The Rationality Walk

Transcript of Helen Sword’s podcast episode The Rationality Walk

Hi, I'm Helen Sword from helensword. com, and this is Sword Swings, my podcast series for writers in motion. Whether you're out walking in a car or on a train or a bus or just pottering around in your house, this recording will help you move yourself and your writing to someplace new. I've extracted today's podcast episode from a conversation that I had back in 2022 with the distinguished psycholinguist, fearless social commentator, and consummate prose stylist, Stephen Pinker.

Steve is the John Stone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and the author of, among many books, The Sense of Style, The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. I engage Steve in a wide ranging conversation about his background and evolution as a writer, his personal and professional sense of style, and with a nod towards his book title Rationality, we also touched on the role of rational thought in academic and professional writing.

So without further ado, here's how it's going to work. I'm going to have a conversation with Steven Pinker. I've said about writing and rationality because rationality is the title of his latest book, and I want to make sure that he gets a chance to to tell us about that book. And but, Steve also published a wonderful book a few years back called The Sense of Style, The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.

Great title, which again invokes rationality, doesn't it, Steve? So I'm interested in seeing how we might link those two topics of writing and rationality, but also talk more broadly about style and about how Steve a consummate stylist, thinks about how he writes while he's writing. And I'm sure it will be a very rational approach, but I'm sure that it will also involve a lot of craftsmanship and artistry and perhaps even some intuitive thinking.

We'll, we'll find out. So welcome Steve. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Helen. It's a pleasure to be here. Wonderful. Well, to start off, can I just ask you to tell us a little bit about your, I guess your intellectual autobiography as a writer? a writer, how you got to where you are, because you're such a wide ranging writer in terms of the topics you've addressed.

And also somebody who I presume has evolved in your style, probably from, I haven't gone back and looked at how you wrote when you were a young experimental psychologist, but I, I presume that things have evolved since then. And I've noticed well, when I interviewed you a few years back, you said that your very first.

And one of your most important readers is your mother, and so from that I would assume that writing has maybe always been a part of your, your life and your family conversations. Can you take us right back to your childhood and then bring us up to here in your life as a writer? Sure. I was always an avid reader.

And as I note early in my book, The Sense of Style, a humbling realization in writing it was that most good writers don't consult style manuals. So how do they write well? They consume a lot of good prose. They I think they reverse engineer it consciously or implicitly. Namely, they are impressed by good writing when they when they encounter it.

And, and I think they devote at least some attention to figuring out what, what makes this so good? Why does this sentence sing? Why does this, why is this so clear? Why is this so affecting? And even if they don't, they assimilate a huge Inventory of words and idioms and figures of speech and tropes and constructions, so that when the time comes to express something themselves, they've got a vast set of of elements to draw on which they can recombine in unique ways.

And that, that was certainly true of me. I didn't consume a lot of fiction but certainly a lot of nonfiction. And I would I would notice when a passage was, was well written when it, when it struck me. Then I became an academic. And the in response to a frequently asked question, namely aren't you often, as a professor, aren't you often appalled by the low quality of writing among your undergraduate students?

The answer is no. A lot of undergraduates write just fine. It's the graduate students who are the worst writers, and often because they feel that they have to prove their bona fides, their bona fides by Drawing on the jargon, the internal language of a very, very small clique, one that they often don't realize is as small as it is and in order to show that they prove that they are not naive, they're not methodologically innocent.

Everything gets hedged and qualified and stated indirectly out of a terror that they might actually be pinned down to actually saying anything about anything. And I know Helen, this is a syndrome that you've written about in stylish academic writing. Yeah. I tried to resist the Process by which people's writing gets worse in graduate school and my first major publication, which is on, you know, mathematical and AI artificial intelligence models of language acquisition.

I, I think wasn't, wasn't bad for an academic paper, especially considering some of the abstruse material that it tried to explain. And I, as I wrote it, I was conscious of writing as a, as a, as a craft. I had consumed some style manuals, Strunk and White, of course, as an undergraduate, Theodore Bernstein's The Careful Writer, which I highly recommend, even though it's probably 50 or 50 or 60 years old now, but a very witty alphabetical coverage of writing foibles and words.

