 My guest today is Steven Pinker, the psychologist and best-selling author who's emerged over the past two decades as one of the leading defenders of academic freedom and liberal values of limited government, secularism, tolerance, and free enterprise. A year ago, we helped found the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, a faculty organization to advocate for the free and civil exchange of ideas inside and outside the classroom. In the wake of the reaction by the campus left to the October 7th Hamas attacks on Israel, he published a five-point plan to save Harvard from itself. We talk about whether higher education is doomed, why so many people on the right and left are skeptical about moral and material progress, and how his photography fits into his larger, intellectual worldview. Here is the reason interview with Steven Pinker. Steve, last December you published an op-ed titled a five-point plan to save Harvard from itself in the Boston Globe. You wrote that Harvard is now the place where using the wrong pronoun is a hanging offense, but calling for another Holocaust depends on context, and that deplorable speech should be refuted, not criminalized, but you also noted that outlawing hate speech would only result in students calling anything they didn't want to hear, hate speech. Can you bring us up to date on the climate at Harvard, and we'll go from Harvard to a larger academic setting, but how are things going there? It seems as if free speech was embraced by the former president of Harvard and by many people in the institution, but is it a real commitment to free speech and intellectual seriousness? Well, Harvard's a big place, and there is a diversity of opinion in co-founding the council on academic freedom at Harvard. There was a rush of faculty joining us, but still a small percentage of the faculty. Many of them vocal, many of them for the first time had an opportunity to just communicate with themselves across the sprawling, multiple campuses at Harvard. Many are upset at the direction that Harvard and other elite universities have taken in restricting the range of expressible opinions to a pretty narrow slice of the spectrum, to criminalizing certain opinions, to getting into needless trouble by taking, by university, taking stands that really should be the prerogative of its students and faculty, that there isn't any reason that a university should have a foreign policy, or should, and in general at the level of discourse where just calling someone a racist is considered a counterargument or a refutation. So we formed this council to try to push back, to try to offer emotional support to those who are under attack, because it can be devastating to be the target of a cancellation campaign, to also be a constituency that would, while activists are yelling into an administrator's ear, and a lot of the problems that universities have faced have come from the fact that deans and provosts and presidents just want to make trouble go away, and so if someone is yelling at them and making their life miserable, they'll do whatever it takes to shut up. So we figure if we also yell at them, then they'll actually have to think about what's the optimal thing to do rather than just do what makes the noise go down. Do you feel like it's having, I mean that this time it's different, that this time it's different. There have been flare ups in the past, but it seems like the outrage over the response to, I mean it was really the congressional hearing about the college responses to the attacks by Hamas on Israel. Is it different this time? I think so there, that Harvard itself is in a kind of crisis by its own standards, which is to say that donations are down. It doesn't really need the money, but it wants the money, right? And applications are down. It's become a national joke. I have a collection of memes and headlines and bumper stickers, like the bumper sticker my son didn't get into Harvard. Editorial cartoon of a corporate guy saying this guy has a stellar resume, straight A's, top scores, didn't go to Harvard. So the reputation, which is something that, which is a huge resource that Harvard has drawn on is, is threatened. And when it's threatened, a lot of Harvard's comparative advantage will also be threatened. Now Harvard has a lot of money, but it also can to some extent coast on its reputation. And it can only go down, right? I mean for the longest time. And at least if the past few months are an indication it is. I mean, you also pointed out in that Boston Globe piece and elsewhere that it wasn't just that. I mean, the affirmative action case that Harvard lost. Does that play into the sense that, OK, like Harvard has been moving in the wrong direction for a long period of time and needs to kind of back up and get back on the highway? Yeah, it did. It certainly got Harvard's attention. The fact that it is, it does have an outsized reputation means that it has a certain cushion that it doesn't necessarily, not every department has to compete to be the best in the country because people, students will come, graduate students will come, donors will give. And so they can be. So you're saying that like psychology doesn't really have to work very hard at all, right? Well, it, psychology has gone through waves and my former colleague Steve Costlin is here who made it the I think the best department in the country when he was a chair and working behind the scenes, which is one of the reasons that I decamped MIT for Harvard almost 20, well, more than 20 years ago. But the actual quality of departments can go up and down and but Harvard has a certain buffer because of its reputation, which is now now being threatened. And a lot of the things that we're proposing would actually we like we meaning the council on academic freedom would actually take some leave some headaches on the administration itself, even though their prime driver is to avoid bad publicity, keep the donations going. But a lot of the trouble, especially that our former president Claudine Gay found herself in could have been avoided if Harvard did have a more robust academic freedom policy. Among other things, what do you what do you mean by that? That plagiarism would have been allowed under a well, and I'm joking. But you in in the op ed that you had written, you said you didn't think that it was a hanging offense, gay's appearance in the response in the congressional hearing. That was before the plagiarism. Yes, that was before that is that is the plagiarism. Was that a legitimate firing offense or is that kind of a side issue? For me, it was a side issue. And I think I just won't go there because it's a. I mean, that was her. She was her testimony did not differ from the other two elite university. Only one is left, right? The president, Liz McGill left even before and sadly, Cornblath is still a president of MIT, although also under fire. But I think focusing on Claudine Gay was a bit of a distraction because the problems are more, as we say, systemic. But among them are the fact that universities feel that they have to universities and their divisions, that they have to offer moral guidance, some sort of, you know, pastoral counseling to a grateful nation, what they ought to feel in response to various tragedies and and outrageous and that inevitably gets them into trouble because someone will think they haven't. It was too early. It was too late. It was too strong. It was only one side was represented. They were too on the other hand. So if they just could shut up and point to a policy that said, we have to shut up, we don't comment as the University of Chicago has done for more than 50 years, it would just get them off the hook. They don't have to comment on Ukraine. That's the institution of neutrality. And in