[Applause] Stephen Pinker has STD 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 geted you say got now how computationally efficient is that process uh the I think it Taps two of the mechanisms that make intelligence possible I mean why why would I spend a good chunk of my career uh studying the
minui of irregular verbs uh I 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 uh so why do we have uh 165 or so quirky exceptions like um stride stro come came Sing sang go went and so on it just
seems there could be no Rhyme or Reason behind it uh I think it's just a consequence of the fact that uh we uh memorize words and that's one of the two mechanisms behind language we um store by Brute Force wrote memory arbitrary pairings between a sound and a meaning the word uh 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 uh a pairing between that sound and that meaning uh we don't just blurt out words but we also combine them into
phrases and sentences using rules that allow you to predict the or compute the meaning of a combination from the meaning of the parts and the way that they are arranged those I I are the two U mechanisms that make language possible uh but there are some kind of meanings where they can uh compete over which
system expresses a particular uh Concept in the case of uh regularity irregularity we have two different ways of conveying the concept uh an action that took place in the past or in the case of plurals like um Mouse mice and rat rats uh two ways of talking about more than one thing we can memorize a uh
more or less independent word to convey the idea like U uh struck or sang or we can apply uh 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 you 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 hi an 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 so the regular verbs are ones that you don't use so often and thus again you're economizing on information in this
decentralized way yeah um I I don't know how I don't know how well that analysis would work across a range of of um zones of irregularity so in the it is certainly true that irregular verbs tend to be uh common and uh which is kind of the bane of the language learner you you
you learn Spanish or French and uh all of the words that you use all the time you've got to memorize the conjugations um but the and I think the reason for that is I might even invoke Darwin more than than Hayek uh namely that um in the generation to generation transmission process of an irregular
verb an irregular verb has to be memorized uh 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 uh use C uh since memory thrives on frequency the more often you hear something the better
you remember it if any verb uh 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 allpurpose uh aded Rule and then the verb will go from irregular to regular for that generation
and all all subsequent generations and so you've got a kind an erosion of the stock of irregular verbs as they get filtered through the minds of children memorizing them uh where it's the less frequent ones that tend to to fall out of the language so dreamt becomes dreamed for instance Dre is prettier it
is prettier and that's one of the uh 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 when they're is a choice strided versus stro uh strove versus strived uh ho versus heaved is that they 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 uh a nickname or a common word and they are more euphonious uh because they aren't assembled uh in a clui way from uh the verb stem and this this bit of detrit
hanging on the end this Ed or or or S this suffix which is serviceable it allows you to convey a message but it makes the the sound of the word itself a bit clunky and then there are almost unpronouncable regular words like sixths or edited where because you're sticking an extra bit on the end of a word you're
actually um uh messing up the nice Contour of a standard word in the language and that's another one of the tensions that over the history course of the history of a language will kind of shape the balance of regular and irregular forms so that is hakan in in the sense that um no one planned the
language to be optimal in satisfying one Criterion there are trade-offs there are multiple tugs pushes and pulls and um in a as speakers millions of speakers make little adjustments as they use the language as kids learn the language the language itself spontaneous evolves with some balance so let me now put on my
Economist hat and ask you about this as you know in George Orwell's 1984 the party bands all are regular 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 I like the irregular verbs I'd like to see more of them uh but
um uh and it is uh you know it is a u sad when we lose them we occasionally a new one gets a tow hold in the language like um uh snuck for example is about 120 years old it came in on the analogy of dig Doug and um stink stunk and uh uh sing sangs uh and strike struck so occasion
what will protect a verb against erosion when it becomes too uncommon is similarity to uh 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 um kind of parasitize the memory strength of something nearby in in in phonological space and occasionally there will be uh analogies people will coin new verbs sometimes in in a jular way like uh uh you're invited to a party spice are welcome you know instead of spouses it's kind of a little you know a
little bit uh a little bit Jo but sometimes these things can uh can catch on and that was the case for um 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
is a that it's slang whereas people younger uh don't see what they what the fuss is about uh are there 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 right 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 sentence yeah 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 Rob commitments or do you just go ahead and say striden Steven Pinger has ridden into the room yes right uh yeah aod has not been in common usage for a few centuries so I mean it's uh that's one of those that that that that dropped out like chid is the past tense of chide for examp right yes chid or
hulp as the past tense of he some of them survive in in dialects you know in in Appalachia in remote parts of the British Isles uh forms that were in use a couple of hundred years ago may have uh resisted the the erosion for for reasons that are completely obscure part partly capricious but um but yeah I like
them I like the the one distinction that is uh Vanishing that I think is sad is the um three-way distinction in verbs like sink sank sunk uh stink stank stunk shrink shrank shrunk uh where the shrank and the stank are giving way to the participle form no shrank and stank no
shrank and stank and and admittedly it it would have been hard to have a movie called honey I shrank the kids instead of Honey I Shrunk the Kids but I I uh in my my style manual the sense of style I um recommend hanging on to them I think they're they're they're nice it's nice to have that three-way distinction
because English conjugation is already so uh kind of deaerate so degenerate that it's nice to preserve what distinctions that we 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 Nome 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 tological 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 our ability to Define 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 it's not easy to pin down what the hypothesis is partly because Chomsky himself uh revises his theory every decade or so kind of on the principle of of uh was it M's continuous
