Steven Pinker’s new book is all over the news these days. In our era of fake news, deliberate misinformation, superstition, post truths and alternative facts, the message of the book, as conveyed by its title, Rationality: Why it Seems Scarce and Why it Matters, appears clear and relevant. Rationality, described as “a kit of cognitive tools that can attain particular goals in particular worlds” ought indeed to be the “lodestar” of everything we think and do. And yet it isn’t. Something doesn’t work. Or at least it hasn’t worked. Resources for reasoning and information are abundantly available today and yet, people choose to ignore them, or use them in questionable ways. Why?
I haven’t read Pinker’s book, so I cannot say much about the answers he gives to this question. I have only found a small excerpt here. In it, Pinker uses the example of the San people of the Kalahari Desert to emphasise what he describes as their “scientific” mindset, which they have organically and successfully employed in order to sustain themselves for millennia in that rather inhospitable place. “They reason their way from fragmentary data to remote conclusions”, he writes, “with an intuitive grasp of logic, critical thinking, statistical reasoning, correlation and causation, and game theory.”
If they can do it, why can’t we? What stops us? That’s the paradox Pinker identifies.
