Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

304 | HOW THE MIND WORKSschool student doing Euclidean geometry gets no credit for pulling out aruler and measuring the triangle, even though that guarantees a correctanswer. The point of the lesson is to inculcate a method that later can beused to calculate the unmeasurable, such as the distance to the moon.But outside of school, of course, it never makes sense to ignore what youknow. A Kpelle could be forgiven for asking, Look, do you want to knowwhether Yakpalo is drinking cane juice, or don't you? That is true for both theknowledge acquired by an individual and the knowledge acquired by thespecies. No organism needs content-free algorithms applicable to any problemno matter how esoteric. Our ancestors encountered certain problems forhundreds of thousands or millions of years—recognizing objects, makingtools, learning the local language, finding a mate, predicting an animal'smovement, finding their way—and encountered certain other problemsnever—putting a man on the moon, growing better popcorn, proving Fermat'slast theorem. The knowledge that solves a familiar kind of problem isoften irrelevant to any other one. The effect of slant on luminance is usefulin calculating shape but not in assessing the fidelity of a potential mate. Theeffects of lying on tone of voice help with fidelity but not with shape. Naturalselection does not care about the ideals of a liberal education and shouldhave no qualms about building parochial inference modules that exploiteons-old regularities in their own subject matters. Tooby and Cosmides callthe subject-specific intelligence of our species "ecological rationality."A second reason we did not evolve into true scientists is the cost ofknowledge. Science is expensive, and not just the superconducting supercollider,but the elementary analysis of cause and effect in John StuartMill's canons of induction. Recently I was dissatisfied with the bread Ihad been baking because it was too dry and fluffy. So I increased thewater, decreased the yeast, and lowered the temperature. To this day Idon't know which of these manipulations made the difference. The scientistin me knew that the proper procedure would have been to try out alleight logical combinations in a factorial design: more water, same yeast,same temperature; more water, more yeast, same temperature; morewater, same yeast, lower temperature; and so on. But the experimentwould have taken eight days (twenty-seven if I wanted to test two incrementsof each factor, sixty-four if I wanted to test three) and required anotebook and a calculator. I wanted tasty bread, not a contribution tothe archives of human knowledge, so my multiply-confounded one-shotwas enough. In a large society with writing and institutionalized science,the cost of an exponential number of tests is repaid by the benefit of the