Revolution just never never let never let people settle into any kind of comfortable consensus so it's a moving Target uh also as you say it was um it was neither uh um specified in a precise way nor field tested against a uh say a data set of of uh language variation um which which I think is
unfortunate in terms of ordinary kind SCI scientific practice uh Linguistics is an eccentric field in some ways partly because uh it was so uh polarized by a charismatic figure and his opponents that um it didn't proceed in the ordinary direction of of kind of uh uh making the theory more precise more
testable um so with that caveat I in mind I think there is such a thing as um you could call it Universal grammar I think that in the in the following sense that the child is biased to analyze uh the speech that uh that that he or she hears in a particular way goes uh it does not simply uh record
sentences verbatim I mean that that's the the memory half of the uh language system but the algorithmic or computational or rule governed half looks for um tries to to pull out uh combinatorial rules from the speech stream that there are certain kinds of uh rules and elements that the child is
uh keyed to look for uh and that those that that uh 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 uh come from the the fact that that language is created a new Every Generation by the minds of the
children who uh constructed out of the data that they get from their parents and peers now 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 hey 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 as if I understand him correctly in our political discourse different moduls take over and it's almost not integrated with the rest of your brain right 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 yeah well the the um metaphor of the module comes from my former colleague Jerry foder philosopher and psycholinguist and it it comes in different versions you had Howard
Gardner proposing a theory of multiple intelligences you have evolutionary psychologists proposing the uh the the metaphor of the Mind as a Swiss army knife now it's more like a smartphone with a bunch of different apps um uh I think that the the 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 basian statistics or it's just the uh the the law of oper and conditioning um how about all just one big teaming mess but no modules well I see I modules never quite um seemed like like the best metaphor I think there is
structure or specialization I don't think the mind is Spam I don't think it's just a I don't think we just have a homogeneous neural network in in the skull I I think there is some organization the problem with the module metaphor is that asum as there are snap-in components that with very
limited channels of communication between them uh I think that's too strong but I think it is reasonable to say that there are different uh faculties to use an old-fashioned word uh to choose a different metaphor I I think it may have been Chomsky who proposed that the U that the mind is like a biological system made out of
organs and tissues where um in uh when I was in high school I was taught for example that the that the blood was an organ uh now uh now the blood of course suffuses all of our tissues you can't draw a dotted line around it it's not like the uh you know the rump roast in the flank steak of the
supermarket cow display uh and likewise the the mind can be can have a specialization and structure and different components and without them L literally being uh independent so I think John height 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 uh set of events and that a lot of political uh disagreement consists of what you know frame of mind if you want what module you use to to um uh analyze a particular issue so you 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 Steven Pinker we have the sense of self however
difficult it may be to describe or study scientifically and that evolved you're a dorinian so where does that come from why is it there well the I I would distinguish certainly the U self-concept self- Knowledge from the uh issue of of subjective experience uh and people 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 I think those are two different I mean the
lessions you mean the lad right as you can sit up and feel something taste something and say hey I'm Steven Pinker and know introspectively that you're saying it to yourself right I mean but 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 you know a robot say 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's the uh that may
be the key the uh philosophical problem uh of sence or qualia or sometimes called the hard problem of Consciousness uh I think might ultimately be uh a um 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 ESP there's no uh life after death uh there's no no uh mysterious action at a distance it's all information processing in neurons uh why it should feel like
something to me to be that network of neurons um I 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 claim that it just isn't a coherent intellectual question at all Dan denet being the most famous um for some people this is a uh kind of
a AP hatch from materialism uh 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 uh non-material Powers which it does not have uh I tend to uh gravitate toward a view that um uh sometimes has been credited to to David Hume um Colin mcin
is the Contemporary philosopher who has uh U kind of made it most prominent sometimes I think Mr mysteriously misleadingly called mysterianism uh Tom Nagel in his semal article what it is what is it like to be a bat whose title captures the essence of the problem uh 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 uh registers the environment that organizes the information acts on it including a model of itself from my point of view it
feels like something uh why that should be true uh I don't know but then again here I am inside me and uh 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 uh and this is one of them uh the nature of time what could have been before the Big Bang if that was the the the beginning beginning of everything how
can the 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 uh a characterization and we'll 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 um 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 nonlinear where some ions Zig instead of zag because of Brownian movement or maybe even Quantum phenomena
and as a result uh the whole system might behave in one way or another that is physically determined but for all practical purposes random uh it may be so complex that it might be like the weather taken to several higher degrees that will never that in in theory perhaps um lass's demon would be able to tell us what each
of us will do next but something things that are true in theory are so um mind-bogglingly complicated that they may as well not be true in theory so yeah 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 um