Chicago, it does sticks by that pretty well. Pretty well. That is, if a department or a center puts up a statement, then they're under pressure to take it down. And the reason that it's relevant to academic freedom is that it's just prejudicial to the people working in the university or in particular in the departments. If your department share is posting some opinion on police shootings or Palestine or Ukraine, Donald Trump, I'm sure that happens a lot. Yeah, we love Trump. I love Trump. My department loves Trump right all the time. All the time. Yes. But it is prejudicial to the faculty and the students who have to worry are my are my professional prospects at stake. If I take a position that differs from the official one on my department website. In in your world of institution and neutrality, would individual faculty be free to issue students and everything? Yeah, absolutely. Just that the institution itself should be the should be the arena. It should be the debating club. It shouldn't actually be a debater. Right. And that leads into one of the other of the five principles. The next one after institutional neutrality was nonviolence, which seems insane, right? That you have to say, you know, the colleges should be mostly nonviolent places. What, you know, how does that fit in? Yeah, it's again, I think we'd be actually saving the university from themselves. But the idea that a legitimate form of expression of opinion in a university campus should be forcibly ejecting a dean from his office and occupying the building, you know, that just shouldn't be what a university is about. And I think a lot of faculty have a certain nostalgia for when they did it in the 60s to protest Vietnam. And it's like, isn't it cute? The younger generations doing the same thing. But it really isn't OK for a number of reasons. It's a commitment to the wrong ideals. The ideal of the university ought to be persuasion, the careful formation of arguments, not chanting slogans over bull horns and getting in other students. So nonviolence includes shouting down like drowning out speakers. It's one thing to protest. It's another thing to preclude somebody from speaking. Exactly. That is, there should not be a heckler's veto. That is, protest obviously is protected and protest could involve holding placards. It could involve it could include, you know, shouting out, you lie in the middle of a lecture, but it can't involve forcing speakers off the stage, drowning them out, drawing a banner across the stage so that speakers can't see them. That is restricting other speech as an extensible form of do you feel like, you know, the, you know, the kind of response that came after, you know, and most of the stuff was touched up by the October 7th attacks. But do you feel like students and faculty kind of at Harvard or elsewhere like kind of understand this isn't simply hypothetical that, you know, nonviolence is actually a principle that we need to kind of hold to? Surprisingly, we've had to make the case or some of us have that that is that it's not OK to invade a classroom and start chanting slogans over bullhorns. But we had to make that case and that the university should be consistent in cracking down on it again to protect itself, such as the lawsuit filed by the students against anti-Semitism who have pointed to episodes in which Jewish students have been intimidated, have been blocked, in one case, were assaulted. And if the university just had a policy that speech is, you know, it's fine, it's OK, we encourage it, but physical force is not and acted consistently, then they would be off the hook for selective enforcement. And in fact, the now if they started to enforce it against the often quite disruptive Palestinian student groups, then the Palestinian students groups could file a lawsuit saying, well, how come they're enforcing it against us and they don't force against other groups? And if it was just clear, this is the policy, this is what we're this is what we recognize as speech. This is what we recognize as force and be consistent. It would remove a headache from. And do you think the bookstore should stop selling Harvard branded bullhorns? It's always amazing, right? Where it is bullhorns, I guess Amazon will deliver anything in a couple of hours. Right. Well, and also just the first of the point of the five point plan was just a consistent commitment to academic freedom, because another reason that Claudine Gaye gone into such trouble is that when she was given, what admittedly was a kind of a trap that she walked into, that is, if students called for genocide against Jews, would that be prohibited by Harvard's code of conduct? And she made a pretty hardcore ACLU style free speech argument which came across as hollow or worse, because we've had a lecturer who was kind of driven out of Harvard for saying they're two sexes. We've had a professor whose course are only two sexes. Yeah, exactly. They're only two sexes that there's a another professor whose course was canceled because he wanted to apply to explore how counter insurgency techniques could be used against gang warfare. We had a professor in the School of Public Health who someone doing some offense archaeology uncovered the fact that he had cosigned an amicus brief for the Obergefell Supreme Court case. Against a national policy allowing gay marriage. There were calls for his tenure to be revoked, for his classes to be boycotted. He had to undergo struggle sessions and restorative justice sessions and basically kind of grovel in front of a mob. So these are, given Harvard's history of those cases and others to all of us and say, well, genocide, it's just a matter of, you know, I disagree with what you say, but I defend to the death you write to say it came off as a little bit, you know, hollow and hypocritical. Yeah. And if Harvard had had a free speech policy that was reasonably enforced before that, then at least you would have had something of a leg to stand on and standing on principle. And she was technically correct in the same sense that in the same way that there's no law in the United States that says you can't call for a Holocaust protected by hate speeches, protected by the First Amendment. But when it's so selectively prosecuted, then it becomes ludicrous and literally becomes a national joke or a national disgrace. And it's worse still that at least the phonic, right? The Congressman leading the hearing was herself a Harvard grad. Well, I guess it would have been worse if she was from Yale or Princeton, that would be. Well, there is some there's some some theories that there's a little bit of a revenge motivation there because of an incident in which she was, I think, her self-target of a disinvitation at the Kennedy School of Government. But there was there was a history. It's it's wonderful when you find out that, you know, all big events in human history are really petty jealousy, right? Or get back. So another one of your points is viewpoint diversity. What does that consist of? Because, you know, on a certain level, one would assume and at the better universities that like, OK, well, the best people rise to the top. And, you know, if there's a consensus, you know, is that a reflection of where the best minds are in a in a field? Well, so academia has rightly resisted external control over content, over hiring, over promotion, which is good at protecting a university against government propaganda, government hacks. On the other hand, you can get self-contained circles of people kind of conferring prestige on each other in a circle. And then you can get entrenched orthodoxies, which no one can challenge because if they do, then they are downgraded in judgments of quality, which is often so subjective. Yeah, if I may, this is on a kind of larger