"Why did The New Yorker, which perpetuates the myth that they employ an army of meticulous fact-checkers, pollute our understanding of mind and brain by publishing these fabrications for decades?"

Asks Steven Pinker, on X, as he reads the New Yorker article "Oliver Sacks Put Himself Into His Case Studies. What Was the Cost?"

Pinker answers his own question like this: "Because their primary commitment is to a belletristic, literarist, romantic promotion of elite cultural sensibilities over the tough-minded analyses of philistine scientists and technologists, their rival elite.... A common denominator behind Sacks's fabrications was that ineffable, refined intuition can surmount cerebral analysis, which is limited and cramped. It's a theme that runs through some of their other blunders, such as... [t]he many articles by Malcolm Gladwell (like Sacks, a fine essayist) which mixed good reporting with dubious statistical reasoning and misleading claims (e.g., that only practice, not talent, is necessary for achievement, or that IQ above 120 doesn't matter)."

From the New Yorker article, which is by Rachel Aviv: 

"The famous party slogan in 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' was 'Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.'"

"Orwell’s proposal that totalitarianism demands the rejection of objective truth and the alteration of the past is perhaps the most original idea in 'Nineteen Eighty-Four.'... 'The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc [English socialism]. And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. In all the useful arts, the world is either standing still or going backwards.' And the very medium of thought, in Orwell’s reckoning, language, would be crippled. Winston’s co-worker, employed in the project, explains: 'Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year? … In the end we will make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.' What actually happened?... This logarithmic graph shows that in 1948, the Encyclopaedia Britannica was about 29,000 pages. Its final printed edition, in 2010, had 33,000. Today most of us rely on Wikipedia (despite its occasional errors and editing wars), which as of last year had the equivalent of 3.2 million Britannica pages, a hundredfold increase...."

Writes Steven Pinker, in "1984 revisited: George Orwell would be relieved at how we’ve done/It’s common to suggest the great dystopian novel was full of warnings that have largely come true. But the evidence shows otherwise" (London Times).

"I ask Pinker whether we are witnessing an anti-rationality backlash. He suggests..."

"... what we’re seeing is 'greater inequality in irrationality.' Sport has never been more rational: nowadays in America every team has a statistician. Also, 'there’s more evidence-based medicine' than before. But 'at the same time as that, irrationality has gotten absolutely entrenched at the highest levels of power in the United States.' He thinks the roots of the problem may be partly traced to 'the politicisation of science.' During Covid there were 'hundreds of public health experts saying that it’s OK to go out in Black Lives Matter protests' because 'the benefits of social justice outweigh the costs of spreading Covid.' They would not have said the same had it been 'say, a Maga rally.' He cites a number of similar examples, including an academic journal that promised to 'consult members of indigenous minority groups before deciding whether to accept scientific papers' and a science magazine that endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. Such things 'erode the credibility of science.' He says: 'If science as an institution brands itself as on the political left, it should be prepared to alienate and maybe kiss off the American right.'"

From "Steven Pinker: I’m pinned between cancel culture and Trump/The Harvard psychologist talks to James Marriott about the campus ‘woke’ left and the Republican campaign to defund universities" (London Times).

"Through one Canadian ancestor, Louis Boucher de Grandpre, who was born in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, the pope is related to... Angelina Jolie, Hillary Clinton, Justin Bieber, Jack Kerouac and Madonna."

The NYT informs in an article that seems mostly concerned with whether the Pope is — in some sense — black.

We're told the article is written "by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in collaboration with American Ancestors and the Cuban Genealogy Club of Miami."

The article contains an amazing — and amazingly wrong — assertion: "Every one of us descends from an astounding number of recent ancestors: two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, 16 great great grandparents, 32 third great grandparents and 64 fourth great grandparents — that’s 126 unique ancestors through two parents. Go back to our 12th great grandparents, and everyone has a whopping 32,766 forebears."

As if the 32,766 positions on the family tree are always — and for everyone — going to be 32,766 different individuals! I think it's unlikely that anyone has 32,766 different individuals on a family tree going back to the 12th great grandparents.

The terms for this very well known issue is "pedigree collapse."

"In my 22 years as a Harvard professor, I have not been afraid to bite the hand that feeds me."

Writes Steven Pinker, in "Harvard Derangement Syndrome" (NYT)(free-access link).

My 2014 essay “The Trouble With Harvard” called for a transparent, meritocratic admissions policy to replace the current “eye-of-newt-wing-of-bat mysticism” which “conceals unknown mischief.” My 2023 “five-point plan to save Harvard from itself” urged the university to commit itself to free speech, institutional neutrality, nonviolence, viewpoint diversity and disempowering D.E.I. Last fall, on the anniversary of Oct. 7, 2023, I explained “how I wish Harvard taught students to talk about Israel,” calling on the university to teach our students to grapple with moral and historical complexity. Two years ago I co-founded the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, which has since regularly challenged university policies and pressed for changes.

So I’m hardly an apologist for my employer when I say that the invective now being aimed at Harvard has become unhinged.

"There is also a peculiar effect whereby different books read by the same narrator can seem to agglutinate into a single mongrel super-book."

"The audiobooks of Norman Mailer’s 'Miami and the Siege of Chicago,' Steven Pinker’s 'The Sense of Style,' and Nabokov’s epic 'Ada' are all read by Arthur Morey, and I’ve begun to hear his circumspect and world-weary enunciation meld into an imaginary work in which the 1968 Republican convention is satirized between bouts of hectoring the reader about sentence construction, all in Nabokov’s wildly over-frosted late prose. Many of my beloved science-fiction audiobooks are read by Robertson Dean, whose voice sounds like a glob of pomegranate molasses falling off the edge of a spoon. It’s a good fit for techy near-future dystopias, at once hal-ishly flat and resonantly mellow, saying things like, '[she] lay staring up at a dim anamorphic view of the repeated insectoid cartouche' (that’s from William Gibson’s 'Zero History')."

Writes Paul Grimstad, in "Confessions of an Audiobook Addict/It’s both strange and enlightening to move through the world with an author’s voice filling your ears" (The New Yorker).

"I struggle as a philosopher to reconcile my image of my body with its task in the world of being the emissary of my mind...."

"Often, I cannot bear the idea of sending out my 'soft animal' of a body, in the words of the poet Mary Oliver, to fight for feminist views that are edgy and controversial and to represent a discipline that prides itself on sharpness, clarity and precision. I feel betrayed by my soft borders. This false binary exists partly in my own head, yes, but also very much in others’: I was recently apprised of a caption on a portrait of David Hume, the 18th-century philosopher, in an introductory philosophy textbook: 'The lightness and quickness of his mind was entirely hidden by the lumpishness of his appearance.' Thus have other fat philosophers been warned that our bodies may similarly mask our intellects. The cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker isn’t a philosopher, but his latest book, 'Rationality,' handily demonstrates the worldview that equates thinness with reason.... [H]e chides the irrational doofus who prefers the 'small pleasur' of chowing down on lasagna now over the supposedly 'large pleasure of a slim body' in perpetuity. They 'succumb' to 'myopic discounting' of future rewards — an (ableist) term for short-term thinking, illustrated with a fatphobic example."

From "Diet Culture Is Unhealthy. It’s Also Immoral" by philosophy professor Kate Manne (NYT).

"I have 5 different colleagues who were in tight with him."

Steven Pinker discusses his impression of Jeffrey Epstein with Joe Rogan. pic.twitter.com/QwbFdw7k8i

— Mythinformed MKE (@MythinformedMKE) December 4, 2021

I decided to blog this with that quote in the headline before I listened to the end of the clip. The quote caught my ear because who were the colleagues? And "in tight" is such an evocative phrase when we're talking about not just friendship but sexual activity.

I finally listened through and heard how that sentence continued: "I have 5 different colleagues who were in tight with him — to my tremendous disadvantage because it meant that people would snap pictures and there I would be in a crowd with this sex criminal, one of the worst things that's ever happened to me."

The news of "moral panic."