you know uh unpredictability nonlinearity that uh for all intents and purposes were not determined now I've been reading through a lot of different aspects of your work a lot of your books reading or rereading and I've been trying to figure out to myself what's the underlying unity in the thought and
writing of Steven 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 if there are people out there say like the blank theorist the blank slate theorists who don't see much structure to 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 reason to operate but within laws of nature so you're trying to rearticulate this modern 21st and 20th Century vision
of what does the 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 taking out this intermediate what you might call voluntarist Pro reason pro-science position and that's what I took away from the the whole Corpus of Stephen thinker but tell me what is your
take on that yeah uh I I I think that's uh not not too far from the way I would see see myself not so much in uh taking intermediate position that's just in know in you know find the goldilock Zone like oh the truth is always halfway in between two extremes I mean it isn't always you know uh on the other hand uh
you know I do believe in the enlightenment Vision that uh by understanding our world that that the world is intelligible that we can understand it that uh that um progress in understanding and therefore progress in rational action are are possible including pointedly uh ourselves that is
there is such a thing is 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 uh uh discount when necessary uh illusions that are quirks of our own makeup that we can uh uh understand what it is that give humans
fulfillment and satisfaction and and pleasure what are the resources that we have to work with in in improving a political system uh and I also think that uh often going back to finding a a middle ground that the middle ground isn't finding say the arithmetic mean between the two extremes but rather it's
trying to go down uh a level of um more uh 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 uh uh kind of bored by the idea of is
language inate or is it learned uh it's just you know it's neither it's uh it's not halfway in between because that doesn't give you any insight either but rather uh there is an innate structure that does the learning because learning is not 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 are the uh what is its computational architecture as the computer scientists say once you have that um that is the solution to to the nature nurture problem namely what's in
eight is an ability to learn uh 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 or is it learned there is something that it's innate but it's a something the innate
stuff allows us to learn and so it's kind of uh gets beneath a dichotomy into something that I like to think is more uh intellectually satisfying here 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 is consciousness really mean is the will really free how do we think about time you're quite willing to pull a of Conan or vien steinan move and say Well it all collapses into contradiction call him again it'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 hakan 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
pinkan view well what are we doing here if you're not if if you don't believe in reason uh you know why don't we have a you know an arm wrestle or a beauty contest or after dinner okay uh by the ve first of all by the very Act of even posing this question you're committed to reason uh that that's what we're trying
to explore here so you're it's kind of it's too late you've already committed yourself to me that's one number two Hume uh even though he was a uh uh a very insightful psychologist and he emphasized that uh that that that humans are subject to all kinds of uh irrational passions and biases and so on
um that was uh 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's 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 they'll uh
uh let their emotions get the better of them he's 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 a a logical distinction between goals on the one hand or desires and beliefs uh and
that you can't um through a chain of deduction identify what you ought to aim for that's just a category mistake you know that's different from the psychological claim that people are are are permanently irrational uh people can be made more rational I I think he would say well and I would say by and by the
act of what we're doing now um that is exploring implications of ideas by science that is by taking your beliefs and allowing reality to refute them or or not and historically even though it's true that people are do all kinds of crazy things subject to all kinds of irrational prejudices passions and so on
um on the other hand some uh ideas really do get dropped by bad ideas get dropped by the wayside um not necessarily quickly not necessarily absolutely but we we we don't have human sacrifice anymore we don't we don't throw virgins into volcanoes to get better weather uh we uh don't have too
many hereditary monarchies anymore uh we um they don't all work badly may maybe not but probably you know on the whole democracy is a better idea than the Bourbons than youmar I I mean I grew up in Canada so and I grew up with a picture of the queen in my classroom so uh so yes uh if you have a
purely uh have all the pageant and and gossip that that you have with with having a a nice juicy monarchy but uh but the queen doesn't actually think up the laws it's probably not a bad compromise uh but but the in both the progress of Science and I really do believe there is such a thing as
scientific progress I mean we we see it in the fruits of Technology but we also see it just in the depth and uh and and um satisfying nature of scientific explanation and uh not linearly and not inexorably and uh but but in in progress in in so many dimensions of human life um I've documented the decline
historical declines of violence um and as an economist you know that we've gotten a lot wealthier and uh life has gotten better in uh many ways we live longer we're healthier we have a rich more breadth of experience uh these are all I would say fruits of the 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 uh frontal cortex kind of grafted onto a brain which now and again can override our passions we can exert
self-control we can count 10 we can save for a rainy day we can hold our horses uh not not uniformly not always reliably but uh but enough that that it's something that we could we could uh celebrate and uh 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 pass us on any one of them but let's start with rap music oh I I 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 uh or at
least my I overrate myself but I just I I I just know I was born 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 uh on my iPod is not an argument for the objective Merit or of rap music compared to any other kind of music there I'm a relativist uh and likewise the uh grammatical structure of African-American English vernacular as linguists call it black English ebonics uh it there's really
nothing inherently to choose between the rules in in black English vernacular and any other English vernacular there I'm also a relativist on the other hand when it comes to uh what dialect we should use in uh the in in formal 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 and certain aesthetic judgments um so the standardization is a good thing but that doesn't necessarily mean that one
