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Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has been one of the English-speaking world’s leading public intellectuals for the past three decades. But rather than retire to full-time punditry, he’s continued to do psychological exploration, first at MIT and now Harvard. His thirteenth book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life, expands upon his original research into the field of “common knowledge” (a term that would be more self-explanatory if it were called “mutual knowledge” or “shared awareness”).

For instance, it may be obvious to you that the emperor has no clothes, but are you totally sure that everybody else knows that too? What if they don’t?

Maybe, just to be sure, you’ll wait until somebody else shouts it out first?

Common knowledge seems straightforward until you start trying to think it through, and then you soon find yourself sounding like Vizzini recursively explaining to the Man in Black in The Princess Bride which glass of wine must be the poisoned one. Pinker’s opening paragraph begins:

As a cognitive scientist, I have spent my life thinking about how people think. So the ultimate subject of my fascination would have to be how people think about what other people think, and how they think about what other people think they think, and how they think about what other people think they think they think.

And yet this devilishly abstract-sounding field has much contemporary relevance during the current vibe shift.

For example, the recent transgender mania among young people seems to be undergoing a preference falsification cascade straight out of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu’s last speech on Dec. 21, 1989, when suddenly everybody in Romania, including Ceaușescu, realized that everybody else no longer feared but instead scorned this long dangerous but now ridiculous old man.

Or consider Hans Christian Andersen’s proto-Orwellian The Emperor’s New Clothes, in which cancel-culture grifters proclaim that their magic couture has “the wonderful quality of being invisible to any man who was unfit for his office.” (George Orwell, by the way, put on a lost BBC radio drama production of Andersen’s fairy tale as he was preparing to write Animal Farm.)

As recently as 2022, according to psychologist Jean Twenge, 9.5 percent of college-age Americans identified as trans or nonbinary. By 2024, this share had fallen by 43 percent. At this point, we can only speculate on what the post-Trump-reelection fraction will look like.

For a decade, transgenderist dogma was sacralized. Anybody who pointed out its absurdities was ostracized from polite society as a Bad Person.

But quite recently, the young have come to notice it’s lame. And once everybody knows that everybody knows that transgenderism is cringe, it’s all over.

It’s not that Today’s Youth can even spell the word autogynephilia, like I’ve been advocating for decades. It’s just that they finally sense that transgenderism is uncool.

Still, how often does an Emperor’s New Clothes turnabout like this happen? As the dissident anthropologists with the children’s-literature names of Robin Fox and Lionel Tiger pointed out, just because one little brat exclaims, “The emperor has no clothes!” the mob isn’t likely to suddenly concede the truth. Most of the time, instead, they are going to get very angry at this unpardonably stupid child who, clearly, is unfit for his office of street urchin.

Still, as interesting as Pinker’s discussion of mutual knowledge is—and nobody is better at finding vivid examples from daily life to illustrate highbrow concepts than he is—I’m more fascinated by a mirror-image topic that has yet to be explored scientifically in much depth. Instead of common knowledge, we might call it discrete ignorance (or perhaps discreet ignorance because it seems to coincide with politically correct discretion). This is the phenomenon of one person knowing a fact in one context for one purpose but simply not knowing it in another context.

For example, during the recent “racial reckoning,” many Americans seemed utterly ignorant for purposes of public policy discussion of two fundamental facts of American sociology: that blacks tend to commit more serious crimes per capita and that they average lower in intelligence.

And yet, absolutely nothing suggested that they had forgotten these unfortunate realities when it came to their own private lives. White urbanite liberals in 2020 didn’t suddenly move to low-rent neighborhoods because they realized that their fears of crime were just a racist delusion, nor did they enroll their children in low-test-score schools because only racists think that the racial makeup of a school affects how fast the teachers can cover the material.

During the mostly peaceful George Floyd protests, metropolitans instead tended to move to small towns and suburbs, reversing the urbanization trend of the lower-crime early 2000s.

Was this an example of hypocrisy among people who understand perfectly well that if a fact is true in their private lives it is implausible to imagine it to be false in our public life?

Among a few folks, yes.

But vast numbers of reasonably intelligent and highly functional individuals are sincerely unable to reason from their daily life to affairs of state or vice versa.

For example, California governor Gavin Newsom employs a quick-witted social media staff that has helped make him a plausible Democratic presidential nominee in 2028 by going toe-to-toe with Trump at owning the cons online.

