The new series of The Traitors has done something similar, but — spoiler alert — the producers have put a mischievous Welsh lady called Fiona in the Jesus position. On Wednesday night, the bubbly sexagenarian was revealed to her fellow traitors as the “secret traitor”: the person who had been pulling their strings for several episodes previously.

Out of all the contestants, she alone had known the identities of both traitors and faithfuls from the start. In this role, she had been anonymously producing a shortlist of murder victims for her three becloaked minions to choose from each week — much to the latter’s resentment at the time. “I am so annoyed about this … I do not require middle management,” complained self-styled “psychopathic teddy bear”, barrister Hugo, shortly before Fiona planted some well-timed seeds of doubt about him in the back of a car.

Presumably, Hugo and his fellow traitors were unsettled by the revelation of a secret traitor amongst contestants partly because — as so often for harassed middle managers, getting it from both ends — the goals associated with this new leadership role were very unclear. Were they to be helped or hindered? For Hugo at least, the answer would prove a negative one. But the presence of an uber-traitor also meant that the other traitors no longer counted as the apex knowers in the game: a fact which automatically made them far less effective at their job.

In previous series, existing baddies could be confident they knew the player identities of everyone else — all faithful — and could plan their chicanery accordingly. But with the new announcement, suddenly nothing was certain. Even the most unlikely suspects — manic James with his wild scattergun theories, or Amanda the worryingly overconfident ex-copper, apparently obsessed with pinning the blame on innocent Jade — might secretly turn out to be a criminal mastermind after all. So when the secret traitor’s existence was announced, but not her name, those in the tower immediately became much more like the faithfuls outside of it. Under those monk’s cowls, heads that had previously contained confident declarative sentences were now overwhelmed with tentative hypotheticals.

In past seasons, traitors have held nearly all the knowledge cards and so have had nearly all of the fun. Much less enticing has been the hapless lot of faithful know-nothings, wandering about aimlessly waiting to be picked off. This is presumably why, in early interviews with Claudia this time around, nearly every contestant was desperately twirling an invisible sinister mustache, covertly auditioning for the more attractive role. (A sample statement from Sam, an account manager from North Yorkshire, apparently unconcerned about meeting work colleagues later: “I’m a fantastic liar to people who don’t know me. I will throw whoever under the bus to make sure I win.”)

Granted, occasionally there have been odd things that particular faithfuls have known in the game that traitors didn’t — usually, about family relationships, like that of mother and daughter contestants Judy and Roxy, revealed early on this season. But even then, the rules of the game do not permit these private facts to pass into what Steven Pinker has called “common knowledge”: things that other faithfuls in the game know too, and know that you know, and you know that they know that you know, and so on. For that reason, they aren’t particularly useful for the group.

Sometimes, as Pinker also relates, a social convention develops that certain pieces of common knowledge may not be mentioned in polite society: for instance, that cameras are in the room with Traitors contestants, or that Claudia’s foundation makes her look like she has jaundice. But for our purposes, the more interesting point is that there is precious little reliable and relevant common information shared amongst faithfuls — and also now amongst traitors, given the new format — yet its presence is essential to good interpretation and effective strategizing.

For if you are unsure, both about what other players believe and what they believe that you believe (and so on), then you can’t make accurate predictions about their likely actions, nor even properly understand the actions that you witness. Human behavior is not just a collection of self-evident facial and bodily movements, accompanied by sounds; it depends on a background mental context to give it meaningful shape. To take just one example: when Jade took off her blindfold after traitor selection, Amanda became convinced that she looked “shifty” as a result of having just been tapped on the shoulder by Claudia, while Jade insisted (correctly, as it happened) that she had simply felt anxious and hot.

This scarcity of common beliefs amongst faithfuls, in particular, means that the game they are officially supposed to be playing is not the one they are playing at all. On paper, as a faithful you are supposed to be trying to work with others, identifying traitors and voting them out. In practice, for most of the episodes you haven’t a hope in hell of doing this. Every spoken utterance, gesture, movement of every fellow player, no matter how bizarre, is equally compatible with theories of guilt and innocence. A pompous speech about a murdered contestant at the breakfast table could be evidence of noble intent (see Kas, series three); or of fiendish malevolence (see Hugo, series four.) And your fellow players are likely to fumble any real intelligence you pass on to them anyway, since they have no idea whether to trust you. In the absence of jointly available firm evidence, radical mistrust disrupts the laborious process of getting several people on the same epistemic page at once.

