Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

by Steven Pinker

counterfactual,

“fundamental problem of causal inference,”

mechanism:

a cause and a condition.

Events are embedded in a network of causes

a causal chain,

A randomized experiment is the closest we can come to creating the counterfactual world that is the acid test for causation.

experiments of nature

multiple regression,

events have more than one cause, all of them statistical. The idea seems elementary, but it’s regularly flouted in public discourse.

a few simple concepts from statistics can make everyone smarter. The revelatory concepts are main effect and interaction.

“clinical versus actuarial judgment.”

As soon as I mention the topic of rationality, people ask me why humanity appears to be losing its mind. At the time of this writing, a glorious milestone in the history of rationality is coming into view: vaccines likely to end a deadly plague are being administered less than a year after the plague emerged. Yet in that same year, the Covid-19 pandemic set off a carnival of cockamamie conspiracy theories:

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.

To understand popular delusions and the madness of crowds, we have to examine cognitive faculties that work well in some environments and for some purposes but that go awry when applied at scale, in novel circumstances, or in the service of other goals.

Motivated Reasoning

The time-honored method to head off a line of reasoning before it arrives at an unwanted destination is to derail the reasoner by brute force. But there are less crude methods that exploit the inevitable uncertainties surrounding any issue and steer the argument in a favored direction with sophistry, spin-doctoring, and the other arts of persuasion.

rather be right than get it right.

The Myside Bias

the myside bias is only too replicable.

recent flip-flops in which side supports which cause, such as immigration, trade, and sympathy for Russia, suggests that the political sides have become sociocultural tribes rather than coherent ideologies.

religious sects, which are held together by faith in their moral superiority and contempt for opposing sects.

gerrymandering and other geographic distortions of political representation, which incentivize politicians to cater to cliques rather than coalitions;

Could the myside bias possibly be rational? There is a Bayesian argument that one ought to weigh new evidence against the totality of one’s prior beliefs rather than taking every new study at face value.

expressive rationality:

Unfortunately, what’s rational for each of us seeking acceptance in a clique is not so rational for all of us in a democracy seeking the best understanding of the world. Our problem is that we are trapped in a Tragedy of the Rationality Commons.

Two Kinds of Belief: Reality and Mythology

People divide their worlds into two zones.

the reality mindset.

The other zone is the world beyond immediate experience:

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. Beliefs in these zones are narratives, which may be entertaining or inspiring or morally edifying. Whether they are literally “true” or “false” is the wrong question. The function of these beliefs is to construct a social reality that binds the tribe or sect and gives it a moral purpose. Call it the mythology mindset.

Bertrand Russell famously said, “It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.” The key to understanding rampant irrationality is to recognize that Russell’s statement is not a truism but a revolutionary manifesto. For most of human history and prehistory, there were no grounds for supposing that propositions about remote worlds were true. But beliefs about them could be empowering or inspirational, and that made them desirable enough.

Russell’s maxim is the luxury of a technologically...

We children of the Enlightenment embrace the radical creed of universal realism: we hold that all our beliefs should fall within the reality mindset.

But as desirable as that creed is, it is not the natural human way of believing. In granting an imperialistic mandate to the reality mindset to conquer the universe of belief and push mythology to the margins, we are the weird ones—

The human mind is adapted to understanding remote spheres of existence through a mythology mindset.

Submitting all of one’s beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated.

the mythology mindset still occupies swaths of territory in the landscape of mainstream belief. The obvious example is religion.

Thankfully, Western religious belief is safely parked in the mythology zone,

believers in belief

Belief in God is an idea that falls outside the sphere of testable reality.

Another zone of mainstream unreality is the national myth.

Since the Enlightenment, the tides in the modern West have eroded the mythology zone, a historical shift that the sociologist Max Weber called “the disenchantment of the world.” But there are always skirmishes at the borders. The brazen lies and conspiracies of Trumpian post-truth can be seen as an attempt to claim political discourse for the land of mythology rather than the land of reality. Like the plots of legends, scripture, and drama, they are a kind of theater; whether they are provably true or false is beside the point.

The Psychology of Apocrypha

dualists,

intuitive essentialists,

intuitive teleologists.

A scientific education is supposed to stifle these primitive intuitions, but for several reasons its reach is limited.

Foundational principles, such as that the universe has no goals related to human concerns, that all physical interactions are governed by a few fundamental forces, that living bodies are intricate molecular machines, and that the mind is the information-processing activity of the brain, are never articulated, perhaps because they would seem to insult religious and moral sensibilities.