 Steven Pinker has stridden into the room and requires no further introduction. So I've looked at a lot of Steven's work again lately, and I'd like to start with your early work on irregular verbs, and it's striking to me how much in this work you think like an economist. So some verbs are regular, you conjugate them with an ED, others are irregular, right? You don't say get it, you say got. Now how computationally efficient is that process? I think it taps two of the mechanisms that make intelligence possible. I mean why would I spend a good chunk of my career studying the minutiae of irregular verbs? I do love language, I love linguistic detail for its own sake, but I chose that topic because I thought it shed light on bigger issues of cognitive organization. So why do we have 165 or so quirky exceptions like stride, strode, cum, came, sing, sang, go, went, and so on? I mean it just seems there could be no rhyme or reason behind it. I think it's just a consequence of the fact that we memorize words, and that's one of the two mechanisms behind language. We store by brute force, rote memory, arbitrary pairings between a sound and a meaning. The word duck doesn't look like a duck, or walk like a duck, or quack like a duck, but I can use it to get you to think the thought of a duck because we and everyone in this room has memorized a pairing between that sound and that meaning. We don't just blur out words, but we also combine them into phrases and sentences using rules that allow you to compute the meaning of a combination from the meaning of the parts and the way that they are arranged. Those are the two mechanisms that make language possible, but there are some kinds of meanings where they can compete over which system expresses a particular concept. In the case of irregularity, we have two different ways of conveying the concept, an action that took place in the past, or in the case of plurals like mouse, mice, and rat, rats, two ways of talking about more than one thing. We can memorize a more or less independent word to convey the idea, like a struck or sang, or we can apply an algorithm to say something in the past tense, add ed to the end, and then we get walk walked. And because of the peculiarities of the history of a language, we can have that labor divided between the rule system, the algorithmic system, and the memory system, and it's the tension between those two systems that give rise to a lot of the quirkiness of language, including English irregular verbs. So when you did this, this was one of the first things to make you famous. Did you know in the back of your mind, this was a kind of Hayekian argument, because it seems to me the common verbs that we use a lot, those go irregular, and it's easy to remember them because you use them all the time, but the irregular verbs are ones that you don't use so often, and thus again you're economizing on information in this decentralized way. I don't know how well that analysis would work across a range of zones of irregularity. So it is certainly true that irregular verbs tend to be common, which is kind of the bane of the language learner. You learn Spanish or French, and all of the words that you use all the time, you've got to memorize the conjugations. And I think the reason for that is, I might even invoke Darwin more than Hayek, namely that in the generation-to-generation transmission process of an irregular verb, an irregular verb has to be memorized because by definition there is no rule behind it. The only way you know that the past tense of come is came is that you hear everyone else use came. Since memory thrives on frequency, the more often you hear something, the better you remember it. If any verb declines in frequency and verbs become more or less fashionable for all kinds of reasons, then you could have a generation that never successfully masters it. They'll default to the all-purpose ADD rule, and then the verb will go from irregular to regular for that generation and all subsequent generations. So you've got an erosion of the stock of irregular verbs as they get filtered through the minds of children memorizing them where it's the less frequent ones that tend to fall out of the language. So dreamt becomes dreamed, for instance. But dreamt is prettier. It is prettier, and that's one of the reasons that irregular verbs do stay in the language, and one of the reasons that often lyricists and poets and novelists will prefer the irregular to the regular. When there's a choice, strided versus strode, strove versus strived, whole versus heaved, is that they're good words. They actually fit the phonological template for a standard word in the language, the kind of sound that you would use for a nickname or a common word. They are more euphonious because they aren't assembled in a kluji way from the verb stem and this bit of detritus hanging on the end, this E-D, or as the suffix, which is serviceable. It allows you to convey a message, but it makes the sound of the word itself a bit clunky. And there are almost unpronounceable regular words like sixths or edited where because you're sticking an extra bit on the end of a word, messing up the nice contour of a standard word in the language. And that's another one of the tensions that over the course of the history of the language will shape the balance of regular and irregular forms. So that is Hayekian in the sense that no one planned the language to be optimal in satisfying one criterion. There are trade-offs, there are multiple tugs, pushes and pulls, as speakers, millions of speakers make little adjustments as they use the language, as kids learn the language, the language itself spontaneously evolves with some balance. So let me now put on my Economist's hat and ask you about this. As you know, in George Orwell's 1984, the party bans all irregular verbs. It's a kind of excess regulation, but from a social point of view, are there too many or too few irregular verbs in English? I like the irregular verbs. I'd like to see more of them. And it is a sad one when we lose them. Occasionally a new one gets a toehold in the language, like Snuck, for example, is about 120 years old. It came in on the analogy of Dig Dug and Stink Stunk and Sing Sang Sung and Strike Struck. So occasionally what will protect a verb against erosion when it becomes too uncommon is similarity to other verbs. I think it's another property of human memory. One property of human memory is you hear things a lot, they stick in memory better, but another one is if it's similar to other things that are well-memorized, it can kind of parasitize the memory strength of something nearby in phonological space. And occasionally there will be analogies. People will coin new verbs. Sometimes in a jocular way, like you're invited to a party, Spice are welcome instead of spouses. It's kind of a little bit jocular, but sometimes these things can catch on. And that was the case for Snuck, where originally it was considered kind of cutesy, like Spice is the plural of Spouse. And in fact people who are older than about 70 or 75 still think that it's slang, whereas people younger don't see what the fuss is about. Are there irregular verbs you're afraid to use? Because I have this problem, so think of the word abide. I'm perfectly happy to say abide, but the past tense abode is thought of as a noun, a place, and then there's a bidden, and then there's the noun abidance, and I won't go near any of those. And every now and then you'll be in a sense where the notion of abide comes up, and you'll just stick with the present tense and do whatever circumlocution you need to avoid having to make these other irregular verb commitments. Or do you just go ahead and say stridden? Steven Pinker has stridden into the room. Yes. Abode has not been in common usage for a few centuries. That's one of those that dropped out. Like chidden is the past tense of chide. For example. Yes, chidden or hold is the past tense of help. Some of them survive in dialects, in Appalachia, in remote parts of the British Isles. Forms that were in use a couple of hundred years ago may have resisted the erosion for reasons that are completely obscure, partly capricious. But yeah, I like them. One distinction that is vanishing that I think is sad is the three-way distinction in verbs like sink, sank, sunk, stink, stunk, shrink, shrink, shrunk, where the shrink and the stank are giving way to the participle form. No shrink and stank. No shrink and stank. Admittedly, it would have been hard to have a movie called Honey I Shrank the Kids. Instead of Honey I Shrunk the Kids. In my style manual, the sense of style, I recommend hanging on to them. I think they're nice to have that three-way distinction. Because English conjugation is already so kind of de-popperate, so degenerate, that it's nice to preserve what distinctions that we have. Now moving chronologically through your career, let me ask you a big picture question about language. And I come to linguistics very much as an outsider. But Noam Chomsky's idea of a universal grammar which is somehow built into the structures of the human mind. In its early years, there seemed to be a promise of some very definite accounting of what that structure would be. After a while, it seemed to collapse into this very general idea of recursion, which to me as an economist seems almost tautological. And if I came away from this debate and then I read people writing in popular science, today language is a number of different capacities brought together. They're independent and just combined with their ability to divine meaning from others. I mean, could it be the case that Chomsky's hypothesis was simply wrong? 