Steven Pinker is a professor of psychology at Harvard University. The author of several books, his latest is Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. He joins the podcast to talk about this work, and the discussion includes topics such as why voters make bad decisions, the appeal of conspiracy theories and the sense in which believing in them is rational, how to get more rational elites, and which statistical methods are better than others for establishing causation. In the second half of the discussion, Hanania and Pinker talk about how the conversation surrounding the influence of genetics on human behavior has changed since the publication of The Blank Slate, freedom of speech in academia, and advice for young scholars.

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