standard is uh inherent objectively better than another aerobic exercise underrated or overrated oh uh uh underrated I like it you like it and you think it's good for you I I hope so because I I do I I like to think that I'm also accomplishing something when I when I go jogging or or cycling
behavioral economics economists playing it psychology obviously you have a stronger background in Psychology than the economists what do you think of Behavioral econ uh I'm I'm for it uh what's it missing well I think it's I do think that it's missing and I'm I'm completely out of my uh depth here but I
do think that it is too quick to dismiss classical economics to um I I don't think there this maybe false dichotomy but that uh the idea that uh 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 uh 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 were works by certain rules to have a kind of rationality that none of the individual
Minds has also it's possible because we're we're corrigible because the mind is is many parts we can override some of our uh biases and and instincts uh either through confrontations with reality through education through debate and we do know that um even the that that people who are experienced in
Market transactions for example um don't fall for the kinds of fallacies that behavior economic 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 uh it has its underrated underrated yeah underrated yeah the in in the following sense you open up any style manual and it uh one
of the first bits of advice is uh don't use the passive that's too crude academics overuse the passive or maybe I should say the passive voice is overused by academics that's better that but you know no it is thought as such by many people so it is thought but it is uh the case is is is overdrawn um
because no construction could have survived in the language for more than 1500 years if it didn't serve something 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 the uh in the spotlight
is the done to or acted upon another rule of style aside from avoiding the passive is start the sentence with uh the the given information the topic end the sentence with the new information the the the focus if you're already talking about something something that is uh done to then that's the logical
way to begin the next sentence and the passive voice makes that possible uh if I'm talking about U if I'm saying you look at the that uh mime in the park he's being pelted with zucchini uh 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 the the brunt of an action then the passive voice is the way to begin the next sentence with him as opposed to saying some people are throwing zucchini at him where he gets put in the focus of the sence which is the best place to introduce new information and in fact as
I point out in the sense of style uh the two most famous style guides in the English language namely Orwells politics in the English language and drunken whites 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 got I I I'd have to say underrated underrated although maybe not as singing here's Susan you're well known for your photography here's Susan sag 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 overated overrated yeah photography is or Susan sag well maybe that maybe just that passage uh you like like any art form photography is many things and uh you know and first and foremost it's a kind of it's
a a simulacrum of perceptual experience it's possible because uh visual perception doesn't consist of uh of of knowing the external World directly but rather making hypothesis 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 or LEDs and you can fool the receiver into thinking that he's seeing the actual thing uh that is then in tension with the fact that the photograph itself is a splash of geometric and and and uh colored uh patches and the challenge photography is to both convey uh 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 um uh 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 Oh Where do I again uh um yeah where to begin um biggest mistake maybe I'm going to punt on that okay that's fine well 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 uh let me ask you a general question let's say it were possible by spending $10,000 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 $10,000 how long would it take before someone actually did this anywhere on Earth anywhere on Earth 7 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 um and and by blow up do you mean like the Saria brothers or do you mean like Hiroshima like Hiroshima uh someone on Earth anywhere um yeah maybe not too long but I you know but I I don't know I could
couldn't really prophecy let me then work back from that and and ask you about your optimism about peace is it then your belief it will never be that cheap to blow things up you know I I I don't know my my optimism doesn't consist of Prophecy in that sense um that is my optimism consists of looking
at what has happened and um and noting that first of all the pessimistic view is factually incorrect namely people believe the we're living in unusually violent times and we're not uh what how to project that into the future is a separate set of questions and there there are many unknowns that I I just
I'm not arrogant enough to to know the answer to um it's something that we could debate we could explore them but but I I am not an optimist in the sense of saying well let's just extrapolate the curves uh in the future without uh 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 while it can be quite terrible it's not enough to take out a major city or start a war uh 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 then we will 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 like what's the weakest premise in in the
chain I've given you well um I guess there are two two um one is that uh that every form of physical accomplishment follows a you know an exponential curve of getting cheaper and cheaper for example you know plane travel hasn't gotten faster and faster if you extrapolate from the right Brothers to
say 1957 then it just totally leveled off uh you know in fact if anything might be a little bit slower for for a number of reasons um so it is not necessarily true that there'll be a $10,000 nuclear uh weapon um I'm not an expert on nuclear proliferation but my reading is that
that that there isn't you still need the thousands of centrifuges and so on uh so that that's one at least topic to explore again I'm not an optimistic saying oh relax it'll never happen uh it just this is but that on the other hand I think it's very easy I think it's too
easy to be a pessimist and just and to say that um I can imagine bad things therefore they are certain which I think is the has been a default in a lot of our discourse sure the other is how much of Desire is there for that kind of Destruction that is uh we could see the the rate I think the rate limiting step
on a lot on on terrorist destruction is how many people think that it's a good idea to cause a lot of damage for no particular reason uh we could have uh you know there could be taray of Brothers in this audience and and there could be a pressure cooker that would blow up uh you know in the next few