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There’s no silver lining to FGM

By Kathleen Stock

A faithful’s real job for most of the game is to avoid arousing suspicions that will lead either to their personal banishment or murder. At the same time, it is in their interests to get rid of any fellow contestants that aren’t serving them in some way, whether these be traitors or otherwise. For another piece of common knowledge too impolite to mention out loud is that fellow faithfuls are your direct competitors too.

The best way to achieve these things is to appear brainless and easily swayed by the herd: to get behind whatever convenient theory some fellow player has just spouted, and look convincingly stupid in repeating it. (This, essentially, was the key to Kate Garraway’s longevity in Celebrity Traitors last year, though it was unclear whether this was by design.) To such ends, players need to make the most of what Pinker calls “focal points”: points of salience judged likely to loom large enough in the consciousness of fellow players, around which some kind of maneuver can be attempted.

For instance: key to the traitorous Hugo’s demise in episode three was a roundtable moment when Harriet, herself secretly a former barrister, confidently aired a theory. Had Hugo really been a faithful, she suggested, he would surely have been murdered already, because barristers are commonly perceived as very clever. Since he hadn’t, in fact, been murdered, he must surely be a traitor.

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Lies, damned lies, and Claudia Winkleman

By Tom Chivers

This is an extremely slim evidential reed upon which to hang someone, possibly saying more about Harriet’s regard for her former profession than any grasp of the facts. Still, along with a bit of odd behavior at breakfast, it was enough to empower a majority of contestants to vote Hugo out. Here, thanks to the focal point of his supposedly intimidating employment status, faithfuls’ beliefs about other people’s beliefs were able to work together for once. For Harriet’s theory to be taken up by fellow players, no particular player had to find Hugo threateningly clever in person — which is probably just as well, since he manifestly wasn’t. It was sufficient for faithfuls to believe that other people — namely, traitors — would have believed him to be threateningly clever, had he been a faithful and not one of their own. And if faithfuls couldn’t even muster that last belief sincerely, they could at least believe that nobody else would notice they were only pretending to have it.

Perhaps there are some life lessons from The Traitors here, though not the banalities we often read about “building trust” or “effective teamwork”. Such deathly boring activities are intentionally absent from the format, and otherwise it wouldn’t be half as much fun to watch. Instead, the main thing to be learned about reality from The Traitors — apart that is, from finding out about the terrifyingly fixed ideas of detective inspectors — comes via the negative comparison. Unless the circumstances are highly contrived, beliefs about other people’s beliefs about our own beliefs are usually nested in our minds like Russian dolls, and we usefully call upon them all the time to accurately interpret the social world.

Yet equally, on those occasions when you don’t really know what another person believes — including what they believe about what others believe, or even about what others believe that they believe — then you cannot reliably tell what it is that they are doing or saying, even as you watch their faces and bodies move or hear certain words. It’s almost as if there was a message here about overconfident interpretations of strangers we already suspect to be malicious or badly-intentioned; or even of those we assume must be benevolent and friendly. I myself refrain from applying this point to the current news cycle, for I believe that you are already aware of some of its possible applications — and I trust that you can bring them to mind if you try. Sometimes a kiss is a signal to passing Romans, and a terrible betrayal. And sometimes, a kiss is just a kiss.

Now, in Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, Pinker synthesises both aspects of his oeuvre. On the one hand, Rationality briskly introduces you to essential concepts like Bayesian reasoning and technical terms like modus ponens. But the technical, learned aspects of the book are accompanied by a polemical drive. Rationality matters — every day, everywhere. Especially at present, in a world that many think has gone mad, whipsawed irrationally by social media mobs and online conspiracy theories. Pinker argues that methods of rationality represent not an esoteric corner of cognitive science or philosophy, but an essential set of tools for individual human flourishing, maintaining our sanity and perpetuating civilisation as a collective whole. To reason and think clearly is to be modern, and even requisite in order to be moral.

In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, the rational actor and “homo economicus” seemed to have failed us. Nature abhors a vacuum, so there was a vogue for the field of behavioural economics, a discipline that operates in the gray zone of economic frictions and psychological irrationalities powered by faulty intuition. A crop of authors harvested these ideas: Dan Ariely, Rom Brafman, Ori Brafman, Cass Sunstein, and Richard Thaler among them. More broadly, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s heuristics and biases research program, to which all these authors owe a debt, entered the mainstream — Kahneman also contributed a bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow in 2011. Barack Obama’s administration tried to ‘nudge’ America through policy. David Cameron’s government, and the British civil service, embraced nudging too.