level. John Dos Passos, the American novelist, was considered by international modernist, one of the greatest writers, you know, alive. And then he had the misfortune of going to the Spanish Civil War and deciding that the loyalists were actually kind of as bad as the Francoists. And overnight, literally has, you know, he became a terrible writer like aesthetically and whatnot. So this kind of stuff happens, right? No, this stuff happens. And if you just define viewpoint by the conventional left-right political spectrum, then things look pretty grim because according to at least a survey of the Crimson. Now, three percent of Harvard faculty identify themselves as conservative. And it was like four tenths of one percent as very conservative. I wonder who those are. And those three percent are a lot of them are like in their 90s. So we kind of know where that's going. But it's not just the left-right spectrum, but there can be dogmas that become entrenched within academic fields. So, for example, our program of women and gender studies, you know, I don't think you could use the word, you know, chromosome, hormone, sexual selection. That would just be not an idea that is thinkable. Now, the question is, how do you, given that universities do operate by peer review, peer evaluation, how could you open them up to the kind of viewpoint diversity that is intellectually indispensable? And it's a shame that almost 200 years ago, we still have to recite the arguments from John Stuart Mill about why you should allow, listen to arguments that you disagree with. Namely, maybe they're right and you're wrong. You know, unless you're infallible, you really should listen to other viewpoints. Maybe the truth lies somewhere in between. Maybe there's some third position you haven't thought of that would only occur to you if you hear the problems with your own position. And even if you're right, your position is only stronger if you have to defend it against legitimate criticisms. But that is that that case has to be made again 200 years later. The question is, how do you rescue programs, universities, departments, fields that become kind of self-referential echo chambers? John Hite and Phil Tetlock and a number of others in an article came out about eight years ago, kind of called for a kind of affirmative action for conservatives. As long as they're not Asian, right? Yeah, yeah, we can't we can't have a whole country over there that they can work in. So that be, you know, I mean, what do you think of that? So it's I mean, that seems terrible. I mean, yeah, yeah. But just as an idea that maybe especially departments of, you know, political science, or as we call it at Harvard government, maybe it's not such a terrible thing to have a couple of conservatives around. And that should actually be an explicit desideratum if not a quota. But also, I think there may be other mechanisms just opening the process up. So we even have at universities a mechanism that's supposed to do that. There are so-called visiting committees where departments every few years are evaluated by academics from other universities, but also people from also some donors, trustees. And what they're supposed to do is advise deans on whether the department is going in a wrong direction. In practice, they don't have that much influence and they're often quite cozy with the departments themselves. But if they were more empowered to be alert to intellectual monocultures, to dogmas that have become entrenched, if that was part of their mission, that would be another less obtrusive way of trying to mix up the ideas. Can I ask, say in psychology, I mean, you obviously, you know, I don't know the right word or phrase to say, but you believe in evolutionary psychology or evolutionary approaches to psychology. And I suspect there are fewer and fewer Freudians in the psychology department. That's not necessarily a problem, right? As much as, okay, independent of what we do academically, we're going to enforce a political or ideological hierarchy or monoculture that has really nothing to do with academics. Is that really the problem that we're talking about more? Yeah, because there are what hopes that as a field makes progress, certain schools of thought become historical interest. They've kind of made their contribution. You don't have to represent, you don't have to have like one Freudian and one Chomskyan and one structuralist and one functionalist. But there shouldn't be a kind of political litmus test. And there are many departments there really is and sometimes it doesn't even have to pertain to the subject matter of the field. It can just be the person's reputation politically. I had, I was on a hiring committee for another department at Harvard, not psychology. And there was an excellent candidate who was by any standards, including his own a political liberal, but he had some heterodox positions. He was opposed to affirmative action, for example. And the department chair said, we can't hire him. He's an extreme right winger, extreme right winger meaning he had criticism of affirmative action. You'll often think of academia as being at the left pole. You know that at the north pole is the spot from which all directions are south. So the left pole is the hypothetical position from which all directions are right. Yeah. And that's the final principle that you talked about or five final point was DEI disempowerment. How does that happen? I mean, building off of that, why is DEI bad? And then how do you minimize it? Well, you know, I've nothing against diversity, equity and inclusion. But as Voltaire said about the Holy Roman Empire, it was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. And diversity, equity, inclusion is, it imposes an intellectual monoculture. It favors certain groups over others and it has a long list of offenses that mean you can be excluded. But it is a strange bureaucracy that it's a culture that is kind of an independent stratum from the hierarchy of the universities themselves. The officers get kind of hired or poached or moved laterally from university to university. It's with their own culture, their own mores, their own best practices. And just not clear who they report to or who supervises them or who allows them to implement policy. And one of the things that the Council on Academic Freedom discovered is that, and we had to dig to do the research, that a notorious practice of the last decade in many universities has been the so-called diversity statements where job applicants have to submit not only a statement of their research project, their teaching philosophy, but also their commitment to diversity, which in practice means endorsing a certain set of certain canon of beliefs, that there is systemic racism, that it's only remedy is racial preferences, that racism is pervasive, that it is the only cause of any disparity in racial proportions. So someone in their diversity statements says, I believe that the most defensible policy is color blindness and that the reason for racial inequities in universities is because of our educational system in high school, their application would go into the circular file. How did that come to be? Well, this is a good question. That is a question we've asked ourselves. First of all, no one knew that it was a policy of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Fortunately, unlike some universities like the University of California, where they are taken seriously, they are vetted by DEI bureaucrats before they're even sent to departments and the ones that don't endorse what we could call a kind of woke ideology are just filtered out. Which of course- You mean applications go there first before they go to the department? Yes, not at Harvard, but at many universities. But no one