1. "The conservative moral panic over a new California bill on children's toys" (SF Gate): The purported "moral panic" is criticism of a bill that requires toy stores to have a "gender neutral" section. Who's closer to a condition that can be called "moral panic" — the people who push through legislation like this or the people who don't appreciate the regulation? 

2. "The BBC and The Times are accused of stoking a 'moral panic' against the trans community" (Insider). A trans person asserts "I now feel like I'm a disease, a problem, something that needs to be gotten rid of, because every story that features in the British press about trans people is negative." There was a BBC article recently, "We're being pressured into sex by some trans women" about lesbians objecting to being called transphobic because they only want to have sex with people who are biologically female. (Isn't this Insider article itself raising a moral panic — about attacks on transgender people?)

3. "Steven Pinker: Danger of moral panic over 'fake news'" (Global Herald). 

4. "A Frenzy of Book Banning" by Michelle Goldberg (NYT). "[T]he paranoid belief that liberalism is a front for pedophile cabals is a staple of the QAnon conspiracy theory. This spreading moral panic demonstrates, yet again, why the left needs the First Amendment, even if the veneration of free speech has fallen out fashion among some progressives." (But isn't there also a moral panic about QAnon?)

5. "Election guru Rachel Bitecofer: Democrats face '10-alarm fire' after Virginia debacle Democrats could still win midterms and stop Trump's coup, says election forecaster — if they actually had a plan" (Salon). Republicans are using "the bogeyman of 'critical race theory' to mobilize white voters anxious about demographic change and overly eager to protect their children (or other people's) from the truths of American history" and Democrats lack "anything close to an adequate defense against these racist moral-panic attacks." (Isn't this idea of "Trump's coup" also a moral panic?)

6. "‘Traditional Values’ Unite Both Sides in a New Ideological Cold War/Republicans and global authoritarians around the world from different political, cultural and social contexts use alarmingly similar tactics" (Moscow Times). "Far-right demagogues from Moscow to Texas increasingly incite moral panic to stir up tensions and deflect from domestic troubles.... [Putin] did not address public health measures and instead chose to rail against 'cancel culture' and gender-segregated bathrooms in the West."

7. "How Did Paul Gosar Become Such a Deranged Meme Lord?/'You are a dentist, for God’s sake. You don’t need to be tweeting these "Attack on Titan" memes'" (Daily Beast)."You’re seeing these weird shades of conspiracy theories—there’s a softer, leftier tinge to all of these. I’m seeing people with, like, anime avatars using astrology to argue [Travis Scott's Astroworld concert] was a Satanic ritual... There is sort of a soft spiritualism, I think, among certain Gen Z and millennial cohorts… I think that these audiences are a little bit more receptive to moral panics than older folks might realize."

8."How France's ‘great replacement’ theory conquered the global far right" (France24). 'The people who watch that interview and who may fall for this moral panic, this idea that they’re going to be replaced ethnographically... don’t want to be called racist and will say they’re defending civilisation."

"Still, Pinker is troubled by what he sees as rationality’s image problem. 'Rationality is uncool,' he laments."

"It isn’t seen as 'dope, phat, chill, fly, sick or da bomb.' As evidence for its diminished status, he quotes celebrations of nonsense by the Talking Heads and Zorba the Greek. (Pinker is also vexed by the line 'Let’s go crazy,' which he says was 'adjured' by 'the Artist Formerly Known as Prince.')"

From "In ‘Rationality,’ Steven Pinker Sticks Up (Again) for Reason’s Role in Human Progress" by Jennifer Szalai (NYT).

Prince wasn't calling himself the Artist Formerly Known as Prince when "Let's Go Crazy" came out (or when he last walked the face of the earth), but I guess the idea is to highlight his connection to the irrational. Ironically, Pinker's writing employs irrationality in an effort to convince us that people don't value rationality. Maybe that's rational. If we're irrational and he wants to persuade us that rationality is good, maybe he needs to scare us about the threat of irrationality. 

"Relying on an anecdote, arguing ad hominem — these should be mortifying."

Said Steven Pinker, quoted in "Steven Pinker Thinks Your Sense of Imminent Doom Is Wrong" (NYT), an interview with Pinker about his new book "Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters."

