Rationality | Pinker, Steven

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

In our uncertain age, which can so often feel so dark and disturbing, Steven Pinker has distinguished himself as a voice of positivity. New York Times

Can reading a book make you more rational? Can it help us understand why there is so much irrationality in the world? Steven Pinker, author of Enlightenment Now (Bill Gates s 'new favorite book of all time ) answers all the questions here

Today humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding--and also appears to be losing its mind. How can a species that developed vaccines for Covid-19 in less than a year produce so much fake news, medical quackery, and conspiracy theorizing?
 
Pinker rejects the cynical cliché that humans are simply irrational--cavemen out of time saddled with biases, fallacies, and illusions. After all, we discovered the laws of nature, lengthened and enriched our lives, and set out the benchmarks for rationality itself.  We actually think in ways that are sensible in the low-tech contexts in which we spend most of our lives, but fail to take advantage of the powerful tools of reasoning we ve discovered over the millennia: logic, critical thinking, probability, correlation and causation, and optimal ways to update beliefs and commit to choices individually and with others. These tools are not a standard part of our education, and have never been presented clearly and entertainingly in a single book--until now.
  
Rationality also explores its opposite: how the rational pursuit of self-interest, sectarian solidarity, and uplifting mythology can add up to crippling irrationality in a society. Collective rationality depends on norms that are explicitly designed to promote objectivity and truth.
  
Rationality matters. It leads to better choices in our lives and in the public sphere, and is the ultimate driver of social justice and moral progress. Brimming with Pinker s customary insight and humor, Rationality will enlighten, inspire, and empower.

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'Erudite, lucid, funny and dense with fascinating material . . . A pragmatic dose of measured optimism, presenting rationality as a fragile but achievable ideal in personal and civic life. . . . It s no small achievement to make formal logic, game theory, statistics and Bayesian reasoning delightful topics full of charm and relevance.' The Washington Post

An impassioned and zippy introduction to the tools of rational thought Punchy, funny and invigorating. The Times (London)

An engaging analysis of the highest of our faculties and perhaps (ironically) the least understood The Wall Street Journal

If you ve ever considered taking drugs to make yourself smarter, read Rationality instead. Jonathan Haidt, New York Times bestselling co-author of THE CODDLING OF THE AMERICAN MIND
 
Pinker manages to be scrupulously rigorous yet steadily accessible and entertaining whether probing the rationality of Andrew Yang s presidential platform, Dilbert cartoons, or Yiddish proverbs. The result is both a celebration of humans ability to make things better with careful thinking and a penetrating rebuke to muddleheadedness Publishers Weekly (starred)
 
A reader-friendly primer in better thinking through the cultivation of that rarest of rarities: a sound argument. Kirkus Reviews

Buchausschnitt

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How Rational an Animal?

Man is a rational animal. So at least we have been told. Throughout a long life I have searched diligently for evidence in favor of this statement. So far, I have not had the good fortune to come across it.

-Bertrand Russell

He that can carp in the most eloquent or acute manner at the weakness of the human mind is held by his fellows as almost divine.

-Baruch Spinoza

Homo sapiens means wise hominin, and in many ways we have earned the specific epithet of our Linnaean binomial. Our species has dated the origin of the universe, plumbed the nature of matter and energy, decoded the secrets of life, unraveled the circuitry of consciousness, and chronicled our history and diversity. We have applied this knowledge to enhance our own flourishing, blunting the scourges that immiserated our ancestors for most of our existence. We have postponed our expected date with death from thirty years of age to more than seventy (eighty in developed countries), reduced extreme poverty from ninety percent of humanity to less than nine, slashed the rates of death from war twentyfold and from famine a hundredfold. Even when the ancient bane of pestilence rose up anew in the twenty-first century, we identified the cause within days, sequenced its genome within weeks, and administered vaccines within a year, keeping its death toll to a fraction of those of historic pandemics.

The cognitive wherewithal to understand the world and bend it to our advantage is not a trophy of Western civilization; it's the patrimony of our species. The San of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa are one of the world's oldest peoples, and their foraging lifestyle, maintained until recently, offers a glimpse of the ways in which humans spent most of their existence. Hunter-gatherers don't just chuck spears at passing animals or help themselves to fruit and nuts growing around them. The tracking scientist Louis Liebenberg, who has worked with the San for decades, has described how they owe their survival to a scientific mindset. They reason their way from fragmentary data to remote conclusions with an intuitive grasp of logic, critical thinking, statistical reasoning, causal interference, and game theory.

The San engage in persistence hunting, which puts to use our three most conspicuous traits: our two-leggedness, which enables us to run efficiently; our hairlessness, which enables us to dump heat in hot climates; and our big heads, which enable us to be rational. The San deploy this rationality to track the fleeing animals from their hoofprints, effluvia, and other spoor, pursuing them until they keel over from exhaustion and heat stroke. Sometimes the San track an animal along one of its habitual pathways, or, when a trail goes cold, by searching in widening circles around the last known prints. But often they track them by reasoning.

Hunters distinguish dozens of species by the shapes and spacing of their tracks, aided by their grasp of cause and effect. They may infer that a deeply pointed track comes from an agile springbok, which needs a good grip, whereas a flat-footed track comes from a heavy kudu, which has to support its weight. They can sex the animals from the configuration of their tracks and the relative location of their urine to their hind feet and droppings. They use these categories to make syllogistic deductions: steenbok and duiker can be run down in the rainy season because the wet sand forces open their hooves and stiffens their joints; kudu and eland can be run down in the dry season because they tire easily in loose sand. It's the dry season and the animal that left these tracks is a kudu; therefore, this animal can be run down.

The San don't just pigeonhole animals into categories but make finer-grained logical distinctions. They tell individuals apart within a species by readin