Description: Pinker on the dangers of academic isolation.

Transcript:

I think a political leadership that blows off science is going to lead to nothing but disaster. But I think though for their part, people in universities and newspapers have to open their minds to have the same kind of critical self-reflection that everyone must have; realize that universities can also spiral into kind of a self-contained, ideological, almost religious cult; and that it’s important for universities to open up and welcome ideas from smart people who aren’t in that particular orbit. I think that think tanks and policy institutes have been invaluable in that regard; that there are certain ideas that don’t come out of university departments because a university becomes a tribe or a culture, has an ideology, and they have to realize that they’re not an infallible and welcome ideas. I don’t think universities have been completely successful in doing that either.

Description: Human choices are not easily predictable.

Transcript:

I don’t believe there’s such a thing as free will in the sense of a ghost and a machine, a spirit or a soul that somehow reads the TV screen of the senses and pushes buttons and pulls the levers of behavior. There’s no sense that we can make of that. I think we are . . . Our behavior is the product of physical processes in the brain. On the other hand, when you have a brain that consists of one hundred billion neurons connected by one hundred trillion synopses, there is a vast amount of complexity. That means that human choices will not be predictable in any simple way from the stimuli that I’ve hinged on beforehand. We also know that that brain is set up so that there are at least two kinds of behavior. There’s what happens when I shine a light in your eye and your iris contracts, or I hit your knee with a hammer and your leg jerks upward. We also know that there’s a part of the brain that does things like choose what to have for dinner; whether to order chocolate or vanilla ice cream; how to move the next chess people; whether to pick up the paper or put it down. That is very different from your iris closing when I shine a light in your eye. It’s that second kind of behavior – one that engages vast amounts of the brain, particularly the frontal lobes, that incorporates an enormous amount of information in the causation of the behavior that has some mental model of the world that can predict the consequences of possible behavior and select them on the basis of those consequences. All of those things carve out the realm of behavior that we call free will, which is useful to distinguish from brute involuntary reflexes, but which doesn’t necessarily have to involve some mysterious soul.

Description: Summers, on why academics rely more on theory than on data analysis.

Transcript:

I think in some cases, it’s a comfortable world view if you lack the analytic techniques to deal with data and evidence, that it’s comfortable to develop theories that render them less relevant. And that, I think, is certainly a part . . . is certainly a part of the story. I think another part of the story is that people develop a conviction that you can’t know things and, you know. And in some ultimate, philosophical sense that may be true; but decisions have to be made and people do make decisions. And it seems to me that it’s better to think about more informed decisions than less informed decisions; but with the luxury of not needing to decide, it’s easier to take the relaxed view of what constitutes truth, and what need there is for evidence than when there are consequential choices that, if made more wisely, will either have enormous benefits for people or have enormous costs to people. So I think the feeling of responsibility for action – which I’ve been fortunate to have in my time outside and inside the university – probably creates a greater sense of responsibility to debate.

Description: Dershowitz wishes academics would go back to first principles.

Transcript:

I’m not part of any school. And I don’t like the current conversation that’s going on in academia. It’s voguish. It’s often just part of today’s convention. And I like to start with first principles and see where they take me based on my own personal observations.