minutes I don't think there will be uh but clearly there's no technological or economic impediment to that the amount of violence that that we see is not uh limited by uh cost of Technology it's limited by the number of people who think that it would be a good idea to blow a lot of stuff up for no for no
reason other than attracting publicity and there are certain kinds of of violence that are so pointless that just no one really wants wants to do it one of the reasons that we've gone now 70 more than 70 years without a uh nuclear weapon being used in war is that they're just not terribly useful as As Weapons
to accomplish anything I mean they're they're useful to deter an existential threat an allout invasion that's presumably why North Korea wants them but they haven't been used on the battlefield because leaving a huge radioactive crater is just not a very coherent you know War goal and the um uh
for their I mean 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 and sorry yeah but we don't know how many people there like that
there are and I don't know the answer so let me try another angle on potential pessimism and see if you can talk me down out of that tree yeah I'm sure you've thought about the fairy 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 or constructing glamorous 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 uh but otherwise if
one is relatively optimistic as a default where are they to pose FM's question to you yeah uh I I don't think there's a natural Arc toward destru of civilizations and in fact one could make the argument that it's the goes the other other direction that uh as you become more uh Advanced uh civilizations
develop mechanisms that make conflict less likely uh uh which I think is the trajectory we have gone on so far again I'm not willing to prophecy that it'll continue but uh you know war is a pretty stupid thing to do I mean you blow a lot of stuff up you kill people and uh 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 a hubs in Hoban Anarchy but if you can have some kind of uh of system either of world government or of a functional
equivalent like International norms and the United Nations and a set of expectations then everyone can live a lot better uh if you don't if you aren't all living by the sword it's just as plausible to me that as civil civilizations Advance rather than getting having more and more destructive
Wars they could continue the trend that we've been on since World War II and they uh eventually make war obsolete uh that's another plausible trajectory and indeed the idea that um the worst aspects of this particular primate namely we evolved in a in such a way that we are too quick to anger we're too
quick to um uh defend our dominance that that's the only way for intelligence to evolve I think is is parochial it's saying that what we see in in Homo sapiens is the only way that intelligent beings can come into existence and uh you know I don't I don't think we should be constrained by that outside of zoo
and the like do you think the other primates will go extinct um the uh not the other primates I I think it'll be I don't think they'll shortage of monkeys larger larger you know monkeys are like rats uh you know they're you know as you know you go to India and they're they're everywhere um great apes
uh you know I I I think it depends it it just depends on the race between you know poaching and habitat destruction on the one hand and uh conservation and ecotourism on the other uh I don't think they have to they could but I don't think they have to and what do you see personally as the greatest existential
threat a high civilization um your biggest worry I I I I'll give to climate change and uh uh nuclear war but why climate change even if one thinks that's very costly yeah is there really a scenario where it ends civilization can't people move adjust build uh it might be they could
yeah uh but it it could be unrecognizable under the the the uh most extreme scenarios of of what what could happen uh but um it would be you know it would be pretty miserable if you imagine the number of uh people that would uh would die and the number of and the the the um decrement in in prosperity so it would
be pretty bad I wouldn't say I don't think I don't think it it would extinguish us as a species for the reasons that you mentioned what's your favorite TV show um in uh let's see in in all in my entire lifetime or now or your lifetime when you were 19 oh uh let's see I I like the Ed Sullivan
Show uh why Ed Sullivan well because you could where else could you see Italian acrobats and then a Jewish comedian and then the Beatles uh and and and The Supremes uh and then another Jewish comedian all all in an hour he was an early proponent of integration on TV you probably know this absolutely very
influential absolutely particularly with he had the The Supremes on uh more I think more than any other any single act in an era where America just barely deseg started to desegregate so yes uh I like Hill Street Blues I don't even know if that's available on uh streaming um I like
cheers uh those are as you can see I haven't done a lot of TV watching uh recently and uh probably efficient uh unlike uh you know most academics I think you know secretly watch TV as a guilty pleasure and then deny it I think I'm kind of the other way around like I actually just don't watch a whole lot of
TV and I feel like I ought to watch more they're starting to use IR regular verbs [Laughter] again let's take bioengineering Technologies genea and crisper 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 um I I'm skeptical of the premise uh as someone who was very interested in uh genetically influenced
traits and was uh kind of 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 uh now more and more I appreciate that even traits that are that have a heavy genetic component um 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 um
incorrect that's not the way genes 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 um depends on what the trade-offs are I mean we don't
know how many how much uh boost in brain power you can get without an increase in in chances of brain cancer or of uh of other uh trade-offs of uh a neural network too dense actually is stupider um the so I guess I'm rooted enough in what we know about behavioral genetics
not to think that these science fiction scenarios are um just not particularly productive I don't think we it's Pro I 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 chrisper cast 9 has uh become extraordinarily accurate but if you're talking about changing a thousand genes in your Offspring or 10,000 genes we're so risk averse uh in in genetic manipulation even when it comes to our
Tomatoes uh people won't eat a tomato that's genetically modified the idea that that you're going to take that kind of risk with your children uh I think is is Extreme extraordinarily unlikely that we'll get there from here so you know do you want me to speculate about the scienic science fiction scenario in
which we do sure I mean I don't think it would be a terrible thing but I think it's it's kind of a idle speculation because I just don't think it's uh I don't think we're 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 [Laughter] so we're not surprised to hear Jerry foder and Nome Chomsky are on your shelf right oh 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 uh bicycling magazines uh and I
