewards the goat, a talented, are unnecessarily in sectors that lead to what we might call ah, productivity.

  • In the sense of increasing societal wealth, an argument can be made that there's some mis allocation of intellectual resources that we have.

  • The economy is too driven by my finance that the, uh, too many lawsuits legal system to each other on So, uh, we're estimated by intellectuals.

  • This does still leave a a place for criticizing a number of the reason which our economy is set up.

  • There's always scope for improvement.

  • Yes, and we were talking about why, despite the fact that a fair bit of the various or third to 1/2 of the variance in life success is taken up by, let's say, individual attributes, there's still room for a systemic critique.

  • That's palate.

  • Yeah, what one of the pathologies of intellectual life that I wrote about in the blank slate.

  • The denial of human nature was that Theo, the in polite company in intellectual circles, the amount of life success determined by inherent, largely heritable psychological traits has to be zero.

  • We got just the thing, the the only acceptable position, and you and I know it's not zero.

  • Well, I also used to be interject for one second.

  • Most of all, there's a fairness element there.

  • But the other thing is, it seems to me that that's extraordinarily self serving of people, too.

  • Because, you know, if you get together with a group of Harvard professors, for example, it's pretty obvious that their innate intelligence is one of the factors that determine their success and to deny the fact that heritable differences made a difference means perhaps to act as an avatar of a social justice orientation, but equally to deny the role of of the benefits of chance in your own success and therefore lack a certain degree of humility that you might otherwise be required to have.

  • So it's not all on, and I'm not claiming that you were implying this at all.

  • But it's not all in the service of a higher social ideals that people deny the the contribution of of heritable components, for example, that birth laundry.

  • So whoops, we just have Okay.

  • Unfortunately, the video just froze, and after you said, I'm not saying you claimed this.

  • Oh, you suddenly froze on the screen so well, because hey, Yeah, I'm not saying you're claiming this.

  • Sure.

  • Well, it's just it seems self serving for people who are particularly bright, for example, to not be grateful for the fact that they won the genetic lottery in that in that that matter and insufficiently humble, I do not know the role of that arbitrary chance in determining their success.

  • I mean, it's not like they don't deserve their success because of that.

  • But claiming a certain degree of biological determinism doesn't necessarily make you a bad person, even though it could be read that way because it makes you very sensitive, too.

  • Your own good fortune, if you if you think it through carefully.

  • Oh, absolutely.

  • In fact, successful people are the winners of at least three lotteries, one of them that you mentioned.

  • Of course, it's the genetic lotto lottery.

  • The fact that that some people were born with greater intelligence and conscientiousness and openness to experience another is that there's ah second lottery in human development that is not strictly genetic, but it is, in a sense, constitutional or developmental.

  • The fact that I might consider this one of the most profound discoveries in the history of psychology that correlations between identical twins were together are generally, uh on the order of 0.5.

  • Uh, and they share not only their Gino, but the vast amount of their environments.

  • Their parents, their neighborhoods.

  • They're older sibs.

  • They're younger sibs a number of books in the House.

  • Number of guns in the House.

  • Number of TV's in the house.

  • They're not indistinguishable.

  • Identical twins are poorly, quite highly, but Noah near perfectly.

  • Which means that there is a second lottery that has to do either with just the way leave the brain congeals during development, which can't be specified down to the last synapse by the genes on, perhaps by chance, life events, which might leave unpredictable traces that we can't I document or or systematic we understand.

  • Now, of course, there's the third lottery of what happens to you in your profession.

  • Did you?

  • And on the right sector did you happen to, uh, have a good relationship, boss?

  • Uh, numerous, right?

  • That's a matter of being in the right place at the right time, the right time.

  • So all that having been said on dure, you're absolutely right.

  • We have to acknowledge the non zero roll off.

  • Ah, hereditary temperament of talent.

  • The non zero role of chance and that still leaves a big chunk of the variance that could be due to systemic features of the system that perhaps ought to be changed.

  • There's no doubt that the wealthy game the system, particularly in the United States, and a number of ways that don't work too toothy at the benefit off society at large.

  • There also aspects of the system that are perhaps fair but irrational.

  • The fact that so much of our intellectual talent now gets sucked into finance.

  • Now, of course, we do need a financial sector, and it's with that.

  • They're smart people, innit?

  • But having ah, lot of our brain power devoted to figuring out how to act on financial information, Microsoft microsecond faster than once competitors is probably not the best use of our society's intellectual capital.

  • Likewise, a lot of there's no doubt that we have far too much spring power invested in legal system in corporations suing each other, patent trolling on another not so productive uses.

  • You know what the funny thing is to know that there's a there's an erotic, ineradicable amount of pathology in a system?

