When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .
Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
From one of the world’s most celebrated intellectuals, a “fascinating” (Financial Times), brilliantly insightful work that explains how we think about each other’s thoughts about each other’s thoughts, ad infinitum.
It sounds impossible, but Steven Pinker shows that we do it all the time. This awareness is called common knowledge, and it has a momentous impact on our social, political, and economic lives.
Common knowledge is necessary for coordination, for making arbitrary but complementary choices like driving on the right and coalescing behind a political leader or movement. It’s also necessary for social coordination: everything from meeting up at a time and place to forming enduring bonds of friendship, romance, or authority. Humans have a sixth sense for common knowledge, and we create it with signals like laughter, tears, blushing, eye contact, and blunt speech.
But people also may strive to avoid common knowledge—to ensure that even if everyone knows something, they can’t know that everyone else knows they know it. And so we get rituals like benign hypocrisy, veiled bribes and threats, sexual innuendo, and pretending not to see the elephant in the room.
Pinker shows how the hidden logic of common knowledge can make sense of many of life’s enigmas: financial bubbles and crashes, revolutions that seem to come from out of nowhere, the eruption of cancel culture, and even the awkwardness of a first date.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It's not what everyone knows that counts but what everyone admits they know, according to this labyrinthine pop-sci treatise. Harvard cognitive psychologist Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature) recaps research—his own and others'—into common knowledge, the store of information that everyone knows and, crucially, is universally acknowledged to be true (as illustrated by the folktale "The Emperor's New Clothes," wherein everyone can see the ruler is naked, but it only becomes common knowledge when a naive child publicly declares it). Pinker analyzes how common knowledge enables the coordination of mutually beneficial outcomes: a public protest establishes the common knowledge of political dissatisfaction and allows protestors to take unified action, for example. Elsewhere, a chapter on cancel culture—Pinker has spoken out against its eruptions at Harvard—argues it's an attempt by ideologues to band together to protect common knowledge from infiltration by politically incorrect ideas. Pinker's discussions of these findings are intriguing if not earthshaking, but the scientific apparatus he assembles—replete with psych experiments into "recursive mentalizing," or "thinking about thoughts about thoughts"—can feel overblown and onerous. The result, in a lapse from Pinker's usual brilliance, is a taxing outing that yields mostly pedestrian insights.
