Rationality Quotes

“Disagreement is necessary in deliberations among mortals. As the saying goes, the more we disagree, the more chance there is that at least one of us is right.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality

“Instead of feeling any need to persuade, people who are certain they are correct can impose their beliefs by force. In theocracies and autocracies, authorities censor, imprison, exile or burn those with the wrong opinions. In democracies the force is less brutish, but people still find means to impose a belief rather than argue for it.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality

“The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor favor to those of skill, but time and chance happen to them all. An essential part of rationality is dealing with randomness in our lives and uncertainty in our knowledge.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality

“And as excellent as our cognitive systems are, in the modern world we must know when to discount them and turn our reasoning over to instruments—the tools of logic, probability, and critical thinking that extend our powers of reason beyond what nature gave us. Because in the twenty-first century, when we think by the seat of our pants, every correction can make things worse, and can send our democracy into a graveyard spiral.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

“The philosophers Liam Clegg and Daniel Dennett have argued that human behavior is inherently unpredictable not just because of random neural noise in the brain but as an adaptation that makes it harder for our rivals to outguess us.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality

“Rationality is uncool. To describe someone with a slang word for the cerebral, like nerd, wonk, geek, or brainiac, is to imply they are terminally challenged in hipness. For decades, Hollywood screenplays and rock song lyrics have equated joy and freedom with an escape from reason. “A man needs a little madness or else he never dares cut the rope and be free,” said Zorba the Greek. “Stop making sense,” advised Talking Heads; “Let’s go crazy,” adjured the Artist Formerly Known as Prince.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

“Tell people there’s an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure. —George Carlin”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

“Since no one can know everything, and most people know almost nothing, rationality consists of outsourcing knowledge to institutions that specialize in creating and sharing it, primarily academia, public and private research units, and the press. That trust is a precious resource which should not be squandered. Though confidence in science has remained steady for decades, confidence in universities is sinking. 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 (as when a professor was recently suspended for mentioning the Chinese pause word ne ga because it reminded some students of the racial slur). On several occasions correspondents have asked me why they should trust the scientific consensus on climate change, since it comes out of institutions that brook no dissent. That is why 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.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality

“Odyssean self-control [...] is more effective than the strenuous exertion of willpower, which is easily overmatched in the moment by temptation.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality

“Just as citizens should grasp the basics of history, science, and the written word, they should command the intellectual tools of sound reasoning. These include logic, critical thinking, probability, correlation and causation, the optimal ways to adjust our beliefs and commit to decisions with uncertain evidence, and the yardsticks for making rational choices alone and with others.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

“What does this tell us about human rationality? A common explanation is that it reveals our confirmation bias: the bad habit of seeking evidence that ratifies a belief and being incurious about evidence that might falsify it.26 People think that dreams are omens because they recall the time when they dreamt a relative had a mishap and she did, but they forget about all the times when a relative was fine after they dreamt she had a mishap. Or they think immigrants commit a lot of crime because they read in the news about an immigrant who robbed a store, but don’t think about the larger number of stores robbed by native-born citizens.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

“Poverty needs no explanation; it is the natural state of humankind. What needs an explanation is wealth.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality

“The cluster illusion, like other post hoc fallacies in probability, is the source of many superstitions: that bad things happen in threes, people are born under a bad sign, or an annus horribilis means the world is falling apart. When a series of plagues is visited upon us, it does not mean there is a God who is punishing us for our sins or testing our faith. It means there is not a God who is spacing them apart.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

“The psychologist Walter Mischel captured the conflict in an agonizing choice he gave four-year-olds in a famous 1972 experiment: one marshmallow now or two marshmallows in fifteen minutes.15 Life is a never-ending gantlet of marshmallow tests, dilemmas that force us to choose between a sooner small reward and a later large reward.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” wrote James Madison about the checks and balances in a democratic government, and that is how other institutions steer communities of biased and ambition-addled people toward disinterested truth. Examples include the adversarial system in law, peer review in science, editing and fact-checking in journalism, academic freedom in universities, and freedom of speech in the public sphere. Disagreement is necessary in deliberations among mortals. As the saying goes, the more we disagree, the more chance there is that at least one of us is right.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

“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 harrasment.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality

“A communal outrage inspires what the psychologist Roy Maumeister calls a victim narrative: a moralized allegory in which a harmful act is sanctified, the damage consecrated as irreparable and unforgivable. The goal of the narrative is not accuracy but solidarity. Picking nits about what actually happened is seen as not just irrelevant but sacrilegious or treasonous.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality

“The press is an availability machine. It serves up anecdotes which feed our impression of what's common in a way that is guaranteed to mislead.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality

“Fashionable academic movements like postmodernism and critical theory (not to be confused with critical thinking) hold that reason, truth, and objectivity are social constructions that justify the privilege of dominant groups.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality

“It would be nice to see people earn brownie points for acknowledging uncertainty in their beliefs, questioning the dogmas of their political sect, and changing their minds when the facts change, rather than for being steadfast warriors for the dogmas of their clique.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

“Is something moral because God commands it, or does God command some things because they are moral? If the former is true, and God had no reason for his commandments, why should we take his whims seriously? If God commanded you to torture and kill a child, would that make it right? “He would never do that!” you might object. But that flicks us onto the second horn of the dilemma. If God does have good reasons for his commandments, why don’t we appeal to those reasons directly and skip the middleman?”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality

“But probabilities are not about the world; they’re about our ignorance of the world. New information reduces our ignorance and changes the probability.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

“Reality is a powerful selection pressure. A hominid that soothed itself by believing that a lion was a turtle or that eating sand would nourish its body would be outreproduced by its reality-based rivals.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality

“Given the costs of information, the perfect can be the enemy of good.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality

“For every job lost to automation, a new one will materialize that we cannot anticipate: he unemployed forklift operators will retrain as tattoo removal technicians and video game costume designers and social media content moderators and pet psychiatrists.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality

“If you have to silence people who disagree with you, does that mean you have no good arguments for why they’re mistaken?”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

“The psychologist David Myers has said that the essence of monotheistic belief is: (1) There is a God and (2) it’s not me (and it’s also not you).6 The secular equivalent is: (1) There is objective truth and (2) I don’t know it (and neither do you). The same epistemic humility applies to the rationality that leads to truth. Perfect rationality and objective truth are aspirations that no mortal can ever claim to have attained.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

“Intuitive probability is driven by imaginability: the easier something is to visualize, the likelier it seems. This entraps us into what Tversky and Kahneman call the conjunction fallacy, in which a conjunction is more intuitively probable than either of its elements.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

“A major theme of this book is that none of us, thinking alone, is rational enough to consistently come to sound conclusions: rationality emerges from a community of reasoners who spot each other’s fallacies.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

“Tversky and Kahneman note that no one would buy probabilistic insurance, with premiums at a fraction of the cost but coverage only on certain days of the week, though they happily incur the same overall risk by insuring themselves against some hazards, like fires, but not others, like hurricanes.27 They buy insurance for peace of mind—to give themselves one less thing to worry about.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters