The views of Club speakers are their own and their participation does not constitute or imply endorsement or recommendation by The Commonwealth Club. Each year, we bring nearly 500 events on topics ranging across politics, culture, society and the economy to our members and the public, both in-person and via extensive online and on-air listenership and viewership. Pinker devotes plenty of space to advocating rationality, which the authors of similar works have not found necessary to do, perhaps because anybody who chooses to read about rationality is. The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum. The leading national forum open to all for the impartial discussion of public issues important to the membership, community and nation. Join Steven Pinker and Lara Bazelon as they delve into his new book and reveal how today’s society, in all its complexity, is formed by our collective human nature. Steven Pinker is Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, Harvard University. Pinker asserts that a society that is collectively rational depends on objectivity and truth-and that this kind of thinking leads to better individual choices and is the ultimate driver of social justice and moral progress.

But despite our sensible thinking in the low-tech contexts in which we spend most of our lives, he says we often fail to take advantage of the 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. Over time, humans have discovered the laws of nature, lengthened and enriched our lives, and set out the benchmarks for rationality itself.

Pinker explains this by rejecting the cynical cliché that humans are simply irrational, arguing instead that the rational pursuit of self-interest, sectarian solidarity, and uplifting mythology can add up to crippling irrationality in a society. Today, humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding, yet we continue to produce fake news, medical quackery and conspiracy theories. In his new book Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, popular psychologist and author Steven Pinker explores the concept of collective rationality in society.

Rationality by pinker