{"id":815777,"date":"2021-09-26T05:14:14","date_gmt":"2021-09-26T09:14:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=815777"},"modified":"2021-09-26T05:14:16","modified_gmt":"2021-09-26T09:14:16","slug":"pinkers-guide-to-good-thinking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/pinkers-guide-to-good-thinking\/","title":{"rendered":"Pinker\u2019s Guide to Good Thinking"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">10<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fpinkers-guide-to-good-thinking%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=815777&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/pinkerbook-scaled-e1632326936899.jpg\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" \/><\/div>\n<p><span>Face it: Human beings are pretty stupid sometimes. We fall for astrology, vote for morons, buy into conspiracy theories, and send our money to obvious scammers. Today, all this seems to be getting worse as &#8220;fake news&#8221; and &#8220;disinformation&#8221; take root and the country fragments along partisan lines\u2014not just when it comes to political beliefs but even when it comes to basic facts.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Oddly enough, though, we\u2019re also stunningly brilliant. Not only have the brightest among us produced stunning feats of science and technology, but even normal people, working without modern tools, can use reason to improve their lives. The hunting-and-gathering that humans did long ago required extensive knowledge and careful thought about plants, seasons, animal behavior, and how humans might get what they want from the world around them.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>That\u2019s the tension animating Steven Pinker\u2019s new book <\/span><i><span>Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters<\/span><\/i><span>. The tome celebrates reason, and it provides a digestible primer on the basics of logic, statistics, and other building blocks of rationality, illustrated with clever brain teasers and the occasional comic. Yet it also explains how the human mind can go wrong and asks why rationality seems to be in short supply these days.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>This book does an excellent job explaining the basics of good thinking, though Pinker\u2019s final musings about what ails the modern world are a bit unsatisfying.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Pinker\u2019s thinking toolkit is laid out in a series of lucid chapters in the middle of the book. They explain the basics of formal logic: &#8220;If it rained, then the streets are wet&#8221; doesn\u2019t imply &#8220;if the streets are wet, then it rained,&#8221; for example, because something else might have made the streets wet. Pinker also goes through the core concepts of probability, explaining, for instance, why a 50 percent chance of rain on Saturday and a 50 percent chance of rain on Sunday don\u2019t add up to a 100 percent chance of rain over the weekend.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>He further introduces readers to &#8220;signal detection theory,&#8221; the study of all the weird stuff that happens when we\u2019re forced to grapple with false positives and false negatives. For instance, if a test for a disease is 95 percent accurate, but only 1 percent of people have the disease, a positive test will still suggest you probably <\/span><i><span>don\u2019t<\/span><\/i><span> have the disease: In every 100 people tested, about one will correctly receive a positive result, but about five will receive false positives. Unless, that is, there are other reasons to think your risk might be higher than a random person\u2019s\u2014in which case we might use &#8220;Bayesian&#8221; reasoning to integrate the results of the test into everything else we know. Then it\u2019s on to game theory, such as the famous Prisoner\u2019s Dilemma, and social science\u2019s never-ending quest to distinguish causation from mere correlation. In the latter, I was especially impressed by Pinker\u2019s explanation of how regression analysis works, which manages to be simple and easy to follow while capturing some of the more technical details.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>All of these tools are incredibly important for those who evaluate scientific studies, try to convince people with logical arguments and sound evidence, or even just bicker with family over politics. They introduce and enforce a rigor to one\u2019s thinking by highlighting common errors and formalizing the best ways to interpret evidence.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>But applying them to actual arguments gets messy in a hurry and is rarely sufficient to resolve a genuine dispute, which is why even experts so often disagree with each other. Pinker discusses numerous reasons for this throughout the book. The categories of things we talk about are &#8220;fuzzy&#8221; around the edges, for example, making them hard to slot into logical formulas with simple true-or-false binaries. And <\/span><i><span>logical<\/span><\/i><span> truths are not the same thing as <\/span><i><span>empirical <\/span><\/i><span>truths anyway\u2014you can\u2019t reason from premises to conclusions without first establishing sound premises by observing the real world. When doing that, we might disagree about how much weight to place on different kinds of evidence. And then, even if we agree on the facts, we might disagree on how much value to place on different risks and benefits\u2014the inescapable moral dimension to all this.