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

by Steven Pinker

A major reason for the mistrust is the universities’ suffocating left-wing monoculture, with its punishment of students and professors who question dogmas on gender, race, culture, genetics, colonialism, and sexual identity and orientation. Universities have turned themselves into laughingstocks for their assaults on common sense

universities have a responsibility to secure the credibility of science and scholarship by committing themselves to viewpoint diversity, free inquiry, critical thinking, and active open-mindedness.

Like universities, news and opinion sites ought to be paragons of viewpoint diversity and critical thinking. And as I argued in chapter 4, they should also become more numerate and data-savvy, mindful of the statistical illusions instilled by sensationalist anecdote chasing.

countermeasures like fact-checking, labeling false claims and not repeating them, stating facts affirmatively rather than negatively, correcting errors openly and swiftly, and avoiding a false balance between experts and cranks.

Educational institutions, from elementary schools to universities, could make statistical and critical thinking a greater part of their curricula.

Rationality should be the fourth R, together with reading, writing, and arithmetic.

But well-designed courses and video games—ones that single out cognitive biases (the gambler’s fallacy, sunk costs, confirmation bias, and so on), challenge students to spot them in lifelike settings,

Each of us has a motive to prefer our truth, but together we’re better off with the truth.

Obviously we can’t implement a fallacy tax, but particular commons can agree on rules that jigger the incentives toward truth.

The media can become either crucibles of knowledge or cesspools of malarkey, depending on their incentive structure. The dream at the dawn of the internet age that giving everyone a platform would birth a new Enlightenment seems cringeworthy today, now that we are living with bots, trolls, flame wars, fake news, Twitter shaming mobs, and online harassment.

As long as the currency in a digital platform consists of likes, shares, clicks, and eyeballs, we have no reason to think it will nurture rationality or truth.

Wikipedia, in contrast, though not infallible, has become an astonishingly accurate resource despite being free and decentralized. That is because it implements intensive error correction and quality control, supported by “pillars” that are designed to marginalize myside biases.89 These include verifiability, a neutra...

We should be creative in changing the rules in other arenas so that disinterested truth is given an edge over myside bias. In opinion journalism, pundits could be judged by the accuracy of their forecasts rather than their ability to sow fear and loathing or to fire up a faction.

our powers of reason are guided by our motives and limited by our points of view. We saw in chapter 2 that the core of morality is impartiality: the reconciliation of our own selfish interests with others’. So, too, is impartiality the core of rationality:

We try to recoup sunk costs, and so stay too long in bad investments, bad movies, and bad relationships. We assess danger by availability, and so avoid safe planes for dangerous cars, which we drive while texting.

In dealing with money, our blind spot for exponential growth makes us save too little for retirement and borrow too much with our credit cards.

In dealing with our health, our difficulty with Bayesian thinking can terrify us into overinterpreting a positive test for an uncommon disease.

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.

framing effects (being affected by whether an outcome is described as a gain or a loss).

Not surprisingly, people’s skill in avoiding fallacies was correlated with their intelligence, though only partly. It was also correlated with their decision-making style—the degree to which they said they approached problems reflectively and constructively rather than impulsively and fatalistically.

To measure life outcomes, the trio developed a kind of schlimazel scale, a measure of people’s susceptibility to mishaps large...

taken the wrong train or bus, broken a bone, crashed a car, driven drunk, lost money in stocks, gotten into a fight, been suspended from school, quit a job after a week, or accidentally gotten pregnant or gotten someone pregnant. They found that people’s reasoning skills did indeed predict their life outcomes: the fewer fallacies in reasoning, the fewer debacles in life.

Reasoning competence is correlated with raw intelligence, and we know that higher intelligence protects people from bad outcomes in life such as illness, accidents, and job failure, holding socioeconomic status constant.7 But intelligence is not the same thing as rationality,

Rationality also requires reflectiveness, open-mindedness, and mastery of cognitive tools like formal logic and mathematical probability.

even when they held intelligence constant, better reasoners suffered fewer bad outcomes.

here, too, the regression analyses showed that better reasoners had better life outcomes, holding socioeconomic status constant. All this still falls short of proving causation. But we do have some of the needed links:

This entitles us to vest some credence in the causal conclusion that competence in reasoning can protect a person from misfortunes in life.

