SP One of the biggest enemies of reason is tribalism. When people subscribe to an ideology, they suck up evidence that supports their preconceptions and filter out evidence that goes against them. Contrary to the belief of most scientists that denial of climate change is an effect of scientific illiteracy, it is not at all correlated with scientific literacy. People who believe in man-made climate change don’t know any more about climate or science than those who deny it. It’s almost perfectly correlated with left-wing versus right-wing orientation. And a move toward greater rationality would unbundle them and let evidence inform what the optimal policies ought to be.

PG But breaking deadlock surely requires more than asking people to be rational.

BG I don’t think we’ve come to the point yet where democracy and science is going to stop working to improve lives. I was at a climate conference in Paris, and, honestly, there were as many nonscientific things said there in a good cause as I imagine were said at the non-climate convention that I didn’t happen to attend. But I’m optimistic. I do think awareness of how things have worked is important to recreate a conservative center — that is, make us careful about what we change.

PG And here I thought you were going to say: Innovation drives progress, not Washington.

BG But the problem now is that innovation is not viewed as an unalloyed way to improve the human condition. And that’s fair, because it’s not pure. Does social media split us into tribes in a way that’s dangerous? Does it create, even in high school social circles, a channel for bullying, or a desire to look perfect in photos? Is A.I. going to proceed so quickly that work, which is something people worship, will suffer bad distributional effects, and people won’t know what to do? This is an unfortunate time for saying, “Take all your damn negative thoughts, and I’ll innovate away from them.” People are seeing difficulty with that argument.

SP There’s also a dichotomy between the roles of innovation and policy. There are certain things that governments are always going to do better than private innovators. Basic research, for instance. Also, governments can do things that might be necessary to accelerate the development of innovations. And in terms of numbers, the Gates Foundation is smaller than government by a significant margin, right?