2016, I know your books, but what's your take on that today? Yeah, it's not easy to pin down what the hypothesis is, partly because Chomsky himself revises his theory every decade or so, kind of on the principle of Mao's continuous revolution. Just never let people settle into any kind of comfortable consensus. So it's a moving target. Also, as you say, it was neither specified in a precise way nor field tested against a, say, a data set of language variation, which I think is unfortunate in terms of ordinary scientific practice. Linguistics is an eccentric field in some ways, partly because it was so polarized by a charismatic figure and his opponents that it didn't proceed in the ordinary direction of kind of making the theory more precise, more testable. So with that caveat, in mind, I think there is such a thing as you can call it universal grammar, I think in the following sense that the child is biased to analyze the speech that he or she hears in particular ways goes, it does not simply record sentences verbatim. I mean, that's the memory half of the language system, but the algorithmic or computational or rule governed half looks for tries to pull out combinatorial rules from the speech stream, that there are certain kinds of rules and elements of the child is keyed to look for and that those that set of abilities would be what I would call if I use the term universal grammar. And there are commonalities across the world's languages that come from the fact that language is created anew every generation by the minds of the children who constructed out of the data that they get from their parents and peers. Let's turn from language to a closely related topic, theory of mind. Of course, you've written a lot on this. We had John Haidt for one of these discussions, and he has this notion that in the mind there are these modules and they're almost a bit independent. So there's an empathy module or a being analytic module. And if I understand him correctly in our political discourse, different modules take over and it's almost not integrated with the rest of your brain what's your take on how unified cognition is? To what extent to say our political discourse ruled by independent modules or is that not how you think about it? Well, the metaphor of the module comes from my former colleague Jerry Fodor, a philosopher and psycho linguist. It comes in different versions. You had Howard Gardner proposing a theory of multiple intelligences. You have evolutionary psychologists proposing the metaphor of the mind as a Swiss army knife. Now it's more like a smartphone with a bunch of different apps. I think that I do agree these can all be opposed to a view of the mind that would just have a theory of everything that there's just one principle. It's all Bayesian statistics or it's just the law of operant conditioning. How about all just one big mess but no modules? Well, see, modules never quite seemed like the best metaphor. I think there is structure specialization. I don't think the mind is spam. I don't think it's just we just have a homogeneous neural network in these skulls. I think there is some organization. The problem with the module metaphor is that as soon as there are snapping components that with very limited channels of communication between them I think that's too strong but I think it is reasonable to say that there are different faculties to use an old fashioned word to choose a different metaphor. I think it may have been Chomsky who proposed that the mind is like a biological system made out of organs and tissues where in when I was in high school I was taught for example that the blood was an organ. Now, the blood of course suffuses all of our tissues. You can't draw a dotted line around it. It's not like the the rump roast and the flank steak of the supermarket cow display. Likewise, the mind can have a specialization and structure and different components without them literally being independent. I would agree with John Height that there are different mindsets, there are different faculties, there are different ways in which we can analyze the same set of events and that a lot of political disagreement consists of what frame of mind if you want what module you use to analyze a particular issue. So you've got to acknowledge the complexity, the multiplicity of the mind even if you don't subscribe to the strict metaphor of modules. What evolutionary purpose does a sense of self serve in human beings? So could you imagine human beings performing the same actions but being zombies, not saying to themselves like, hey, I'm Tyler or hey, I'm Stephen Pinker. We have the sense of self, however difficult it may be to describe or study scientifically, and that evolved. You're a Darwinian, so where does that come from? Why is it there? Well, I would distinguish certainly the self-concept, self-knowledge from the issue of subjective experience. We often use the word consciousness to refer to both of these phenomena, namely self-consciousness or self-knowledge on the one hand and subjectivity or the qualitative nature of consciousness, qualia, what it is like to feel something or taste something on the other. You mean the latter. You can sit up and feel something, taste something and say, hey, I'm Stephen Pinker and know introspectively that you're saying it to yourself. Those are two, you could have subjective experience of redness and sourness and warmth and so on without it including some concept of yourself and conversely, you could imagine an intelligent system, a robot where there's no one home, where it monitors its own state, it presents itself in certain ways and at least as far as we know, it's not actually feeling anything. Of course, we don't know it and that may be the key. The philosophical problem of sentience or qualia or sometimes called the hard problem of consciousness. I think might ultimately be a quirk of our own way of analyzing the world that is the mind reflecting on itself is naturally going to be puzzled by some aspects of itself. We know from neuroscience that there is no aspect of consciousness that does not have some physical correlate. There's no SCP, there's no life after death, there's no mysterious action at a distance, it's all information processing in neurons. Why it should feel like something to me to be that network of neurons? I don't think we have a satisfying answer to and it may not be a scientific puzzle at all. There are some philosophers who claimed that it just isn't a coherent intellectual question at all, Dan Dennett is one of the most famous. For some people this is a kind of escape hatch from materialism and a way to bring back some notion of the soul. The problem there is that you'd expect the mind to have some kind of non-material powers which it does not have. I tend to gravitate toward a view that sometimes has been credited to David Hume. Colin McGinn is the contemporary philosopher who has made it most prominent, sometimes I think misleadingly called Mysterianism. Tom Nagel in his seminal article, What Is It Like to Be a Bat, whose title captures the essence of the problem, speculated in that article along the lines that I'm suggesting, namely there may just be some facts about the universe that are true and will never be satisfied that we intuitively understand them, not because there is some mystery in the sense of undiscovered scientific principle, but just that our very way of grasping reality might make certain things puzzling to us, even though we know at a more explicit cognitive level that they're true. So a heap of neurons that registers the environment that organizes the information, acts on it including a model of itself, from my point of view it feels like something. Why that should be true, I don't know, but then again here I am inside me and almost by definition there are going to be some things about the view of me inside me, that the me doing the view is not going to be able to articulate because