When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .

Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life

De: Steven Pinker

Narrado por: Fred Sanders

From one of the world’s most celebrated intellectuals, a “fascinating” (Financial Times), brilliantly insightful work that explains how we think about each other’s thoughts about each other’s thoughts, ad infinitum. It sounds impossible, but “superlatively gifted science writer” (The Times) Steven Pinker shows that we do it all the time. This awareness, which we experience as something that is public or “out there,” is called common knowledge, and it has a momentous impact on our social, political, and economic lives.

Common knowledge is necessary for coordination, for making arbitrary but complementary choices like driving on the right, using paper currency, and coalescing behind a political leader or movement. It’s also necessary for social coordination: everything from rendezvousing at a time and place to speaking the same language to forming enduring relationships of friendship, romance, or authority. Humans have a sixth sense for common knowledge, and we create it with signals like laughter, tears, blushing, eye contact, and blunt speech.

But people also go to great lengths to avoid common knowledge—to ensure that even if everyone knows something, they can’t know that everyone else knows they know it. And so we get rituals like benign hypocrisy, veiled bribes and threats, sexual innuendo, and pretending not to see the elephant in the room.

Pinker shows how the hidden logic of common knowledge can make sense of many of life’s enigmas: financial bubbles and crashes, revolutions that come out of nowhere, the posturing and pretense of diplomacy, the eruption of social media shaming mobs and academic cancel culture, the awkwardness of a first date. Artists and humorists have long mined the intrigues of common knowledge, and Pinker liberally uses their novels, jokes, cartoons, films, and sitcom dialogues to illuminate social life’s tragedies and comedies. Along the way he answers questions like:

-Why do people hoard toilet paper at the first sign of an emergency?

-Why are Super Bowl ads dominated by crypto?

-Why, in American presidential primary voting, do citizens typically select the candidate they believe is preferred by others rather than their favorite?
-Why did Russian authorities arrest a protester who carried a blank sign?
-Why is it so hard for nervous lovers to say goodbye at the end of a phone call?
-Why does everyone agree that if we were completely honest all the time, life would be unbearable?

Consistently riveting in explaining the paradoxes of human behavior, and “one of the most insightful books…about what makes us human” (Bill Gates), When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows… invites us to understand the ways we try to get into each other’s heads and the harmonies, hypocrisies, and outrages that result.

Reseñas de la Crítica

"Fred Sanders delivers this audiobook about metacognition with a perfect balance of erudition and approachability. Psychology professor Pinker describes how we understand our thoughts and how we know what others are thinking. To frame this discussion, he evokes the classic moment from the ‘90s television show “Friends,” the one in which Phoebe realizes “they don’t know we know they know!” That scene played for laughs, but Pinker is seriously applying this approach to the understanding of shared knowledge, as well as how we can be misunderstood. Social media is rife with examples of attempts at humor or sarcasm being taken out of context. Sanders doesn’t oversell these themes; he delivers Pinker’s ideas clearly, trusting that listeners will follow them."

Very relevant

Again Pinker picks an extremely important topic and treats with the competence and intellectual honesty that we have come to expect from him.

The timeliness of an obscure domain of game theory

The narrator was… odd, but not BAD. A real reader would have made the experience more enjoyable, but I’m not sure I would have gleaned more. The fact that he was so utterly flat forced me to focus on the text more than I probably would have had it been otherwise. And the text is fantastic. Even if 1/3 to 1/2 of the book is a digression from the subject (and it is), everything was fascinating, well sourced, and brilliantly described. The weakest part was the conclusion, which I think is just flat out wrong. Despite the fact that we FEEL we live in a world of lies made MORE obfuscated by the internet, the opposite is obviously true. Today, for many, lies and myths are a choice instead of an inherited condition. This will become more true as time passes. It can feel like the opposite is true, but that is only because you are pricing cost of information in 20th and 21st century terms. The EXACT SAME FEELING must have hit like a bomb in Mainz in 1450 and radiated outward across the world.

Phenomenally deep insights

Clear examples pointing out behaviors and cognition we don’t even register but are clearly true; seems to explain a lot of our behavior more parsimoniously than I’ve previously thought possible

Salient and Thought-Provoking

This book allowed me to better understand the extent to which others consider likelihoods and risks of events outside of their own control.

My brain always defaulted to a "do not care" cycle, even as I grew older; as an adult, though, the significance of knowing that someone knows that you know what they know, and so on — as goofy as that sounds — has become increasingly clear.

I had a wonderful time listening to this. Several chapters, especially the ones on blushing and cancel culture, really threw me for a loop.

I can't believe that I almost overlooked this one. The best compliment that I can give to Dr Pinker is, "his writing gets better and better with each new entry".

Sir, you have a life-long fan in me. Please do take care, and stay off social media as long as you can muster! We need more deep thinkers and focused writers of pertinent subjects such as this.

Thanks Harvard

Mind games, small-talk or stories from a collective subconscious. I chose this book seemed inviting and not dated.