Steven Pinker on Coordination, Common Knowledge, and the Retreat of Liberal Enlightenment

Steven Pinker returns to Conversations with Tyler with an argument that common knowledge—those infinite loops of "I know that you know that I know"—is the hidden infrastructure that enables human coordination, from accepting paper money to toppling dictators. But Tyler wonders: if most real-world coordination works fine without recursively looping (a glance at a traffic circle), if these models break down with the slightest change in assumptions, and if anonymous internet posters are making correct but uncomfortable truths common knowledge when society might function better with noble lies, is Pinker's theory really capturing how coordination works—and might we actually need less common knowledge, not more?

Tyler and Steven probe these dimensions of common knowledge—Schelling points, differential knowledge, benign hypocrisies like a whisky bottle in a paper bag—before testing whether rational people can actually agree (spoiler: they can't converge on Hitchcock rankings despite Aumann's theorem), whether liberal enlightenment will reignite and why, what stirring liberal thinkers exist under the age 55, why only a quarter of Harvard students deserve A's, how large language models implicitly use linguistic insights while ignoring linguistic theory, his favorite track on Rubber Soul, what he’ll do next, and more.

Recorded September 12th, 2025

Transcript and links: https://conversationswithtyler.com/ep...

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Timestamps

00:00:00 - On common knowledge
00:02:24 - On the difference between coordination and common knowledge
00:17:30 - On Schelling points vs. common knowledge
00:22:06 - On rational disagreement
00:29:44 - On fading liberal enlightenment
00:40:05 - On grading Harvard students
00:42:59 - On linguistics vs LLMs

This episode was made possible through the support of the John Templeton Foundation