the part that would do the articulating is part of the me trying to explain it. So I don't think there are a lot of cases where we I think there are some cases where human intuition hits a wall and this is one of them the nature of time, what could have been before the Big Bang if that was the beginning of everything, how can the universe be either finite or infinite? There's no reason to think that every aspect of reality will be intuitive, there may be some aspects where our best science will give us a characterization and will always scratch our head as we appreciate that it's true, but it never feels totally satisfying. So how about metaphysical determinism for the human well? Cause and effect everything in the mind has a physical correlate, you've told us you're a Darwinian the natural world is ruled by something like cause and effect and the laws of nature haven't changed so our minds are fully determined? Well they you didn't say yes, yes well they may not be for any practical purpose determined in the sense that there may be processes that are chaotic, that are non-linear, where some ions zig instead of zag because of Brownian movement or maybe even quantum phenomena and as a result the whole system might behave in one way or another, that is physically determined, but for all practical purposes random it may be so complex that it might be like the weather taken to several higher degrees that will never in theory perhaps Laplace's demon would be able to tell us what each of us will do next but some things that are true in theory are so mind bogglingly complicated that it may as well not be true in theory but I don't think there's any miracle that goes on in the brain when we make a decision in that sense we're determined on the other hand there is so much unpredictability non-linearity that for all intents and purposes we're not determined Now I've been reading through a lot of different aspects of your work a lot of your books, reading or re-reading and I've been trying to figure out to myself what's the underlying unity in the thought and writing of Stephen Pinker from irregular verbs to world peace and yes we'll get to that but let me try to give you my account of what I've taken away which I'm sure is not the same as yours but it's a way of prompting you to tell us your view of the underlying unity and all of the things you did so I see you as very often trying to stake out a midway position that there are people out there say like the blank theorists the blank slate theorists who don't see much structure in the natural world or the social world or the linguistic world and you reject that but then on the other hand there are people who postulate too much structure and at least early Chomsky would be an example there and you're trying to create some kind of intermediate position where there's room for a reason to operate but within laws of nature so you're trying to re-articulate this modern 21st and 20th century vision what does enlightenment mean for now and how might we apply enlightenment kinds of reasoning across all the different areas you've written on and then kind of figuring out, shown in all these books what are the methodological prerequisites for that and it's level at which we're willing to talk about structure and levels at which we're not willing to talk about structure and you staking out this intermediate what you might call volunteerist pro-reason pro-science position and that's what I took away from the whole corpus and thinker but tell me what is your take on that I think that's not too far from the way I would see myself not so much in taking intermediate position that's just in find the Goldilocks zone like oh the truth is always halfway in between two extremes I mean it is always on the other hand I do believe in the enlightenment vision that by understanding the world is intelligible that we can understand it that progress in understanding and therefore progress in rational action are possible including pointedly ourselves that is there is such a thing as human nature it can be studied scientifically the way other phenomena are studied that it's good to understand human nature because then we can discount when necessary illusions that are quirks of our own make up that we can understand what it is that give humans fulfillment and satisfaction and pleasure what are the resources that we have to work with in improving a political system and I also think that often going back to finding a middle ground that the middle ground isn't finding say the arithmetic in between the two extremes but rather it's trying to go down a level of more a finer grain causal mechanisms underneath the phenomena and to state a position that may not look like either of the original extremes because it's more precise so in the case of language for example I've always been kind of bored by the idea of is language innate or is it learned it's just neither it's not halfway in between because that doesn't give you any insight either but rather there is an innate structure that does the learning because learning doesn't happen by magic there has to be something in place that does the learning let's characterize the nature of the learning mechanism in terms of its information processing abilities what is its computational architecture as the computer scientists say once you have that that is the solution to the nature problem namely what's innate is an ability to learn but since any mechanism does some things well and some things not so well that gives you insight as to what and how we learn and that makes irrelevant the question of is it innate or is it learned there is something that it's innate but it's something the innate stuff allows us to learn and so it's kind of gets beneath a dichotomy into something that I like to think is more intellectually satisfying here's one difference between us perhaps and we discussed this earlier in the green room I think of you as believing more strongly in the powers of human reason than I do so when we hit upon these various you might call them antinomies what does consciousness really mean is the will really free how do we think about time you're quite willing to pull a sort of Kantian or Wittgensteinian move and say well it all collapses into contradiction call them again that's knowledge forever denied to us and then there's this other sphere in which reason operates quite well and I tend to think of that more as a continuum that if we can't understand some truly fundamental things the problems in our thinking will bleed into everything we try to analyze and I tend to think of reason as being fairly weak maybe I'm more Hayekian in this way than you are people being ruled by their passions as David Hume might have thought and in this sense I'm more skeptical about the enlightenment so what can you say to talk me out of the skepticism and back into the truly Pinkarian view well what are we doing here if you don't believe in reason you know why don't we have you know an arm wrestle or a beauty contest or after dinner first of all by the very act of even posing this question you're committed to reason that's what we're trying to explore here so it's too late you've already committed yourself to reason that's one number two even though he was a very insightful psychologist he emphasized that humans are subject to all kinds of irrational passions and biases and so on that was one of the reasons that he did philosophy was to expose some of those fallacies the better that we should be able to work around them and his argument about reason being a slave to the passions was not so much a psychological claim that people will lose self control and they'll let their emotions get the better of them he was partly making a conceptual point that the ability to go from A to B using reason doesn't tell you what the B should be that there's just a logical distinction between goals on the one hand or desires and beliefs and that you can't through a chain of deduction identify what you ought to aim for that's just a category mistake that's different from the psychological claim that people are permanently irrational people can be made more rational I think he would say and I would say and by the act of what we're doing now that is exploring implications of ideas by science that is by taking your beliefs and allowing reality to refute them or not and historically even though it's true that people do all kinds of crazy things subject to all kinds of irrational prejudices, passions and so on on the other hand some ideas really do get dropped by bad ideas get dropped by the wayside not necessarily quickly not necessarily absolutely but we don't have human sacrifice anymore we don't throw virgins into volcanoes to get better weather we don't have too many hereditary monarchies anymore we they don't work