So I tried to make it clear. I tried to make it accessible. And you know, I can't claim that all of my publications and peer reviewed journals were marks of style. Many of them definitely weren't. But it was in my head. And the fact that as a cognitive psychologist, I'm interested in all aspects of how the mind works.

But one of my specialties is language itself. And so I had a kind of consciousness of what are the cognitive processes that are engaged when we when we read a sentence and try to make sense of it. Perhaps, I don't know if this is a coincidence or a contributor, but my main, Original area of research and the topic of my PhD thesis was actually visual imagery had nothing to do with language.

On the other hand, I, one of the main ingredients of good style, and I, and I think Helen, you would you've made similar points, is that the reader should be able to have a visual image of what it is that the writer is, is describing. And one of the big sins of writing is to talk in abstractions. We just can't figure out what on earth is going on.

We effectuated the administration of stimuli of age appropriate animated figures instead of, we showed the kids a picture of, you know, Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch. You, writing succeeds when your reader can form a visual image. And that perhaps was An epiphany from the fact that I, as much as I love language, it's not all that's going on in the, in the human mind.

And some of the most intuitive ways of understanding the world are in terms of visual imagery. Anyway, I, I wrote papers, I did experiments, I got tenure, and then in mid career, I think, Thought it would be fun and perhaps valuable to write a book for a wider audience, a book that would actually be sold in stores and people would want to read and buy.

Partly from feedback from editors of my academic books. Who said I'm and I paraphrase you know, for academic, your writing doesn't suck. At least if I, in particular, I bonded with my copy editor and she has edited, I think, seven or eight of my books. We were both very young at the time. And she was impressed by the fact that I.

Knew the difference between to home and to hone and but anyway, we with the encouragement of some editors of my academic books, I thought I would try my hand at writing for a general audience. I can, I myself consumed popular science books like those of Lewis Thomas and Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins, George Damo, one, two, three, infinity, a book of physics and math for children.

And so I decided to write a book on language itself. And that kind of drew on. Two two ways of thinking, two bodies of, of, of knowledge. One of them is my understanding as a scientist of language, as a psycholinguist of what are the cognitive processes that are engaged in understanding a sentence, but then also as my personal experience as a guy who tried to make the transition from academic writing to more general writing.

And I brought those two together, like what am I doing and what could I share and what could I do better for that matter in avoiding the pitfalls of stodgy, turgid, wooden, soggy, incomprehensible academic writing. What is it that I'm doing to try to make it more accessible and can I share that? Wonderful.

Yeah. And I'm I'm not a cognitive scientist, but I still talk a lot about cognitive load. Just about the ways that abstract language and sort of roundabout sentences that have anything other than a standard subject verb structure and those sorts of things just place extra cognitive load on our readers.

So it's not that academic readers. can't handle that if they put their mind to it, but maybe they shouldn't have to work that hard all the time. You know, maybe the more cognitive load we're putting on them with the language itself, the less. kind of space they're going to have to deal with the concepts, the conceptual stuff, because they're just trying to, to make their way through it.

So this brings me to the question that I've been dying to ask you, which is your last two books both have titles that have zombie nouns in them, right? Enlightenment now, rationality, even the sense of style, those are abstract nouns. So can you talk a bit about how you, how you bring those principles of making things more vivid and more visual when you're writing about such inherently abstract subjects as enlightenment and rationality, right?

We can't avoid abstraction altogether. We'd be, you know, we'd be crippled. We'd be very like, like, like young children if we, if we did the, I think the art is in. minimizing abstractions to those that are either already known by your reader so that when you use them you can count on your reader understanding them or ones in which that are indispensable but which you can explain because of course the purpose of writing is to share new ideas with people so it's not as if you know, your readers Can't learn anything new, including new abstractions.

That's kind of what we're, what we're in the business of doing, or if that matter, new facts, new illusions. I've, I wrote a lot in the sense of style about the cognitive, um, impairment called the curse of knowledge was, that's what I, what I called it. Namely that when you know something, it's new. hard to imagine what it's like not to know it.