uh and and I am obsessed about the difference in weight in grams between various kinds of derailer and uh water bottle cage so it's aerobic exercise being underrated again maybe yeah anyway Stephen Pinker thank you very much so much Tyler thank you 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 Steph Pinker on this side first in line hi Mr Pinker thank you for speaking um you mentioned the preservation of uncommon words in dialects that evolved as a result of geographic isolation such
as Appalachia and uh remote islands with International connectivity caused by the internet uh do you think that we are on track for more linguistic homogeneity uh we almost certainly are and uh we we're we're in the midst of a mass extinction of languages um I don't think it will result in everyone
speaking English um even under the most dire predictions say 90% of languages go extinct uh that leaves 600 and uh no one's going to be giving up Spanish or Hindi or or Russian or Chinese any anytime soon um and in fact the uh growth of translation software and of um National media combined with
old-fashioned um national pride and and just the inertia of growing up with a language and feeling more comfortable in it means that we're not going to have a uh u a s single language driving out all the others thank you on this side I um appreciate the book and quite a um quite
an amazing thing that Bill Gates is recommending this book so I have it do you believe that um mankind has the ability to get prophetic dreams like Joseph in the Bible and do you believe that we can act on those um prophetic dreams I did Psychiatry so I'm interested in your answer from that perspective yeah
no no no dreams are are uh yeah I think dreams are kind of screen saver um they have uh it would it would uh violate many much of what we know about physics uh for a dream to be able to prophecy the future and our understanding of physics I think is pretty good is good
enough to rule out the possibility that dreams can be prophetic on this side I was influenced by you you've written about the limits of uh language to sort of advanced political change euphemism treadmill and stuff like that uh there seems to be modern versions of that where you know to abolish gender
binaries we going to abandon pronouns and so forth and you work on University so you're probably familiar with with a lot at this and I'd 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 there
uh politically motivated campaigns to change language can have an effect as we see in uh what I call the euphemism treadmill that is the the fact that we don't use the word negro anymore uh even though it was a perfect perfectly respectful and unexceptionable term in the uh through the
1970s uh 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 uh and and U but it's easier to do it with what linguists call Open Class vocabulary items nouns and verbs than with closed class or
grammatical items like like pronouns and since the 70s there have been a number of proposals to uh introduce a gender natural 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 I mean it
does change but not quickly and usually not by deliberate uh engineering when it comes to things like articles pronouns uh past tense and plural markers and and so on so they'll be just a natural resistance they're they're learned early they are highly frequent uh they are distributed across uh millions of people
conversing with with one another and uh they uh um so so I don't think have to worry about that changing you know too too quickly uh but but sure there there are more respectful and less respectful ways of referring to to people and uh we've seen those change and they they'll
probably continue to change I mean I what I call the euphemism treadmill refers to the fact that uh the reason that there often is a cycling is that the change in attitudes that you want to affect by changing the language will um meet resistance in terms of uh the rest of our psychology I don't think it's
true that language determines your uh attitudes and uh beliefs although it can push against them and as long as there's still some kind of negative connotation to uh an entity then uh changing the label for it will just result in the new label picking up the emotional Aura of the concept uh
rather than the other way around and as long as there is prejudice against African-Americans and there and where the connotation is not as um positive as you'd like it to be there'll be the uh the the urge to find a new label that has not yet absorbed the taint of the existing one um now we have now
African-American was um I think be took over pretty quickly in the sometime in the 1990s I think Jesse Jackson was the uh 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 uh that that prejudice against
African-Americans is is declining in other cases like Asian replacing Oriental that stayed put possibly because there was less prejudice against uh 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 it's in America yeah it's it's possible um that uh I don't think that um um the trumpism has uh shows that our attitudes have changed that that we're becoming more um misogynistic or or racist or um but um
and and uh you can do some Google searches that are uh kind of quicker than Gallup or Pew poles to track some of these changes Seth Stevens dtz has shown that uh for example uh if you Google for various uh racist or sexist terms that are used in jokes you get a pretty good barometer of uh of
of um racism that people may not be willing to admit to in public and um if you uh if you do that you don't see a sudden U term urn in the popularity of racist jokes in the last say six months so I think it is more a question of people who uh kind of kept their attitudes to themselves now feeling that
there is uh that they're allowed to get away with it that some of the Tabo have been broken whether they will um reassert themselves uh with the with the decline of of of of of trump we don't know I S I kind of hope so I think that there is a benign taboo against um uh
overly racist and misogynistic and homophobic language uh that there are ugly attitudes that and there always will be um and that there is a kind of benevolent uh hypocrisy and taboo where there are certain things that you just don't say in public because that does kind of legitimate them um they can be
threatened we saw that with taboo words for sexuality starting in the in the 60s um that words that you just could not say in print or on uh on the airwaves are now uh common um that could happen with racist and and homophobic terms you know I hope not and too early to tell next question thanks
to both of you for inviting us to an intelligent literate conversation that I'd like to imagine you always have over almost every meal I'd like to hear you speak about just how Central Language is to Being Human I'm thinking of JL Austin and John surl on speech acts in the social constructed world all the way up to I
think it's called the war f hypothesis that the language we use limits what we can experience and do yeah I think it's um uh I think language is Central to um everything else that's human I think that uh it was very much figured in our our evolution by making um social cooperation that