badly maybe not but probably on the whole democracy is a better idea but you can have virgins I grew up in Canada I grew up with a picture of the queen in my classroom so yes if you have a purely have all the pageantry and gossip that you have with having a nice juicy monarchy but the queen doesn't actually think up the laws it's probably not a bad compromise but in both the progress of science and I really do believe there is such a thing as scientific progress we see it in the fruits of technology but we also see it just in the depth and satisfying nature of scientific explanation not linearly inexorably but in progress in so many dimensions of human life I've documented the historical declines of violence and as an economist you know that we've gotten a lot wealthier and life has gotten better in many ways we've lived longer we're healthier, we have a rich more breadth of experience these are all I would say fruits of enlightenment despite the fact that as products of evolution we've got a lot of irrational quirks baked into us fortunately and this gets us back to say modularity or specialization we don't only have irrational passions we do have this big frontal cortex kind of grafted onto a brain which now and again can override our passions we can exert self control save for a rainy day we can hold our horses not uniformly not always reliably but enough that it's something that we could celebrate and try to encourage now in the middle of all of these dialogues we have a section called underrated, overrated I'm going to name some things, some people and ask you if you think they're overrated or underrated and feel free to pay us on any one of them but let's start with rap music oh I never got rap music so I don't want to say it's overrated it may be that I'm overrated and that I I overrate myself but I just know I was probably born too soon but there's a much younger Steven Pinker on YouTube debating with William F. Buckley and Steven Pinker of that time is defending black English and telling William F. Buckley he basically doesn't understand what's special about it and indeed Buckley doesn't so is rap music in a sense not just a musical extension of the black English you once defended on firing line well it is in the sense that I would not make the argument that there's anything that the fact that I don't have any rap music on my iPod is not an argument for the objective merit of rap music compared to any other kind of music there I'm a relativist and likewise the grammatical of African American English from vernacular as linguists call it black English, ebonics there's really nothing inherently to choose between the rules in black English vernacular and any other English vernacular there I'm also a relativist on the other hand when it comes to what dialect we should use in the informal essays in the academic literature in the New York Times it's good to have a standard the standard could have been black English if history had run differently it doesn't happen to be it's good that we all settle on a standard to maximize communication and efficiency and certain aesthetic judgments so the standardization is a good thing but that doesn't necessarily mean that one standard is inherently objectively better than another aerobic exercise underrated or overrated underrated I like it you like it and you think it's good for you I hope so because I do I like to think that I'm also accomplishing something when I go jogging or cycling behavioral economics economists playing at psychology obviously you have a stronger background in psychology than the economists what do you think of behavioral econ I'm for it what's it missing well I think it's I do think that it's missing I'm completely out of my depth here but I do think that it is too quick to dismiss classical economics to I don't think there is maybe another false dichotomy but that the idea that the rational actor and models derived from it are obsolete because humans make certain irrational choices have certain rules of thumb that can't be normatively defended those aren't necessarily incompatible because even though every individual human brain might have its quirks and be irrational it is possible for a collective enterprise that works by certain rules to have a kind of rationality that none of the individual minds has also it's possible because we're corrigible because the mind is many parts we can override some of our biases and instincts either through confrontations with reality through education through debate and we do know that even though that people who are experienced in market transactions for example don't fall for the kinds of fallacies that behavioral economists are so fond of pointing out you really can't turn a person into a money pump even though in the lab I can set up a demo that shows that people can be intransitive in their preferences but you actually put a person in a situation where there's real money at stake and all of a sudden they're not so irrational they walk away, the passive voice in writing it has it's underrated underrated, underrated in the following sense you open up any style manual and one of the first bits of advice is don't use the passive that's too crude academics overused the passive or maybe I should say the passive voice is overused by academics that's better but you know it is thought as such by many people so it is thought but it is the case is overdrawn because no construction could have survived in the language for more than 1500 years if it didn't serve some purpose and there are circumstances in which the passive is the better choice in particular when you have to when the topic of the conversation the entity that's already in the spotlight is the done to or acted upon another rule of style aside from avoiding the passive is start the sentence with the given information the topic and the sentence with the new information the focus if you're already talking about something that is done to then that's the logical way to begin the next sentence and the passive voice makes that possible if I'm talking about if I'm saying look at that mime in the park he's being pelted with zucchini then since I've already called your attention to the mime now I want to add information about him if he happens to be the brunt of an action then the passive voice is the way to begin the next sentence with him as opposed to saying zucchini at him where he gets put in the focus of the sentence which is the best place to introduce new information and in fact as I pointed out in the sense of style the two most famous style guides in the English language namely Orwell's politics in the English language and Strunk and White's the elements of style both accidentally use the passive in the very sentence in which they say don't use the passive William Shatner oh you're connected to him in several ways oh fellow Montreal Jew I have to say underrated underrated although maybe not as singing here's Susan you're well known for your photography here's Susan Sontag writing on photography and I quote photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention and she also wrote it is mainly a social right a defense against anxiety and a tool of power overrated overrated photography is or Susan Sontag well maybe just that passage like any art form photography is many things and first and foremost it's a it's a simulacrum of perceptual experience it's possible because visual perception doesn't consist of of knowing the external world directly but rather making hypotheses about it via a two-dimensional array of light that's reflected from it you duplicate that two-dimensional array of light with pigment or LEDs and you can fool the perceiver into thinking that he's seeing the actual thing that is then intention with the fact that the photograph itself is a splash of geometric and colored patches and the challenge of photography is to both convey a sense of something out there but also for that two-dimensional patch to itself be an aesthetically pleasing object and as a photographer it's I'm always cognizant of what will that two-dimensional patchwork of color look like and what is it a photograph of if you think on all the different things you've written in various areas what do you think has been your biggest mistake where do I begin where to begin biggest mistake maybe I'm going to punt on that okay that's fine why don't I just say that so it's not to convey the impression that I've never made mistakes there's so many where do I begin let's turn to the topic of world peace the book better angels of our nature will be available afterwards let me ask you a general question let's say it were possible by spending ten thousand dollars and devoting a few months of your life to it that any person on earth could blow up a significant part of a major city they could