knew that we had this requirement. No one knew who implemented it. That is, the faculty never voted on it. There was not, the president never said this is our policy going forward. A dean of arts and sciences must have signed off on it, but no one can remember who or when, but we just live with it. And likewise, freshman orientation that consists of indoctrination sessions. Somehow, and I think this is emblematic of a trend in universities, that this nomenklatura just got empowered and no one knows exactly how. I think what often happens is a dean gets into trouble because of some racial incident. So they hire a bunch of staff and that's their way of getting out of the trouble and then they're there forever. And there is only one way that they've been growing and that's changing and that's upward. So one of the points in the five point plan is not to necessarily abolish them, although the Florida University System has done that, but at least to, just as the military is under civilian control, the DEI bureaucracy should be under the control of responsible deans and by which I mean real deans, not. So would that mean they should be under the supervision or discretion of faculty, ultimately? Well, yeah, faculty or at least academic deans like the dean of arts and sciences, and the policies should be exposed to the light of day and the ones that are defensible should be kept and the ones that aren't should be abolished, but they shouldn't change the entire university structure by stealth, which is what has happened. With the Harvard admissions policies that got into trouble with the Supreme Court, is part of the problem was that they were lying about it. They were saying we weren't penalizing Asian students. Would you have, if Harvard had been more open about it and said, you know what, we want a different student body than the one that our current admissions process is giving, you know, would you be okay with that? Or like, how would you? How would you? I think it was transparent and defensible. Again, it's odd how many policies at a university just got entrenched and no one ever kind of decided on them, defended them against criticism, but the so-called holistic admissions, which is a kind of eye of newt wing of bat mystical process where they won't say exactly how they do it because it's holistic. But which favors some mix of regional diversity, which is okay. It's certainly class diversity, I think is a good thing. Racial diversity was okay if it was for diversity, but not for rectifying injustices, but also activism and arts and athletics and volunteer work and cultural experiences, which also provided a fig leaf where in practice, as we now know from these documents, Harvard could make sure it didn't get to Asian. I mean, de facto, that's what happened. And we know that in the elite schools in the UC system, they have gotten largely Asian because they're more meritocratic. Doesn't seem to have done them tremendous harm, but Harvard did not want that to happen. And so the Asian applicants, as with the Jewish applicants 75 years before just happened to be lower in leadership, creativity, all these things that you can't measure. Right. You mentioned that Florida has banned DEI statements and things like that. How do you feel, and I guess that affects state-supported institutions or state-assisted colleges, how do you feel about that in the sense of, I mean, if a state supports a school, it's gonna have some kind of stay, but isn't that kind of, from an academic freedom point of view, this can be troubling, right? If the state legislature starts saying, well, you can't do this, you really shouldn't teach that, which Florida has also tried to do. Yeah, and that is another kind of menace. I do think that it's not unreasonable for the taxpayers to have some kind of input into what it is they're supporting, but what is the best institutional arrangement where there can be input, there can be safeguards against self-serving insular communities without it being managed by political ideologues. It's a question of institutional design that I don't even know we have the optimal design for yet. So I don't think it's unreasonable, and here I differ with some of my faculty colleagues who almost define academic freedom as professorial privilege, professorial prerogatives. Professors should be able to do anything they want, and it's no one else's business. I don't think that's right, but you also don't want, as with the McCarthy era, politically motivated ideological restrictions or loyalty tests to be imposed by the government. But the government does have a legitimate interest in making sure universities don't go off the rails. Over the past, to shift topics a little bit, over the past dozen years or so in books such as The Better Angels of Our Nature, which came out in 2011 and Enlightenment now in 2018, you've emerged as a chronicler of moral and material progress, and I recommend everyone here in preparing for this, watch the 2015 Monk Debate, the Canadian debate, which I guess that's nice for you, right, as a Canadian to go back and eke out a victory, but it's where Matt Ridley, the rational optimist author, and Steve, were saying that what it was, that humankind's best years are ahead of it, and you eaked out a victory over Malcolm Gladwell and the Swiss philosopher Alain de Bottem, and then a more recent Institute of Art and Ideas debate with John Meersheimer on whether Enlightenment is a good idea or not. These are, can you summarize your case for progress? I suspect most of the people in this room are kind of like, obviously it's better now than it was 50 or 100 years ago, but what's the case for progress? The case is that if you list what you consider dimensions of human well-being, that is, we're better off if we are alive than dead, if our babies don't die, if women don't die in childbirth, if people don't live in extreme poverty, if we're safe from violent crime, if we're not at war, if our environments are clean, if people aren't discriminated against on the basis of their race or sex, if children aren't beaten, that is, list and think- You're really taking all the good stuff out of life. I mean, it's like, what else is there? Yes, so if you gotta list some reasonable things that people tend to agree are good things, it's better not to have a famine, better to be well-fed, and then you look at the best quantitative estimates over time, yet as you plot the trends, almost all of them get better, not all, but that would be a miracle, and they don't get better everywhere all the time. It's not as if the trends are not, as we say, monotonic, that is, the bad things don't always go down and the good things don't always go up. There are often lurches and shocks, but in pretty much all of them, the historical trend has been things are getting better. Do you have a theory of social change? Do you have, like, why have things gotten better? Yeah, I think it's that as knowledge increases and as the arena of debate, discussion, power, deliberation expands, there are just certain things that have to fall by the wayside. So you just can't, barbaric practices of antiquity, like human sacrifice, that you throw a virgin into a volcano to get better weather. You know, sooner or later you discover. And if you don't, you realize, well, she wasn't a virgin. No, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not. You know, sooner or later you discover that's the wrong theory, that actually does not, in fact, prevent crop failures, or so there's just superstition that is, if the conditions are in place that knowledge increases, or that certain races are fit for slavery, that's just empirically incorrect, that women are not capable of intellectual work, but are designed just for the homeland. Again, these are all