Then the interviewer asks him "Do you see any irrational beliefs as useful?" and he says:

Yeah. For example, every time the media blames a fire or a storm on climate change, it’s a dubious argument in the sense that those are events that belong to weather, not climate. You can never attribute a particular event to a trend. It’s also the case, given that there is an availability bias in human cognition, that people tend to be more influenced by images and narratives and anecdotes than trends. If a particular anecdote or event can in the public mind be equated with a trend, and the impression that people get from the flamboyant image gets them to appreciate what in reality is a trend, then I have no problem with using it that way.

Should we be mortified?

I'm sure Pinker could give a rational or rational sounding answer to the question whether he contradicted himself, but let me try to do it myself. You can wish people would favor rationality so much that they'd be mortified by reliance on anecdote and still notice, quite rationally, that as irrationality rages on in the human mind, it will, at least some of the time, drive people in the right direction. 

By using climate change as his example, Pinker is assuming the reader already believes what he believes and what he believes rationally, which is that climate change is indeed an immense problem and one that the less rational people have difficulty facing. So he likes that irrational thought — reliance on "images and narratives and anecdotes" — will work on these less rational people. We already know what we need them to think and that their minds don't work right, so it's okay — it's rational — to do what's necessary to get them to think what it's good for them to think. In that sense, propaganda is rational.

I'm not agreeing with all that, just sketching it out as a sympathetic reader after I flagged a seeming contradiction. 

"He lied to people in his advertising; he had more money to spend because he represented corporate interests; states changed their voting laws and let illegal people vote; the Russians intervened..."

"... they suppressed turnout; the press was biased against him; He was wrongly blamed for [insert here]; some people voted twice; etc."

That's what people whose candidate lost have said about why the winner won after every election since 1996, according to University of Pennsylvania polisci prof Diana Mutz, who's been taking surveys on this question. 

Quoted in "America, We Have a Problem/The rise of ‘political sectarianism’ is putting us all in danger" by Thomas B. Edsall (NYT).

Edsall wants to say that now people must stop behaving like this, but why would that happen? The idea — which doesn't strike me as too promising — is that with Trump people have finally gone too far. And Trump himself stoked these ideas. Edsall quotes Harvard psychology prof Steven Pinker: 

What’s extraordinary about the present moment is how far most Republicans have gone in endorsing beliefs that are disconnected from reality and serve only to bind the sect and excommunicate the unfaithful. 

At some point, Pinker says, "reality will push back." 

Systemic racism at TikTok?

My TikTok isn't being promoted to the top of people's feeds either. This is outrageous. I mean, I don't even have one, but why am I not getting more attention. It's obviously systemic prejudice against me. https://t.co/zDa9OeKrI8

— James Lindsay, if that's my real name (@ConceptualJames) July 31, 2020

Problems with TikTok may be so yesterday, because today is the day Trump said he was banning TikTok. Interesting to see him getting ahead of The Woke, who were coming for TikTok anyway.

Keep an eye on James Lindsay. He's the author of that excellent essay "No, the Woke Won’t Debate You. Here’s Why" that we were talking about yesterday, here. He's got a book coming out, "Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody," which is going to be a big deal. And look at the high-level attention he's getting:

The Roots Of Wokeness: Insightful review by @sullydish of Pluckrose & Lindsay’s “Cynical Theories,” on the philosophical foundations of “social justice” warfare. https://t.co/dK9LV49eWW

— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) August 1, 2020

"The Fox News star Tucker Carlson said on Monday evening that he would leave on a vacation, starting immediately, days after a writer on his program, Blake Neff, resigned over racist, sexist and misogynist messages..."

