Steven Pinker

Right?

Or like when Winston Churchill was asked, maybe the reason you lost the election to Clement Attlee is that people thought that Attlee was more modest.

He said, well, Mr. Attlee has much to be modest about.

Yeah, well, we're seeing some of it.

We're seeing the polarization, particularly the negative polarization, that is not just disagreeing, but thinking that the other side is stupid or evil.

I don't have an algorithm for reversing that, but the kind of norms that we should spread would be ones of

civil disagreement, epistemic humility, charity, things that go against human nature, where we tend to think of argument as a competition, as a war.

I attacked his arguments, he defended them, but then I demolished them.

We use the metaphors of war in talking about argument.

And in one of the chapters, I talk about a different model for argument, coming out of a mathematical theorem, claiming that rational agents should not agree to disagree.

Well, there's actually some, it's a proof by the Israeli mathematician Robert Allman that depends on common knowledge.

We don't have time to go through it now, but it does set a kind of an alternative paradigm for argument that instead of two people beating each other up and the one left standing wins, that's not how you discover the truth.

Or even bargaining and negotiating and you come to some compromise.

You think about why should the truth just happen to lie halfway in between two opinionated guys?

But rather it's kind of a random walk where when two people exchange information, they might go all over the map until they converge on a common conclusion.

That is kind of like your whole field.

So that would be the kind of norm, it goes against human nature.

I think the progress of science shows it's the best way to do things.

And even, of course, scientists are not immune to pissing contests, dominance contests, and at least we acknowledge it's a bad thing.

For that norm to spread in journalism, in politics, in the court system would be...