  • In some sense, I mean one of the things that struck me quite hard, for example, is that if you look at the creativity curves across the life span, they match the criminality curves almost perfectly.

  • And one of the things that make me think what I was doing that research was so that a cz young men become more antisocial.

  • They also become more creative, even though those things might be correlate.

  • But they do math on top of one another and was taking in a society like the United States, which has a fair degree of criminality and also a fair degree of creativity.

  • We have no idea how loose the system has to be so that Melfi sins can thrive so that it can also be simultaneously loose enough so that creativity can thrive.

  • Right, Because you might think if you were optimistic that you could tighten up the system, get rid of the criminal behavior without adding a totalitarian layer to the system that would also simultaneously demolish, you know, individual variability and creativity.

  • We just our morals to start sophisticated enough to see such things apart, you know?

  • Well, there I I'm not so sure they're I do agree with you.

  • There is a certain amount of risk taking or young men on the make that might underlie criminality and, uh, productive creativity.

  • But over the course of history, I think one of the accomplishments of civilization and indeed of, uh, of enlightenment driven progress is that we have managed to teach the heart.

  • Just two examples are the fact that the rate of homicide plunged by a factor about 35 from the Middle Ages to the 20th century.

  • And that and that includes the scientific revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment, all of the events of the 20th century.

  • So justice people were not stabbing each other, ours over insults.

  • They were also coming up with the theory of evolution that the atomic theory matter.

  • Then again in the 19 nineties, when the rate of violent crime in the United States fell by half and there were also declines in Canada, Britain, other Western countries, that certainly was not a time of economic stagnation or, well, no, no fair.

  • Fair enough, I just Then the question starts to become his.

  • How in the world did those things get teased apart so that we were able to regulate antisocial behavior without simultaneously making things of excessively region regulated totalitarian.

  • We managed it.

  • Maybe it's part of that same incremental process that you detailed out at the beginning of our talk.

  • You know, another thing that start me about your book That was quite interesting.

  • I thought was that you list the names of a very large number of totally unsung heroes.

  • You know what?

  • Those are people, and we have a very interesting table near the beginning where you list, I think about 10 names, maybe 12 off people have saved between hundreds of millions and billions of lives with their scientific, with your incremental scientific productivity.

  • And yet those air people that are by no means household names.

  • That's another place where things don't make the news is absolutely.

  • And it's, uh it's funny how our, um moral, uh, crediting our moral are awarding of world brownie points doesn't quite correlate with how much good people often doesn't.

  • It all core elect uh, and the case of the inventors of synthetic fertilizer of vaccines off coronation of public water supplies, green revolution in agriculture are pretty much unknown on.

  • They literally saved billions of lives, whereas various reformers and profits and agitators are pretty well known a number of, uh, certainly people who are sainted by the Roman Catholic Church who have to perform a miracle that might resolve it results in saving one life course, if in fact, did not.

  • Because miracles don't happen.

  • The fact that that definition of saint has nothing to do with saving lives on scales off millions or billions just shows how human moral sense is not really well calibrated to morality as we would defend it.

  • I think it was Stalin who said something like a single death is a tragedy, but a 1,000,000 deaths is a statistic and maybe maybe actually didn't say it, but it z conventionally attributed to him so well and for good reason.

  • I mean, I suppose Mao could have said it, too, or any back.

  • That's right.

  • I guess maybe the same thing plays in reverse say, is that the saving of a single life has a narrative punch and the incremental savings of AH, 100 million lives, especially through prevention.

  • That's another problem, right?

  • Because prevention isn't dramatic, because the terrible thing merely doesn't happen.

  • And that's nightly news.

  • I I rather cheaply wrote an article on human moral sense that began with Who do you?

  • Who do you think is most morally praiseworthy?

  • Mother Teresa, Bill Gates or Norman Borlaug on this is before against his pivot from computer technology to philanthropy.

  • Was was, well, notice about 10 years ago, and I set it up.

  • It's a bit of a trick question because, of course, everyone would say Mother Teresa, even our field in discussions of moral psychology, whenever a speaker has toe pull out of the air an example of a particularly moral person.

  • Mother Teresa is stereotype, even though if you ask people, what exactly did she accomplish?

  • How many lives did she save?

  • How many sick people did she actually, uh, cure?

  • It's very hard to come up with her actual accomplished.

  • What is?

  • Bill Gates has already been credited with saving perhaps 100 million lives through his efforts to eliminate affection.

  • Infectious disease Eloping World in Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Peace price of 1970 for its role in fomenting the Green Revolution.

  • How we saved a 1,000,000,000 lives right?

  • Elective reading of hybrid crops that required less fertilizer that could be grown twice a year less water higher yields less susceptibility to disease.

  • I would try it.

