Steven Pinker on Common Knowledge, From Eye Contact to the Super Bowl

Some things change the world not because they are new, but because everyone learns them at once. That is the difference between mutual knowledge, where each of us knows something, and common knowledge, where each of us knows that the other knows, without end. It is the hidden machinery behind money, language, authority, and revolution.

Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard, joins Scaling Theory to discuss his latest book, “When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows.” We move from a folk tale to game theory, from the evolution of altruism to the future of artificial agents. I read the book as a theory of scaling. A single mind can hold only a few layers of who knows what about whom, yet we coordinate in the millions. How we bridge that gap, and what happens to it in an age of fragmented media and machines that can model one another, is what I wanted to understand.