#1073 - Steven Pinker

Joe Rogan (0:00)

I can keep it in check.

Four, three, two, and we're live. First of all, Steve, thank you very much for doing this. I really appreciate it.

Steven Pinker (0:09)

Oh, thank you for having me.

Joe Rogan (0:10)

I've been a big fan of your work for a long time, and you bring up some really fascinating subjects, and we were talking right before the podcast about social media and how weird it is that you got lumped in with the alt-right for a comment saying something along the lines of that you find, what was the exact quote, something along the highly intelligent people seemed to, which is not saying they're good people.

Steven Pinker (0:37)

No, that's right, and I think a lot of people who are ignorant of the alt-right equate them with the skinheads and the neo-Nazis carrying the tiki torches.

But when I was referring strictly to the alt-right from its origin in internet discussion groups, and I know some of them, some of them are former students, and some of them are highly intelligent and highly read. So, but that's not what people often think of when they think of the alt-right, and that's what I was referring to. I was referring to, there are people in tech, there are some people in universities that stay undercover, and I made some remarks on how to starve that movement, not how to feed it.

Joe Rogan (1:15)

But so many people jumped on it as if you were endorsing the alt-right. What was the exact quote? You were just basically saying something along the lines of there's a lot of intelligent people that are involved in this.

Steven Pinker (1:26)

Well, it wasn't so much that. It was also that because of the various taboos in mainstream intellectual culture, because of political correctness, there's certain things that are just kind of not discussable. But then when people in the alt-right discover them, they feel tremendously empowered. Like we are now privy to the truth that the establishment can't handle. You can't handle the truth.

And since it was never discussed in the open, there are no counterarguments to some of the most toxic interpretations. And so the alt-right can run with the... Never having been in a forum where these things are debated and criticized and put into context, they take like one fact and then they draw the most extreme conclusions. If these things were debated in the first place, then you'd realize that those conclusions are not warranted. Oh, an example is there are average differences between men and women and a lot of psychological traits.

Now, if that's... And that's often quite taboo in intellectual circles for, I think, bizarre reasons. I think there are people who think that somehow women's rights depend on men and women being indistinguishable, which I think is a bad equation in the first place. But as soon as you come across the fact that men and women on average are different, you also come across the fact that men and women overlap in a lot of these traits, that whatever trait you name that men on average are better at than women or vice versa, there are a lot of women who are better than a lot of men or vice versa.

And so you can't really judge an individual from the average of their sex. Also, even though there are some traits where men score a little better than women, there are some traits where women score a little better than men. And that's the complete picture. But the thing is that if the entire subject is out of bounds, you never get to present the complete picture. And some people run away with, oh, men and women are totally different.

Joe Rogan (3:13)

What are your thoughts on how the subject got out of bounds? Because it's very confusing to me that certain subjects, like the differences between genders, are so taboo when they seem so obvious. I mean, you just could go to a mall and just look at the way the men dress and the women dress, and you go, well, there's some obvious distinctions here.

Steven Pinker (3:34)

There's a history to it. Because there were a lot of cockamamie theories in the 19th century and a lot of the 20th century that men were intellectual and women were not, and women were governed by their emotions and their, if women thought too much, it would take blood away from their ovaries and their womb and they wouldn't be fertile and then they'd be all miserable. I mean, really like crazy stuff. And as a reaction to that, in the 70s, when the second wave of feminism became prominent, it became almost an article of faith that there were no differences between men and women.