Unraveling the Mystery of the "Curse of Knowledge" with Steven Pinker!
Ғылым және технология
#stevenpinker #professor #curseofknowledge #data #storytellingwithdata
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To kick-off the second season of Data Malarkey, Sam Knowles talks to one of the all-time greats of academic psychology - Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. An experimental psychologist interested in all aspects of language, mind, and human nature, Steve is one of the most important public intellectuals - and best-selling authors - of the past 30 years. He came to global attention with his 1994 book, The Language Instinct, and followed that three years later with How The Mind Works.
In the 2000s, Steve’s interests - and popular-science best sellers - have flexed and grown to cover nature and nurture, human progress, violence (or otherwise) in society, and most recently, rationality. Many listeners will be familiar with The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of our Nature, Enlightenment Now, and - most recently - Rationality. A less well-known but important work is Steve’s 2014 book The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, and what it has to say about the Curse of Knowledge.
Garlanded by media, national and international associations, and academic institutions around the world, Steve is generally agreed to be one of the world’s leading thinkers and most influential writers. He is that rarest of creatures - a serious, practicing academic who writes with great clarity for both his peers and an intelligent lay audience.
Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on 18 May 2023.
Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.
Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.
Voice over by Samantha Boffin.
Steve spends his time reading, teaching, and writing - totally immersing himself when it comes to books. And when he’s not doing that, he’s walking, hiking, cycling, travelling and talking with his wife, the novelist and philosopher, Rebecca Goldstein. He also has a passion - and a real skill - for photography, a passion developed from his early-career research in visual cognition and his love of visual aesthetics.
This episode covers so much in just 45 minutes, from why the world is rather less violent than the news cycle might suggest to the replicability crisis in psychology; from our faulty belief that a sample will be representative of a population, to underpowered psychological research using too few experimental subjects. More than once, Steve refers to Amos Tversky’s 1971 paper in Psychological Bulletin, “Belief in the law of small numbers”. As Steve points out: “He did warn us. We should have listened!” For those unfamiliar with this seminal, overlooked paper - here it is.
And while we’re very much in the wheelhouse of an academic psychologist at the height of his profession, at all times Steve avoids the Curse of Knowledge, which he defines as “the difficulty in imagining what it’s like for some else not to know something that you know”. As the Curse of Knowledge is a repeated target of Sam’s in his data storytelling training, host and guest wig out about the Curse, which Steve also characterises as a lack of Theory of Mind.
Other topics covered in this episode include: what insight is and how to move from data to insight; the very real power of analogy (like the solar system for atomic structure) in driving breakthrough innovation and understanding; the dangers (and shortcomings) of AI. While Steve suspects the dangers have been overstated, he’s all for minimising deep fakes - on news in particular - and fraud.
EXTERNAL LINKS
Steve’s home page - stevenpinker.com
Photos by Steven Pinker - stevepinker.com
The Harvard Department of Psychology page for Steve - psychology.fas.harvard.edu/pe...
Пікірлер: 36
Pinker is such pleasant person to listen to. Not only interesting, but soothing. Yay to Canadians!
@thedededeity888
10 ай бұрын
Great hair too :)
@datamalarkey
10 ай бұрын
He makes so much sense of the world, doesn't he? And agreed on the interesting x soothing combo. Go Canada!
@datamalarkey
10 ай бұрын
@@thedededeity888Remember the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists - this blog suggests it was FOUNDED in honour of Steve ;) www.neatorama.com/2011/03/22/the-luxuriant-flowing-hair-club-for-scientists/
Big fan of Pinker , read them all , great speaker and clear thinker. That being said , was watching this and my youngest son walked by and said ' Oh ,the advent candles. " I looked as dense as I am and he said " Purple shirt , white hair and Pinker. " I was pretty impressed with the little lapsed Catholic. If your kids aren't smarter than you , that means you didn't know enough to marry a woman who was smarter than you.
@datamalarkey
9 ай бұрын
Nice observation from Davenport Junior!
Reading Pinker for many years. Opened my mind, continues to do so
@datamalarkey
10 ай бұрын
It first started with me with the Language Instinct in 1994, and I've devoured pretty much everything else ever since. I had the honour of hosting him to give a talk at Sussex Uni in 2003. I was doing a PhD in Experimental Psychology and set up a society - the Sussex Postgraduate Psychological Society to host him. Even though it was a Friday night out of term, the 380-capacity lecture theatre held - oh - about 500 that night. Happy memories; great mind; amazing communicator.