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>To the extent we do invoke the principles of rationality in everyday debates, we often rely on &#8220;informal&#8221; logical fallacies\u2014which, as typically used in practice, are far more subjective (and in my experience obnoxious) than Pinker lets on in his discussion of the issue. Have you drawn a &#8220;false equivalence,&#8221; or was that a sound comparison? Have I relied on a &#8220;slippery slope fallacy,&#8221; or could we be talking about a slope that\u2019s actually, you know, slippery?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>At any rate, when Pinker gets around to his penultimate chapter, in which he tries to explain &#8220;why humanity appears to be losing its mind,&#8221; he sheepishly admits that &#8220;the inventory of logical and statistical fallacies explained in the preceding chapters&#8221; probably aren\u2019t what\u2019s driving the problem. &#8220;Nothing from the cognitive psychology lab,&#8221; he adds, &#8220;could have predicted QAnon.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>In this chapter, though, it\u2019s not entirely clear whether Pinker is trying to explain why humans are irrational in general, or why things seem to have gotten <\/span><i><span>worse<\/span><\/i><span>. The aforementioned &#8220;losing its mind&#8221; and &#8220;QAnon&#8221; lines would suggest the latter, as would numerous other comments Pinker makes: There\u2019s a &#8220;pandemic of poppycock,&#8221; for example, exemplified in part by fake news and COVID conspiracy theories, part of what &#8220;some are calling an \u2018epistemological crisis.\u2019&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>But then Pinker turns around and downplays the importance of social media, writing that while new technology may be accelerating the spread of bad thinking, such thinking has been with us forever, and that by some measures, conspiracy theories haven\u2019t become more popular in recent decades. This leads the reader to scratch his head: If we\u2019re asking why the world is &#8220;losing its mind,&#8221; don\u2019t we <\/span><i><span>need<\/span><\/i><span> a variable that\u2019s changed recently? And if we <\/span><i><span>don\u2019t<\/span><\/i><span> think things have actually gotten worse, what\u2019s with all the insinuations to the contrary?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>When it comes to other theories that could explain a change, Pinker mostly just lists them without exploring them in detail: the fractionalization of the media, the rise of gerrymandering, the growing self-segregation of urban liberals, the decline of civil society, etc. Beyond that, he largely sticks to common explanations of why humans are irrational in general, such as motivated reasoning and tribalistic &#8220;myside&#8221; bias. Which is fine but hardly revelatory.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>This chapter could have focused more on the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/journals.sagepub.com\/doi\/abs\/10.1177\/0956797614545133\"><span>longer-term decline<\/span><\/a><span> of Americans\u2019 trust in each other and their institutions as well as the very real failures of the country\u2019s expert class, including the serial mishandling of COVID-19. (Pinker\u2019s discussion here dwells mainly on academia and the press in particular.) A productive argument requires at least some underlying agreement on the key premises, and such agreement fades when we don\u2019t\u2014or can\u2019t\u2014trust the folks who are supposed to nail down the major facts and run the country in a way that\u2019s in line with our values. Some of Pinker\u2019s proposed solutions, including more scientists in Congress and a media more willing to &#8220;fact-check,&#8221; are likely to fail in this environment.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>We should all aspire to think clearly, and most of <\/span><i><span>Rationality<\/span><\/i><span> is admirably dedicated to showing us how. That makes it worth reading, even if the book stumbles in diagnosing the modern world\u2019s problems.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span><em>Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters<\/em><br \/>by Steven Pinker<br \/>Viking, 432 pages, $32<br \/><\/span><\/p>\n<p><i><span>Robert VerBruggen is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Face it: Human beings are pretty stupid sometimes. We fall for astrology, vote for morons, buy into conspiracy theories, and send our money to obvious scammers. Today, all this seems &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-815777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=815777"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815777\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=815777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=815777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=815777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}