But whenever they get to tweeting about crime rates by state, they constantly step on rakes that by now they ought to have learned to see coming. Apparently, it’s simply inconceivable for them to apply their awareness of racial crime patterns in daily life, which they are no doubt aware of when choosing where to live, to public affairs. Those appear to be two wholly separate realms of thought for them.

When walking down the street, Newsom’s social media managers are prudently aware to avoid rakes, but when advocating for legislation, it never, ever occurs to them to legalize not stepping on rakes.

Pinker may well have the highest IQ of any public intellectual, so his views of the problem are unlikely to be naive. Pinker himself sort-of advocates ignorance about the rake problem. He writes on page 277:

Let’s consider the topic that Cory Clark and her collaborators discovered to be the most incendiary of the ten they examined in their survey of censorship in science, the possibility that average racial differences in measured intelligence have both genetic and environmental causes rather than environmental causes alone.

Obviously, Charles Murray assuming that both Nature and Nurture influence IQ is, prima facie, less extremist than the conventional wisdom of Stephen Jay Gould assuming that the sizable racial gap in IQ is due to “environmental causes alone.”

What seems to be the sore spot in Pinker’s perspective is not the hard problem of figuring out what fundamentally causes the existing racial gaps in IQ, which is indeed difficult. For example, a new study of identical twins reared apart finds that IQ differences are higher among those who were educated at different-quality schools. But perhaps the pairs of adoptive parents chose to send the smarter twin to better schools? Who can tell?

Yet, Pinker seems to be more worried about the easy problem of the public noticing that existing racial gaps in IQ exist. Pinker writes:

If differences in average intelligence are commonly known, especially if they are seen to be genetic and hard to eliminate, people might be tempted to use them as Bayesian [probabilistic] priors in their treatment of individual African Americans, unjustly putting them at a disadvantage. It might embolden racists, make it easy to overlook systemic racism, shake the confidence of individual African Americans, and further divide the country along racial lines.

Pinker may or may not be flippant in this last sentence. For instance, whether or not racists are emboldened would seem to depend on whether or not being racist is defined as not being ignorant about intelligence differences between the races. Similarly, the dangers of overlooking systemic racism depend on objectively observing whether or not systemic racism actually exists or is just a hallucination, which largely depends on objective measurements of intelligence and criminality, which Pinker is objecting to.

The risk of shaking the confidence of individual African Americans is particularly facetious because research since the turn of the millennium has uncovered that self-esteem is less likely to be lacking on average among blacks than among any other race. And whether or not awareness of the facts uncovered by social science is likely to further divide the country along racial lines seems especially droll following the recent racial reckoning’s mostly peaceful protests.

All this seems like an argument between our two leading human science public intellectuals, Steven Pinker and Charles Murray, over whether or not to go there over race and IQ.

But if you aren’t allowed to notice white-black differences in test scores, how can you intelligently administer schools? For instance, will you track? Or will tracking seem racist like it does to New York City mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani?

For example, every single one of the 2,000-plus school districts in the U.S. has higher average white scores than black scores. But virtually nobody knows this. Hence, during the thirty years the World Wide Web has existed, I’ve read hundreds of newspaper articles lamenting the existence of white-black racial differences in various local school districts with absolutely none of them mentioning that they turn up in every other school district in the country.

Likewise, virtually no reporters have ever reported that on average blacks die ten times as often by homicide as whites do across the country, even though the CDC lets you easily look this up.

And yet, in 2025 barely anybody realizes that Hispanics are killed in homicides only about twice as much as whites, four to five times less often than blacks. Hispanics have been getting more law-abiding in recent decades, but because you aren’t supposed to think about race and crime, nobody gives Latinos credit for this or asks why blacks can’t improve as well.

And likewise, nobody except my readers realizes that African Americans have recently developed a bad driving problem. That would seem like a by-no-means insoluble problem, but nowadays nobody dares mention that blacks have developed any negative cultural trends.

At the end of his book, Pinker argues (presumably against racial realism):

In a similar way, if scholars tacitly decide that the best way to handle a socially pernicious and intellectually minor topic is not to go there, they would not be surrendering to the ignorance of a dark age, but may be deploying a higher-order personality which factors in the effects of making discoveries common knowledge. That could even be true if they reasoned that the best way of implementing such a policy is not to speak too long and loud about why they are implementing it.

Well…maybe… But how did ignorance work out for us during the recent racial reckoning? Granted, we’re all the way into 2025, but I recall 2020–2023 as being…not so hot.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I suspect knowing the truth is better for us than stupidity, falsehood, and wishful thinking.