buy something some kind of explosive it would cost them ten thousand dollars how long would it take before someone actually did this anywhere on earth anywhere on earth seven billion people on earth any one of them that can come up with the 10k and have a desire to do it which is not most people of course right but how long would it take before this would happen oh I have no idea and by blow up do you mean like the Tsarnaev brothers or do you mean like Hiroshima like Hiroshima someone on earth anywhere maybe not too long but I don't know I couldn't really prophecy that but let me then work back from that and ask you about your optimism the dead peace is it then your belief it will never be that cheap to blow things up I don't know my optimism doesn't consist of prophecy in that sense that is my optimism consists of looking at what has happened and noting that first of all that the pessimistic view is factually incorrect namely people believe that we're living in unusually violent times and we're not what how to project that into the future is a separate set of questions and there are many unknowns that I just I'm not arrogant enough to know the answer to it's something that we could debate or them but I am not an optimist in the sense of saying well let's just extrapolate the curves in the future without asking questions like that maybe you could at least try to talk me out of my pessimism okay what I see is that through the course of history as societies become wealthier they also find destructive power is cheaper now for most people even today the destructive power at their hands well it can be quite terrible it's not enough to take out a major city or start a war but the price of destructive power has been falling for as long as we've had economic growth and it's hard for me to think of exceptions to that trend so if I expect economic growth to continue I expect we'll get in a world in some way a bit like my $10,000 question how long would it take and I worry that will happen a few times and I'll cycle into some fairly significant form of disorder and that's my default prediction I don't quite mean to prophesize it but I take that to be what one normally would expect and I'm happy for you to talk me out of that but what's the weakest premise in the chain I've given you well I guess there are two one is that every form of physical accomplishment follows an exponential curve of getting cheaper and cheaper for example plane travel hasn't gotten faster and faster if you extrapolate from the Wright brothers to say 1957 then it just totally leveled off in fact if anything it might be a little bit slower for a number of reasons so it is not necessarily true that there'll be a $10,000 nuclear weapon I'm not an expert on nuclear proliferation but my reading is that there isn't you still need the thousands of centrifuges and so on so that's one at least topic to explore again I'm not an optimist in saying relax it will never happen but on the other hand I think it's very easy I think it's too easy to be a pessimist and to say that I can imagine bad things therefore they are certain which I think has been a default in a lot of our discourse the other is how much a desire is there for that kind of destruction that is we could see the rate I think the rate limiting step on terrorist destruction is how many people think that it's a good idea to cause a lot of damage for no particular reason we could have there could be Tsarnaev brothers in this audience and there could be a pressure cooker that would blow up in the next few minutes but clearly there's no technological or economic impediment to that the amount of violence that we see is not limited by cost of technology is limited by the number of people who think that it would be a good idea to blow a lot of stuff up for no reason other than attracting publicity and there are certain kinds of violence that are so pointless that just no one really wants to do it one of the reasons that we've gone now 70 years without a nuclear weapon being used in war is that they're just not terribly useful as weapons to accomplish anything I mean they're useful to deter an existential threat an all out invasion that's presumably why North Korea wants them but they haven't been used on the battlefield because leading a huge radioactive crater is just not a very coherent war goal and the you could imagine some apocalyptic cult where destruction for its own sake is so desirable that they would do anything possible and we don't know how many people like that there are let me try we don't know how many people there are like that there are and I don't know the answer let me try another angle on potential pessimism and see if you can talk me down out of that tree I'm sure you've thought about the Fermi paradox there are more and more potentially habitable planets out there and yet no one is showing up to visit us or sending us signals of numerous advertisements up there in the stars by manipulating matter the universe seems oddly quiet at least our corner of it now that's not a surprise if you think that civilizations tend to destroy themselves once energy becomes cheap enough but otherwise if one is relatively optimistic as a default where are they to pose Fermi's question to you I don't think there's a natural arc toward destruction of civilizations and in fact one could make the argument that it goes the other direction that as you become more advanced civilizations develop mechanisms that make conflict less likely which I think is the trajectory we have gone on so far again I'm not willing to prophecy that it'll continue but war is a pretty stupid thing to do you blow a lot of stuff up you kill people and you don't end up with anything that you couldn't have gotten by some other means as soon as you become too belligerent you give other people an incentive to destroy you that may not be avoidable in Hobbesian anarchy but if you can have some kind of system either of world government or of a functional equivalent like international norms in the united nations and a set of expectations then everyone can live a lot better if you aren't all living by the sword it's just as plausible to me that as civilizations advance rather than having more and more destructive wars they could continue the trend that we've been on since World War II and they eventually make war obsolete that's another plausible trajectory and indeed the idea that the worst aspects of this particular primate namely we evolved in such a way that we are too quick to anger we're too quick to defend our dominance but that's the only way for intelligence to evolve I think is parochial it's saying that what we see in homo sapiens is the only way that intelligent beings can come into existence and I don't think we should be constrained by that outside of zoos and the like do you think the other primates will go extinct the not the other primates I don't think they'll be a large of monkeys monkeys are like rats as you know you go to India and they're everywhere great apes I think it depends it just depends on the race between poaching and habitat destruction on the one hand and conservation and ecotourism on the other I don't think they have to they could but I don't think they have to what do you see personally as the greatest existential threat to high civilization the biggest worry I'll give to climate change and nuclear war but why climate change even if one thinks that's very costly is there really a scenario where it ends civilization can't people move, adjust build it might be they could, yeah but it could be unrecognizable under the most extreme scenarios of what could happen but it would be pretty miserable if you imagine the number of people that would die and the number of the decrement in prosperity so it would be pretty bad I don't think it would extinguish us as a species for the reasons that you mentioned what's your favorite TV show in let's see in my entire lifetime now or your lifetime when you were 19 oh let's see I like the Ed Sullivan show why Ed Sullivan where else could you see Italian acrobats and then a Jewish comedian and then the Beatles and the Supremes and then another Jewish comedian all in an hour he was an early proponent of integration on TV you probably know this very influential he had the Supremes on I think more than any other, any single act in an era where America just barely started to desegregate so yes, I liked Hill Street Blues I don't even know if that's available on streaming I like Cheers as you can see I haven't done a lot of TV watching recently probably efficient I'm like most academics secretly watch TV as a guilty pleasure and then deny it I'm kind of the other way around I just don't watch a whole lot of TV and I feel like I ought to watch more they're starting to use their regular verbs again