Hi, this is Lawrence Krause and welcome to the Origins Podcast.

This episode is with my friend, the remarkable scientist, writer, all-around good guy, Stephen Pinker.

Stephen is a brilliant scientist and a really brilliant writer.

I learned something from him every time I read anything he's written, and I've enjoyed our friendship.

And what's nice is, in this case, familiarity has not read contempt, quite the opposite.

The more I get to know, Steven, the more impressed I am with him and the luckier I feel

to know him.

In this podcast, which we've been talking about doing a podcast together for a long time, but this podcast follows on his recent book, Rationality.

And we talk about that, but we also talk about Stephen's background, what got him interested in psychology and language,

and his thoughts about writing in general on what he thinks about when he writes books.

The new book, Rationality, is a book that really surprised me actually when I

read it. It wasn't what I expected. It's about the reasons we are rational, the reasons we

aren't rational and why we should be rationality is, what it corresponds to. And it's not, it's, um, it's specific and detailed with lots of good examples and, uh,

really a study of a lot of interesting aspects of, of, um, of logic and reason, uh,

including I was very proud and pleased to see that Steven spent a long time talking

about Bayesian analysis, which is something the average person doesn't talk about much,

but which is really at the heart of modern science.

And really that kind of thinking often leads to results which are quite unexpected and

demonstrates in some sense how our kind

of evolutionary training is not necessarily the best training to be completely rational.

In any case, we talk about all of this in the podcast and I found it fascinating and I hope you

do too. Once again, if you're watching this on YouTube, I hope you'll subscribe to our YouTube channel.

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