What if the biggest threat to good decisions isn’t a lack of intelligence, but a lack of the right reasoning tools and habits to spot bad arguments, weigh evidence, and update our beliefs?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. His work has focused on language, cognition, social relations, and more.
Check out his book, "Rationality: What it is, Why is Seems Scarce, Why it Matters"!
2. Book Summary
In Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, Steven Pinker argues that rationality should guide “everything we think and do,” especially in a moment when public life is awash in misinformation and shaky reasoning. The book is organized as a practical toolkit: after setting up the puzzle of how rational an animal we are, it walks through core “instruments of reason” (logic and critical thinking; probability; Bayesian updating; expected utility; signal detection; game theory; and correlation vs. causation), ending with chapters on what goes wrong and why rationality matters.
Pinker’s diagnosis of why rationality can look scarce is that we mistake it for a single mental “power,” when it’s really a set of tools that work well only when they’re learned, cued, and applied to the right kinds of problems. He also emphasizes modern “reasoning traps”: people can be impressively capable in real-world settings yet still fall for distortions amplified by today’s information ecosystem, where falsehoods spread easily and grab attention. And he thinks part of the confusion comes from mixing two “modes of believing”—a reality mindset aimed at truth and evidence, and a mythology mindset that treats some cherished ideas (religious or national narratives, for instance) as insulated from ordinary truth-testing.
Finally, Pinker’s case for why rationality matters is both urgent and concrete: we face large-scale threats (to health, democracy, and the planet) where solutions exist but persuading people to accept them is itself a rationality problem. The reasoning tools he surveys aren’t just classroom formalities; they’re meant to help us avoid personal and policy blunders by calibrating risk, evaluating claims, and making decisions under uncertainty. He also ties rationality to moral and social progress: historically, big improvements often begin with arguments that expose inconsistencies between what people already value and what they tolerate in practice—showing how “reasoners” are not just individual brains but members of communities that can revise norms when better arguments win out.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
01:04 - Rationality
03:43 - Instrumentalism
05:32 - Irrational goals
09:28 - Expected outcomes
12:15 - Rationality and morality
17:20 - General outlook
22:08 - Bayesian reasoning (audio improves here)
27:08 - Hume
28:16 - Priors
31:56 - Vagueness
35:37 - Expected utility
37:10 - Newcomb’s problem
41:07 - Decision theory
49:45 - Causation
53:47 - Higher-level causation
55:56 - Improving rationality
1:00:10 - Why does rationality matter?
1:04:22 - Conclusion