Rationality is part of a tacit backlash against these authors, their books, and the atmosphere they generated in public policy circles in the 2010s.

Today, Dan Ariely faces accusations of fraud at worst and scientific malpractice at best. More broadly, behavioural economics has been hit by the replication crisis. Humans respond to incentives, and for scientists, sexy and vivid results are rewarded, while negative findings can stall a career. The scientific culture of the aughts was defined at its peril by “publish or perish,” as well as sloppy experimental practices, a mechanically unthinking application of statistics, and cognitive biases in the very fields dedicated to understanding how rationality fails us. Kahneman himself began having doubts in 2012, justifiably, about some of the results reported in his 2011 book.

Pinker’s good news in Rationality is that with deliberate effort, humans can think clearly and move beyond their biases. Where much of cognitive psychology focuses on illusions and mental misfires, Rationality instead argues that our faculties are up to the task, and that this is all a natural consequence of our evolution. Evolutionary psychology leans heavily on the idea that humans are only equipped with “stone-age minds” in a technologically advanced present. Pinker seems a bit chagrined at this angle being so overplayed, and in Rationality he attempts to redress the balance, making the case that humans are naturally equipped to reason and that reason is not a dark art or the province of philosophers and mathematicians alone.

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By Stuart Ritchie

If you are a consumer of anthropology and ethnography or even have simply watched The Gods Must Be Crazy, you are aware of the preternatural skills of the San hunters of the Kalahari desert. Pinker shows this is not due to inborn traits, but the ability of the San to take in the information around them, the time of the year, the season, the species of antelope, and make inferences in alignment with their overall goals. The San, like all humans, engage in a rough and ready form of syllogistic reasoning. They start with axioms, premises informed by their experiences, and deduce logical consequences from their assumptions. Things don’t just “happen” in the Kalahari, there is a rhythm and rhyme the hunters exploit, a pattern and sense of the world that allows them to survive and flourish. Steenbok antelope are hunted during the rainy season while eland are stalked during the dry season. You might think this is due to custom and tradition, but the San are aware that steenbok has stiff joints during the rainy season while eland hooves are ill-equipped to navigate sandy soil. They hunt animals in the season that loads the dice for a success hunt. The alternative, simply, is a higher risk of starvation. The San have goals, and they naturally use the tools of rationality to achieve them.

But what if the San did not rationally know the reasons for their actions?

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Do genes determine intelligence?

By Razib Khan

One of the essential points in Rationality is that reasoning and understanding the world are collective enterprises. We know that socially-generated knowledge and rationality can be embedded enduringly through rules and taboos. Yes, those executing a cultural script may not be aware of the ultimate reasons, but a deeper investigation by anthropologists can reveal that mindless traditions actually serve functional purposes.

Joe Henrich in 2015’s The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter reports how traditional societies across the world have a system of preparing cassava that prevents them from getting cyanide poisoning. Those following the methods do not know what cyanide is, nor do they even know that consuming unprepared cassava will lead to death, but their culture comes preloaded with the fruits of adaptive learning that are highly rational.

The deepest insight then is that our ability to reason through complex problems depends on our willingness to stand on the shoulders of giants. Though we can all reason, Pinker does not shy away from conventional pitfalls of human analysis such as the Monty Hall problem, the gambler’s fallacy and the base rate fallacy. He recounts that Paul Erdos, author of 1,500 mathematical papers, was as mystified by the Monty Hall problem as most people who encounter it. He refused to believe he was wrong, relying on his native intuitions, despite his prodigious ability to work through formal mathematics.

The point is that the most brilliant individual mind can fail at reasoning unless it approaches the enterprise with humility and the willingness to update beliefs and understanding. The scholarship reviewed in Rationality, from Aristotle to machine learning, is not just the product of singularly brilliant minds, but the collective efforts of whole scientific traditions. The replication crisis shows that groups of scholars can blunder into traps and dead ends en masse. But advances in fields like statistical decision theory would be impossible without the collective efforts of disparate research groups across numerous domains. Pinker’s treatment of deep learning neural networks also makes it clear that some of these tools for rationality are approaching the dark edge of Arthur C. Clarke’s formulation that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And, like magic, they often fail without the guiding hand of human reasoning faculties.

