This is the Katori Daily Podcast for Saturday, January 8, 2022. I'm Keilah Brown.

Even our most honest efforts to be rational are beset by all manner of biases that

confound us at every turn.

And so we end up with lots of strange, often irrational beliefs about the world.

Stephen Pinker is author of rationality, what it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters.

He spoke at the Cato Institute's Cato Club retreat in October.

We are susceptible to fake news, such as Obama signs executive order banning the Pledge of Allegiance in schools

nationwide or Yoko Ono had an affair with Hillary Clinton in the 1970s.

Many of us believe in paranormal woo-woo, such as possession by the devil,

extra sensory perception, ghosts and spirits, witches, spiritual energy in mountains, trees, and crystals.

I wrote rationality to try to resolve this paradox.

What is rationality?

Why does it at least seem so scarce?

And why does it matter?

Well, to begin at the beginning, what is rationality? The best definition that I could come up

with is that it is the use of knowledge to attain goals where knowledge means

justified true belief.

My favorite characterization of rationality

comes from the namesake of the building

that I work at in Harvard, the American philosopher

and psychologist William James, who

tried to capture what distinguishes an agent

...