![]() ![]() ![]() It isn’t seen as “dope, phat, chill, fly, sick or da bomb.” As evidence for its diminished status, he quotes celebrations of nonsense by the Talking Heads and Zorba the Greek. Still, Pinker is troubled by what he sees as rationality’s image problem. This, he says, is “the essence of Bayesian reasoning” - assessing evidence in terms of prior knowledge. ![]() To illustrate this principle, Pinker gives the example of the San hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari Desert, who will assume that a set of ambiguous animal tracks come from a common species unless they get definitive evidence that the tracks must belong to a rarer one. We may be living through a “pandemic of poppycock,” he says, but he refuses to submit to “the cynical view that the human brain is a basket of delusions.”Īfter all, people use rationality all the time in their everyday lives, consulting the knowledge they have in order to get what they want. Pinker doesn’t believe he has much hope of reaching the anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists who indulge in the “florid fantasies” of QAnon. In “Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters,” Pinker writes as if he’s part of an embattled minority, valiantly making the case that “the ability to use knowledge to attain goals” is so underappreciated these days that the reading public needs a new book (by Pinker) “to lay out rational arguments for rationality itself.” For someone who so frequently and serenely proclaims that he’s right, Steven Pinker can get curiously defensive. ![]()
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