Excellent interview, interviewer, and interviewee. Pinker's brilliance and articulation add clarity and light to my life!
@datamalarkey
10 ай бұрын
Thanks, Brad. Much appreciated. Steve makes the interviewer's job so easy. Not least because - if you say something stupid or ill-informed, he doesn't say that. He just puts you straight and provides you with the ammunition not to make the same mistakes in the future!
@bradsillasen1972
10 ай бұрын
@@datamalarkey I did note a correction in one instance. If there were others I can't recall. His gracious rebuttal then was admirable, almost like an elegant dance move. And you handled it graciously as well. If you knew all the answers then perhaps you should be interviewing yourself ;-) To stretch the dance metaphor, if I were to interview Steven I'd be tripping all over my feet. But of course, no sincere question is stupid. It may though be stupid not to ask a question :)
When I wrote my book on card play at bridge, I went out of the way to keep beginner's mind. I deliberately did not use the names of plays that all experienced players know, but simply illustrated the play. I saved the names for an appendix with a reference to the play in the text.
@datamalarkey
9 ай бұрын
The beginner's mind is powerful. Because I was once (in the 1980s) a Classicist, I prefer to call this approach "embracing your inner Socrates". Plato has Socrates say several times in his dialogues "All that I know is that I know nothing". Adopting a position of ignorance parks all biases, assumptions, prejudices, and prior knowledge at the door. It prevents you creating an inevitable outcome. And it might just mean you crack a problem that for days, months, years or more has been eluding you. There's (a whole lot) more in my 2022 book, "Asking Smarter Questions" and its Six Universal Principles. These are detailed on asksmarterqs.com - check it out and let me know what you think @4CardsMan
I trust Steven Pinker's choices, having followed his career and read (and/or listened to) all of his books. I always look forward to whatever he's going to do next.
@datamalarkey
10 ай бұрын
Thanks @jmarty1000 - I can't think you were let down by this appearance.
@darthlegit
9 ай бұрын
@@datamalarkey I trust Steven Pinker's choices, knowing that he was a friend and client of Jeffrey Epstein
42:59 The passive voice is used quite a lot in newsreading, such as 'A man has been killed ...' It makes sense in such circumstances!
@datamalarkey
10 ай бұрын
You make a good point. In news reading - as in a lot of academese (as Steve would put it) - the passive voice is used (there I go again!) to put some distance between the speaker and agency. In academese, this is designed to add spurious weight and independence to the argument, IMO.
Depends on which variables you consider in plotting the data. That is whydata of poverty may be underinclusive or cherry picked
I'm somewhat surprised that Pinker didn't mention Einstein's use of analogy to illustrate his theories. Well explained in Lincoln Barnett's 'The Universe and Dr. Einstein.'
@steveflorida8699
9 ай бұрын
However, on our remote planet from the Milky Way galaxy's center, scientific modernity knows Not the source and origin of Life --- living organisms.
@datamalarkey
9 ай бұрын
Fair point, but I loved the examples of analogy he did use.
@datamalarkey
9 ай бұрын
Thanks for the comment. Not sure Steve's suggesting that the systems are controlled by anyone or anything sentient. More a point about the importance of analogy in explaining unrelated phenomena
@steveflorida8699
9 ай бұрын
@@datamalarkey Being there is no empirical evidence that Life (living organisms) was created by random chance’s natural emergence (i.e., Abiogenesis), then it can be logically ascertained --- Life is not inherent in mechanistic atoms & lifeless molecules. Therefore, an intelligent “sentient” universal being is the source of Life.
If book writers adopt the same procedures as movie producers they would gradually present the elements and trajectory that lead to a certain conclusion in the end.
@datamalarkey
10 ай бұрын
Unless, of course, they read from the David Lynch school of unjoined-up movies ...
14:22
@datamalarkey
10 ай бұрын
A perfect data-driven observation, that the most frequent verbs are the least regular.
mr. optimism , really?
Boring and click bait
@datamalarkey
Ай бұрын
Obviously I can’t and don’t agree with- either the “boring” or the “click bait” comment. Hearing the Curse of Knowledge unpacked and explained by the best-selling popular science author on the planet so eloquently is a treat - not least with the appearance of Quincy the cat’s tail in a querulous “?” just when we were talking actives vs passives with the example “the mouse was chased by the cat”. And “click bait”? That seems OTT. But each to their own. Thanks for watching, Bob