let's take bioengineering technologies genetic and CRISPR and the like imagine a much more advanced version than what stands right before us so imagine that parents could to some extent influence or design the children they would have above and beyond eliminating a few particular diseases does that worry you or does that get you excited that we're going to have smarter, better people I'm skeptical of the premise as someone who was very interested in genetically influenced traits and was excited in the 90s at the possibility that we'd find the gene for this, the gene for that and there were a number of discoveries which turned out to be false alarms now more and more I appreciate that even traits that have a heavy genetic component which most traits do the genetic influence is distributed over thousands and thousands of genes each of which increment or decrement the trait by a smidgen and many of which have a mixture of positive and negative effects so the idea that you'll put in the gene for musical ability in your child just turns out to be factually incorrect that's not the way genes work but not now, say we apply big data Monte Carlo methods you only raise the chance of your kid being a certain way by 1% but there's that technology and let it rip for 50 generations and at the end aren't people very, very different depends on what the tradeoffs are we don't know how much boost in brain power you can get without an increase in chances of brain cancer or of other tradeoffs of a neural network that's too dense actually is stupider so I guess I'm rooted enough in what we know about behavioral genetics not to think that these science fiction scenarios are just not particularly productive, I don't think we I think it's probably a scenario that we're not going to have to worry about just because it's too complicated we're not going to want to especially since every time you monkey with a gene you are taking some chance that something will go wrong admittedly CRISPR-Cas9 has become extraordinarily accurate but if you're talking about changing 1000 genes in your offspring or 10,000 genes we're so risk-averse in genetic manipulation even when it comes to our tomatoes people won't need a tomato that's genetically modified the idea that you're going to take that kind of risk with your children I think is extraordinarily unlikely to get there from here so do you want me to speculate about the science fiction scenario in which we do? I mean I don't think it would be a terrible thing but I think it's kind of an idle speculation because I just don't think it's I don't think we're going to have to worry about it and last question before we get to Q&A what is a book we might be surprised to find on your shelves that you've read or will read or want to read? I don't know so we're not surprised to hear Jerry Fodor and Noam Chomsky are on your shelf what would surprise us? what's there that we don't think of as a Steven Pinker kind of book to read? I have a big stack of bicycling magazines and I am obsessed about the difference in weight and grams between various kinds of derailer and water bottle cage so it's aerobic exercise being underrated anyway Steven Pinker thank you very much Q&A we will do from two mics we will alternate I will call on you this is not the time to make a statement if you do I will cut you off you are asking a question to Steven Pinker on this side first in line Hi Mr. Pinker, thank you for speaking today you mentioned the preservation of uncommon words in dialects that evolved as a result of geographic insulation such as Appalachia and remote islands with international connectivity caused by the internet do you think that we are on track for more linguistic homogeneity? we almost certainly are and we're in the midst of a mass extinction of languages I don't think it will result in everyone speaking English even under the most dire predictions say 90% of languages go extinct that leaves 600 and no one is going to be giving up Spanish or Hindi or Russian or Chinese anytime soon and in fact the growth of translation software and of national media combined with old fashioned national pride and just the inertia of growing up with the language and feeling more comfortable means that we're not going to have a single language driving at all the others on this side I appreciate the book and quite an amazing thing that Bill Gates is recommending this book so I have it do you believe that mankind has the ability to get prophetic dreams like Joseph in the Bible and do you believe that we can act on those prophetic dreams I did psychiatry so I'm interested in your answer from that perspective no no dreams are I think dreams are a kind of screen saver they have it would violate many much of what we know about physics to be able to prophecy the future and our understanding of physics I think is pretty good enough to rule out the possibility that dreams can be prophetic on this side you've written about the limits of language to sort of advance political change and stuff like that there seems to be modern versions of that we're to abolish gender binaries we're going to go on and so forth and you work on a university so you're probably familiar with a lot of this and I like your opinion on some of these strategies for advancing social change through abandoning certain languages and certain words and forms of language yeah well there politically motivated campaigns to change language can have an effect as we see in what I call the euphemism treadmill that is the fact that we don't use the word negro anymore even though it was a perfectly respectful and unexceptionable term through the 1970s Martin Luther King frequently referred to negroes he had the United Negro College Fund and that got replaced by black which then got replaced by African American and but it's easier to do it with what linguists call open class vocabulary items nouns and verbs then with closed class article items like pronouns and since the 70s there have been a number of proposals to introduce a gender neutral pronoun into the English language so we wouldn't have to say he or she or the clumsy he or she none of them have caught on and the language doesn't change in terms of its it does change but not quickly and usually not by deliberate engineering when it comes to things like articles, pronouns past tense and plural markers and so on so it's just a natural resistance they're learned early they are highly frequent they are distributed across millions of people conversing with one another so I don't think I have to worry about that changing too too quickly but sure there are more respectful and less respectful ways of referring to people and we've seen those change and they'll probably continue to change what I called the euphemism treadmill refers to the fact that the reason that there often is a cycling is that the change in attitudes that you want to affect by changing the language will meet resistance in terms of the rest of our psychology I don't think it's true that language determines your attitudes and beliefs although it can push against them and as long as there's still some kind of negative connotation to an entity then changing the label for it will just result in the new label picking up the emotional aura of the concept rather than the other way around and as long as there is prejudice against African-Americans and where the connotation is not as positive as you'd like it to be there'll be the the urge to find a new label that has not yet absorbed the taint of the existing one now we have the African-American was I think took over pretty quickly in the some time in the 1990s I think Jesse Jackson was the force behind it and we have gone now for more than 20 something years without a replacement of that which might be a reflection of the fact that prejudice against African-Americans is declining. In other cases like Asian replacing Oriental that stayed put possibly because there was less prejudice against Asian people and there wasn't a need to find a fresh replacement for that. If I could just interject on this given this campaign season and also what you can say see on Twitter if you look for it do you think public speech is now evolving to become less polite in America? It's possible that I don't think that that Trumpism has shows that our attitudes have changed that we're becoming more misogynistic or racist or but and you can do some Google searches that are kind of quicker than Gallup or Pew polls to track some of these changes but Seth Stevens Davidowitz has shown that for example if you Google for various racist or sexist terms that are used in jokes you get a pretty good barometer of racism that people may not be willing to admit to in public and if you do that you don't see a sudden U-turn in the popularity of racist jokes in the last say six