"... that Mr. Neff published pseudonymously on an online message board. Mr. Carlson told viewers that he would return to his show next week and described the vacation as 'long planned,' suggesting that his time off had been set before Mr. Neff was revealed on Friday as the author of the offensive posts.... Mr. Neff... resigned last week after Fox News learned of his activity on AutoAdmit, an online forum popular with law students. There, Mr. Neff had written messages that denigrated African-Americans, Asian-Americans and women.... 'What Blake wrote anonymously was wrong,' [Carlson] told viewers. 'We don’t endorse those words. They have no connection to the show. It is wrong to attack people for qualities they cannot control.'... Mr. Carlson, who has used his platform to denounce a so-called cancel culture that he says stymies free speech, appended a somewhat defiant note. He said that Mr. Neff 'has paid a very heavy price' for his behavior, 'but we should also point out to the ghouls now beating their chests in triumph at the destruction of a young man, that self-righteousness also has its costs... We are all human.... When we pretend we are holy, we are lying. When we pose as blameless in order to hurt other people, we are committing the gravest sin of all, and we will be punished for it, there’s no question."

From "Tucker Carlson to Take ‘Long-Planned’ Vacation After Writer’s Resignation/On his Monday evening show, the Fox News host said racist and sexist posts by one of his writers, Blake Neff, were 'wrong,' while castigating his detractors as 'ghouls'" (NYT).

I hope this "ghouls" terminology catches on. It was only 3 days ago that I myself said: "I've been seeing this Steven Pinker story out of the corner of my eye for a while. I don't even know what the cancel ghouls even say that he did wrong. I just assume they're crying wolf."

IN THE COMMENTS: Wince links to the fascination with the word "ghoul" in "Gangs of New York":

"This practice of reading someone's words in an attempt to look for 'dogwhistles' is the opposite of 'charitable interpretation'..."

"... which means 'interpreting a speaker's statements in the most rational way possible and, in the case of any argument, considering its best, strongest possible interpretation.' In contrast, dogwhistle hunting is the practice of interpreting someone's words in the most unreasonable or offensive way imaginable."

Writes my son John, discussing a recent effort to cancel Steven Pinker.

I've been seeing this Steven Pinker story out of the corner of my eye for a while. I don't even know what the cancel ghouls even say that he did wrong. I just assume they're crying wolf. (Sorry to introduce a rival canine into this little post.)

Not laughable at all.

I'm reading "Cancel Culture Claims Another Scalp" by John Hinderaker (at Power Line), which is about the Bret Stephens column on the "genius" of Jews. I blogged about the column, here, before the Twitter outrage cranked up.  I said:

So, according to Stephens, there are the people who can build things and do things in the real world. They can perform feats of engineering or devise military strategy. But those things are "prosaic," and — in Stephens blunt view — not what Jews do with their "prodigious intellect." Jews — in Stephens view — stand apart from these practical things and "question the premise and rethink the concept," they "ask why (or why not?)," they see absurdities and "maintain[] a critical distance." It may be good to value different kinds of intelligence and to roughly opine that there are the people who do things in the real world and people who stand back and observe and critique everything, but it's a big problem to put a group — even your own group — in the second category.

I was focusing on the danger to Jews that was inherent in the praise Stephens was attempting to offer. The outrage on Twitter (and elsewhere) was more about the use of IQ data from a paper co-authored by the anthropologist Henry Harpending. Hinderaker is critical of that outrage:

[L]iberals promptly swung into action, in many cases weirdly accusing Stephens of perpetuating an anti-Semitic stereotype.

Hinderaker quotes "Bret Stephens under fire for NY Times column on Jewish intelligence" (Jewish Telegraphic Agency):

But the Southern Poverty Law Center said that Harpending was an anthropologist who possessed a white nationalist ideology and promoted eugenics, which was studied and practiced by the Nazis.

Hinderaker comments:

I would’t take the SPLC’s word for anything, and there is something laughable about a supposed pro-Nazi who publishes an article finding that Jews have high IQ scores. 

Wow! I do not find that laughable at all. Whatever may or may not be true about Harpending, it is not inconsistent with anti-Semitism to believe that Jews are especially intelligent! Bigotry takes many forms, and the stereotypes about some groups include the notion that they have lower intelligence, but other stereotypes — for other groups — have the idea that they are more intelligent. That can be a basis for admiration, but it can be — and has been — a source of fear and the desire to disempower the people who you might imagine are deviously arranging the world to hurt you.

