Do You Know What I Know? Steven Pinker argues that common knowledge makes the world go round--and off the rails. Take your young kid with you as you commute through Penn Station and you'll find that you have a lot to explain. Walking through the Long Island Railroad concourse, my son was perplexed by the close proximity of three chicken-themed restaurants--Chick-fil-A, Raising Cane's, and Pollo Campero--and by the fact that a shop called Gotham News mainly seemed to sell candy and bottled water. He also wanted to know why some people, as they strolled or waited, drank out of cans in brown paper bags.

Dr. Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist and prolific author, has often been described as a cheerleader for science, reason, and humanism. He is often maligned by his critics as a defender of the status quo. Much of his research focuses on slow and steady incremental improvements that have defined rapid human development, both in the United States and globally, over the past century. His 2018 book, "Enlightenment Now" was famously cited by Bill Gates as "his new favorite book," and became a focal point for global policymakers. He is a fierce defender of liberalism, democracy, and market economies, and believes a variety of forces are conspiring against them: populism of both the right and left, religious fundamentalism, and political correctness, among others. He also has emerged as a champion of reasoned, civil debate on college campuses, pushing back against cancel culture, and what he views as a'political monoculture' in academia.

The suspended Google software engineer at the center of claims that the search engine's artificial intelligence language tool LaMDA is sentient has said the technology is "intensely worried that people are going to be afraid of it and wants nothing more than to learn how to best serve humanity". The new claim by Blake Lemoine was made in an interview published on Monday amid intense pushback from AI experts that artificial learning technology is anywhere close to meeting an ability to perceive or feel things. The Canadian language development theorist Steven Pinker described Lemoine's claims as a "ball of confusion". "One of Google's (former) ethics experts doesn't understand the difference between sentience (AKA subjectivity, experience), intelligence, and self-knowledge. The scientist and author Gary Marcus said Lemoine's claims were "Nonsense". "Neither LaMDA nor any of its cousins (GPT-3) are remotely intelligent.

A few years ago, at the Princeton Club in Manhattan, I chanced on a memorable chat with the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. His spouse, the philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, with whom he was tagging along, had been invited onto a panel to discuss the conflict between religion and science and Einstein's so-called "God letter," which was being auctioned at Christie's. Pinker had recently published Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. I was eager to pepper him with questions, mainly on religion, rationality, and evolutionary psychology. I remember I wanted Pinker's take on something Harvey Whitehouse, one of the founders of the cognitive science of religion, told me in an interview--that my own little enlightenment, of becoming an atheist in college, was probably mostly a product of merely changing my social milieu. I wasn't so much moved by rational arguments against the ethics and existence of God but by being distanced from my old life and meeting new, non-religious friends. I recall Pinker almost pouncing on that argument, defending reason's power to change our minds. He noted that people especially high in "intellectance," a personality trait now more commonly called "openness to experience," tend to be more curious, intelligent, and willing to entertain new ideas. I still think that Pinker's way of seeing things made more sense of my experience in those heady days. I really was, for the first time, trying my best to think things through, and it was exhilarating. We talked until the event staff shelved the wine, and parted ways at a chilly midtown intersection.

Man is born smart, and everywhere he lacks brains. So, minus The Social Contract's gendered language, might Steven Pinker have opened Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. Pinker, a senior Harvard professor, cognitive psychologist, bestselling author, and alleged victim of cancel culture, spends a lot of time these days fighting culture wars. Picking up where 2018's Enlightenment Now left off, his latest book takes as its problem the contrast Pinker sees between humankind's innate rationality and our observable taste for the irrational. Where his last book argued for "Enlightenment" as a source of values, however, Rationality introduces a specific set of logical and statistical tools, "benchmarks" of reasoned argument, as weapons in the fight against "rumor, folk wisdom, and conspiratorial thinking" that, Pinker thinks, poison our politics and endanger our world. Take up these tools, Rationality exhorts us, and champion "the reality mindset" against the forces of "mythology"!

In 1999 or so your correspondent (me) was in college and went to see a linguist named Steven Pinker speak. His talk was about linguistics and evolution (I think). It was very interesting and Pinker seemed to your correspondent (me--the correspondent is still me) like the smartest person in the world, particularly for the way he responded immediately to audience questions about essentially random topics with comprehensive, example-laden answers. But it's apparently been downhill for him intellectually ever since, if this excerpt from a New York Times review of his new book Rationality is any indication: "Still, Pinker is troubled by what he sees as rationality's image problem. 'Rationality is uncool,' he laments. It isn't seen as'dope, phat, chill, fly, sick or da bomb.'"

As children acquire the knowledge of their language's morphology, they invariably discover the productive processes that can generalize to new words. Morphological learning is made challenging by the fact that even fully productive rules have exceptions, as in the well-known case of English past tense verbs, which features the -ed rule against the irregular verbs. The Tolerance Principle is a recent proposal that provides a precise threshold of exceptions that a productive rule can withstand. Its empirical application so far, however, requires the researcher to fully specify rules defined over a set of words. We propose a greedy search model that automatically hypothesizes rules and evaluates their productivity over a vocabulary. When the search for broader productivity fails, the model recursively subdivides the vocabulary and continues the search for productivity over narrower rules. Trained on psychologically realistic data from child-directed input, our model displays developmental patterns observed in child morphology acquisition, including the notoriously complex case of German noun pluralization. It also produces responses to nonce words that, despite receiving only a fraction of the training data, are more similar to those of human subjects than current neural network models' responses are.

The images are everywhere: People crowded face-to-face in swimming pools, shoulder-to-shoulder in indoor bars, cheering without masks at a rally held by President Trump, who often downplays the global pandemic. Now, as many public health experts predicted, waves of new COVID-19 infections and deaths are rolling across the South and West. Many, still practicing social distancing, look at their fellow Americans and ask, "What are they thinking?" We turned to Steven Pinker for help with an answer. The professor of psychology at Harvard, author of widely discussed books, including How the Mind Works and most recently, Enlightenment Now, sees the deep-seated mindset, tribalism, at work in people's defiance of health recommendations.

Forget for a moment that you know the meaning of "quantum supremacy," the idea of a quantum computer outdoing its conventional counterpart. What does the phrase instantly bring to mind? Perhaps the idea that the quantum world, with its electrons, neutrons, and quarks, is, somehow, better than ours--more dazzling and awe-inspiring. Or perhaps it's the claim that exploring quantum phenomena is more worthwhile, in a socioeconomic or in a personal, life-fulfilling sense. Or perhaps it's the suspicion that quantum beings exist, and exert absolute control over everything we do.

IT'S ALMOST A BANALITY nowadays to remark that artificial intelligence (AI) is so deeply embedded in our infrastructure that it's affecting decisions everywhere. But what's not trite is considering exactly how it will change markets, medicine, transportation, military operations, politics, social relations, criminal justice, and the likes of you and me -- which will largely depend on big tech companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and the rest. If these behemoths continue to grow by supporting products and services that cause harm, then the most important stories we tell about AI won't be about technology, but about capitalism incapacitating democratic governance. In other words: They will be about the private sector dictating the terms of innovation, including the direction of regulation. While the 25 contributors to Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI have lots of smart, multidisciplinary things to say about software and society, they mostly underplay or quickly move past the supersized consequences of supersized corporate ambitions.