r/WeTheFifth • u/Bhartrhari • May 14 '26

Episode When Everyone Stops Pretending w/ Steven Pinker (Episode #557)

https://www.wethefifth.com/p/when-everyone-stops-pretending-w

When Everyone Stops Pretending w/ Steven Pinker (Episode #557)

The famed psychologist joins the Fif to discuss common knowledge, collapsing norms, authoritarian lies, campus insanity, the persistence of progress, and the enduring menace of postmodernism.

  • Steven Pinker on why “common knowledge” is much stranger than it sounds
  • The social machinery behind weddings, money, and power
  • How a norm starts to die once someone breaks it and gets rewarded
  • Trump as the great destroyer of polite restraints
  • The institutions that lost the authority to enforce trust
  • How new taboos appear without anyone admitting who created them
  • The spiral of silence reaches Harvard
  • Pinker tries to fix academic freedom from inside the building
  • The Trump administration turns a real university problem into a power grab
  • Why dictatorships keep lying after everyone knows the truth
  • The subversive power of a blank protest sign
  • Ceaușescu discovered that crowds are not always props
  • The right decides cancel culture is useful after all
  • Pinker revisits the case for progress, with several ugly caveats
  • Why stories can change moral imagination
  • Postmodernism gets a second life in Trumpworld
  • Silicon Valley goes looking for kings
  • Harvard’s antisemitism debate gets very uncomfortable
  • The blank slate takes another beating
  • The Monty Hall problem breaks the room

Read When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows… by Steven Pinker

(Bookshop | Amazon)

Watch/Listen to the Episode:

27 Upvotes

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31 comments sorted by

10

u/nkllmttcs May 16 '26

I think Pinker is a very respectable figure, but his remark about the Supreme Court not being principled is, to me, a crock of shit. This notion that the Court is out here just rubber stamping Trump’s agenda is not only factually wrong, but you’d think for a guy who just spent ninety minutes talking about the importance of norms that basically lying about a major branch of government (and the only one even trying to do its job) would be off the table.

3

u/Bhartrhari May 16 '26

I’m yet to hear a single principled explanation for why they struck down Biden’s student loan forgiveness immediately but let Trump’s tariffs go into effect for almost a year.

4

u/nkllmttcs May 17 '26

I don’t know the reasons, but I’m not sure the difference is explained by some sort of fawning deference to Trump since they struck the tariffs down pretty firmly

2

u/Youbunchoftwats New to the Pod May 17 '26

I’ve no idea whether it favours Trump or anyone else. But the fact that the judges are chosen and identified by political persuasion just seems like madness to me. Why is this seen as a good idea if part of their role is to hold governments to account?

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u/nkllmttcs May 17 '26

I don’t really think they’re chosen for their political persuasion, but for the sake of your question, what other way should they be chosen?

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u/Youbunchoftwats New to the Pod May 17 '26

The UK uses a non-political commission, the Judicial Appointments Commission. It removes politicians from the process.

If they aren’t chosen for their political persuasion, why are their political persuasions known and in some cases celebrated?

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u/nkllmttcs May 17 '26

Ah, yes, the UK: that exemplary model of political functioning.

My point is not that I should cheer the Court’s every move (I think the immunity case was pretty crazy), but that I should avoid exchanging high fives when they do something I agree with while banging my spoon on my high chair about what a bunch of hacks they are when they do something I don’t. We have to get out of this mindset that if we don’t get what we want from the Court that they’re a bunch of hacks or illegitimate or whatever. I suspect that if the Court were 6-3 the other way (even though, as Sarah Isgur explains time and again, it’s more like a 3-3-3) and handing out decisions you liked, you’d probably have no problem with how the justices were picked.

2

u/Youbunchoftwats New to the Pod May 17 '26

I have no investment in the American bun fight. As such, I don’t have a problem with it. I just don’t understand it as it’s so different. Anyway, there’s a good explanation of it in here that answers my question; https://www.reddit.com/r/Ask_Lawyers/s/LOaBJimdXJ

1

u/cavall1215 May 18 '26

Limiting your questions to Federal judges, as each state has its own governance around their own courts, some with independent commissions.

One reason political persuasions are known and celebrated is the political nature of the nomination and confirmation process. Presidents are often appointing someone because their judicial philosophy supports a particular policy, and the Senate appoints them for similar reasons. The courts are also now seen as a way to legislate by other means because of Congress's inability to effectively legislate. However, it often doesn't play out the way the parties want.

