Jules van Binsbergen
speaker
478 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 13 Aug
Jules van Binsbergen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Today's episode covers the second half of the interview with Steven Pinker, where we talk about his fascinating book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows, Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life.
As you may recall from the previous episode, we had a very interesting discussion about the concept of common knowledge, how it is defined, and where it has first-order explanatory power for how humans behave in everyday life.
Today, we're going to broaden the discussion quite a bit to various applications of common knowledge in, for example, financial markets.
And I think, Jonathan, if I can summarize some of the insights we had in the first part of the interview, we generally viewed common knowledge as a convenient modeling device in economics and finance, not as a first-order explanatory phenomenon in human decision-making.
Yeah, and of course, I think the conclusion of the story is that in the first scenario, it is going to be more likely to be replaced because if he announces it in the public hall and everybody knows that everybody knows that everybody knows this information and so on, that means that everybody's going to assume that somebody else will replace the filter.
Now, one thing that I think the book very nicely explains is that if I know something, and then if I know that you know something, Jonathan, and then I know that you know that I know that you know something, and we can just go further and further into deeper levels of you knowing that I know that you know, or vice versa,
What is sort of a working brain, what can it handle in terms of those levels?
And I think that the book shows that it's actually only a couple levels that most people can comfortably work with.
Even if we just here describe it in the show and you hear me say these iterations several times, after three or four, you're just gonna throw up your hands in the air and you're gonna say, oh yeah, whatever, I can't even follow anymore what is going on here.
And so what I think the book has as one fantastic example is if you are able to train yourself and you can get to these higher levels of induction, I think is the best way to describe it, how much information you can actually get from that.
And the book has an example that just blew my mind, and I taught it in class a couple times, and I think it generally blows the student's mind as well.
And so here's the situation.
There are 12 psychologists sitting around a table.
Three of the psychologists, because they've been eating fish and spinach, end up with spinach in their teeth, one of those big leaves of spinach that everybody at the table can see.
But because they're psychologists, these are Steven Pinker's words, not our words, they are too polite and nobody wants to say to anybody else directly, hey, you have spinach in your teeth, you need to remove it.
And so this situation continues and continues.
And at some point, the department chair, it's the department of psychologists, cannot stand it any longer, but doesn't want to embarrass anybody particularly and just stands up and says, at least one person at this table has spinach in their teeth.
As I already explained earlier, there are three in total that have this.
The department chair says, once I clean my glass, I want that person to remove one or more people.
I want them to remove the spinach.
Showing 81–100 of 478 · page 5 of 24
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