Is it better to be rational or optimistic? Steven Pinker explains.

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There is no force in the Universe called progress. But there are plenty of natural forces that seem to only make it harder for us to make progress as a species, such as disease, the laws of entropy, and the dark sides of human nature.

So, what pushes humanity forward in the face of all these obstacles? To the psychologist Steven Pinker, the answer is rationality: When people use their reasoning skills and other cognitive abilities to help improve the lives of others, the result is progress.

From pseudoscience to religious extremism, irrational beliefs can cause real harm. That’s why Pinker argues that society would be better off if more people learned to be more rational.

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0:00 The bad news: reality
0:39 The good news: rationality
1:26 How rational are we?
3:04 Even Americans, though? (Rationality inequality)
4:45 The pinnacle of human rationality
5:45 How can you teach critical thinking? How?

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About Steven Pinker:
Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard. Currently Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has won numerous prizes for his research, his teaching, and his nine books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Sense of Style, and Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

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Read more of our stories on rational thinking:
Hasty generalization: how to escape your biases and be more rational
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System 1 vs. System 2 thinking: Why it isn’t strategic to always be rational
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What Nietzsche really meant: The Apollonian and Dionysian
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