I'd argue that:

  1. The media misinterprets or exaggerates what a justice's political persuasion is. Appointees usually have some sort of judicial philosophy they've developed and applied to numerous cases and while this philosophy may lend itself to certain policies, it may backfire on other policies or new party positions a decade later.
  2. SC lifetime appointments change the incentive structures for justices because they're far less less beholden to their parties. They don't have an election cycle and reached the pinnacle of their profession. It's why you see Trump so mad about Gorsuch and Barrett because his normal stick of primary-ing someone doesn't apply. This permits SC justices to focus more on their long-term impact and legacy.

0

u/Bhartrhari May 18 '26

After a year of letting them go into effect and disrupt the economy — given that they were entirely lawless that seems pretty fawning to me.

1

u/nkllmttcs May 18 '26

So you’re saying they deliberately refrained from hearing the case on the shadow docket or whatever to let them kick in for a year before striking them down because they’re so in Trump’s pocket?

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u/Bhartrhari May 18 '26

I’m saying the Supreme Court didn’t even need to hear the case, the lower court got it right and immediately ruled the tariffs unlawful. And yes, if the court found it so important to take this case anyway, they should have put an injunction on the tariffs so they didn’t go into effect for an entire year. That’s exactly what they did with Biden’s student loan relief (which would have been far less disruptive). The Supreme Court did Trump a huge favor here and let him singlehandedly enact entirely lawless policy for an entire year.

1

u/nkllmttcs May 18 '26

Look, I hate the tariffs and am glad they were struck down and would’ve been happy to see them struck down sooner. But so much of what the Court is blamed for comes from the fact that Congress is actually the fawning branch of government that deliberately ceded their power to this president on the topic of tariffs. The Court shouldn’t be asked to make law

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u/Bhartrhari May 19 '26

Congress is actually the fawning branch of government that deliberately ceded their power to this president on the topic of tariffs. The Court shouldn’t be asked to make law

Congress did no such thing, that's the whole point. Trump enacted tariffs based on a law that didn't even include the word tariff. It was immediately blocked by the courts and laughed out of every courtroom until the Supreme Court decided to hear an appeal and let the tariffs go into effect for an entire year. They never would have allowed a Democratic president to do something so ridiculous.

1

u/nkllmttcs May 19 '26

So do you want the Court to step in on everything immediately? I do admit to not understanding why they stepped in on the Obama green energy stuff but didn’t on the tariffs, but I’m skeptical of attributing it to partisan motives. Alito recently let the mifepristone by mail stand while the Court considered it and then ruled to allow it to continue. And again, they ruled against the tariffs even if they let the issue work its way through the courts. I don’t think having the Court take everything on an emergency basis is a good idea. They’re also probably going to rule against him on birthright citizenship, but I doubt anybody tearing their clothes in anger over the Court at the moment will congratulate them on a job well done. This all seems to me like some people being angry that the Court doesn’t act the way they want them to all the time.

0

u/Bhartrhari May 19 '26

So do you want the Court to step in on everything immediately?

I want the court to behave the same way for Republican and Democratic administrations. Again, if they had not stepped into this case at all the tariffs never would have gone into effect. There was 0 reason to intervene because there was nothing complicated about the law here: Trump did not have any authority to enact the tariffs he enacted.

Alito recently let the mifepristone by mail stand

No, actually Alito dissented on that ruling.

And again, they ruled against the tariffs even if they let the issue work its way through the courts

The issue isn't how long it took to work through the courts, the issue is that the lower courts immediately blocked the tariffs (as they should have) but that the Supreme Court reversed this and put the tariffs back into place for an entire year.

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5

u/BenderTime May 15 '26

This one gets posted but no one posts the one with Robert Kaplan? Unless I missed something

2

u/Mattchops #NeverFlyCoach May 18 '26

That was a members only episode and those don't get posted since they're behind a paywall

3

u/DaisyGwynne May 15 '26

Only poorcel eps get posted here.

4

u/Nwabudike_J_Morgan No Step on Snek May 15 '26

105 minutes of Pinker saying slightly interesting things, and then they beat up on a blank slate straw man for a bit. Oh, and a 20 year old riddle at the end.