When we look beyond the headlines to the trend lines, we find that humanity overall is healthier, richer, longer-lived, better fed, better educated, and safer from war, murder, and accidents than in decades and centuries past.

On the contrary, nature has no regard for our well-being, and often, as with pandemics and natural disasters, it looks as if it’s trying to grind us down. “Progress” is shorthand for a set of pushbacks and victories wrung out of an unforgiving universe,

The explanation is rationality. When humans set themselves the goal of improving the welfare of their fellows (as opposed to other dubious pursuits like glory or redemption), and they apply their ingenuity in institutions that pool it with others’, they occasionally succeed. When they retain the successes and take note of the failures, the benefits can accumulate, and we call the big picture progress.

The lifesavers included chlorination and other means of safeguarding drinking water, the lowly toilet and sewer, the control of disease vectors like mosquitoes and fleas, programs for large-scale vaccination, the promotion of hand-washing, and basic prenatal and perinatal care such as nursing and body contact. When disease and injuries do strike, advances in medicine keep them from killing as many people as they did in the era of folk healers and barber-surgeons, including antibiotics, antisepsis, anesthesia, transfusions, drugs, and oral rehydration therapy (a salt and sugar solution that stops fatal diarrhea).

advances in agronomy. These included crop rotation to replenish depleted soils; technologies for high-throughput planting and harvesting such as seed drills, plows, tractors, and combine harvesters; synthetic fertilizer (credited with saving 2.7 billion lives); a transportation and storage network to bring food from farm to table, including railroads, canals, trucks, granaries, and refrigeration; national and international markets that allow a surplus in one area to fill a shortage in another;

For most of human history, around 90 percent of humanity lived in what we today call extreme poverty. In 2020, less than 9 percent do;

the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century. It was literally powered by the capture of energy from coal, oil, wind, and falling water, and later from the sun, the earth, and nuclear fission. The energy was fed into machines that turn heat into work, factories with mass production, and conveyances like railroads, canals, highways, and container ships.

And neither of these could have been parlayed into widespread prosperity without governments to enforce contracts, minimize force and fraud, smooth out financial lurches with central banks and reliable money, and invest in wealth-generating public goods such as infrastructure, basic research, and universal education.

a toll of 21.9 battle deaths per 100,000 people in 1950 to just 0.7 in 2019.

One of them is democracy, which, as we saw in the chapter on correlation and causation, really does reduce the chance of war, presumably because a country’s cannon fodder is less keen on the pastime than its kings and generals. Another is international trade and investment, which make it cheaper to buy things than to steal them, and make it unwise for countries to kill their customers and debtors.

Yet another is a network of international organizations, particularly the United Nations, which knits countries into a community, mobilizes peacekeeping forces, immortalizes states, grandfathers in borders, and outlaws and stigmatizes war while providing alternative means of resolving disputes.

My greatest surprise in making sense of moral progress is how many times in history the first domino was a reasoned argument.17 A philosopher wrote a brief which laid out arguments on why some practice was indefensible, or irrational, or inconsistent with values that everyone claimed to hold.

no logical argument can establish a moral claim. But an argument can establish that a claim under debate is inconsistent with another claim a person holds dear, or with values like life and happiness that most people claim for themselves and would agree are legitimate desires of everyone else. As we saw in chapter 3, inconsistency is fatal to reasoning:

for most of history, war was seen as noble, holy, thrilling, manly, glorious.20 Though it was only after the cataclysms of the twentieth century that war ceased to be venerated, the seeds of pacifism had been planted by one of the “fathers of modernity,” the philosopher Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), in his 1517 essay “The Plea of Reason, Religion, and Humanity against War.”

Astell shrewdly appropriated Locke’s argument (including his phrase “the perfect condition of slavery”) to undermine the oppression of women, making her the first English feminist. Long before it became an organized movement, feminism began as an argument,

Ideas are true or false, consistent or contradictory, conducive to human welfare or not, regardless of who thinks them.

Sound arguments, enforcing a consistency of our practices with our principles and with the goal of human flourishing, cannot improve the world by themselves. But they have guided, and should guide, movements for change.

And it will be sound arguments, both to reveal moral blights and discover feasible remedies, that we will need to ensure that moral progress will continue, that the abominable practices of today will become as incredible to our descendants as heretic burnings and slave auctions are to us.