much uh uh easier namely with language for example you can make a an agreement to uh do a favor for someone now in exchange for um 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 uh I think that since we our species lives
on information information is the um ultimate trade good because it is a it's a a non-rival good you can um share it with someone else without being deprived of it yourself so it can be multiplied and that makes it the ideal medium of communic of of um reciprocity conferring a large F benefit to someone else at a
small cost to oneself so it lubricates the kind of cooperation that is hyperdeveloped in in uh 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 knowhow that uh with language if you um make a discovery you can spare other people from having to
remake that Discovery um you can pull um inov ations that are invented across a huge catchment area uh I don't though endorse uh a uh um a version of linguistic determinism associated with Benjamin Warf and and Edward super 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 we uh 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 H Hayek's notion of spontaneous order and distributed intelligence that uh that they even though language is this uh any given language is a um uh an Exquisite system for conveying complex thoughts it was never designed by a committee it emerged because
millions of people 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 uh and it and uh therefore and languages of course are uh always continuing that cycle our language is
different from the language of the founders which is different from the language of Shakespeare um so the fact that the that we're we're always adding to the language we're losing bits of the language as I as we talked about in the case of irregular verbs shows that it isn't itself the medium of thought uh
and um you can always invent a circum locution if your language doesn't have a h have a pre-existing word and a lot of the brain is devoted to forms of thinking that are are not just um uh trading in words not just assembling words so I think Warf went too far but there's no doubt that language is an
inherent uh part of what makes us unusual as a species unique um yeah I would say I I would say unique um other language other species communicate but um grammatical language in which the um meaning of the combination depends on the arrangement of the meaning of the parts and moreover
uh that that that the number of such combinations is unlimited this goes back to the idea of recursion which is nowadays often associated with with gome chsky is something that uh I without doing kind of procrasti and stretching uh I don't think you see in other other species I mean there are
some aspects of bird song that are that are combinatorial but bird song has no semantics that is the the calls don't mean anything uh 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 they the
primates out of them I think it's different enough from Human grammatical language to say that that it really is unique next question all right thank you Dr Pinker for fascinating discussion while we're going through this thinking about language Society culture and your answer
your response to Tyler's question on the likelihood of a 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 a cultural effect on the individual through Evolution it's much more less
aggressive than my ancestors from uh tens of thousands of years ago were do you agree with the theory of group selection thinko Wilson or Jonathan height and uh do you think that's a correct response to what yeah we're talking about well there there are two ideas that that I think you've
approached here one of them is uh groups is the unit of analysis in uh Evolution and natural selection and um if you Google false Allure of group selection or Pinker group selection you'll see that I have I have pretty strong opinions on that I think that that the idea of group selection is a is a a big
blunder uh so no I don't think that there I don't think that there is a pro darwinian process of differential survival of replicators that applies to groups in the way that it applies to genes I think it's it's a bad analogy uh the question of whether we but you you uh refer to specifically to the case of
violence and a frequently Asked question that I get is how are we literally evolving to become less violent in the biologist sense that genes that encourage violence are becoming less common in the gene pool um I I I doubt it I but I can't rule it out and uh um uh fellow Economist Gregory Clark uh
argued that uh in Europe between the Middle Ages and the present in in a process that I actually wrote about in terms of the uh quite spectacular declines in rates of violence he speculated might have been helped Along by a genetic change um I'm 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 um for example the fact that uh Germany went from the world's most militaristic culture to the world's most pacifist
culture in pretty much a general generation or that the American homicide rate fell in half in 8 years uh there you didn't have a turnover of generations uh that occurred long enough for it to be a genetic change so we know that be overt violent Behavior can change really really quickly uh that
just means that we don't need to in need to invoke a genetic change for similar reductions of similar magnitude that we see in history next question um I was wondering if you any thoughts on the evolution of fashion it seems like um language has much stronger Network effects than fashion does and it's
easier to mix and match parts of fashion from different cultures um and so as we go forward and culture continues to uh conjoin across different continents are we heading towards a global super fashion or are the cultural uh meanings of fashion to embodi and are we going to
kind of maintain different like Circles of fashion still yeah uh it is uh it is it is a fascinating question and I think we are seeing a kind of globalization of of fashion combined with a kind of a globalization of youth culture that you can go to an awful lot of parts of the world and see similar um uh you know
baggy shorts in eras when baggy shorts are in fashion or for that matter in Elite fashion as well uh it it's actually quite astonishing what percentage of male Elites wear neck ties and jackets not too different from this and I I don't know and it is surprising why there is such a reduction in
diversity of of fashion um at the same time as that you have this globalization there's also a um a churning over time and there is an interesting Theory with an analogy from biology biological evolution of frequency dependent selection namely when uh and this this goes back to um the art historian
Quenton Bell who in turn was influenced by by thorstein velin that in the competition for status in in differentiating your differentiating yourself as an elite uh from the the Hoy pooy or or the Rabel you want a look that's different enough that uh distinguishes you uh in Vin's day that took the form of
sumptuous that is fine fabrics and uh 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 uh with uh advances in in in uh clothing manufacturer and everything manufactur with the everything becoming cheaper you
can't differentiate yourself through sumos and riches and also through because of democratization and informalization it's kind of tacky to kind of look like a you belong in a Donald Trump Hotel uh that kind of flashy ostentation has kind of lost uh status lost value as a status symbol