  • Countries like Mexico and India, from from basket cases to exporters of food in less than a decade, right?

  • You think that would be a story that everyone in elementary and junior high school would learn?

  • Because it's such a remarkable It's an absolutely remarkable story.

  • And no one.

  • I mean, I don't know what percentage of people would know his name Borlaug's name, but I don't imagine it's It's, I suspect it's in the low percentages.

  • If that I I'm sure that's right.

  • I think they may have been a change, I seem to recall.

  • I hate to begin any sentence with when I was young in my day.

  • But Way did read, um, heroic biographies of medical pioneers like Antique, the discoverer of insulin, and that Thomas Edison and I don't know if that kind of heroic biography of the innovator of the inventor scientist is as common in Children's education.

  • Yeah, I suspect I strongly suspect not.

  • It certainly wouldn't be in Canada, given the tilt that our education system is taken.

  • So all right, so a couple of a couple of broader questions again, if you don't mind, you have a whole carpets of work.

  • And and there are recurrent themes in some sense, one of them being things are getting better in ways that we really don't know.

  • And what are you?

  • What if you could have what you wanted with regards to the impact of your books?

  • What what would you want that impact to be?

  • And also, what do you think?

  • Look, one of the things I've done on Twitter recently because I'm trying to figure out how to use Twitter is, too, till my tweets towards people like human progress dot or someone you cite in your introduction and people who are purveying information while including yourself, by the way, who are purveying information about how much better things were getting.

  • And so what the impact would you like to have your books have?

  • And how do you see that playing out psychologically and politically and what do you think?

  • People who are listening now say could do practically to get the good news out, so to speak.

  • Certainly, intellectual life should be more data driven about.

  • You shouldn't be allowed to say talk about any reported trend based on an event that happened yesterday or this year because trend means change over time.

  • And in so many areas, we really do have data, and it's just irresponsible, not Thio site Those data, particularly since they have become increasingly available through websites like our world in data, uh, Cuban Progress.

  • So I'd like to see a replacement of ideological debate, which so much of our current debate ISS it's whether the right of left us more saintly, moral, uh, praiseworthy, correct and more.

  • Well, let's look at the data it.

  • Chances are that neither on off the shelf position of the left nor an off the shelf position right, it's likely to have it all fitted out.

  • No one is missing or infallible.

  • These ideologies go back to the to the French Revolution, and they're unlikely to be the ah fond of solutions to complex problems.

  • Let's try to see what works and what doesn't and come up with the mixture of what is most likely to solve our problems.

  • Spoken like a true proponent of the Enlightenment.

  • Yeah, I guess, on Dhe stepping back even farther, I would like to see a greater integration of the the insights and mindset of science into social and cultural affairs.

  • A cz we talked about earlier in the conversation.

  • This very idea is often met with horror.

  • Well, you don't think the humanities types, I suppose in some sense aren't very happy with the idea that they'd have to learn statistics, and I can I have a certain amount of sympathy for that perspective, but well, there is, Yes, there is a, ah, horror of the expanding realm of number and data.

  • And ahora p fought that, uh, ideas about human nature from from science, from evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics from social personality.

  • A computer psychology might be brought to bear on our understanding of society, of justice, of art literature fiction.

  • Quite contrary to be the mindset of the Enlightenment, where all of the Enlightenment Phyllis off.

  • We're, uh we're pretty serious.

  • Psychologists in the field didn't exist at the time, so they wouldn't call that.

  • But they, uh, mind the observations from travelers of missionaries explorers of the ways of other cultures.

  • They relied on their own observations and common sense.

  • They tapped into what brain science existed at the time.

  • So it's not.

  • It's hardly a radical idea that our understanding of, uh of art and culture and society should be informed by our understanding of human nature.

  • But now that the disciplines have become so professionalized in the house of different buildings on campus, of their rivals for money from Nadine there's great hostility to the old enlightenment idea of conciliate.

  • Ce right is often a a, a paranoid fear that this means that the sciences will take over the humanities, which, of course, is preposterous.

  • They wouldn't they want to.

  • They couldn't.

  • No one.

  • I think the sciences can really informally, humanity's, I mean first.

  • Yeah, I trained as a scientist.

  • My appreciation for the humanities is actually substantially deepened.

  • So in here on indeed, in many fields, this is, Ah, medical complete my one of my own fields of linguistics.

  • It's just taken for granted that no one really cares where the humanities influences end of the scientific ones begin studies of philology of classical grammar of texts now blend into statistical studies of uh, Barbara of laboratory studies of speech and language processing and where the science ends up in the hands off me.

  • Mammy's begins known even talks of the science can also really change could really change your mind like I've looked at individual differences in relationship to political belief, and so I've learned three things from doing that that I think are revolutionary, being revolutionary for me.