months so I think it is more a question of people who kind of kept their attitudes to themselves now feeling that there is that they're allowed to get away with it that some of the taboos have been broken whether they will reassert themselves with the decline of Trump we don't know I kind of hope so I think that there is a benign taboo against overly racist and misogynistic and homophobic language that there are ugly attitudes and there always will be and that there is a kind of benevolent hypocrisy in taboo where there are certain things that you just don't say in public because that does kind of legitimate them they can be threatened we saw that with taboo words for sexuality starting in the 60s that words that you just could not say in print or on the airwaves are now common that could happen with racist and homophobic terms I hope not and too early to tell next question thanks to both of you for inviting us to an intelligent literate conversation I'd like to imagine you always have that over almost every meal I'd like to hear you speak about just how central language is to being human I'm thinking of J.L. Austin and John Searle on speech acts in a social constructed world all the way up to I think it's called this is that the language we use limits what we can experience and do I think it's I think language is central to everything else that's human I think that it was very much figured in our evolution by making social cooperation that much easier namely with language for example you can make an agreement to do a favor for someone now in exchange for a very different kind of payback or a payback very far in the future something that you can't do when you're just bartering physical goods I think that since we our species lives on information information is the ultimate trade good because it is it's a non rival good you can share it with someone else without being deprived of it yourself so it can be multiplied and that makes it the ideal medium of reciprocity conferring a large benefit to someone else at a small cost to oneself so lubricates the kind of cooperation that is hyperdeveloped in humans it's also I think tied in with the fact that we're a technological species that we live by our wits by our know-how that with language if you make a discovery you can spare other people from having to remake that discovery you can pool innovations that are invented across a huge catchment area I don't though endorse a version of linguistic determinism associated with Benjamin Wharf and Edward Superior according to which we can only think thoughts for which there are words in our language if that were true then you'd have to ask how did language originate in the first place it wasn't kind of given to us by Martians it was we developed language because we had ideas that existed prior to our being able to articulate them for which we coined words language is always changing again this gets back to Hayek's notion of spontaneous order and distributed intelligence that even though language is this any given language is an exquisite system for conveying complex thoughts it was never designed by a committee it emerged because millions of people had ideas that they struggled to express they would coin a bit of jargon they would invent a circumlocution it would go viral it would become entrenched as part of the language and therefore and languages of course are always continuing that cycle our language is different from the language of the founders which is different from the language of Shakespeare so the fact that we're always adding to the language we're losing bits of the language as we talked about in the case of irregular verbs shows that it isn't itself the medium of thought and you can always invent a circumlocution if your language doesn't have a pre-existing word and a lot of the brain is devoted to forms of thinking that are not just trading in words not just assembling words so I think warf went too far but there's no doubt that language is an inherent part of what makes us unusual as a species I would say unique other species communicate but grammatical language in which the meaning of the combination depends on the arrangement of the meaning of the parts and moreover that the number of such combinations is unlimited this goes back to the idea of recursion which is nowadays often associated with Noam Chomsky is something that without doing kind of procrusty and stretching I don't think you see in other species there are some aspects of birdsong that are combinatorial but birdsong has no semantics that is the calls don't mean anything you can have some kinds of primate calls where maybe if you have two of them they're in one order versus not the other they're different circumstances in which they figure the primates out of them I think it's different enough from human grammatical language to say that it really is unique next question alright thank you Dr. Pinker for a fascinating discussion while we're going through this thinking about language culture and your answer your response to Tyler's question on the likelihood of a catastrophic event someone being willing to go out and take such extreme measures it seems like all this discussion is leading to us thinking that there's a group effect or a cultural effect on the individual through evolution it's much more less aggressive than my ancestors from tens of thousands of years ago were do you agree with the theory of group selection like Gio Wilson or Jonathan Haidt and do you think that's a correct response to what we're talking about well there are two ideas that I think you've broached here one of them is groups is the unit of analysis in evolution and natural selection and if you google false allure of group selection or Pinker group selection you'll see that I have pretty strong opinions on that I think that the idea of group selection is a big blunder so no I don't think that there is a Darwinian process of differential survival of replicators that applies to groups in the way that it applies to genes I think it's a bad analogy the question of whether we but you referred specifically to the case of violence a frequently asked question that I get is are we evolving to become less violent in the biologist sense that genes that encourage violence are becoming less common in the gene pool I doubt it but I can't rule it out and fellow economist Gregory Clark argued that in Europe between the middle ages and the present in a process that I actually wrote about in terms of the quite spectacular declines in rates of violence speculated might have been helped along by a genetic change I'm a little more skeptical but I can't rule it out the reason I'm skeptical is that we can you can see similar you can see declines of violence that take place on time scales that couldn't possibly be due to Darwinian natural selection for example the fact that Germany went from the world's most militaristic culture to the world's most pacifist culture in pretty much a generation or that the American homicide rate fell in half in eight years there you didn't have a turnover of generations that occurred long enough for it to be a genetic change so we know that overt violent behavior can change really really quickly that just means that we don't need to invoke a genetic change for similar reductions of similar magnitude that we see in history next question I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the evolution of fashion it seems like language has much stronger network effects than fashion does it's easier to mix and match parts of fashion from different cultures and so as we go forward and culture continues to conjoin and cross different continents are we heading towards a global super fashion or are the cultural meanings of fashion too embodied and are we going to kind of maintain different circles of fashion yeah it is it is a fascinating question and I think we are seeing kind of globalization of fashion combined with a globalization of youth culture that you can go to an awful lot of parts of the world and see similar baggy shorts in eras when baggy shorts are in fashion or for that matter in elite fashion as well it's actually quite astonishing what percentage of male elites wear neckties and jackets not too different from this and I don't know and it is surprising why there is such a reduction in diversity of fashion at the same time as you have this globalization there's also a a churning over time and there is an interesting theory with an analogy from biology, biological evolution of frequency dependent selection namely when and this goes back to the art historian Quentin Bell who in turn was influenced by Thorstein-Webelin that in the competition for status differentiating yourself as an elite from the hoi poloia or the rabble you want to look that's different enough that