Into the Impossible With Brian Keating Steven Pinker on Cancel Culture, Common Knowledge & AI
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Sep 24, 2025 
Steven Pinker, a renowned cognitive psychologist and author, delves into the intricacies of common knowledge and its impact on society. He explains how misconceptions can lead to social discord and explores the tension between expert knowledge and public perception. Pinker discusses the role of common knowledge in everything from markets to cancel culture, highlighting how social norms can dictate individual behavior. He also sheds light on how AI struggles with common knowledge, emphasizing its unpredictable effects in technology and society.
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Common Knowledge Powers Coordination
- Common knowledge means nested mutual awareness: I know that you know that I know... ad infinitum.
- That recursive mutual awareness is necessary for coordination, norms, and institutions to function.
Be Humble About Predicting Tech's Effects
- Expect technological downstream effects to be hard to predict; avoid confident long-range forecasts.
- Treat claims about broad societal impacts of new tech with humility and probabilistic caution.
Why Rational People Can't Keep Disagreeing
- The Aumann 'agree-to-disagree' theorem shows rational agents with common-knowledge posteriors must converge.
- Prices and market predictions act like common-knowledge posteriors, explaining why you can't reliably outpredict efficient markets.
