You Are Not So Smart 323 - Job Therapy - Tessa West (rebroadcast)
37 snips
Sep 29, 2025 
In this discussion, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker shares insights from his book, detailing the nature of common knowledge and its crucial role in human interaction. He distinguishes between private, shared, and common knowledge, explaining how they influence cooperation and coordination. Pinker delves into the evolution of language, arguing it developed for better coordination among people. He also tackles topics like shifting word meanings and how authoritarian regimes manipulate common knowledge to suppress dissent.
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Common Knowledge Enables Coordination
- Common knowledge is the recursive awareness that everyone knows something and knows others know it, enabling coordination.
- Steven Pinker argues this mutual awareness underpins institutions like markets, laws, and language.
Focal Points Hold Social Life Together
- Focal points and public signals let people coordinate without re-negotiating every interaction.
- Money, rituals, and norms work because people share expectations about them, not because of intrinsic properties.
Conspicuousness Creates Common Knowledge
- Humans avoid literally nesting infinite "I know that you know" thoughts by treating conspicuous public events as granting common knowledge.
- Conspicuousness lets mortals act as if infinite recursion occurred and coordinate effectively.