"I was surprised by how much interest there’s been from centrist politicians, who are desperate for a coherent narrative to defend centrist liberalism, cosmopolitanism, open society..."

"... from the threats both by populists and by the hard left. I think there is a hunger for a coherent worldview that isn’t just the status quo, the un-Trumpism. We can do better than that. We ought to use reason and science to enhance human well-being.... We can set up institutions that result in greater rationality than any of us is capable of individually, like peer review, like free speech, like a free press, like empirical testing — norms and institutions that make us collectively more rational than any of us is individually.... One answer is to make people aware of [irrationality], because I think most people are not. Then once one has that understanding, to try to depoliticize issues as much as possible. I do try to disassociate empirical issues from political baggage."

Said Steven Pinker, quoted in the NYT last November in "Steven Pinker Thinks the Future Is Looking Bright/The Harvard psychologist says he is no starry-eyed optimist. It’s just that the data don’t lie." The "interest" he's talking about is in his book "Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress."

I found that this morning because I was searching the NYT for the phrase "hard left" after encountering a reference to the "hard right" in a NYT article about Ginni Thomas ("President Trump met last week with a delegation of hard-right activists led by Ginni Thomas") and seeing a barrage of comments objecting to the term. It raises the question whether the NYT will say "hard left" at the same degree of deviation from the center that causes it to say "hard right." I haven't systematically counted, but I think "hard right" is much more common, and "hard left" is most likely to come up in references to other countries (notably Venezuela) or in quotes, but I did find some examples of "hard left" in news articles, such as "Rally by White Nationalists Was Over Almost Before It Began" (from last August):

The alt-right movement, never very well unified, has been particularly rived by infighting and schisms in the last year. Members have been outed by both online activists and mainstream media outlets, causing some to lose their jobs. The left’s ability to turn out counterprotesters has also been a factor, from the hard-left activists threatening violence against far-right street protesters, to center-left citizens who have been vocal, and explicit, in expressing their disgust and scorn.

And "There Is a Revolution on the Left. Democrats Are Bracing." (from last July):

Some national Democrats remain skeptical that voters are focused on specific policy demands of the kind Mr. El-Sayed and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez have championed. Former Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland, a left-of-center Democrat who ran for president in 2016, suggested the party wants “new leaders and fresh ideas” more than hard-left ideology.

Isn't the hard left more of a problem for Democrats than the hard right is a problem for Republicans? If so, I would expect the NYT to help the Democrats stay in the zone of electable leftish moderation.

And I love the Steven Pinker stuff. But he's not a political candidate (indeed that quote came after he rejected the idea of his running for office). I'd like a candidate for President who would talk like that. Howard?

"The idea that [Steven] Pinker, a liberal, Jewish psychology professor, is a fan of a racist, anti-Semitic online movement is absurd on its face..."

"... so it might be tempting to roll your eyes and dismiss this blowup as just another instance of social media doing what it does best: generating outrage. But it’s actually a worthwhile episode to unpack, because it highlights a disturbing, worsening tendency in social media in which tribal allegiances are replacing shared empirical understandings of the world. Or maybe 'subtribal' is the more precise, fitting term to use here. It’s one thing to say that left and right disagree on simple facts about the world — this sort of informational Balkanization has been going on for a while and long predates Twitter. What social media is doing is slicing the salami thinner and thinner, as it were, making it harder even for people who are otherwise in general ideological agreement to agree on basic facts about news events."

Writes Jesse Singal in "Social Media Is Making Us Dumber. Here’s Exhibit A" (NYT).

I think this is the 8 minute version of the talk from which the viral video clip was made:

Steven Pinker "fights pedantry with more pedantry."

"He doesn’t want to concede that the phrase 'very unique' makes no sense (things are either unique or not), so he mounts an odd defense."

Look at two snowflakes from far away, he says, and they no longer seem unique: “The concept ‘unique’ is meaningful only after you specify which qualities are of interest to you and which degree of resolution or grain size you’re applying.” If we did all that, we wouldn’t need the word.

"This class is sh*tty."