Is Steven Pinker Right?

that review sums up everything i find irritating about pinker's outlook.

more gould gems: its only bias if it leads you to evaluate data non-objectively. a scientist is perfectly within his rights to state his preference!

yeah exactly; the problem is when these guys jump out into full-fledged speculation in areas where science as we know it today is incapable of performing any experiments to falsify their wacky ideas, then bias becomes the whole story and, well, mismeasure-of-man shit and bad public policy decisions wind up following just the same. but I think that's a story for another time and I really don't need to be getting into this thread

(and yes of course physicists are always delving into stuff that can't currently be falsified, Einstein did it a LOT, but they have the sense (generally) to put THEORETICAL in front of their title when they do)

once at my school i saw a lecture given by the chair of the psych department where she argued that the fact that bonobo groups, which are led by female bonobos, are far more peaceful than chimpanzee groups gave us insight into why so many peace organizations are run by or founded by women

did you thump your chest and hurl vegetation until she presented her rump?

hurlin' vegetation baybehh

thanks for the new yorker article. i watched the "gender" debate between pinker and elizabeth spelke for a class a few months ago (http://edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html). spelke kind of pwned pinker imo.

as an only child, i don't really have any problem with julie and mark's forbidden lust

plus his hair:

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/2005/0805/images/pinker1.jpg

Short postscript to moonship & Maria's posts yesterday: yeah I was on/off whether to bring up determinism too -- I'm pretty much pro, but (similar to what Maria said) then I'm then veering into metaphysics and I can't argue it well.

in my mind, 'mismeasure-of-man' (not 'determinism') is the key word moonship brings up in relation to evolutionary bio and everything mentioned in this thread so far that i can make heads or tails of. and not just 'mismeasure,' but the practices of science, beyond 'mis'.. i'm just diving into sts at this point (bruno latour etc), but it's helping me dig on the idea of the practice of science in sociological (where it all begins amirite) systems. (disclaimer: liberal arts major speaking).

full disclosure of bias: i majored in anthropology & sociology, and am applying to grad schools in archaeology. so i'm not an expert but i am opinionated! (and irritated by the "it's either science or bullshit" point of view.)

that's kind of amazing hair, by the way. i would probably want to believe someone who looked like that if i saw him talk. i've only read the blank slate, thought it was interesting. (my father actually found it comforting. he said it meant his parenting could only screw us up so far, and he was glad to be not totally responsible for how we turned out. thanks, dad!)

Haha, reading The Stuff of Thoughts yesterday, I saw something that made me wonder if he's an ilxor lurker: talking about datives etc, he used the example sentence (something like)

Norm was given the pashmina

-- which struck me as an unlikely name/object combination to occur in two places independently... :)

peven stinker

Lolita Express passenger!

http://gawker.com/flight-logs-put-clinton-dershowitz-on-pedophile-billio-1681039971

Me (dumb guy): They wrote "exposes Pecker." Heh, heh.
You (smart guy): Thanks to my graduate degree in psycholoinguistics and studies with Noam Chomsky, I notice they wrote "exposes Pecker." Heh, heh. https://t.co/e5yE5ovYVG

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) February 10, 2019

I thought this book review did a good job of summarizing his strengths and weaknesses as a writer (see the second half):

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/02/07/pinker-rosling-progress-accentuate-positive/

lol pic.twitter.com/BeAzo1FLoM

— Michael Hobbes (@RottenInDenmark) August 6, 2023

Peven Stinker strikes again

would love to see this dude meet a horrific violent end