Loading video...

Video Failed to Load

There was a problem loading this video. This could be due to a temporary network issue or the video might be unavailable.

With The Fifth Column 🖐 talking about common knowledge: “Common knowledge can be generated at a stroke when something is witnessed in a forum where you can witness other people witnessing it. So if something just happens in public and you can see everyone else seeing it, that gives... you an instant intuition that there’s common knowledge. Humor, I suggest in one of the chapters, is a common-knowledge generator, usually of some infirmity or indignity or weakness in someone or something. And the laughter, which is conspicuous—you can hear it when someone is laughing; it interrupts their speech and breathing—at the moment of laughter, suddenly becomes common knowledge. Everyone who gets the joke suddenly realizes that someone has been taken down, and they realize that everyone else realizes it. And that’s why freedom of speech and freedom of assembly are suppressed in autocracies. The joke from the Soviet era is about the man handing out leaflets in Red Square. Of course, the KGB arrest him, take him down to headquarters, only to discover that the leaflets are blank sheets of paper. They say, ‘What is the meaning of this?’ And he says, ‘What’s there to say? It’s so obvious.’ And the reason that it was subversive is that he was generating common knowledge. Just the mere fact of trying to make something public, even if you don’t have to stipulate what it is, can generate the coordination—everyone acting together to bring down a regime.”show more

Steven Pinker

857,395 subscribers

44,747 views • 11 days ago •via X (Twitter)

Comedy News & Politics Education

Anya Rossi• Live Now

Private livecam show

0 Comments

No comments available

Comments from the original post will appear here

Related Videos

On laughter generating common knowledge: "Laughter is--like eye contact, like direct speech--generates common knowledge. When you're laughing, you know it, because your breathing is interrupted. People around you know it, because they can hear the laughter. It interrupts your speech, and so people who are listening to you know that you're laughing, and you know that you're laughing. So it's generally common knowledge of something. What is that common knowledge? It's generally common knowledge of some infirmity, indignity, embarrassment, cause for humility. And the laughter makes that private knowledge of an infirmity common knowledge. There's something that we all knew compromised that person's dignity, stature. Now, we are all acknowledging it commonly, which means that that person's stature has gone down." Clip on laughter and common knowledge, the topic of my new book, from an interview with Robert Contofalsky (Robert Contofalsky) of R-Academy. -- When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life:

On laughter generating common knowledge: "Laughter is--like eye contact, like direct speech--generates common knowledge. When you're laughing, you know it, because your breathing is interrupted. People around you know it, because they can hear the laughter. It interrupts your speech, and so people who are listening to you know that you're laughing, and you know that you're laughing. So it's generally common knowledge of something. What is that common knowledge? It's generally common knowledge of some infirmity, indignity, embarrassment, cause for humility. And the laughter makes that private knowledge of an infirmity common knowledge. There's something that we all knew compromised that person's dignity, stature. Now, we are all acknowledging it commonly, which means that that person's stature has gone down." Clip on laughter and common knowledge, the topic of my new book, from an interview with Robert Contofalsky (Robert Contofalsky) of R-Academy. -- When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life:

Steven Pinker

42,797 views • 7 months ago

I recount a joke from the old Soviet Union: a man handing out leaflets in Red Square. Of course, the KGB arrested him and bring him back to headquarters. Only they discover the leaflets are blank sheets of paper. They confront him: "What is the meaning of this?" He says, “What’s there to say? It’s so obvious.” So the point of the joke was, he was generating subversive common knowledge. That is, the citizens of the Soviet Union, they all knew that the regime was inefficient and cruel and oppressive, but each one may have thought that they were the only one, that everyone else was happy. Or they may even have thought that everyone else was aggrieved the way they are, but they didn’t know that everyone else was. And so everyone just kept their misery to themselves. By just making it public, making it common knowledge that there’s a reason to oppose the regime, that can unite people in opposition and can really bring down a regime. Thinkable

I recount a joke from the old Soviet Union: a man handing out leaflets in Red Square. Of course, the KGB arrested him and bring him back to headquarters. Only they discover the leaflets are blank sheets of paper. They confront him: "What is the meaning of this?" He says, “What’s there to say? It’s so obvious.” So the point of the joke was, he was generating subversive common knowledge. That is, the citizens of the Soviet Union, they all knew that the regime was inefficient and cruel and oppressive, but each one may have thought that they were the only one, that everyone else was happy. Or they may even have thought that everyone else was aggrieved the way they are, but they didn’t know that everyone else was. And so everyone just kept their misery to themselves. By just making it public, making it common knowledge that there’s a reason to oppose the regime, that can unite people in opposition and can really bring down a regime. Thinkable

Steven Pinker

70,137 views • 4 months ago

I'll be giving talks on common knowledge in Australia and New Zealand in February 2026. Tickets : "I begin the book with the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes because it’s the quintessential illustration of common knowledge. When the boy said the Emperor was naked, he wasn’t telling anyone anything they didn’t already know. They could see the Emperor was naked, but he changed the state of their knowledge nonetheless because, by blurting it out within earshot of everyone, now everyone knew that everyone else knew that everyone else knew that everyone else knew that the Emperor was naked. So it shows, first of all, that even though the concept of common knowledge, as I defined it, seems impossible—your head starts to spin after, you know, one or two “I know that she knows,” let alone an infinite number. But what the story shows is that a conspicuous, public, self-evident event—something that you see while you see everyone else seeing it, or you hear when you know everyone else can hear it—can give you common knowledge at a stroke. And the other moral is that it changed the relationship of the people to the Emperor, from obsequious deference to ridicule and scorn. And a major theme of the book is that common knowledge, even though it sounds like this abstruse, recondite academic concept, actually figures into everyday life, figures into our money, and figures into our politics, because it enables coordination and it changes social relationships." Thinkable -- When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life

I'll be giving talks on common knowledge in Australia and New Zealand in February 2026. Tickets : "I begin the book with the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes because it’s the quintessential illustration of common knowledge. When the boy said the Emperor was naked, he wasn’t telling anyone anything they didn’t already know. They could see the Emperor was naked, but he changed the state of their knowledge nonetheless because, by blurting it out within earshot of everyone, now everyone knew that everyone else knew that everyone else knew that everyone else knew that the Emperor was naked. So it shows, first of all, that even though the concept of common knowledge, as I defined it, seems impossible—your head starts to spin after, you know, one or two “I know that she knows,” let alone an infinite number. But what the story shows is that a conspicuous, public, self-evident event—something that you see while you see everyone else seeing it, or you hear when you know everyone else can hear it—can give you common knowledge at a stroke. And the other moral is that it changed the relationship of the people to the Emperor, from obsequious deference to ridicule and scorn. And a major theme of the book is that common knowledge, even though it sounds like this abstruse, recondite academic concept, actually figures into everyday life, figures into our money, and figures into our politics, because it enables coordination and it changes social relationships." Thinkable -- When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life

Steven Pinker

22,283 views • 6 months ago

Me: I discuss in the book—it refers to the state where I know something, you know something, I know that you know it, you know that I know it, I know that you know that I know it, and so on ad infinitum. So it differs a bit from the conventional usage, which just refers to something that everyone knows. Here, everyone has to know that everyone knows. Times Radio Interviewer (Daniel Finkelstein Daniel Finkelstein): Can I use this with reference to the interview that I did yesterday with my brother? My brother’s a professor at City University; he’s president of the university, and there’s a campaign at the moment going on against one of their professors who was in the Israeli Defense Forces in the 1980s. We were having a discussion about how the university was standing up for the free speech of its staff, and I’d begun to wonder, as I went home reading your book on the tube, whether I’d made a big mistake—because the protest against this professor is really just a coordination exercise, isn’t it? And maybe I’d aided it by talking about it. Me: Oh yes—protests are coordination exercises. They’re designed to make private knowledge common knowledge. So, in a repressive regime, everyone may know that they despise the government, but because criticism of the government is punished, people might keep their opinions to themselves, with a result that they really don’t know what their fellow citizens think. Each one might think that they’re the only ones that are disgruntled, and so they can’t fear standing up to—they fear standing up to oppose the regime, because they can be picked off one at a time. If everyone were to protest at once, no government has the firepower to intimidate all its citizens at once. In a public protest, people can see other people there, and they know that the people there see other people there, and that can give them the strength and numbers to oppose the regime—sometimes by literally storming the palace, or sometimes just bringing the machinery of the state to a halt through work stoppages. But the crucial thing is that they are coordinated. They can only be coordinated if everyone knows that everyone knows that they hate the regime. Daniel Finkelstein: I suppose that social media is making people—is increasing the stock of common knowledge. We’re all much more aware of what other people like us, in particular like us, know, and we also know that other people know it, and so on, as you put it, and that makes people have more common knowledge. It’s not making us happier though; maybe we’d be better with less common knowledge? Me: Social media are making us more connected within certain circles—that is, those who are receiving the same texts and feeds that we are. It reduces the pool of, or shrinks the largest pool of common knowledge, namely the whole country, which may have been accessible in a day in which, say, in the United States there were three networks, or in Britain everyone was listening to the BBC. And yes, it probably doesn’t make us as happy, because when everything is public, it means that your reputation is on the line for anything you say or do. It means that since social media allow us to generate common knowledge, not just receive it like in the old days, it means that attacks on people’s reputation can be common knowledge, which means that it’s all the more painful for people on the receiving end of the attack. It may have something to do with the fact that in certain demographics—especially young people whose lives increasingly are online—that there’s that much more social competition, opportunities for gossip and ostracism and demeaning comments, and so on. When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life:

Me: I discuss in the book—it refers to the state where I know something, you know something, I know that you know it, you know that I know it, I know that you know that I know it, and so on ad infinitum. So it differs a bit from the conventional usage, which just refers to something that everyone knows. Here, everyone has to know that everyone knows. Times Radio Interviewer (Daniel Finkelstein Daniel Finkelstein): Can I use this with reference to the interview that I did yesterday with my brother? My brother’s a professor at City University; he’s president of the university, and there’s a campaign at the moment going on against one of their professors who was in the Israeli Defense Forces in the 1980s. We were having a discussion about how the university was standing up for the free speech of its staff, and I’d begun to wonder, as I went home reading your book on the tube, whether I’d made a big mistake—because the protest against this professor is really just a coordination exercise, isn’t it? And maybe I’d aided it by talking about it. Me: Oh yes—protests are coordination exercises. They’re designed to make private knowledge common knowledge. So, in a repressive regime, everyone may know that they despise the government, but because criticism of the government is punished, people might keep their opinions to themselves, with a result that they really don’t know what their fellow citizens think. Each one might think that they’re the only ones that are disgruntled, and so they can’t fear standing up to—they fear standing up to oppose the regime, because they can be picked off one at a time. If everyone were to protest at once, no government has the firepower to intimidate all its citizens at once. In a public protest, people can see other people there, and they know that the people there see other people there, and that can give them the strength and numbers to oppose the regime—sometimes by literally storming the palace, or sometimes just bringing the machinery of the state to a halt through work stoppages. But the crucial thing is that they are coordinated. They can only be coordinated if everyone knows that everyone knows that they hate the regime. Daniel Finkelstein: I suppose that social media is making people—is increasing the stock of common knowledge. We’re all much more aware of what other people like us, in particular like us, know, and we also know that other people know it, and so on, as you put it, and that makes people have more common knowledge. It’s not making us happier though; maybe we’d be better with less common knowledge? Me: Social media are making us more connected within certain circles—that is, those who are receiving the same texts and feeds that we are. It reduces the pool of, or shrinks the largest pool of common knowledge, namely the whole country, which may have been accessible in a day in which, say, in the United States there were three networks, or in Britain everyone was listening to the BBC. And yes, it probably doesn’t make us as happy, because when everything is public, it means that your reputation is on the line for anything you say or do. It means that since social media allow us to generate common knowledge, not just receive it like in the old days, it means that attacks on people’s reputation can be common knowledge, which means that it’s all the more painful for people on the receiving end of the attack. It may have something to do with the fact that in certain demographics—especially young people whose lives increasingly are online—that there’s that much more social competition, opportunities for gossip and ostracism and demeaning comments, and so on. When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life:

Steven Pinker

21,547 views • 5 months ago

Why don't we just cut the crap and say it? And the conclusion that I came to, this is an earlier book, The Stuff of Thought (subtitle is Language is a Window into Human Nature), is that direct speech generates common knowledge, and that common knowledge is the basis of our social relationships. Two people--if they're friends, if they're lovers, if they're transactional partners, if they're in a dominance hierarchy--all of those are equilibria in coordination games, and they're matters of common knowledge. In the case of friends, it's we're equal, we would do anything for each other, we're there for each other, and that's kind of the common knowledge that makes friends friends. Clip on direct speech and common knowledge from an interview with Robert Contofalsky (Robert Contofalsky) of R-Academy. -- My new book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life is available here:

Why don't we just cut the crap and say it? And the conclusion that I came to, this is an earlier book, The Stuff of Thought (subtitle is Language is a Window into Human Nature), is that direct speech generates common knowledge, and that common knowledge is the basis of our social relationships. Two people--if they're friends, if they're lovers, if they're transactional partners, if they're in a dominance hierarchy--all of those are equilibria in coordination games, and they're matters of common knowledge. In the case of friends, it's we're equal, we would do anything for each other, we're there for each other, and that's kind of the common knowledge that makes friends friends. Clip on direct speech and common knowledge from an interview with Robert Contofalsky (Robert Contofalsky) of R-Academy. -- My new book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life is available here:

Steven Pinker

56,074 views • 7 months ago

"Salience is the more common way that we entertain common knowledge, generated by certain common knowledge generators like direct speech, but also laughter, I argue, tears, blushing. We have nonverbal common knowledge generators and eye contact. With eye contact, you're looking at the part of the person that's looking at the part of you that's looking at the part of them, ad infinitum. Eye contact is a very powerful signal. Eye contact makes something that was private knowledge, common knowledge, which is why we and our primate ancestors are very sensitive to eye contact." Clip on common knowledge, the topic of my new book, from an interview with Robert Contofalsky (Robert Contofalsky) of R-Academy. -- When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life:

"Salience is the more common way that we entertain common knowledge, generated by certain common knowledge generators like direct speech, but also laughter, I argue, tears, blushing. We have nonverbal common knowledge generators and eye contact. With eye contact, you're looking at the part of the person that's looking at the part of you that's looking at the part of them, ad infinitum. Eye contact is a very powerful signal. Eye contact makes something that was private knowledge, common knowledge, which is why we and our primate ancestors are very sensitive to eye contact." Clip on common knowledge, the topic of my new book, from an interview with Robert Contofalsky (Robert Contofalsky) of R-Academy. -- When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life:

Steven Pinker

47,007 views • 7 months ago

Yes, what's happening in the Monty Hall problem is not common knowledge, but it is knowledge about knowledge. To use a fancy term, recursive mentalizing, where mentalizing means getting into someone else's head, trying to figure out what they know. Recursive mentalizing is trying to get inside their head, and when they're trying to get inside your head, as you're trying to get inside their head at an item. So that's common knowledge. In the case of the Monty Hall problem, it's private knowledge, namely, Monty Hall knows You know that he knows, you don't know what he knows. -- When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life

Yes, what's happening in the Monty Hall problem is not common knowledge, but it is knowledge about knowledge. To use a fancy term, recursive mentalizing, where mentalizing means getting into someone else's head, trying to figure out what they know. Recursive mentalizing is trying to get inside their head, and when they're trying to get inside your head, as you're trying to get inside their head at an item. So that's common knowledge. In the case of the Monty Hall problem, it's private knowledge, namely, Monty Hall knows You know that he knows, you don't know what he knows. -- When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life

Steven Pinker

26,462 views • 6 months ago

Dr P Arora (Pooja Arora) and I spoke about cancel culture and common knowledge, the topic of my new book: When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . . Me: Yeah, so cancel culture is one of the phenomena that has surrounded what’s sometimes called the Great Awokening. It’s a humorous term based on the Great Awakening, which was an era in American history where there was a huge multiplication of Protestant churches and of religious fervor in the 19th century. That was the Great Awakening, and so the joke is it’s the Great Awokening, probably starting maybe around 2014, but then it really exploded in 2020 in the United States with the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. But anyway, cancel culture, which is not restricted to the left, to wokeism—and in fact, in the United States in the last year, we’ve seen an eruption of cancel culture from the populist MAGA Trumpian right, especially after the killing of Charlie Kirk—where the same things that were happening in woke culture, namely someone would have a tweet or a comment that seemed disrespectful of the dominant ideology, and they would get threatened, they would get censored, they would get fired. So in my book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows, one of the chapters is called The Cancelling Instinct. It’s a bit of a play on my book, The Language Instinct. It just asks the question: since it is not only the woke left, but it can also be the MAGA right—and to say nothing of the fascist right or the Nazi right—to repress speech, the question is why? Why do we feel the urge to shut up people we disagree with? Particularly since one of the principles of the Enlightenment, and of science and democracy, is that you need to have free speech, because none of us is infallible. The only way we make progress is that people—everyone—express an opinion; other people are free to criticize those opinions; and it is in the crucible of debate and criticism that we see which ideas are good, which ones are true, which ones are errors that we should discard. I suggest the reason that there is such an urge to cancel is that we all are—we live by moral norms, not just by laws where the police will arrest you and put you on trial and put you in jail if you break a law. And that happens. But we have many more norms of how we live our lives, where people don’t do something because, you know, everyone knows you don’t do it. Why does everyone know? Well, everyone knows that everyone else knows you don’t do it. You don’t walk around naked. You don’t eat mashed potatoes with your hands. You don’t insult people to their faces. You don’t point out—if someone is overweight or has a speech impediment—there are dozens of these norms. And some of the norms are: you don’t make racist comments. You don’t make comments that demean women or gay people. What upholds these norms? Common knowledge. They exist because everyone knows they exist, which means that if it appears that a norm is threatened—crucially, in a public arena where it could be common knowledge—then there is an urge to punish that person, but also publicly. That is, in an arena of common knowledge. That is where everyone can see the punishment, and everyone can see everyone else seeing the punishment. That’s what’s necessary to prop up a norm, and that, I think, gives rise to the urge to censor and cancel, often in highly public ways. Now, in the old days, it used to be that there were public hangings and public crucifixions and burnings at the stake. The electronic equivalent is the internet petition with 600 signatures or the social media shaming mob, but I think the underlying psychology is the same. Now, in some cases, this could be positive. That is, it really is good that we don’t insult each other to our faces, that we don’t tell racist jokes, which were very common when I grew up. On the other hand, in arenas like science, democracy, the rule of law, the truth is more important than social harmony, and the whole point of scholarship, academia, of science is that you find the truth even when the truth seems uncomfortable. And so cancel culture can get in the way of our collective effort to acquire knowledge.

Dr P Arora (Pooja Arora) and I spoke about cancel culture and common knowledge, the topic of my new book: When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . . Me: Yeah, so cancel culture is one of the phenomena that has surrounded what’s sometimes called the Great Awokening. It’s a humorous term based on the Great Awakening, which was an era in American history where there was a huge multiplication of Protestant churches and of religious fervor in the 19th century. That was the Great Awakening, and so the joke is it’s the Great Awokening, probably starting maybe around 2014, but then it really exploded in 2020 in the United States with the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. But anyway, cancel culture, which is not restricted to the left, to wokeism—and in fact, in the United States in the last year, we’ve seen an eruption of cancel culture from the populist MAGA Trumpian right, especially after the killing of Charlie Kirk—where the same things that were happening in woke culture, namely someone would have a tweet or a comment that seemed disrespectful of the dominant ideology, and they would get threatened, they would get censored, they would get fired. So in my book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows, one of the chapters is called The Cancelling Instinct. It’s a bit of a play on my book, The Language Instinct. It just asks the question: since it is not only the woke left, but it can also be the MAGA right—and to say nothing of the fascist right or the Nazi right—to repress speech, the question is why? Why do we feel the urge to shut up people we disagree with? Particularly since one of the principles of the Enlightenment, and of science and democracy, is that you need to have free speech, because none of us is infallible. The only way we make progress is that people—everyone—express an opinion; other people are free to criticize those opinions; and it is in the crucible of debate and criticism that we see which ideas are good, which ones are true, which ones are errors that we should discard. I suggest the reason that there is such an urge to cancel is that we all are—we live by moral norms, not just by laws where the police will arrest you and put you on trial and put you in jail if you break a law. And that happens. But we have many more norms of how we live our lives, where people don’t do something because, you know, everyone knows you don’t do it. Why does everyone know? Well, everyone knows that everyone else knows you don’t do it. You don’t walk around naked. You don’t eat mashed potatoes with your hands. You don’t insult people to their faces. You don’t point out—if someone is overweight or has a speech impediment—there are dozens of these norms. And some of the norms are: you don’t make racist comments. You don’t make comments that demean women or gay people. What upholds these norms? Common knowledge. They exist because everyone knows they exist, which means that if it appears that a norm is threatened—crucially, in a public arena where it could be common knowledge—then there is an urge to punish that person, but also publicly. That is, in an arena of common knowledge. That is where everyone can see the punishment, and everyone can see everyone else seeing the punishment. That’s what’s necessary to prop up a norm, and that, I think, gives rise to the urge to censor and cancel, often in highly public ways. Now, in the old days, it used to be that there were public hangings and public crucifixions and burnings at the stake. The electronic equivalent is the internet petition with 600 signatures or the social media shaming mob, but I think the underlying psychology is the same. Now, in some cases, this could be positive. That is, it really is good that we don’t insult each other to our faces, that we don’t tell racist jokes, which were very common when I grew up. On the other hand, in arenas like science, democracy, the rule of law, the truth is more important than social harmony, and the whole point of scholarship, academia, of science is that you find the truth even when the truth seems uncomfortable. And so cancel culture can get in the way of our collective effort to acquire knowledge.

Steven Pinker

63,433 views • 4 months ago

On Friday, Bill Maher asked me if what happened with Biden at the disastrous debate with Trump was the same story as the Emperor's New Clothes. Me: The story of the Emperor's New Clothes is a story about common knowledge, because when the kid blurted it out, he actually wasn't telling anyone anything they didn't already know. They could see the Emperor was naked. But he still changed their knowledge, because by blurting it out with an earshot of the others, now everyone knew that everyone else knew that everyone else knew that everyone else knew. And what that allowed them to do is change their relationship with the Emperor, from obsequious deference to ridicule and scorn. And the thing about common knowledge in the social realm is that it's what props up our social relationships. And so when something is blurted out, then it can change everything. It changes the nature of your relationship with someone. Maher: And we do have sort of a modern version of the Emperor parable, which is Joe Biden. I mean, he was the Emperor who everyone wouldn't say had lost his marbles. I mean, is that not really the same story? Me: It is the same story, because opinion polls showed that after that disastrous debate with Trump, the number of people who thought that he was cognitively impaired didn't go up by that much. It went up by a few percentage points. But before, a majority of people thought that he was cognitively impaired. The difference is, when it's on TV, where you're watching it, you know that the rest of the country is watching it, you know the rest of the country knows the rest of the country, it's no longer private. It's common. And that's when he was challenged. That was the end. Bill Maher Real Time with Bill Maher

On Friday, Bill Maher asked me if what happened with Biden at the disastrous debate with Trump was the same story as the Emperor's New Clothes. Me: The story of the Emperor's New Clothes is a story about common knowledge, because when the kid blurted it out, he actually wasn't telling anyone anything they didn't already know. They could see the Emperor was naked. But he still changed their knowledge, because by blurting it out with an earshot of the others, now everyone knew that everyone else knew that everyone else knew that everyone else knew. And what that allowed them to do is change their relationship with the Emperor, from obsequious deference to ridicule and scorn. And the thing about common knowledge in the social realm is that it's what props up our social relationships. And so when something is blurted out, then it can change everything. It changes the nature of your relationship with someone. Maher: And we do have sort of a modern version of the Emperor parable, which is Joe Biden. I mean, he was the Emperor who everyone wouldn't say had lost his marbles. I mean, is that not really the same story? Me: It is the same story, because opinion polls showed that after that disastrous debate with Trump, the number of people who thought that he was cognitively impaired didn't go up by that much. It went up by a few percentage points. But before, a majority of people thought that he was cognitively impaired. The difference is, when it's on TV, where you're watching it, you know that the rest of the country is watching it, you know the rest of the country knows the rest of the country, it's no longer private. It's common. And that's when he was challenged. That was the end. Bill Maher Real Time with Bill Maher

Steven Pinker

272,948 views • 9 months ago

Discussing common knowledge with Bill Maher. Common knowledge is the topic of my new book: When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows...: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life.

Discussing common knowledge with Bill Maher. Common knowledge is the topic of my new book: When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows...: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life.

Steven Pinker

76,415 views • 9 months ago

Galen Druke (Galen Druke) interviewed me about common knowledge, the topic of my new book (link in thread): Me: What common knowledge does in informal interactions is it ratifies social relationships. So if two people are friends, if they’re lovers, if one of them is dominant and the other is subordinate—that is, one always gets it this way—these exist because each party knows the other one knows they exist. And they survive by being common knowledge. Sometimes we don’t want to destroy a relationship, and so we keep things out of common knowledge by using euphemism or innuendo or genteel hypocrisy. Druke: What’s an example of this? Me: At the end of a date, you’ve got a couple of friends and one says, “Hey, do you want to kind of come up for coffee—or Netflix and chill?” That’s very different from, “Do you want to have sex?” even though if they’re both grownups, they both know that it’s having sex. So there’s a denial of common knowledge, which would allow them—if the overture is not reciprocated—to go back to being platonic friends or workplace colleagues.

Galen Druke (Galen Druke) interviewed me about common knowledge, the topic of my new book (link in thread): Me: What common knowledge does in informal interactions is it ratifies social relationships. So if two people are friends, if they’re lovers, if one of them is dominant and the other is subordinate—that is, one always gets it this way—these exist because each party knows the other one knows they exist. And they survive by being common knowledge. Sometimes we don’t want to destroy a relationship, and so we keep things out of common knowledge by using euphemism or innuendo or genteel hypocrisy. Druke: What’s an example of this? Me: At the end of a date, you’ve got a couple of friends and one says, “Hey, do you want to kind of come up for coffee—or Netflix and chill?” That’s very different from, “Do you want to have sex?” even though if they’re both grownups, they both know that it’s having sex. So there’s a denial of common knowledge, which would allow them—if the overture is not reciprocated—to go back to being platonic friends or workplace colleagues.

Steven Pinker

22,350 views • 8 months ago

Why is it hard for nervous lovers to say goodbye on the phone? More on this can be found in my new book: When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . . Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life. Out soon:

Why is it hard for nervous lovers to say goodbye on the phone? More on this can be found in my new book: When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . . Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life. Out soon:

Steven Pinker

66,072 views • 9 months ago

"So what innuendo, euphemism, and indirect speech acts do is prevent the proposition from becoming common knowledge. That is, let’s say he said, “Do you want to come up for Netflix and chill?” She says no. She’s a grown-up; she knows this was a sexual invitation. And he’s a grown-up; he knows it too. But does he know that she knows that he knows it? He can still think, “Well, maybe she thinks I’m dense. Maybe she thinks I don’t know that she knowingly turned down a sexual invitation.” And as far as she’s concerned, he might think she just didn’t want to stay out late. And she could think, “Well, maybe he thinks I’m naïve. Maybe he thinks I just didn’t want to be out late, and he might think I’m just turning down an invitation for Netflix.” Without the common knowledge—the “he knows that I know that he knows that I know”—they can maintain the fiction of a purely platonic friendship without sacrificing their claim to rationality and sanity. If it had been blurted out, “Hey, do you want to have sex?” and she were to say no, then they couldn’t maintain the fiction of a purely platonic friendship, or of colleagues at work, or, even more dangerously, a supervisor and supervisee. And so we use indirect speech, I argue, to keep things out of common knowledge—out of relationship-threatening common knowledge." Clip on innuendo and common knowledge, the topic of my new book, from an interview with Robert Contofalsky (Robert Contofalsky) of R-Academy. -- When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life:

"So what innuendo, euphemism, and indirect speech acts do is prevent the proposition from becoming common knowledge. That is, let’s say he said, “Do you want to come up for Netflix and chill?” She says no. She’s a grown-up; she knows this was a sexual invitation. And he’s a grown-up; he knows it too. But does he know that she knows that he knows it? He can still think, “Well, maybe she thinks I’m dense. Maybe she thinks I don’t know that she knowingly turned down a sexual invitation.” And as far as she’s concerned, he might think she just didn’t want to stay out late. And she could think, “Well, maybe he thinks I’m naïve. Maybe he thinks I just didn’t want to be out late, and he might think I’m just turning down an invitation for Netflix.” Without the common knowledge—the “he knows that I know that he knows that I know”—they can maintain the fiction of a purely platonic friendship without sacrificing their claim to rationality and sanity. If it had been blurted out, “Hey, do you want to have sex?” and she were to say no, then they couldn’t maintain the fiction of a purely platonic friendship, or of colleagues at work, or, even more dangerously, a supervisor and supervisee. And so we use indirect speech, I argue, to keep things out of common knowledge—out of relationship-threatening common knowledge." Clip on innuendo and common knowledge, the topic of my new book, from an interview with Robert Contofalsky (Robert Contofalsky) of R-Academy. -- When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life:

Steven Pinker

65,013 views • 7 months ago

Me: What the Trump administration is doing by this trolling—by this contempt for standards of evidence, truth, sound argument—is what many dictators have done. Namely, not so much lie, because people can see through lies. But just as Steve Bannon put it, flood the zone with—we're on the radio—so, flood the zone with feces; he didn’t use the word feces. That is, spread so much nonsense, some things that are true, some things that are false, that people just feel there’s no way to tell the difference, and so they just accept what the powerful leader says. That is, you undermine the feeling that there’s any basis to distinguish truth from falsehood. Meaning, well, then what are you going to believe? Well, believe what the leader says. Adam Boulton: And that is, you know, making common knowledge toxic to a certain extent, isn’t it? Me: Yes, it’s spreading the common belief that works in the interests of the powerful leader, the sovereign, the dictator, the chief, at the expense of the democratic principle that the government serves the interests of the people. Adam Boulton: It also seems to me that because America is so dominant and so large, that it is something that is spreading out into political discourse in other countries. You know, people talk about being like Trump, or Trump’s got a point, or things like that. Do you see that coming here? Me: Yeah, I think that is a danger. I mean, I think there were hints of that during the administration of Boris Johnson, who has been called Trump with a thesaurus. But there was some of that trolling, some of that not being quite serious—you never knew whether he was joshing or not—which is less benign than it might seem. It’s not just that he has a sense of humor, but by just fuzzing the border between truth and exaggeration and trolling, it meant that you’re in a position where you may as well believe what the leader says, because the whole atmosphere of knowing has been so polluted that there’s no way of determining what’s true or false. Adam Boulton: It also seems to me—I don’t know if you’d agree—that there’s a tremendous amount of gaslighting, that the fault which Trump or the administration is manifesting, they then accuse their opponents of having. You know, it’s not me, it’s you. Me: Exactly, that kind of naked partisanship: I’m right, people who disagree with me are bad, whatever it is that they say, and I never make a mistake, anything I say is true, is another tactic of control. And indeed, gaslighting—which is like the emperor’s new clothes, the elephant in the room—where people know something privately, but they are punished for saying it publicly, with the result that you can be in a situation where everyone knows something, mistakenly thinks that no one else knows it, whereas everyone really does know it. And that spiral of silence, as it’s sometimes called, can happen when the expression of beliefs is punished. With Adam Boulton of Times Radio (Times Radio):

Me: What the Trump administration is doing by this trolling—by this contempt for standards of evidence, truth, sound argument—is what many dictators have done. Namely, not so much lie, because people can see through lies. But just as Steve Bannon put it, flood the zone with—we're on the radio—so, flood the zone with feces; he didn’t use the word feces. That is, spread so much nonsense, some things that are true, some things that are false, that people just feel there’s no way to tell the difference, and so they just accept what the powerful leader says. That is, you undermine the feeling that there’s any basis to distinguish truth from falsehood. Meaning, well, then what are you going to believe? Well, believe what the leader says. Adam Boulton: And that is, you know, making common knowledge toxic to a certain extent, isn’t it? Me: Yes, it’s spreading the common belief that works in the interests of the powerful leader, the sovereign, the dictator, the chief, at the expense of the democratic principle that the government serves the interests of the people. Adam Boulton: It also seems to me that because America is so dominant and so large, that it is something that is spreading out into political discourse in other countries. You know, people talk about being like Trump, or Trump’s got a point, or things like that. Do you see that coming here? Me: Yeah, I think that is a danger. I mean, I think there were hints of that during the administration of Boris Johnson, who has been called Trump with a thesaurus. But there was some of that trolling, some of that not being quite serious—you never knew whether he was joshing or not—which is less benign than it might seem. It’s not just that he has a sense of humor, but by just fuzzing the border between truth and exaggeration and trolling, it meant that you’re in a position where you may as well believe what the leader says, because the whole atmosphere of knowing has been so polluted that there’s no way of determining what’s true or false. Adam Boulton: It also seems to me—I don’t know if you’d agree—that there’s a tremendous amount of gaslighting, that the fault which Trump or the administration is manifesting, they then accuse their opponents of having. You know, it’s not me, it’s you. Me: Exactly, that kind of naked partisanship: I’m right, people who disagree with me are bad, whatever it is that they say, and I never make a mistake, anything I say is true, is another tactic of control. And indeed, gaslighting—which is like the emperor’s new clothes, the elephant in the room—where people know something privately, but they are punished for saying it publicly, with the result that you can be in a situation where everyone knows something, mistakenly thinks that no one else knows it, whereas everyone really does know it. And that spiral of silence, as it’s sometimes called, can happen when the expression of beliefs is punished. With Adam Boulton of Times Radio (Times Radio):

Steven Pinker

82,182 views • 7 months ago

“Social media now allow any of us to be an executioner or a grand inquisitor—pile on—and our tweet shaming someone could go viral or cause other people to tweet. That can happen in academia, where you can gin up a petition denouncing someone in a few minutes with social media. I have a chapter in When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows..., in particular on academic cancel culture—or cancel culture more generally—why people feel the urge to cancel, even in an arena like academia, which ought to be about ideas, including ideas that are advanced with the point that they be evaluated and falsified. And so you think that what you say might be wrong, but it surely can’t be evil. But in academia, there’s been a temptation to treat certain ideas as evil and to try to punish or censor the person broaching them.” Clip on common knowledge, the topic of my new book, from an interview with Robert Contofalsky (Robert Contofalsky) of R-Academy. -- When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life:

“Social media now allow any of us to be an executioner or a grand inquisitor—pile on—and our tweet shaming someone could go viral or cause other people to tweet. That can happen in academia, where you can gin up a petition denouncing someone in a few minutes with social media. I have a chapter in When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows..., in particular on academic cancel culture—or cancel culture more generally—why people feel the urge to cancel, even in an arena like academia, which ought to be about ideas, including ideas that are advanced with the point that they be evaluated and falsified. And so you think that what you say might be wrong, but it surely can’t be evil. But in academia, there’s been a temptation to treat certain ideas as evil and to try to punish or censor the person broaching them.” Clip on common knowledge, the topic of my new book, from an interview with Robert Contofalsky (Robert Contofalsky) of R-Academy. -- When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life:

Steven Pinker

45,050 views • 6 months ago

.Naval: You have a beautiful definition of knowledge, which most people don’t even try to tackle, about how knowledge perpetuates itself in the environment. You gave some really good examples. One was around genes. Successful, highly adapted genes contain a lot of knowledge and can cause themselves to be replicated because they’re survivors. In the same way, knowledge itself is a survivor, in that if you transmit to me the knowledge of how to build a computer, it’s an incredibly useful thing. I’m going to build more and more computers and that knowledge will be passed on. Your underlying point that you repeated here was if you want to understand the physical universe you have to understand knowledge, because it is the thing that over time takes over and changes more and more the universe—more than almost anything else. You have to understand all the explanations behind it. You can’t just say “particle collisions” because that explains everything, so it explains nothing. It’s not a useful level to operate at. Therefore, the things that create knowledge are uniquely influential in the universe. And as far as we know, there are only two systems that create knowledge. There’s evolution and there are humans. But is there a difference even between these two forms of knowledge creation, between evolution and between humans? David Deutsch: Yes. I have argued that the human way of creating knowledge is the ultimate one, that there aren’t any more powerful ones than that. This is the argument against the supernatural. Assuming that there is a form of knowledge creation that’s more powerful than ours is equivalent to invoking the supernatural, which is therefore a bad explanation—as invoking the supernatural always is. The difference between biological evolution and human creative thought is that biological evolution is inherently limited in its range. That’s because biological evolution has no foresight. It can’t see a problem and conjecture a solution. Whenever biological evolution produces a solution to something, it’s always before natural selection has even begun. This is Charles Darwin’s insight. This is the difference between Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and the other theories of evolution that had been around for a century or more before that, including Charles Darwin’s grandfather and Lamarck. The thing they didn’t get is that the creation of knowledge in evolution begins before. That means that biological evolution can’t reach places that are not reachable by successive improvements, each of which allows a viable organism to exist. Creationists say that biological evolution has, in fact, reached things that are not reachable by incremental steps, each of which is a viable organism. They’re factually mistaken. The thing which they have in mind is the idea of a creator who can imagine things that don’t exist and who can create an idea that is not the culmination of a whole load of viable things. A thinking being can create something that’s a culmination of a whole load of non-viable things. Explanatory creativity makes humans unique Out of all the billions and billions of species that have ever existed, none of them has ever made a campfire, even though many of them would’ve been helped by having the genetic capacity to make campfires. The reason it didn’t happen in the biosphere is that there is no such thing as making a partially functional campfire; whereas there is, for example, with making hot water. The bombardier beetles squirt boiling water at their enemies. You can easily see that just squirting cold water at your enemies is not totally unhelpful. Then making it a bit hotter and a bit hotter. Squirting boiling water no doubt required many adaptations to make sure the beetle didn’t boil itself while it was making this boiling water. That happened because there was a sequence of steps in between, all of which were useful. But with campfires, it’s very hard to see how that could happen. Humans have explanatory creativity. Once you have that, you can get to the moon. You can cause asteroids which are heading towards the earth to turn around and go away. Perhaps no other planet in the universe has that power, and it has it only because of the presence of explanatory creativity on it.

.Naval: You have a beautiful definition of knowledge, which most people don’t even try to tackle, about how knowledge perpetuates itself in the environment. You gave some really good examples. One was around genes. Successful, highly adapted genes contain a lot of knowledge and can cause themselves to be replicated because they’re survivors. In the same way, knowledge itself is a survivor, in that if you transmit to me the knowledge of how to build a computer, it’s an incredibly useful thing. I’m going to build more and more computers and that knowledge will be passed on. Your underlying point that you repeated here was if you want to understand the physical universe you have to understand knowledge, because it is the thing that over time takes over and changes more and more the universe—more than almost anything else. You have to understand all the explanations behind it. You can’t just say “particle collisions” because that explains everything, so it explains nothing. It’s not a useful level to operate at. Therefore, the things that create knowledge are uniquely influential in the universe. And as far as we know, there are only two systems that create knowledge. There’s evolution and there are humans. But is there a difference even between these two forms of knowledge creation, between evolution and between humans? David Deutsch: Yes. I have argued that the human way of creating knowledge is the ultimate one, that there aren’t any more powerful ones than that. This is the argument against the supernatural. Assuming that there is a form of knowledge creation that’s more powerful than ours is equivalent to invoking the supernatural, which is therefore a bad explanation—as invoking the supernatural always is. The difference between biological evolution and human creative thought is that biological evolution is inherently limited in its range. That’s because biological evolution has no foresight. It can’t see a problem and conjecture a solution. Whenever biological evolution produces a solution to something, it’s always before natural selection has even begun. This is Charles Darwin’s insight. This is the difference between Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and the other theories of evolution that had been around for a century or more before that, including Charles Darwin’s grandfather and Lamarck. The thing they didn’t get is that the creation of knowledge in evolution begins before. That means that biological evolution can’t reach places that are not reachable by successive improvements, each of which allows a viable organism to exist. Creationists say that biological evolution has, in fact, reached things that are not reachable by incremental steps, each of which is a viable organism. They’re factually mistaken. The thing which they have in mind is the idea of a creator who can imagine things that don’t exist and who can create an idea that is not the culmination of a whole load of viable things. A thinking being can create something that’s a culmination of a whole load of non-viable things. Explanatory creativity makes humans unique Out of all the billions and billions of species that have ever existed, none of them has ever made a campfire, even though many of them would’ve been helped by having the genetic capacity to make campfires. The reason it didn’t happen in the biosphere is that there is no such thing as making a partially functional campfire; whereas there is, for example, with making hot water. The bombardier beetles squirt boiling water at their enemies. You can easily see that just squirting cold water at your enemies is not totally unhelpful. Then making it a bit hotter and a bit hotter. Squirting boiling water no doubt required many adaptations to make sure the beetle didn’t boil itself while it was making this boiling water. That happened because there was a sequence of steps in between, all of which were useful. But with campfires, it’s very hard to see how that could happen. Humans have explanatory creativity. Once you have that, you can get to the moon. You can cause asteroids which are heading towards the earth to turn around and go away. Perhaps no other planet in the universe has that power, and it has it only because of the presence of explanatory creativity on it.

Deutsch Explains

186,102 views • 1 year ago

Steven Pinker (Steven Pinker) returns to Conversations with Tyler with an argument that common knowledge—those infinite loops of "I know that you know that I know"—is the hidden infrastructure that enables human coordination, from accepting paper money to toppling dictators. But tylercowen wonders: can there be too much common knowledge? COWEN: For a while now, we’ve had this thing called anonymous posters on the internet. Do you think, on average, they make the world better or worse? PINKER: Interesting. Probably worse. COWEN: They help make some things common knowledge. If there are things that are not common knowledge, some anonymous poster will say it. There’ll also be misinformation. Is that a clue that maybe at the margin, we have too much common knowledge rather than too little?

Steven Pinker (Steven Pinker) returns to Conversations with Tyler with an argument that common knowledge—those infinite loops of "I know that you know that I know"—is the hidden infrastructure that enables human coordination, from accepting paper money to toppling dictators. But tylercowen wonders: can there be too much common knowledge? COWEN: For a while now, we’ve had this thing called anonymous posters on the internet. Do you think, on average, they make the world better or worse? PINKER: Interesting. Probably worse. COWEN: They help make some things common knowledge. If there are things that are not common knowledge, some anonymous poster will say it. There’ll also be misinformation. Is that a clue that maybe at the margin, we have too much common knowledge rather than too little?

