When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .

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

By: Steven Pinker

Narrated by: Fred Sanders

**Selected by Bill Gates as One of Five Books to Read This Winter**

From one of the world’s most celebrated intellectuals, a brilliantly insightful work that explains how we think about each other’s thoughts about each other’s thoughts, ad infinitum. It sounds impossible, but 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 filled with ads for 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, 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.

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.

Pinker takes us in an intellectual journey

Clear, engaging, cogent. you follow along because it's fascinating. Then you see the world like never before. Pinker is always great for this

Mediocre at best

This author spends a lot of time repeating a few concepts. these are good to know, but could have been done in a much shorter book

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.

an interesting way to think about culture

an interesting way to think about culture. Also has some humorous examples . this review must contain 15 words