facts. My favorite example of that was I am 60, I was born in 1963, and up until the late 70s, when I graduated high school in 81, and girls were not allowed to pole vault because evolution had decreed that they didn't have the upper body strength to pole vault. You know, and seems like evolution has caught up since I put that type of. As an example, right, exactly. So there's just a sheer gain of knowledge, I think Voltaire, the way he put it, those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. And just if you understand how the world works, then, and also because there's some things that really people do want, they want to be well-fed as opposed to hungry and healthy as opposed to sick. When technology provides them with the means, you're not uniformly because there is superstition, but in general, more people get vaccinated than don't. But that's not the only thing. Let me just mention one other idea, which is that as it's harder for small elites to wield absolute power, as you open up the discussion, then there's certain ideas that just aren't going to fly. I mean, you just can't defend apartheid without seeming ridiculous or monstrous. You can't defend slavery, Jim Crow laws. When the world's nations came together in the late 40s to agree on a universal declaration of human rights, the question is, is there some common denominator that all of the world's countries, Muslim and China and India and the Western countries could all agree on, or would it kind of contract to the null set as many people suspected? Well, it turned out the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, there's a lot of stuff in there. And most of it isn't particularly controversial. Like everyone should have an education. Everyone should, people shouldn't be imprisoned for their political beliefs. Now, if they had started out with the drafters with something like, well, the first thing in the Universal Declaration is that, America is a shining city upon a hill. Well, you probably wouldn't have gotten agreement on that or Jesus Christ is our savior and that is the way to redemption. Again, then the Hindus would drop out and the Chinese. So what's left? Well, what's left is the conditions of human flourishing. That is the list of things that I mentioned that it isn't flamingly controversial to say that it's better to be healthy than sick or better for kids not to die. So I think that realization tends to be what survives when the more parochial ideologies become untenable as the circle of discourse broadens. Do you think that kind of material progress and moral progress follow the same logic or when a new technology comes along that say increases crop yields or makes some kind of medicine that keeps people from dying, the adoption of that follow the same kind of process by which moral progress happens or are they independent of one another or do they drag each other a little? It's interesting, I think they are related. This is something that I kind of looking at cross national and cross temporal comparisons in putting together the data that went into enlightenment now. I was kind of surprised at how many good things come from being rich for countries. That is that people point to Sweden and Denmark and Norway is really nice places to live and you can invoke their egalitarian ethos but these are rich countries. If you look at the plot almost any good thing that is peace, safety, environmental quality against GDP per capita, most of the countries fall on a line with the exception of the Gulf oil states which are rich but kind of wretched places. And it may be that an idea is that wealth is good just because it buys good stuff like healthcare, like environmental protection which is a luxury that you can afford after you have electricity and running water and roads and such. And education, I mean education is expensive, good policing is expensive so being rich buys you preconditions for a good life but there's all, so why isn't Saudi Arabia such a great place? They got no shortage of money. There's an idea that I think should be congenial to many people in this room which is that when you have networks of exchange and commerce and markets and that's the way you get rich as opposed to digging stuff out of the ground which can be monopolized by an elite and then fought over but if the wealth comes from distributed networks of commerce and voluntary exchange that kind of pushes people toward cooperation. It's an old enlightenment idea of do commerce, gentle commerce that the American founders endorsed and Emmanuel Kant and Voltaire and others that if you're in a trading relationship that gives you, it yokes your wellbeing to that of other people so you don't kill your customers, you don't kill your debtors. And if it becomes cheaper to buy stuff than to steal it that eliminates one of the incentives for conquest and plunder. And so countries that get affluent or both affluent and get their affluence from networks of exchange tend to be pleasant in other ways. They tend to be more liberal in the classical sense, right? In the classical and in the, well, and in the kind of American political sense in that they have more munificent welfare states. So as countries get richer they get more redistributive. That's another. All right, that's, yeah. Maybe less congenial here. But it's an interesting kind of narrative. It's sometimes called, I've heard it called Wagner's Law. So rich country, the countries that people on the left tend to extol because of their welfare states also have a lot of economic freedom and also are very affluent. Yeah, that came up when Bernie Sanders was pointing to places like Norway and Sweden which actually do better or at least sometimes do better on economic freedom indexes than the US. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, there's a lot of kind of bullshit on both sides of that debate. What do you think explains? And I realize this would cover a vast range of people but the people who deny progress, moral and material, like what's in it for that? What's in it for them to be like, no, you know what, actually, we're no better off than we were 100 or 200 years ago or there has not been any significant progress when it comes to things like race, class, gender, sexual orientation over the past 20 or 50 years. Yeah, I think it's a question I've thought about a lot. So why do progressives hate progress, for example? And it is, I have to say that in the various political factions and bands along the spectrum, it does tend to be libertarians who are most congenial to the idea of progress. That wasn't always true. That's what I found. I think one reason is that, I think the Hobbes put it well because it's a long standing phenomenon because we're talking about, I'm giving you a quote that's almost 400 years old. Let's see if I can remember it verbatim. Competition of praise inclineth to a reverence for antiquity, for men contend with the living, not with the dead. That is to criticize the present is a way of criticizing your rivals, your competitors. So if there's something that you don't like about the status quo, you want to say how much everything sucks. You don't wanna say how much better everything is than it used to be than you might be giving credit to the people that you're contending with. So that's a big one. There are also, I think, cognitive biases that hide progress from us, such as the availability bias coined by Amos Trisky and Daniel Kahneman, which is that we tend to judge probability, risk, danger according to how easily anecdotes come to mind. That is we use our brain's search engine as a surrogate for probability. And so if there is a disaster, a terrorist attack, a police shooting, a famine in a part of the world, that's our answer to the question, are things getting