Conversations with Tyler

22,273 views • 9 months ago

.Naval: Epistemology, which is a fancy word for the theory of how knowledge grows or how knowledge growth occurs. And we've all been told since we're young that there's a scientific method and that scientists sort of do this stuff in white lab coats and we're supposed to accept it because of this thing called the scientific method. And then they give us true beliefs that we can then say, well the science is settled and we take that we move on. And we all only have a very, very vague understanding of how this works. And people say, well maybe you go out in the real world, you look at what's happening, you make all these observations, and then based on that you form a theory, you test the theory against more observations, and the more observations you get the closer you get to the truth. And once you have enough observation it's true and then you call it a scientific theory or a law and it's settled and you move on. And this is the popular conception of how science works. And as Popper pointed out and as you take even further, this is completely wrong. And so I'd love for you to get into that, which is what is knowledge? How does it grow? What is the real scientific method? And how do we figure things out? David Deutsch: I love the way you just stated the prevailing view there and laced every aspect of it with the contempt that it deserves. So you just went through touching every base. It's amazing that this series of misconceptions is still common sense. I mean, that it was common sense at a time when we didn't really have science or when science was just starting up, when the main issue in science was freeing itself from dogmatism, freeing itself from religion, freeing itself from authority, and so on. There it was understandable that people would look for an alternative source of authority and they would think, oh, it's sense impressions. We can see the world and you know, these religious people, they can't even see God and so on. And so we are confined to what we can see. That's where we get our ideas from. And as you say, that is completely false. Sense impressions, like all observation, even the most careful scientific observation is all theory laden. And theories are inherently fallible. I mean, we actually want to replace our best theories. Everybody who does a PhD is technically anyway, working to overturn something in the existing body of knowledge. You're not turned away at the door if you say, I don't believe this stuff, I'm going to produce something better. Whereas for most of human history, that was exactly what you were forbidden to do. The idea was that we already had all the important knowledge. If you want to discover something new, what you had to make sure of was that it didn't contradict the existing knowledge. Now, you have to make sure that it does contradict existing knowledge. So more or less. Naval: Yeah, it's this tradition of criticism that you've talked about in the West, that the Enlightenment really ushered in the Enlightenment era. David Deutsch: It has been institutionalized. So in many ways, our institutions are wiser than we are. So the institutions of science, for instance, have this built in, even if scientists actually don't always act that way. In fact, they often don't act that way, and act in a dogmatic way and try to preserve the status quo and are resistant to new ideas and so on. But the institutions, the way the procedures of science work, makes the right thing happen in the end anyway, regardless of what the people are trying to do. Naval: So you're saying the knowledge of the true scientific method is embedded in the institutions of science in the PhD process? David Deutsch: Well, the best scientific method that we know of, and one shouldn't really think of it as a method, you know, there's this wonderful lecture by Popper when he first was made a professor at the London School of Economics. He was made a professor of scientific method, and his first six lectures, I wish the rest of them were, the first six lectures are on the internet somewhere. And he starts the first one by saying, I am the first professor of scientific method in the British Empire. The British Empire still existed at the time, more or less. And so the first thing I want to say to you is that there is no such thing as the scientific method. And then he goes on from there. So this subject does not exist. So if any of you have come here to learn the handle that you have to turn in order to make scientific knowledge come out the other end, you're going to be disappointed.

.Naval: Epistemology, which is a fancy word for the theory of how knowledge grows or how knowledge growth occurs. And we've all been told since we're young that there's a scientific method and that scientists sort of do this stuff in white lab coats and we're supposed to accept it because of this thing called the scientific method. And then they give us true beliefs that we can then say, well the science is settled and we take that we move on. And we all only have a very, very vague understanding of how this works. And people say, well maybe you go out in the real world, you look at what's happening, you make all these observations, and then based on that you form a theory, you test the theory against more observations, and the more observations you get the closer you get to the truth. And once you have enough observation it's true and then you call it a scientific theory or a law and it's settled and you move on. And this is the popular conception of how science works. And as Popper pointed out and as you take even further, this is completely wrong. And so I'd love for you to get into that, which is what is knowledge? How does it grow? What is the real scientific method? And how do we figure things out? David Deutsch: I love the way you just stated the prevailing view there and laced every aspect of it with the contempt that it deserves. So you just went through touching every base. It's amazing that this series of misconceptions is still common sense. I mean, that it was common sense at a time when we didn't really have science or when science was just starting up, when the main issue in science was freeing itself from dogmatism, freeing itself from religion, freeing itself from authority, and so on. There it was understandable that people would look for an alternative source of authority and they would think, oh, it's sense impressions. We can see the world and you know, these religious people, they can't even see God and so on. And so we are confined to what we can see. That's where we get our ideas from. And as you say, that is completely false. Sense impressions, like all observation, even the most careful scientific observation is all theory laden. And theories are inherently fallible. I mean, we actually want to replace our best theories. Everybody who does a PhD is technically anyway, working to overturn something in the existing body of knowledge. You're not turned away at the door if you say, I don't believe this stuff, I'm going to produce something better. Whereas for most of human history, that was exactly what you were forbidden to do. The idea was that we already had all the important knowledge. If you want to discover something new, what you had to make sure of was that it didn't contradict the existing knowledge. Now, you have to make sure that it does contradict existing knowledge. So more or less. Naval: Yeah, it's this tradition of criticism that you've talked about in the West, that the Enlightenment really ushered in the Enlightenment era. David Deutsch: It has been institutionalized. So in many ways, our institutions are wiser than we are. So the institutions of science, for instance, have this built in, even if scientists actually don't always act that way. In fact, they often don't act that way, and act in a dogmatic way and try to preserve the status quo and are resistant to new ideas and so on. But the institutions, the way the procedures of science work, makes the right thing happen in the end anyway, regardless of what the people are trying to do. Naval: So you're saying the knowledge of the true scientific method is embedded in the institutions of science in the PhD process? David Deutsch: Well, the best scientific method that we know of, and one shouldn't really think of it as a method, you know, there's this wonderful lecture by Popper when he first was made a professor at the London School of Economics. He was made a professor of scientific method, and his first six lectures, I wish the rest of them were, the first six lectures are on the internet somewhere. And he starts the first one by saying, I am the first professor of scientific method in the British Empire. The British Empire still existed at the time, more or less. And so the first thing I want to say to you is that there is no such thing as the scientific method. And then he goes on from there. So this subject does not exist. So if any of you have come here to learn the handle that you have to turn in order to make scientific knowledge come out the other end, you're going to be disappointed.