And so many writers will fall back on jargon or abstractions or zombie nouns or acronyms that are perfectly obvious to them. And it doesn't even occur to them that their readers have never seen this. Now this can be misinterpreted. And at one point I referred in, in the sense of style to the, the poem, the charge of the light brigade.

And some reader wrote in and said, gee, I never heard of the charge of the light brigade. Aren't you a victim of the curse of knowledge? And the answer is no, it's okay. If you don't know something that you can actually learn something from reading it, as long as the writer gives you the means of learning it.

Sometimes it may even be clicking on another window in Wikipedia, but in cases where it's, Part of the narrative of the book or the essay to explain it as you go, and that's OK. It's OK to learn things. It's OK to learn new vocabulary items. Part of the joy of writing and reading is expanding your vocabulary.

And so it's okay if the writer say introduces a term that forces the reader to the dictionary sparingly if it is an excellent term, and if it would add to the readers appreciation of that book and going forward, that's how we become increasingly literate. So one can. Kind of over interpret the the advice not to use fancy schmancy vocabulary, not to use fancy words when simple words will do.

That is true most of the time, but every once in a while, strategically, you can place in a a very nice word and enjoy the beauty of the English language. Mm hmm. And if Nina pops into the chat, the The link to my zombie nouns video, anybody who hasn't seen that, it's got a five minute video about nominalizations, which are abstract nouns that have been created from other words.

I love the term zombie nouns. I used it with attribution in the sense of style as an indispensable concept, but you also use the word nominalization. That's kind of a fancy abstract noun, but that's okay. It's not so bad that people know the term nominalization so that they can point to something that they had not noticed before.

Exactly, and that's the point I was going to make, that in there it's not saying don't use the word nominalization, it's saying this is a big chunky abstract word that people are going to struggle with. So make sure that's the only or one of the few big chunky abstract nouns. to give space then for all the other ways that you're going to, all the more concrete ways in which you're going to explain what a nominalization actually is and why they should be minimized, which is not the same thing as avoided entirely.

But were you tempted with rationality or enlightenment now by a more concrete title? Because that is a bit of a trope, isn't it? To do the more concrete title and then the The colon and the more explanatory, which I did, for example, in the better angels of our nature, why violence has declined. It's a great title.

And I can't take credit for it. Abraham Lincoln deserves the credit or for that matter. The blank slate, the modern denial of human nature. And in both cases, I had editors who said, Well, gee, blank slate. Well, people really know what that is. Why don't you just call it the denial of human nature or better.

Why don't you just type? Should you title the book, The Decline of Violence? And the answer is no, that the You want language to communicate, and that's often what subtitles are for, but it doesn't mean that you drain language of all vividness, imagery, pleasure, emotional impact. You just need to craft it so that readers that you'll achieve the effect in your readers that you're aiming for.

Well, can you tell us a little bit about About Rationality, the newest book your, your short blurb version of, of what the book's about and what you, why you wrote it. So that is an, it is an abstract noun, but it's one that, it's, it's hardly an obscure term. Everyone knows, is familiar with the word, so I felt comfortable there.

The subtitle is What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. Now, what it is, is a lot of the book's middle chapters consist of my, Attempt to explain what I think of as the most important tools of rationality. These are something called normative models. Normative meaning how we ought to reason, how we should reason.

And a lot of social scientists have Commented to, you know, we use in our work probability. We use Bayes theorem. We distinguish causation from correlation. But every time I open the newspaper, I see people making fallacies where they just they could avoid them if they just knew an itty bit, a bitty bit of probability and why the human mind has Trouble appreciating it.

So one of my goals was to do what a lot of social scientists think ought to be done that has tried to make these tools common knowledge widely available. So I have a chapter that explains logic, another one on probability, another one on correlation, causation. But I also wanted to make the case for rationality, why we ought to pursue it, why the human mind often falls short of it, and what I could not avoid.

And I knew this because the book originated from a course that I taught at Harvard. I put the lectures on, on the web when COVID happened, got a lot of interest in it. But the response was okay. You're okay, Mr. Mr. Professor, if you're trying to explain rationality, how can you explain conspiracy theories and quack cures and paranormal woo woo and fake news.