instead there's a value placed in in simply being um out of the mainstream enough that there's something special about you combined with enough of an aura of confidence that it's not just that you're um uh hopelessly unhip 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 uh when everyone has fat lapels you have skinny lapels or you know long long skirt length a short skirt length the people who have some claim to already being in the elite will then reinforce it 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 um this uh go is unlike language in that it not have a semiotics in the sense that there's a lot of commentary on Fashion on what are you trying to communicate by you know 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 uh and so it's it's similar to cases in evolution often in parasite host uh co-evolution where simply being rare is
an advantage when so being rare as 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 Belle's analysis of fashion and I think that will will continue two more questions
one thank thank you very much for a fascinating talk I'd like to ask you very quickly about language acquisition and infants and then language learning and adults and finally the implications for neurological development or deterioration first off uh in China generally it's recognize that infants
long before they can do leals or frff and do ba or ma they get the tone correct speech of Pathologists generally in China for five and six seven year olds they correct for the ba and the consonant of the vowels very very s or almost never for the tones paradoxically the US government of state department
and the intelligence agencies spent a tremendous amount of money putting people through two-year intensive programs in Chinese and the thing maybe one person in a thousand gets or the tones the thing that every Chinese infant automatically gets and never forgets is in a sense encoded indelibly uh do you think that in a
sense at some point there I think at 5 or 6 or S there is a module or there's a capability a neurological capability to hear MIM can reproduce that in a sense get shut off in some way around the age of 15 20 and for the state department in the intelligence agencies of median age
for beginning Chinese known as 35 or 36 a quick exotic venture to say the least yeah there is uh there is evidence for uh um at least probably several critical periods or at least sensitive periods in language acquisition that is in particular that phenology that is the sound pattern of the language the accent
uh including in the case of um uh of Chinese tones although that's not that also Blends into the uh morphology that is the distinctions among words that that's the most sensitive that often people who are perfectly articulate and fluent in a in a second language will give themselves Away by their accent
because the uh um Mastery of the accent seems to be more dependent on being of tender age when you acquire it than say syntax or vocabulary and at the and for that matter for vocabulary there is critical period we learn new words all our lives including names for people and
and places syntax may be somewhere in between and in fact I I have a paper that's in one of these interminable cycles of uh of revision and review uh doing kind of plea bargaining with uh Journal referees to please publish our paper um which suggests as you speculate that the that when it comes to um
grammar syntax and vocabulary probably the beginning of the uh uh of the end for um Mastery comes in the teenage years that something happens uh starting around the age of 15 or so that makes it harder to achieve native Mastery if that's when you begin to to uh learn a language so in general uh the the
younger is better uh of course if you there are 6,000 languages you don't necessarily know when you have a child if they're going to grow up to be a Chinese Diplomat or do business in China so you don't know if it's Chinese that you should start them with early or some other language and that of course might
change um but in general there is a 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 uh but we're just ignorant of what change what if anything changes in the brain that makes it
harder to learn a language to Native levels of Mastery if you begin too late last question is from Brian Kaplan and Stephen 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: PM
Brian uh when Tyler are you is about the power reason usually I'm taking your view but when I was sitting at the front row and looking at the titles of your books I was particularly thinking about the blank slate it seems like it's an entire book about how really smart people are really wrong 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 subject the most are just 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 Sten
thinkers out there well I won't answer the last question not in those terms uh there I I think that the um there is a uh intellectual equivalent of of tribalism uh John height writes about it uh you've written about it that uh we tend to think of intellectual disagreements like
the uh the Red Sox versus the Yankees uh there there are are um it's it's deeply pleasurable to read arguments that support a view that you already hold it's U really annoying to read something that calls one of your doubts into qu what your beliefs into question the ideally what we want is an arena in
which the rules of the game uh 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 uh it'll just be too embarrassing to hold on to it uh or at least for other people to hold on to it uh indefinitely that's what I consider to be the idea
with what science is 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 of uh um that the the process in some ways is getting worse I see Greg lukay office here and
the the director of foundation for individual rights and education which is 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 uh you know I'm hoping for uh that naming and shaming and uh and arguments will uh make free speech 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
a press we also have the internet um uh how we could sort of set up the rules so that despite all of the quirks of human nature such as intellectual tribalism are overcome in our Collective uh Arena of discourse is is I think an absolutely vital question and I I just don't know the answer because we're seeing at the
same time as there was the hope uh 20 years ago that the internet would break down um the institutional barriers to the best ideas emerging um 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 have 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 uh I wish I knew but that's that's obviously what we
ought to be um striving for and your next book um I'm uh writing a book who tentative title is the new Enlightenment the manifesto for science reason humanism and progress and uh where I argue that the enlightenment philosophers got a lot of stuff right that uh a lot of their dreams are are
starting to come true that um that a lot of dimensions of human well-being when Quantified as I try to do in the better angs of our nature uh turn out to be going in a good direction that that uh that a lot of aspects of human life are improving Stephen thank you for such wonderful content thank you thanks