better or worse? Well, of course they're getting worse. I just remember, I just read about the terrorist attack this morning and that sticks in memory. Also there's an emotional coloring to memory that even though we remember bad events in the past, we don't remember how bad they were at the time so that the negative affect tends to wear off of memory, whereas the negative aspects of the present are still keenly felt. And again, this is not a new phenomenon. I'd like to quote Franklin Pierce Adams that nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory. And that is really true. And in our lifetimes, even though there are people, especially younger people who kind of moan about how this is an unprecedented healthscape, but in the 70s, the world had only 33 democracies, that half of Europe was behind the Iron Curtain. Spain and Portugal were literally fascist dictatorships, not just countries that people called fascist, but they called themselves fascist. Greece was under the control of a military junta, all of Latin America. So democracy, despite the recent recession, people forget how undemocratic the world was in the lifetime of many people. And just quality of life, like if you missed a movie in the local repertory theater, if you didn't live in a big city that had a repertory theater, you would never see film classics, you couldn't get access to musical performances, you got lost because you didn't have Google Maps, you couldn't look something up in Wikipedia, you had to go to this thing called the Britannica. And all of these ways that our lives really have gotten better are very easily... We take them for granted very quickly. We take them for granted. But I think the biggest thing, at least among intellectuals, is competition among elites. Before we go to audience questions, you are in town partly because your photography is being shown at Brooklyn's Sweet Lorraine Gallery, and your exhibition is called Two and a Half D, the Stereoscopic Photography of Stephen Pinker, which sounds like a concept album from the late 60s, right? It's like, can you explain what stereoscopic photography is and does your interest in photography and you're quite accomplished at it? Does it tie into your larger intellectual interests? Yeah, it does. And it actually goes back to my PhD thesis, and my PhD thesis advisor is actually in the room, Stephen Costlin, where the topic was the mental representative... Do you feel judged? Yes, especially the Q and A. Yeah. We just wire him first. In store, yes. But the term Two and a Half D was borrowed from artificial intelligence. The artificial intelligence of 40 years ago, in particular a researcher named David Maher, who proposed that that is the information that the eyes give to the brain. That is, we don't literally see the world in three dimensions because we see, in perspective, both when we are physically observing a scene. You stand between two railroad tracks, you kind of see them as parallel. You know that they're parallel, but you also see them converged. You see them in perspective. And as things recede in distance, you can sense they get smaller even though you know that they're the same size. So that's not what you'd get from an actual three-dimensional model of the world, a kind of mental sandbox. But it nor is the world flat as a pancake. So the Two and a Half Dimensions alludes to the fact that the third dimension is not like the other two. It's actually computed from a number of visual sources, of visual information. When lines converge toward the horizon, we interpret that as depth. When certain things move in the visual field faster than others, we interpret that gradient of motion as a cue to depth. I think one of the most interesting is the difference in the view that the two eyeballs give you, that each eyeball is a different vantage point on the world. The views are slightly different and the farther away something is, the closer its images are in the two eyeballs, the closer it is, the more they diverge. It's kind of a high school trigonometry problem to triangulate from the distance between the eyes, the angle and the differences in the images and how far away something is. The brain does that trig unconsciously and it gives us a very vivid sense of the third dimension. Now the photography comes from, it's almost as old as photography itself that in the 19th century, most photography was stereo photography, which means showing two images taken from two vantage points separated by approximately the distance of the eyes and figuring out a technological way of getting each image to be seen only by one eye. And that can be done with prisms, that can be done with mirrors, that can be done with false color. And in the recent technology, which is one of the kind of inspirations for the show, when I showed it to the gallery owner, it just blew him away, a new kind of monitor that gives you a stereoscopic image without any headgear, without any glasses, without any gimmicks. It's really a stunning, actually. It just pops out, yeah, through some optical wizardry. And so I used it to, I have ultra close-up photos of flowers, which kind of reveal their shape and color in kind of hyper-natural detail. It's really stunning stuff. So go to the Sweet Lorraine Gallery. How long is it around for? Till the end of March. Okay. Are you an AI optimist or pessimist or is that just a silly question? Yeah. I mean, in principle, I'm an AI optimist. You never know how technologies will be implemented. I'm not an AI doomer. I do not think that AI will enslave us or turn us into raw materials. The scenario sometimes called the paper clip ellipse. That is the scenario in which an artificial intelligence system is given a goal of maximizing manufacturing of some commodity like paper clips and uses every available resource, including our own bodies to make more and more and more paper clips. So that does not keep me up at night. Yeah. There are dangers like impersonation, counterfeit people, spread of disinformation, erosion of kind of the chain of verification of fact. There's the hypothetical of technological unemployment, although we're still waiting for that to happen. But I think there's tremendous promise. It's kind of a shame that the first large-scale implementation of AI was kind of a gimmick of a first-person chatbot, which may have some advantages and may have some misuses. But there are tremendous promise for AI if it's task-oriented. Like, well, autonomous vehicles that could cut down on the million people killed every year in car crashes, of eliminating jobs that no one particularly likes, that are repetitive and dangerous and boring. So like your DEI enforcement, right? Yeah, that could be the first goal. Actually, seriously, one of my postdocs who were on the job market and she had to write a DEI statement but couldn't do it in good conscience, so she had chatGPT writing for her. It's actually pretty good, pretty convincing. Did you get offers or? Well, it's still happening, but yeah. Well, why don't we open it up for audience questions? Let's start with Jonathan. Oh, okay. So I wanted to ask a question about intellectual influences. You mentioned your thesis advisor who's here tonight. We recently lost John Tooby, who I know you were a long colleague with. So I'd be curious to hear your thoughts about some of your intellectual influences, specifically those two people. And but before I let you answer, I want to say thank you for your adverbs, which make me laugh in private. Oh, thank you. Yeah, so several streams. John Tooby was a dear friend and a major intellectual influence together with his co-author and wife, Lita Cosmides. That intellectual tradition from evolutionary biology of George Williams, John Maynard Smith, Richard Dawkins, William Hamilton was