  • So the first is that, and liberal lefty types are characterized by higher trade, openness and lower conscientiousness, and then conservatives the reverse.

  • And I think, well, that's quite interesting, because it puts the liberal left types in the creative entrepreneurial domain because that's characterized by high openness.

  • And it puts the conservative types in the manager on administrative to mate.

  • And so that implies that the liberal left types create new ideas and new enterprises, including entrepreneurial enterprise, is because the doubted there is fairly solid.

  • Where is the conservative types manage and administer those enterprises, and so each needs the other.

  • So there's that nice polarity dynamic.

  • And then there's also where is it idea that the reason that openness and conscientiousness unite to predict political behaviors because of borders so open people like the borders between concepts to be fluid so that there's information exchange and they're not orderly, the liberal types because they're not conscientious, and so they don't see any utility and keeping things categorically distinct.

  • Where's The Conservatives are afraid of the contamination of things because of the movement of information, and they like to see the borders between things to to ensure that that's the case.

  • So the reason that openness and conscientiousness stacked together as predictors of political behavior seems to be because of the too did fundamentally different attitudes toward towards borders all the way from the conceptual to the political.

  • The right wingers think while borders air good because that stops contamination and contaminations a real problem and a definitely problem often, and the liberal lefty types think, no, no, we want as much information to flow is possible, and both of those perspectives are valid and need to be discussed.

  • Then the other thing I learned from the American empirical doubt it was that orderliness, which is part of the part of conscientiousness, predicts conservatism is associated with disgust, sensitivity on so that that feeds that desire to maintain borders so that there's no cross contamination that's associated with what's being called the behavioral immune system.

  • And so those are actually quite revolutionary ideas.

  • From the perspective of political theory, you know that the political belief is temperamentally determined that the reason that the two temperamental traits determined political belief is because of a difference in attitude, fundamental difference in attitude towards the borders, between things, that you could make a case for open and closed borders on evolutionary grounds and that there's a There's an association between conservatism and discussed which Jimmy she had tremendous light, for example, on the motivations of Hitler, who is an extraordinarily orderly person and who used discussed oriented language.

  • It's all the time when he was formulating his policies of extermination.

  • So those air revolutionary contributions of individual, different science to political theory.

  • It's all driven by hard data, statistically derived.

  • Well, I agree.

  • And I can sense the paranoid reaction that these cleans might listen upon some traditional political theorist thinkers that all Are you saying that the conservative beliefs are nothing but an expression of disgust, sensitivity?

  • And, of course, it doesn't like that he's a fascinating findings.

  • Don't say that the earned income tax credit is a good or a bad idea.

  • Had Paris climate accords by themselves, Ivy ish, you still have to be just decided on their merits soon.

  • The other hand, if you do, if you are aware of your own potential bias is that that is a source of inside the source understanding.

  • It could cause you to step, act from your own convictions and be more receptive to arguments on both sides.

  • Of course, that's definitely done that for me.

  • But it can't not be helpful.

  • Cannot be a source of insight as to how political debates unfold here.

  • Well, if you know that the liberal left types are necessary for the fostering of do enterprises and the conservatives are necessary to run them, then that certainly indicates why both groups not only are necessary but are all of mutual benefit.

  • Somebody has to maintain systems and someone has to expand them.

  • And those things are gonna work in opposition to one another because expanding a system often fragments it.

  • So there's gonna be tension.

  • But no system can remain static forever and and and completely untrammelled.

  • Transformation throws everything into chaos, so they're obviously has to be a dialogue between those two viewpoints, like it's like an opponent process issue, essentially and yes, and all of us ought to be more aware, have more insight into how our own psychological Proclivities might affect the positions that seem to each of us to be obvious to me?

  • Well, that and that is what they do, right, because the temperamental variable variables actually tell you what is self evident.

  • That's how they all great, who my understanding from from the literature that you're citing is that the thing, the variance in opinions that is correlated with personality differences, eyes also the hardest to get people to take you up to persuade.

  • Yeah, well, no doubt, because I think the temperamental differences are like axiomatic values, you know, and they're grounded, and I think they're grounded in the hyper development of separate circuitry.

  • So it's going to be very, very mean.

  • And I also think that, like if you're next, if you're an introvert, you want to learn to be an extrovert.

  • You have to learn it.

  • Micro skill by micro skill, right?

  • There's no revolution.

  • There's no revolutionary Kagen of transformation that's going to turn you into an extrovert.

  • You can pick up the skills, but it's it's bit by bit it, and it's incremental.

  • And so I think it's the same.

  • With political attitudes, you can develop an appreciation for the viewpoint of people who are on the other side of the temperamental divid

all right.

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