329 | Steven Pinker on Rationality and Common Knowledge

Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. A few years ago, back when we still lived in LA, we had a summer project, my wife Jennifer and I. We took boating lessons, climbing on a powerboat back in Marina del Rey and uh spent a few hours tootling around learning to like Park the boat, tie it to the dock, all these things.

I've forgotten everything by now. I don't know any of the nautical terms anymore, but there was a moment when if there was a disaster on the boat, I could help you bring it back to shore and tie it up to the dock. One of the interesting things was, of course, what you do when you're out there on the water and there's another boat that is on a collision course with you, right? Typically you don't have direct communication with the other boat. You're not on the radio.

You can't just say, hey, you know, I'm gonna do this. You need to have some rules about how to behave in such a way that the two boats don't hit each other, okay? And there are such rules. You know, if you're literally coming right on, then you're supposed to turn to the right. Uh, you're supposed to change speed and direction in a decisive way so the other boat can read your um implicit boat language, I guess.

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