There's the line of argument, the actual content there are the sources that I feel ought to be represented or that I must consult there's the narrative arc of the prose itself there's the sentence by sentence construction there's the connection to other chapters in the book. In my case, the cognitive rationale is that writing a book involves coordinating many considerations.
I suspect it's some combination of motivation, memory, and personality. So I couldn't root it in any universal property of human cognition if one person varies from another. PINKER: Well, it couldn't support it in this: if people differ. My method is to write sequentially, from the first to the last sentence, and as intensively as possible, almost all day, seven days a week, till I'm done." Could you elaborate on why that approach works best for you and does any of your research into the human mind support that approach, or is it just arbitrary? I'm not sure if you remember this, but four years ago I asked you by email for advice on the process of writing a book, and you very kindly replied, "Everyone is different in their writing habits, I've found. To my lights, you're one of the very best nonfiction writers in the English-speaking world. WALKER: For fun, I'd like to start with writing. Steve, welcome to The Jolly Swagman Podcast. The last book of his I read is Rationality, which is going to be the focus of our conversation today. But the first book of Steve's I read was The Sense of Style, a manual for good writing which exemplifies its own advice, and in which I learned that new information should come at the end of the sentence and that one of Steve's favourite Yiddish words is bubbe-meise. He's authored many famous books, including The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now. Steve is a cognitive psychologist and one of the great public intellectuals of our age. JOE WALKER: I am here at Harvard today with Steven Pinker. He is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, an elected to the National Academy of Sciences and one of Time‘s 100 Most Influential People. Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. How rational are we? How can a species smart enough to set foot on the moon also be prone to conspiracy theories that the moon landing was fake? Joe speaks with Steven Pinker to discuss rationality - and its opposite.
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