an influence. The intellectual founders of cognitive science from the 1950s of Al Newell and Herbert Simon, Noam Chomsky, Marvin Minsky, Jerry Fodor, and the philosophers that were kind of partners of them, Hilary Putnam and later Dan Dennett. The going back further, I think the enlightenment tradition of David Hume, Thomas Hobbes, Spinoza, John Stuart Mill, a little bit later. The, let's see. Thomas Sowell of among living intellectual historians. What do you like about Sowell, and I know you share the interest in photography with him. You've talked about that. We're both of camera nerds. We met over an interest in language because he had written, he's written actually two books. I mean, he's written a super human number of books, but two of them were on late talking children and he actually contacted me because of my long standing research program in child language because his own son was a late talker, but not autistic, not retarded, not deaf. And there is a syndrome of kids who are late in talking, are good in comprehension, often seem to be imbalanced in the other direction of having high spatial, visual spatial skills. So that kind of got us together and that led me to his intellectual history, including a lovely book called The Conflict of Visions, which tried to answer the question, now might be coming obsolete, but why did the ideologies that we associate with the left and the right hang together in the sense that if you know someone's position on say gun control, why can you predict their position on economic redistribution or a strong military? Or a flag burning amendment or something like that. So many things seem to cluster together that superficially have nothing in common. He argued that they come from different visions of human nature, namely whether there is such a thing as human nature, which is fundamentally limited and flawed and which therefore consigns us to certain inherent tragedies that we can't have perfect peace and cooperation. Therefore, we do need military and police. You can't have a designed economic system because no one's smart enough to do it. So you need just the distributed information in markets. Would you consider yourself a kind of anti utopian in that sense because of thinking of Hobbes and even people like Stuart Mill who's more in between, but... Yeah, I'm a miliarist in that I think things can get better but I think aspiring to utopia is dangerous. For reasons that Isaiah Berlin pointed out, namely that they're just inherent trade-offs and if you maximize one thing, you're going to, one criterion, you're gonna have awful trade-offs in others. But another thing that Tom Sowell has inspired me is his analysis of ethnic groups and the history of ethnic groups of how so often the fortunes of groups depend on their own, will depend on their deep history, their ecology. He anticipated a lot of the ideas of Jared Diamond before Diamond published Guns, Germs and Steel. And he also has, I think, one of the most interesting theories of anti-Semitism. Which is? Which is that Jews like other minorities that have been reviled and sometimes massacred Armenians in Turkey, Indians in Africa, Chinese in Southeast Asia, often are middlemen minorities. They specialize in the niches of retail and money lending, both of which violate our intuitive cognitive economics. The natural way that people think of economic activity is kind of barter, equal for equal. But then you have the money lenders where they lend out money and they don't just want it back, but they want it back with something extra, which kind of feels like theft or exploitation or parasitism. Likewise, a retailer doesn't cause stuff to come into being. He's not a farmer, he's not a craftsman, but just takes stuff and then gives it to someone else asking for some extra money. So even though in terms of economics, this is indispensable, this is where wealth comes from, is the ability to move goods in time and in space, which is why all economies depend on both retail and money lending. But if they're so cognitively unintuitive that they're interpreted as exploitation and parasitism, then these minorities will be targets of hatred for being exploiters. And he argues that other parts of this niche that tend to co-occur, they tend to be cohesive because they depend on their own internal networks of trust, at least in the absence of a robust system of contracts, they depend on reputation, they depend on kids kind of replicating their set of values and mores and this whole cluster explains why other ethnic groups have often been informally called the Jews of India, the Jews of China, the Jews of such and such, and these Jews of whatever also tend to be targets of hatred. Next question. Sorry, hi. So I read an article 25 or 30 years ago in the New Yorker about admissions to elite universities and it talked about how the athletic admissions was one of the criteria that was introduced to reduce the proportion of Jews. Athletic, did you say? Yeah. Yes, there's a book by Jeremy Carabell that kind of exposed that. And this article, one of my takeaways from it was that in the end they discovered that these hyper-competitive kids who they had allowed in under sporting scholarships as opposed to academic merit actually ended up being amongst the highest performing graduates in the university because they had this other trait that they hadn't been looking for but had unintentionally improved the outcomes for their students and the argument was in some ways the most intelligent response to life isn't necessarily to throw your personal quality of life away to be hyper-competitive. But it was introduced as one of the many stealth ways of ensuring that Jews didn't overtake the higher institutions. Is this current movement any different from that and is there any potential for an upside? Any potential for? An upside in that you would uncover competitive high-performing kids through the mechanism? Certainly, there are traits of conscientiousness, ambition, taking your career trajectory seriously that probably manifest themselves in not just academic achievement but you also play the violin and you also play sports and you also sort clothes for the homeless and you also have your neighbor sign a petition. Especially if it is common knowledge that the admissions system selects for that then the savvier students or the ones with savvier parents or both will kind of optimize everything that needs to be optimized. But I think it is, I think it's wasteful. I think it probably doesn't optimize for the students that are best matched for the resources that an elite university has to offer. Whereas I think looking at test scores would not only be fairer in the sense that they're much harder to gain, the test prep does not add that, it adds very little. All the other criteria can be gained. They're all of the others are enhanced by class having parents in practice, mothers who know how to gain the system, tutors for writing the personal statements. And as it happens, the data suggests that if you select on test scores, you also get a lot of musical talent and entrepreneurial energy and novelists and playwrights and company starters together with the academic nerds. So I think what you're right that there is a massive inter-correlation among all the positive traits but it'll probably be more straightforward to select for the one that's most relevant to an elite university. So you're against football schools. That's what I'm hearing from that. Well, I'm against... And is that because you're Jewish? Yeah. You know, it's like, come on. All right, let's... Yeah. A surprising number of Harvard students are admitted on athletics scholarships. And often for like kind of more rare. Fencing. Yeah, fencing. So many fencers who know, right? Next question. So