Into the Impossible With Brian Keating Steven Pinker on Cancel Culture, Common Knowledge & AI
58 snips
Sep 24, 2025 
Steven Pinker, a renowned cognitive psychologist and author, delves into the intricacies of common knowledge and its impact on society. He explains how misconceptions can lead to social discord and explores the tension between expert knowledge and public perception. Pinker discusses the role of common knowledge in everything from markets to cancel culture, highlighting how social norms can dictate individual behavior. He also sheds light on how AI struggles with common knowledge, emphasizing its unpredictable effects in technology and society.
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Be Humble About Predicting Tech's Effects
- Expect technological downstream effects to be hard to predict; avoid confident long-range forecasts.
- Treat claims about broad societal impacts of new tech with humility and probabilistic caution.
Reconcile Free Will With Naturalism
- Use a compatible notion of free will: unpredictability suffices for responsibility and social control.
- Don't equate free will with randomness; accountable unpredictability preserves moral responsibility.
Book Cover Visualizes Nested Awareness
- Pinker explains the book title and cover: nested thought balloons visualize infinite mutual knowledge.
- He notes public, undeniable events generate common knowledge in one stroke despite finite minds.