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Rationality, Pinker says, was partly in response to students at Harvard finding the world puzzling, especially with much of psychology focused on how human rationality fails. If Pinker makes the case for thinking clearly, with the most powerful tools we have, whether it be 21st-century computational methods in machine learning or sharper formal analysis that draws upon mid-20th-century economic game theory, he still remains fully aware that he lives in an empirical world of irrationality.

Pinker was not one of the ‘Four Horsemen’ of New Atheism: Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris. But he is, and long has been, a fellow traveller of the group (he is also personally close to Dawkins). In the early 2000’s he took equal-opportunity aim at the Right’s attachment to traditional religion in The Blank Slate while taking the Left to task for its denial of human nature. Twenty years later, he made an extended call for a revival of the cult of rationality in Enlightenment Now. Pinker’s enthusiasm for applying rationality and empiricism to the world reflects the intellectual culture of the mid-2000’s when Dawkins was riding high with his critiques of evangelical Christianity and public intellectuals were gathering to celebrate the Enlightenment in conferences like Beyond Belief. The familiar flame of this hopeful past burns bright throughout Rationality.

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But ours today is a world of cancel culture and QAnon. Ideological polarisation that has turned the pandemic into the object of a culture war in the United States. Pinker does address the reality that the world today is not the world he might have imagined it would be a generation ago, as irrationalities and superstitions spread like ideological pandemics on social media.

The vision of the aughts was one of a reason-ruled future, but Rationality was written in the wake of Donald Trump, whose rise and popularity as an emotive demagogue triggered a reactionary flare-up of identity politics on the cultural Left. This is the world where David Hume observed that “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions”. To a great extent, the project of making Bayesian reasoning, game theory and machine learning accessible and palatable to the public seems born of the disappointments of the past generation. If you are a deep reader of Scott Alexander’s Slate Star Codex, Rationality may not offer you much new food for thought. But if you are terrified by the insanities of the present, and wish to replenish your intellectual armoury in the fight for progress and reason in the 21st century, then Rationality is what you will want to bring to the battlefield.

Sure, I can give mitigating factors — the piece arguing it was in the Atlantic! Steven Pinker had tweeted it apparently approvingly! I included a lot of verbiage about how it might still be “utter garbage” and how I thought it was very unlikely to be true! But, still, I found it convincing enough to tweet it out, publicly and positively.

The thing was, there were some interesting hints. There is, apparently, a strange shortage of surviving manuscripts in Shakespeare’s own hand, unlike other playwrights of the time. And in the same year of Shakespeare’s first public work, an Elizabethan literary critic wrote cryptically about an anonymous “Gentlewoman” who had written sonnets and a comedy, “in her tongue & pen a divine Rhetoric … [a] beautiful and allective style, as ingenious as elegant”. 

A rival playwright wrote, again cryptically, of an “upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers”, who considers himself the “onely Shake-scene in a countrey”. The Atlantic piece says that in classical literature the crow was a thieving bird who stole other birds’ feathers, and that for “anti-Stratfordians”, ie Shakespeare truthers, it was a coded accusation that Shakespeare was a plagiarist. Ben Jonson wrote a satirical poem which was widely believed to be about Shakespeare, and in which he accused the subject of “[making] each man’s wit his own”.

The piece also asked: how come a man who had never apparently had much education or left England knew so much about northern Italy, or astronomy, or foreign languages? Bassano, apparently an exiled Venetian noblewoman, would fit better. The author of the Atlantic piece was also much baffled by how Shakespeare could write women so well and so sympathetically.

Anyway, it turned out to be complete toss. The piece ended up needing significant corrections; the author had ignored scholars who had given her info she didn’t like; it cited material from someone who also believed that ley-lines were landing markers for alien spaceships. The Atlantic ran five ‘responses’ to it from Shakespeare scholars, most of them utterly panning it (the one that didn’t was by Mark Rylance, who is an excellent actor but not a historian).

I’m reminded of this because I came across a study in the journal Science Advances, which provides (it says) evidence against the cross-channel version of this conspiracy theory, that Molière’s plays were in fact written by someone else, probably a rival playwright called Pierre Corneille.

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Let loose the lynx!