you mentioned a number of indicators that are basically in aggregate the general human goodness index of the world. And knowing those indicators and you gave a truncated list, are there some that are leading indicators or some that could be causal to improve society going forward? And is there a path to our leaders taking into consideration those leading indicators and those causal metrics to design policy going forward? And if that's difficult, then we can create a general academic goodness index and use the same for universities and have their leadership decide on these KPIs ahead of time and then govern based on it. Or are we too far away? Yeah, it's a great question. And there are some arguments that education is a leading indicator that countries that kind of invest in primary and secondary education have downstream benefits in, say, GDP per capita and democracy. But like a lot of social science, so many things are correlated with so many other things that, and then you get like one regression expert who does the analysis that shows that this is the, of all the confounded factors, this is a leading indicator and then someone else says, no, you did the regression wrong. But I think it's, I agree that it is a question that we ought to find the answer to. But very difficult. For the university, it's harder because what are the criteria if it's just prestige? The thing is that prestige is kind of a self levitating bubble. How do you judge prestige? Well, the university's presidents raid each other on prestige. You could do it in terms of patents, Nobel Prizes, Pulitzer Prizes, whatever. And then it would, I don't know, the fact that I don't know that it's been done doesn't mean it hasn't been done, but I don't know if it's been done. That is, could you predict what makes the university better other than the obvious thing of money? 10 or 20 years down the line, depending on what they invest in at the beginning of the period. But it's a great question. We've got time for two more questions. So next question. Hi, thanks for coming tonight. And thanks for your work. I really enjoy it. Before your work, the most ardent proponent of reason and enlightenment values was Ayn Rand. So I wonder what's your favorite or least favorite of her works? All of them is an acceptable answer for either side. Yeah, I hope, I hope you don't get canceled, but. You don't want to be canceled by objectivists. No, no. I can't say that she's been an influence. Certainly the, and as my libertarian friends emphasize, objectivism and libertarianism aren't the same thing. And I think Ayn Rand's own influence, although she tried to erase it was in some part, Nietzsche rather than the Enlightenment. Although of course there is Enlightenment thinking in her ideas. But the idea of the heroic industrialist financier combined with a bit of indifference to the schlemiels that make up the majority of society was kind of Nietzschean. And a historian, Jennifer Burns, I think it is, who wrote that biography of her, noted that in her early drafts, there were epigraphs from Nietzsche, which she then erased. So that's, and I, in Enlightenment now, I kind of have some fun at the expense of Nietzsche as kind of the answer to the question, what's the opposite of humanism and Enlightenment thinking? And it would have to be Nietzsche with his deification of the heroic, martial warrior or artistic genius and kind of contempt for the well-being of all of humanity. But now that's, so, I would not say one of my influences, although I have kind of a syncretic worldview that does have certain strong libertarian influences, although there are ways in which I systematically depart from libertarianism as well. Who is one of the libertarian influences? Well, Tom Sowell himself, certainly, and Hayek, who also, together with his analysis of the intelligence that's distributed in markets and the fact that the reason that markets function is that information, local information can be propagated, but he was also an amateur neuroscientist. He had a theory that the brain accomplished its intelligence also by densely interconnected networks of information exchange. This is back, I think, in the early fifties or forties. But, and Hayek's noting of inherent trade-offs, which I think influenced Tom Sowell, that you can't have both perfect equality and perfect freedom. I would count that as a major influence, yeah. Last question. So, my guess is that everyone here, by and large, probably fits under the heterodoxical orientation, which is basically homogeneous. So, my question is how do we engage in not just on the margins, but in a broad way? How do people who take the heterodoxical, which again is kind of like enlightenment thinking, how do we apply that and how do we engage broader with the left, with the right, with those who don't take this orientation so that we're not just talking to ourselves and a few people who are willing to listen? Yeah, good. I mean, an important kind of strategic, tactical, practical question. Some of it would be to forge strategic alliances on issues that different subsets have in common, to have a kind of patchwork coalition based on what ideas are important to which constituencies and emphasize those. Some of it to remind people of the fact that many of these principles are just ground rules that we all depend on, even if we have a temporary tactical advantage in shutting up the people we disagree with in the past or potentially in the near future, they could do it to us. So it really is in our advantage, our meaning everyone's advantage to allow free discourse because as soon as you start to constrict it, it could be a weapon that others use against you. Some of it could be to remind and to use history lessons to remind people that their own tribe, even though now they may be exploiting a tactical advantage in suppressing opinion that they themselves depended on freedom of speech in earlier eras. So for example, women's suffrage, civil rights, gay rights, abolition, all depended on free speech in the day, all were shut down by the council culture in their eras, kind of say that even if you're kind of a egalitarian leftist, you ought to be in favor of free speech because the opposite used to be used as a weapon against you guys. So that is a kind of common ground. I will also point out you, I mean, in books like Enlightenment Now, you relied on work done by the Rosling Roser. Oh, Hans Rosling. Yeah, and our world in data, as well as human progress, the site human progress. And facts always need to be interpreted, but documenting things like progress, I've met a few people who've read your books and are like, oh yeah, I was kind of what I'm in a fog and I'm just making an argument about how shitty things are. It's one thing, but then when you have to start to account for this and this and this, that is one way of being persuasive and reaching people who don't necessarily agree. Yeah, that's right. And there is a kind of a cynical finding from recent social science that people are unmoved by facts that they would just cherry pick or spin doctor any fact to support their prior narrative. And there is a lot of that, but it is too cynical in that there are, people can be persuaded, unless it is they're absolutely central to their identity, they can change their mind on the basis of data, particularly when it's presented in graphs, something that I've tickled me because I've also interested in graph perception and other common interests with Steve Costlin, that Brendan Nye and a political scientist Dartmouth has shown that you give people graphs and it makes them harder to deny reality, even though graphs can lie too, of course. Yeah, that's amazing. Well, I want to thank Stephen Pinker for talking tonight. Please give him a big hand, okay?