And so your rationality had to be a component of the book as well. And you make a lot of the same points. points and arguments as you do in enlightenment now, don't you? But with more emphasis on, it's a bit more fine grained on how to, how to read things in the newspaper and not jump to the conclusions.

I, so I'm really interested in this in the context of writing, because I've been thinking about Daniel Kahneman's distinction between the fast thinking and the slow thinking. So fast thinking, but. The a thinking that's immediate feels intuitive we jump right to it and we're very, very often wrong.

And then the slow thinking, which is precisely what you're talking about through most of rationality going back and saying, well, is that really true? And applying these various tools that we've learned to interrogate what we're doing. So then I've been thinking about, so where does the writing process fit in to that fast and slow thinking paradigm.

Because the process of writing often does feel quite intuitive, particularly free writing, the kind of writing that people do when they get up in the morning and write three pages about their thoughts and feelings. And they find stuff, and academic writers find this all the time too, it's when you're writing that the new idea pops into your mind.

So there, there is this sort of, Magic eight ball quality to it, you know, I'm writing and then suddenly the new thing comes and yet writing itself most of the kind of writing that we do writing about complex topics for publication is really the embodiment of slow thinking, isn't it, you go back to it again and again, and you're, you're thinking, I think about the curse of knowledge all the time.

I find that such a such a helpful phrase. What am I assuming here that my reader doesn't know? And that may be on the level of, of facts, but it may just be on the level of, is the sentence, you know, making assumptions about, am I jumping from one sentence to another without a logical connection that I need to give to my reader, all those sorts of things.

So writing. As a process within this paradigm of rationality, I'd just be really interested to hear you, your thoughts. It's a really good, it's a good question. It's one that I've never actually thought before, but it, but it does, it, it, it's a, an insightful way to think about the, what goes into good writing and the answer is both.

And this actually goes back to the beginning of our conversation today, in which I contrasted consulting a style manual with having consumed lots and lots and lots of good pros. And I think having being a a proficient seasoned reader means that your system one has assimilated lots of words and constructions and tools that just pop into your mind.

Unconsciously, if you've done enough reading system, one being condiments term for the fast thinking. Yes, I'm sorry. That's right. I'm here. I am using falling prey to the curse of knowledge. So yes, fast thinking is unhelpfully sometimes called system one because it just means fast thinking and slow thinking is a system too.

So yes, the fast thinking is just words that pop into mind. You don't know where from where, but it's from somewhere, namely your long history as a reader. System two might be self consciously setting yourself the problem. How do I make this sentence clearer, better? Typically what we do in the revision stage, and there are some writers who can can crank out a an op ed or a blog post or review on the first pass, just touch up a little punctuation and hit send.

I'm not Bye now. One of them. And probably most of you aren't either. Good writing for most of us comes in the revision and the revision process really, and I tell us to students and to people who ask often consists of devoting several passes through just to the task of making the prose better.

That is you've done the work of laying out your content as best you can. Now think only of. Is this clear? Is this crisp? Is this understandable? Is this graceful? And set that as your problem, and that would be the slow thinking, the so called system two. I was also thinking about the kind of four step model of inspiration.

I forget whose this was, you know, it's one of those things that's been out there for a long time, but the idea of the I've forgotten the term for the first one that just sort of information gathering, you're saying all the years of reading. And then there's the, the kind of aha moment where you go, ah, and then there's, there's the incubation where those things just kind of sit there and you mull around problems.

And then there's that aha, the, the inspiration moment. And then there's a long, long, long period of confirmation. And I think in the writing process, the intuition moment might be that sentence coming out the first time, but the confirmation process, part of that is that crafting, crafting, crafting, crafting, have I said it well enough yet?

So there's some, I'm quite interested in and think a lot about the, the place of the Intuitive and the accidental and you know finding the book on the shelf. Well, back when people went to libraries, the book on the shelf next to the one you're looking for you know the serendipitous all those sorts of things as part of a rational writing process.

In other words, not in opposition, but if you are a rational thinker, you will also be, you will be open to whatever makes you a better thinker, which may be the accidental and the serendipitous. I was you know, reading through through your book last night. And it's because it's very much based on the tools.