By Tom Chivers

I had never heard of this conspiracy theory, but it seems to have the same sort of structure: he wasn’t acknowledged as a writer in his own time, he lacked education necessary to write the material he purportedly wrote,  there aren’t many surviving original manuscripts, etc. I don’t have the necessary expertise to critique the study, but it essentially looked at the entire body of written work by Molière along with that of several contemporary French playwrights, including Corneille, and found no similarity of the kind you would expect if any of it was written by the same man.

As I said: I don’t know whether the study really does nail the coffin shut on Molière truthing. But my bet, nonetheless, is that the Molière truthers are wrong, simply because it is much easier to come up with conspiracy theories than it is to debunk them.

For instance: did you know that the latitude of the Great Pyramid of Giza is the same as the speed of light in a vacuum, to nine significant figures? Seriously. The Great Pyramid’s latitude: 29.9792458°N. The speed of light in a vacuum, in metres per second: 299,792,458. Check it out. Ancient Egyptians did not know the speed of light in a vacuum. How do you explain a coincidence like that –  a one-in-a-billion coincidence! – without admitting that aliens built it?

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Statistically, you shouldn't believe the news

By Tom Chivers

Well, you do it by pointing out that it’s less of a coincidence than you think. Scott Alexander does a wonderful job of it, but here are a few basics. For one thing, the precision is spurious. If you only did it to seven significant figures, your coordinates would be slightly closer to the very centre of the pyramid. So it’s really only a one-in-10-million coincidence.

For another, the longitude of the Great Pyramid appears to be cosmically meaningless. Also, all the latitudes 2.99792°N, 2.99792°S, and 29.9792°S would also match the speed of light to the same precision, but there’s nothing super interesting anywhere along those lines of latitude that I’m aware of. Likewise for longitudes with those numbers. And – there’s not just the speed of light to look at. How about the Planck length or the Hubble constant? Or – why did you use the Great Pyramid and not the Sphinx? You’ve got several more tickets to the lottery, and none of the others win anything. (It’s also a bit weird that ancient aliens are using the metre, a measure invented in revolutionary France.)

More generally, you just have to ask: why pick the Pyramids? Why not Stonehenge or Machu Picchu or the Nazca lines, or the Lascaux caves, or – whatever? Why pick a landmark at all, or latitude and longitude – why not a code written in the Bible, or in the DNA of fish? The world is full of billions of things; if you want to find a billions-to-one coincidence, you’ll find it, and you’ll be able to add all sorts of corroborative detail, as well. 

You don’t need to go all the way to aliens building the pyramids to find this sort of thing going on. In much more prosaic forms it goes on all the time — it’s the basis for the replication crisis in science, in that you can see interesting-looking patterns in noisy data that let you find all sorts of spurious things, like literal psychic powers, if you don’t constrain what you’re looking for in advance. It lets you find frightening social trends which probably aren’t real, if you’re allowed to pick when your data series starts and ends and which subset of the data you look at. But you can also do it to let you find that Atlantis was real, or that 9/11 was an inside job, or that we never went to the Moon.

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By Douglas Murray

The trouble is, sometimes there is a conspiracy. Lt Col Oliver North really did sell weapons to Iran and illegally use the proceeds to fund Contra rebels in Nicaragua. The CIA really did run a fake vaccination programme (in Afghanistan to find Osama bin Laden). How do we know when the coincidences aren’t coincidences and there’s really something there? God knows – sometimes it’s just really hard.

In science, things like preregistering your hypotheses before gathering your data can avoid the “degrees of freedom” that let you find spurious patterns in noise. Maybe with conspiratorial thinking, you need to be aware of the possible coincidences that didn’t happen: all the people who didn’t leave the North Tower just before it fell, all the photos of the lunar landscape that don’t look like a Hollywood film set.

But I don’t know if that would have helped me with my Shakespeare conspiracy problem. What would I be looking for — all the Elizabethan authors who didn’t write cryptic notes about how some Shakespeare-like character might or might not be a plagiarist? All the things that Shakespeare wrote about that he could plausibly have written about?

Maybe the answer is simply that, if someone presents you with some complex but plausible-sounding explanation for why almost everyone is wrong about something, your first instinct should be to distrust it. But then I’d be telling you to disbelieve a lot of the things I write. Maybe all you can really take away from this is that Shakespeare probably wrote Shakespeare, Molière probably wrote Molière, we almost certainly did go to the Moon, and generally, the most boring explanation is probably the most likely.