Can Rationality leads us to Morality?

So, it is the ULTIMATE guide, right? There’s got to be something to it. For the first half hour, it’s pretty standard Pinker, the stuff about how humans got where we are, that we are “healthier, wealthier, and wiser” than our predecessors got that way by rationally determining that we, as Paul Wellstone said, “All do better if we all do better.” It’s better to live in a world where more people are flourishing. Even if you look at it selfishly, that is, thinking you will do better if are also caring about how others are doing.

In that, he includes those who say he has an optimistic point of view. He says he doesn’t. There is a bookmark for it at 10:17. Part of it is that data shows the newsworthy events, that are often bad, and the things that don’t or that happen slowly, those can be good.

The 26:05 bookmark is about institutions. Near the end of that he slips in that Anthropogenic Global Warming is real. It seems like an aside, an example of how cancel culture says that’s false because it came from academia. The full point he is making is that academia has a responsibility for maintaining its reputation and for demonstrating they are listening to those that disagree. When they don’t, it becomes popular to blow them off, and leaders can see that and use it to gain power.

It's harder to see if you think you are in the tribe of right-thinking people, because you think you choose that because you are right thinking. Maybe you did. Maybe you are right. That doesn’t make it right to dismiss a large portion of the population that doesn’t think like you. If you are right, and you are thinking rationally as described above, then bringing the world with you is part of that. It’s right to share your right thinking. He moves on to discuss cancel culture, which is directly related to institutions.

There are ways to create spaces where institutional thinking can be questioned without punishment. He then uses the tragedy of the commons as it applies to group think. Again, if you think you are right, you don’t think you are believing what you do based on what the group thinks. Think about his examples. Do they apply to you? Have you at least given those thoughts some credence? He applies the tragedy of the commons to rationality itself. At the 34-minute mark, and it only takes a moment, he describes how we became polarized: There is a rational logic to agreeing with irrational thinking to maintain your status in a group to protect yourself, but if everyone is doing that, then we lose touch with rationality.

He offers a solution too. Something you don’t always get. We need norms of objectivity, truth-seeking, impartiality, a commitment to truth over slogans and memes and making our own side look good.

35:58 is the bookmark for polarization. It’s rational to not want to become a pariah. It’s irrational to not consider the possibility that one of your beliefs is mistaken. It’s rare to hear someone say they could be wrong in these polarized times. It’s dangerous individually. It’s dangerous for the world as a whole if we do not do it.

The next section builds toward the value of having methods to determine and know what’s true. He notes that this is an “unnatural mindset”, something that we have only begun to develop. We have made strides in understanding how minds work, how we can fool ourselves, as Richard Feynman liked to remind us.

If you are looking for a highpoint, at 42:30, he ponders the QAnon believers. He draws on everything above and then how he had to find new cognitive explanations for them. Important among them was that people are not so committed to the factual veracity of beliefs when they have a strong moral component. This is probably how we have been for millennia and goes a long way in explaining why developing scientific methods took so long in human history. The application: when someone says they believe a politician is a pedophile, the response should be to call the police and demand an investigation. More likely, saying you believe that is a way of saying you don’t like the politician. This YouTube was created in 2023, and politicians who are pedophiles has become more probable since then, the example is still relevant.

In my experience, I have come up against non-scientific reasoning when discussing something I consider factual and the person I’m discussing it with disagrees. Instead of a methodological response, the response focuses on what is wrong with the thinking. This includes:

·         There are problems with the peer review process.

·         A scientist once published a bad report and people believed it.

·         What was once the scientific consensus was believed for a long time, even though it was wrong.

·         Consensus is not proof.

·         A theory is said to be equal to a hypothesis.

·         Science is unable to solve all problems or give us all answers. i.e. science can’t explain the feeling of love.

·         Science lacks poetry and imagination.

None of these address whatever specific issue we were discussing.

To discuss completely how we should be thinking, Pinker needs to describe Bayesian reasoning. It has terms and a formula, but it matches how we naturally reason. This is critical, not just an aside about some esoteric way of doing logic.

If you think this is obvious, then you were born in this post-Enlightenment era and you accept that the results of the last few hundred years of human history have developed a reasonable and rational mindset that all of us should follow. Not everyone thinks that. If you haven’t questioned it, then you aren’t following the thing you think you are. The seemingly complex formulas of Bayesian reasoning can begin to be understood, once you get over the hurdle of accepting that you can’t just believe something because it makes your side look good.

What makes this presentation unusual is he covers not only the basics of rationality and why it’s better. He covers more than one way to achieve it. At the one-hour mark, he gives examples when base rates and formulas aren’t the best way to approach a decision. Predictive power can be a way of perpetuating prejudices. There are historical dynamics and ways to isolate data that can appear to be common sense but are more like confirmation bias. Without saying it, he is addressing the argument that liberals use results to determine equality instead of looking at equality of opportunity.

He spends a few minutes on the “publication bias”, that is news is reporting of something happening, and wants you to hear their story, so the headline tries to grab you. Whatever it is, it will be unlikely to change everything and more likely to become part of the Bayesian formula, altering it by a degree or two. The news creates a distortion of how well we know the world and how to navigate toward better health and wisdom.

He gives a short summary of the Bayesian Theorem at 1 hour 10 if you want to try understanding it, without the math. Then, the wrap up, can we become more rational? Can we reason our way out the mess we are in?

Education is often presented as the answer, and there are some basics that are helpful, but school has a limit; you can teach principals but it’s hard to teach how to generalize them. The conclusion; that there’s more to it than simply knowing it, we need a shift to having rationality become part of being decent and respectable. It’s a change in culture that didn’t come from the backlash to world wars and didn’t come with the many culture shifts over the recent decades like women’s rights and gay rights and increased welfare support. Expecting the shift to happen on its own won’t get us there and shaming people into won’t either. It will take living the principals in a way that as yet, we have not.