For particular kinds of rational thinking, you know, Bayesian principles and all those sorts of things. Correlation and causality. I wonder where the sort of human emotional side of, of writing and communication sits for you. With rational thinking and writing. Well, first of all, it depends on obviously on the style of writing, whether you're writing a an instruction manual for a gadget or a political manifesto or a sermon or a personal memoir, and each one calls for a different style.

And I make it clear early on in the sense of style that there are Different styles as we call them. I was influenced by a book by Francine Noel Thomas and Mark Turner called Clear and Simple as the Truth, where they differentiate reflective styles and, and practical style. And they spend most of the time on what they call classic style.

And that is the style that I think a lot of us aim for in Reviews and essays and articles in publications that go beyond, say, our academic peers and are meant for a broader audience. And so the answer to your question depends on what you're what you're aiming for. In the case of writing that is meant to be evocative, or at least Parts of writing that are meant to be evocative it.

There's no, I don't think there's a contrast with rationality because rationality is it's always relative to a goal. It's a means to an end. It can't tell you by itself what the end should be. And if the end happens to be evoking emotions in the reader, achieving a certain rhetorical effect. That's something that you can apply your rationality to attaining.

That is, how do I not put my readers to sleep? How do I even get them engaged and passionate and empathic? Whatever the particular goals happen to be. Yeah, thank you. That's a great answer. And I like it because it doesn't give us this dichotomy. I mean, first of all, it tells us all writing is set for purpose, of course, but it doesn't force us into a kind of dichotomy where if you're rational, it means you're not also allowed to be this or this or this or this, but that depending on the goal of your writing, A rational approach may encompass all different kinds of style and thinking.

Look, shall we move to looking at a bit of writing? So one of my favorite parts of the sense of style that I recommend to people all the time and go back to myself as the chapter on reverse engineering. And of course, this is exactly what I do in stylish academic writing as well. Don't think I call it that, but taking pieces of really fabulous prose and just doing that thing and slowing down and going, okay, how does this work?

What, what are the techniques that are being used here? And then for me, the key is always, and how might I, are these techniques that I can pull into my own writing now, but I think it'll be really interesting. To get an insight into. Your thinking when you're writing about a particular passage as you, if you can remember a bit of the tinkering Yeah.

That you did to get to where you were. So you've got a couple of examples to show us, I think, from Russian. Yeah. I thought, I thought I, I thought I would go through a couple of examples that are represent. Opposite ends of a spectrum of the goals of writing. I'll begin with the first paragraph, the opening sentences of Rationality, where somewhat in contrast to my usual advice of being as, as straightforward and concrete and familiar as possible, simply because those are things that Especially academics tend to neglect.

I decided to aim higher in that first paragraph. I believe in starting strong, especially for something like a book. And I I I I'm not going to recommend this as a general thing for people to do, but it's my attempt to be a little bit poetic, a little bit evocative, a little bit challenging.

I knew that this first paragraph would require a bit of work in the reader, but I knew that, and I was prepared, as opposed to a lot of bad, what I think of as bad academic writing, where the writer doesn't even realize that the reader has to go through the ringer to figure out what you're talking about.

I decided to challenge my reader and to have them learn, learn some things. And so this is not the easiest bit of prose that I've ever written, but the difficulty is is deliberate. And the point of it is, I wanted to contrast, as the book opened, A kind of paradox or attention. We all are familiar with how irrational we can be as a species with the conspiracy theories and the fake news and all the flaws and biases and fallacies that Daniel Kahneman documented in his bestseller, and for which he won a Nobel Prize.

On the other hand, I did, I wanted to emphasize that that can't be the whole story. We're not just a bunch of idiots, we as a species, because we've done these amazing things. We have, you know, science and scholarship, and, and I wanted to impress on readers this tension between the magnificent achievements of the human mind and our bumbling as the charge that I was going to take on in this book.

How do we resolve how we can be such a wise and such a foolish species at the same time? 

That's the end of today's sword swing. I hope that both your body and your mind have moved to someplace new since we started. You can watch and listen to my full conversation with Steven Pinker in the videos section of the Wright Space Library. That's my online resource site at helensword. com right space where you can also find my full series of sword swing podcasts and transcripts.

Thanks for listening and I look forward to walking with you again soon.