Steven Pinker on Cancel Culture, Common Knowledge & AI - #518
Into the Impossible With Brian Keating
Brian Keating
4.7 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 24 September 2025
⏱️ 51 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Stephen Pinker just told me something that honestly blew my mind. |
| 0:03.0 | He said that Malcolm Gladwell's recent cancellation attempt was not only predictable. |
| 0:07.0 | It was mathematically inevitable. |
| 0:09.0 | There is better thing as a social media shaining mob. |
| 0:11.0 | Why do people feel the urge to pile on and collectively punish someone who says something that seems to violate some moral norm? |
| 0:19.0 | And here's the kicker. Pinker started coming years ago using something called common knowledge theory. Common knowledge means I know something. You know it. I know that you know it. You know that I know that I know that you know it at infinitum. Picture this. You're in a meeting where everyone privately thinks the boss's idea is stupid, but nobody speaks up. |
| 0:42.6 | Then one person finally says what everybody's thinking, and suddenly the whole room erupts in agreement. |
| 0:43.5 | What just happened? |
| 0:49.7 | According to Stephen Pinker, you just participated in one of the most powerful forces shaping human civilization. |
| 0:53.8 | And today we dive deep into it with one of the foremost public intellectuals of our time. |
| 0:54.6 | Let's go. Professor Stephen Pinker, welcome back of the foremost public intellectuals of our time. Let's go. |
| 0:57.4 | Professor Stephen Pinker, welcome back to the Into the Impossible podcast. |
| 0:58.4 | Thank you. |
| 1:02.5 | In this book, you've written that civilization itself depends on common knowledge. |
| 1:07.2 | But my first question to you is what happens when that common knowledge is wrong or even when technologies like artificial intelligence threaten us by hallucination, what happens to the |
| 1:12.3 | very foundations of what we thought was secure? The answer is we don't know. Track record in general |
| 1:17.1 | of protecting the downstream consequences of technology are poor. Even the best super forecasters |
| 1:24.7 | are at chance for cut and dry questions five years out, let alone open-ended |
| 1:30.1 | questions like what will happen to society, let alone civilization. |
| 1:34.2 | I don't know if when social media were introduced 15 years ago, if people could have predicted |
| 1:40.8 | social media shaming mobs, the spread of disinformation, the encouragement |
| 1:47.5 | of conspiracy theories. |
... |
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