Deutsch Explains

114,992 views • 1 year ago

.Naval: You define wealth in a beautiful way. You talk about wealth as a set of physical transformations that we can affect. So as a society it becomes very clear that knowledge leads directly to wealth creation for everybody. A given individual can obviously affect physical transformations proportional to the resources available to them—but much more proportional to the knowledge available to them. Knowledge is a huge force multiplier. You then define resources as the thing that you combine with knowledge to create wealth. New knowledge allows you to use new things as resources and discard old things that maybe we’re running out of. There are lots of examples of how we’ve done that in the past. For example, in energy we’ve gone from wood to coal to oil to nuclear. But then people say, “Now we’re out of ideas. Now we’re caught up. Now we’re done. There aren’t going to be new ideas, and now we have to freeze the frame and conserve what we have.” The counter to that is, “No, we’ll create new knowledge and have new resources. Don’t worry about the old ones.” Well they say, “If you’re going to have new resources, if you can’t think of them now, it’s not real.” This now gets into the realm of people demanding that if you’re going to claim that new knowledge will be created, you have to name that knowledge now. Otherwise it’s not real. But that seems like a Catch-22. David Deutsch: It does, and it’s a bad argument. I don’t want to claim that the knowledge will be created. We’re fallible; we may not create it. We may destroy ourselves. We may miss the solution that’s right under our nose, so that when the snailiens come from another galaxy and look at us, they’ll say, “How can it possibly be that they failed to do so-and-so when it was right in front of them?” That could happen. I can’t prove or argue that it won’t happen. What I always argue, though, is that we have what it takes. We have everything that it takes to achieve that. If we don’t, it’ll be because of bad choices we have made, not because of constraints imposed on us by the planet or the solar system. Naval: It will be by anti-rational memes that restrict the creation of knowledge and the growth of knowledge. David Deutsch: Maybe. Or maybe it’ll be by well-intentioned errors, which nobody could see why they were errors. Again, it doesn’t take malevolence to make mistakes. Mistakes are the normal condition of humans. All we can do is try to find them. Maybe not destroying the means of correcting errors is the heart of morality; because if there is no way of correcting errors, then sooner or later one of those will get us. Naval: Don’t destroy the means of error correction is the base of morality. I love that. I think about places like North Korea where you can’t have elections and a revolution is very difficult because the gang in charge is armed to the teeth and they’ve destroyed the means of political error correction for a long time. That is a case where humanity is trapped in a local minimum, and it’s very hard to climb out of that hole. If too much of the world falls into that mindset, then we as a species may just stagnate because we’ve lost our biggest advantage. We’ve lost our biggest discovery, which was the ability to make new discoveries.

.Naval: You define wealth in a beautiful way. You talk about wealth as a set of physical transformations that we can affect. So as a society it becomes very clear that knowledge leads directly to wealth creation for everybody. A given individual can obviously affect physical transformations proportional to the resources available to them—but much more proportional to the knowledge available to them. Knowledge is a huge force multiplier. You then define resources as the thing that you combine with knowledge to create wealth. New knowledge allows you to use new things as resources and discard old things that maybe we’re running out of. There are lots of examples of how we’ve done that in the past. For example, in energy we’ve gone from wood to coal to oil to nuclear. But then people say, “Now we’re out of ideas. Now we’re caught up. Now we’re done. There aren’t going to be new ideas, and now we have to freeze the frame and conserve what we have.” The counter to that is, “No, we’ll create new knowledge and have new resources. Don’t worry about the old ones.” Well they say, “If you’re going to have new resources, if you can’t think of them now, it’s not real.” This now gets into the realm of people demanding that if you’re going to claim that new knowledge will be created, you have to name that knowledge now. Otherwise it’s not real. But that seems like a Catch-22. David Deutsch: It does, and it’s a bad argument. I don’t want to claim that the knowledge will be created. We’re fallible; we may not create it. We may destroy ourselves. We may miss the solution that’s right under our nose, so that when the snailiens come from another galaxy and look at us, they’ll say, “How can it possibly be that they failed to do so-and-so when it was right in front of them?” That could happen. I can’t prove or argue that it won’t happen. What I always argue, though, is that we have what it takes. We have everything that it takes to achieve that. If we don’t, it’ll be because of bad choices we have made, not because of constraints imposed on us by the planet or the solar system. Naval: It will be by anti-rational memes that restrict the creation of knowledge and the growth of knowledge. David Deutsch: Maybe. Or maybe it’ll be by well-intentioned errors, which nobody could see why they were errors. Again, it doesn’t take malevolence to make mistakes. Mistakes are the normal condition of humans. All we can do is try to find them. Maybe not destroying the means of correcting errors is the heart of morality; because if there is no way of correcting errors, then sooner or later one of those will get us. Naval: Don’t destroy the means of error correction is the base of morality. I love that. I think about places like North Korea where you can’t have elections and a revolution is very difficult because the gang in charge is armed to the teeth and they’ve destroyed the means of political error correction for a long time. That is a case where humanity is trapped in a local minimum, and it’s very hard to climb out of that hole. If too much of the world falls into that mindset, then we as a species may just stagnate because we’ve lost our biggest advantage. We’ve lost our biggest discovery, which was the ability to make new discoveries.

Deutsch Explains

143,913 views • 1 year ago

.David Deutsch: “There is an inherent conflict in the human condition—both individually and in society—between the need to preserve existing knowledge and the need to create new knowledge. For most of human history, preserving existing knowledge trumped any kind of attempt to improve knowledge. Because attempts to improve knowledge risk error. Or rather, to be exact, it risks error that has never occurred before. There were plenty of errors that had occurred before. Plenty of kings got overthrown because they couldn’t solve the problem of how to fend off the enemy. But they were in familiar territory conceptually, and they were afraid of changing culture. This fear of changing culture was built into culture itself. And this conflict exists to this day. The most extreme example known to me in the West, anyway, is the conflict in education between preserving existing knowledge and creating new knowledge. Even today, education—education theory—is conceived as the theory of how to decant existing knowledge from the brains that already know it to the brains that do not yet know it. And that’s what Popper calls the ‘bucket theory of the mind’—that the mind is a bucket and knowledge is a fluid. What he stressed, and what I always also want to stress, is that not only is that a mischaracterization of knowledge and of the use of knowledge, but it is the wrong way around. As a practical matter, even right back two million years ago, the transmission of cultural knowledge was not something done by the transmitter; it was something done by the receiver.”

.David Deutsch: “There is an inherent conflict in the human condition—both individually and in society—between the need to preserve existing knowledge and the need to create new knowledge. For most of human history, preserving existing knowledge trumped any kind of attempt to improve knowledge. Because attempts to improve knowledge risk error. Or rather, to be exact, it risks error that has never occurred before. There were plenty of errors that had occurred before. Plenty of kings got overthrown because they couldn’t solve the problem of how to fend off the enemy. But they were in familiar territory conceptually, and they were afraid of changing culture. This fear of changing culture was built into culture itself. And this conflict exists to this day. The most extreme example known to me in the West, anyway, is the conflict in education between preserving existing knowledge and creating new knowledge. Even today, education—education theory—is conceived as the theory of how to decant existing knowledge from the brains that already know it to the brains that do not yet know it. And that’s what Popper calls the ‘bucket theory of the mind’—that the mind is a bucket and knowledge is a fluid. What he stressed, and what I always also want to stress, is that not only is that a mischaracterization of knowledge and of the use of knowledge, but it is the wrong way around. As a practical matter, even right back two million years ago, the transmission of cultural knowledge was not something done by the transmitter; it was something done by the receiver.”

Arjun Khemani

10,523 views • 1 year ago