distinguishes you in Webelin's day that took the form of sumptuosity as fine fabrics and tailored suits that were unfakeable enough that you were broadcasting the information that I can afford things that you can't and you can't fake them with advances in clothing manufacture and everything manufacture with everything becoming cheaper you can't differentiate yourself through sumptuosity and riches and also through privatization and informalization it's kind of tacky to kind of look like you belong in a Donald Trump hotel that kind of flashy ostentation has kind of lost status lost value as a status symbol instead there's a value placed in simply being out of the mainstream enough that there's something special about you that you're trained with enough of an aura of confidence that it's not just that you're hopelessly unhipped rather you're seen as setting the next trend and then eventually so when everyone has long hair you show up with a crew cut or vice versa when everyone has fat lapels you have skinny lapels or long skirt length people who have some claim with an unusual look which then trickles down when it starts to be sold in target then the elite have to jump to yet another look and so you get a kind of churning this is unlike language in that it may not have a semiotics in the sense that there's a lot of commentary on fashion what are you trying to communicate by your long hair your short hair your fat lapels your skinny lapels and the answer may be nothing that is all you're communicating is it's different from what you're wearing and I'm getting away with it and so it's similar to cases of evolution often in parasite host co-evolution where simply being rare is an advantage when being rare is an advantage paradoxically it starts to become more common meaning that you then have to look to something completely different that's rare again and that was Bell's analysis of fashion and I think that will continue two more questions one thank you very much for fascinating talk I'd like to ask you very quickly about language acquisition and inference and language learning in adults and finally the implications for neurological development or deterioration first off but in China generally it's recognized that infants long before they can do labials and do bah or ma they get the tone correct speech pathologists generally in China for 5 and 6 7 year olds they correct for the bah and the consequence of the vowels very very seldom or almost never for the tones paradoxically the U.S. government, State Department and the intelligence agencies spend a tremendous amount of money putting people through two year intensive programs in Chinese and the thing that maybe one person in a thousand gets are the tones the thing that every Chinese infant automatically gets and never forgets in a sense encoded indelibly do you think that in a sense at some point there I think at 5 or 6 or 7 there is a module or capability a neurological capability to hear mimic and reproduce but in a sense get shut off in some way around the age of 15, 20 a.m. for the State Department and the intelligence agencies of median age for beginning Chinese 35 or 36 for exotic venture to say the least there is evidence for at least probably several critical periods or at least sensitive periods in language acquisition that is in particular phonology that is the sound pattern of the language, the accent including in the case of Chinese tones although that's not that also blends into the morphology that is the distinctions among words that that's the most sensitive that often people who are perfectly articulate and fluent in a second language will give themselves away by their accent because the mastery of the accent seems to be more dependent on being of tender age when you acquire it then say syntax or vocabulary and for that matter for vocabulary there is no critical period where we learn new words all our lives including names for people and places syntax may be somewhere in between in fact I have a paper that's in one of these interminable cycles of revision and review doing kind of plea bargaining with journal referees to please publish our paper which suggests as you speculate that when it comes to grammar syntax and vocabulary probably the beginning of the of the end for mastery comes in the teenage years that something happens starting around the age of 15 or so that makes it harder to achieve native mastery if that's when you begin to learn a language so in general the younger is better of course if you there are 6,000 languages you don't necessarily know when you have a child maybe a Chinese diplomat or do business in China so you don't know if it's Chinese that you should start with early or some other language and that of course might change but in general there is a benefit to starting early we don't know for sure no one has identified a particular change in the plasticity of the brain that explains it there probably is one but we're just ignorant of what if anything changes in the brain a language to native levels of mastery if you begin too late last question is from Brian Kaplan and Steven at the end of your answer please conclude everything by telling us what your next book will be about after answering Brian noting that we must conclude by 5 p.m. Brian when Tyler argues about the power of reason usually I'm taking your view but when I was looking at the front row and looking at the titles of your books I was particularly thinking about the blank slate it seems like an entire book about how really smart people are about something and many of your other books I think also could be described in that way the smartest people in the world who think about the subjects the most who are deeply misguided so what do you think is going wrong there and more generally so what is it wrong about what is wrong with academia that there are so few Steven Pinkers out there well I want to answer the last question not in those terms I think that there is a intellectual equivalent of tribalism, John Hite writes about it you've written about it that we tend to think of intellectual disagreements like the Red Sox versus the Yankees there are it's deeply pleasurable to read arguments that support a view that you already hold it's really annoying to read something that calls one of your doubts into question ideally what we want is an arena in which the rules of the game make it so that no matter how emotionally tied you are to your belief if it's wrong it'll be shown to be wrong and it'll just be too embarrassing to hold on to it or at least for other people to hold on to it indefinitely that's what I consider to be the ideal of what science is all about and intellectual discourse in general when it works how to make it work better are really good questions certainly there are disturbing signs that the process in some ways is getting worse I see Greg Lukayanoff is here and the director of foundation for individual rights and education which does a brilliant job in combating some of the restrictions on free speech that we're seeing in university campuses which would be a paradigm case of going in the wrong direction in terms of setting up rules that allow the truth to come out in the long term so I'm hoping for that naming and shaming and arguments will give free speech a greater foothold in academia the fact that academia is not the only arena in which debates are held that we also have think tanks and we also have a press we also have the internet how we could set up the rules so that despite all of the quirks of human nature such as intellectual tribalism are overcome in our collective arena of discourse is I think an absolutely vital question and I just don't know the answer because we're seeing at the same time as there was the hope 20 years ago that the internet would break down the institutional barriers to the best ideas emerging it hasn't worked out that way so far because we have the festering of conspiracy theories and all kinds of kooky beliefs that somehow the internet has not driven out but if anything has created space for how we as a broader culture can tilt the rules or the norms or the expectations so that if you believe something that's false eventually you'll be embarrassed about it I wish I knew but that's obviously what we ought to be striving for and your next book I'm writing a book whose tentative title Enlightenment the manifesto for science reason humanism and progress and where I argue that the Enlightenment philosophers got a lot of stuff right that a lot of their dreams are starting to come true that a lot of dimensions of human well-being when quantified as I tried to do in the better areas of our nature turn out to be going in a good direction that a lot of aspects of human life are improving Steven, thank you for such wonderful content Thank you