Rationality review – a timely rebuke to muddle-headedness

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker (Penguin), £25.

Steven Pinker is a rare bird. An optimistic psychologist, whose 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, argued with convincing statistics that the human race’s propensities to violence and war were in long term decline. The negative left hated that positive conclusion.

Pinker is engaged in a war of his own. He says his opponents believe “reason, truth and objectivity are social constructions that justify the privilege of dominant groups”. 

Campus evangelists preach facts that are constructs of the privileged and should be ignored. Rational conclusions drawn from “facts” should thus be discarded as tainted, an approach Pinker profoundly deplores.

So is salted the battlefield on which the Marxist left in America, especially in the Elysian fields of higher education, hopes to win the hearts and minds of the rising generation to their cause. To the left rationalism is racist, because, by their own definition, rationalism is based on privilege. White privilege. 

Their unshakeable circular logic allows them to omit facts and argue that Pinker, a genial, approachable look-alike for Sir Simon Rattle, with a dry sense of self-deprecating humour, is a bouffant-haired Trumpist Satan. 

He is anything but. Groundless conspiracies of the right are given as short shrift as those of the left in this book. For 300 or so pages, Pinker mounts a stalwart argument in defence of the tools of rational thinking. In sharp, readable prose, the disciplines of logic, critical thinking, probability, statistics and game theory are explained in un-condescending terminology that a reader relatively fresh to the discipline can easily grasp.

This a much more accessible book than its recently published counterpart, American Marxism, by Mark R. Levin, which starkly describes how the core elements of Marxist ideology are now pervasive in American society and culture, often cloaked in candied terms like, “progressivism”, “democratic socialism” and “community activism”. While Levin describes the state of battle in highly technical, academic terminology, Pinker gives us more straightforward intellectual tools to fight “the blob”.

A wry sense of humour colours the text. When dealing with irrationality in the context of career choices, Pinker slyly observes that “deciding that the pleasure of five minutes of fellatio was a greater priority than forging a reputation in history” is an obvious example of irrational judgement. Now, whoever can he be talking about?

The opening chapter, “How Rational an Animal”, takes us back to the rationality of the San tribe of the Kalahari Desert, one of the oldest peoples, who moved from undisciplined foraging to persistent hunting, enabling societal evolution based on rational thought. Joined up thinking brought benefits in its wake.

And so we have gone on, until our species can walk on the moon, decode genomes in minutes and invent vaccines against global epidemics in months. 

The book splits into discrete sections on current decision-making theories: “Bayesian Thinking” – informing the probability of successful decision-making with accumulated experimental evidence.

A good example is the changing policy decisions over Covid-19 restrictions as fresh evidence from the field emerged over time. (Unless you happened to be a hydroxychloroquine salesman, that is.)

Then he moves onto “Rational Choice and Expected Utility” – how to temper a decision by balancing its potential advantages against more adverse outcomes. The least bad choice. Next, “Signal Detection and Statistical Decision Theory” – a combination of Bayesian Theory and Rational Choice. Is that blip on the sentry’s radar screen a cruise missile or a flock of seagulls?

 Previous experience must be brought into play to temper a potentially disastrous auto response. 

And finally, “Game Theory” – as introduced to the world by von Neumann and Morgenstern, useful in a confrontation when assessing if the potential payoff depends on the other guy’s choice. 

This means understanding when some confrontations such as Paper, Rock, Scissors are zero-sum games where analysis of both players’ choices sums to zero and the difference when choice may affect the likelihood of a winning outcome, such as mice deciding who shall bell the cat. 

It boils down to a risk worth taking because it has a potentially beneficial outcome for all mice, but never the cat. Even for the sole loser mouse, the chance of a cat-free future is a respectable 50/50.

I would buy this book for its Index of Biases and Fallacies, a two-page addendum, alone. There are about eighty, ranging from exponential growth bias (every Initial Purchase Offering pitcher is guilty of that), through the dieter fallacy, “I can’t get fat by eating just one more French fry,” to my favourite, the “No True Scotsman” fallacy. 

No True Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge. Angus puts sugar on his porridge. Angus cannot be a true Scotsman. I dislike porridge, so perhaps I’m Welsh. 

This amusing fallacy has serious implications if followed in the wider non-porridge eating world. “No true Christian kills, no true communist state is repressive, and no true Trump supporter endorses violence.”

To lighten the mood, there are some great cartoons. My favourite is from my hero Dilbert’s syndicated strip: “What rational process do you use to determine who is right?” “I label people who disagree with me “idiots” and call it a day”. Pinker draws readers into engaging mind game examples, especially those based on cognitive fallacy, such Tversky and Kahneman’s “Linda the Banker Problem”, which focuses on preconceptions skewing evidential judgements.

This lightness of touch drives the reader on through the necessary but more obscure swamps of academe.

This is Steven Pinker’s twelfth book. He is also a respected editor of many other publications and author of regular articles appearing in learned magazines and the popular press. He is a top-class public speaker. To get the measure of the man I suggest tuning into a lecture he gave at the University of Edinburgh on his book The Better Angels of our Nature. 

He comes across as unstuffy, well in command of his subject and happy to be engaged with sceptical members of the audience. Unfamiliar with Pinker until I read this book, I shall now be watching for further articles and future publications from his pen.

His is a timely rebuke to muddle-headedness. And a reminder to the complacent that unless we not only mount guard but fight back, we risk the irrational taking over the earth.