Is Steven Pinker Right?

Yeah, that's surely the wrongest link up there. ;)

I'm not conceding that it's unexplainable,

Sorry I was unclear, I meant if one (well, I) were to concede that it is unexplainable "scientifically".

I'm just saying maybe science isn't the right tool! Maybe in some areas, a sociological approach is just better.

Yup, got it. But I think we may be talking about different sets of questions here -- to simplify, questions about how A causes/correlates with B in societies, vs questions about how this whole mechanism came to be.

Just on Stephen Jay Gould, I gather his stuff on contingency is heavily contested, not least by the Burgess Shale analysts he writes about in Wonderful Life.

WL is still a great book, if you like reading about crazy animals.

we use only what, 5% of the damn thing

where does this widely repeated idea come from? I am not entirely convinced by it.

that's true DV but i think there's more heat than light in those arguments. for example the the exchange between simon conway morris' and SJG is usually cited (probably because off all the burgess shale group he did the biggest about-face on the issue?) but i think if you read the exchange the controversy comes off sort of flimsy.

sorry to everyone, i'm an unreconstructed SJG fan

by "unscientific" y'all just mean not hard science, right? I would hope that even sociology subscribes to certain scientific methodologies.

Literary theorist calls for more scientific methodology in literary theory

Oh yeah. That's definitely the way to fix literary theory. Make it more interesting with logarithms.

t/s: logarithms vs. logorrhea

"we use only what, 5% of the damn thing

where does this widely repeated idea come from? I am not entirely convinced by it."

it's a myth

...apparently originating from one of those Self Help Guru authors of the 70s

lol @ making literary theory more scientific

Ledge, yeah, sociology and anthropology do use some scientific methodologies. But they also use non-scientific methods and analysis, so they're not "sciences" as such. It varies by subject, of course; archaeology is a lot more like science, postmodern cultural anthropology a lot less.

been thinking about this all morning, starting to think maybe here's what it boils down (apologies for restating other people's ideas, obnoxious habit, but i think maybe these words need to be part of this conversation, so i'll try to do it quick)

now tom used this word but i think he used it in a different sense (or i don't fully get the argument behind the sense in which he used it): determinism

the question boils down to: how much can science explain without falling into determinism? as we attribute more explaining power, are we always creeping toward determinism?

i think there's a tradeoff at work. conway morris and gang are willing to do it because they're still in the field, and it benefits them to push for capital-s science.

stephen jay gould (and pinker and chomsky and dennett and others too) have sort of pushed their way out of their field and into mainstream thinking and mainstream social concern. and so gould as a strong humanist is always going to be turning away from determinism (and that's my bias preference also) ... and pinker and dennett are going to push back on that (and not because i think they're anti-humanist but maybe because doing so lends more wholeness to their own particular research interest)

now i am in a field (education) where "the mismeasure of man" ideas (iq tests, bell curves, and all that) still loom very big (and engaged in daily active struggle against) and so i tilt towards the anti-determinist end

is this a useful distinction, at this point?

It's one I was actually trying to avoid upthread (because it is a bias, and gets metaphysical in a way i don't think i can argue very well), but yeah, that's important.

and kerm's line of argument invoking irreducible complexity to get us out of the determinism (sorry to clown upthread) isn't *that* comforting to me mainly because it seems sorta tautological

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!

The only Pinker I've read is The Blank Slate, which I think suffered a bit from overreach and too many strawman arguments (a point that Louis Menand makes in his mostly skeptical New Yorker review). Perhaps his earlier books that stuck more closely to his area of expertise might be better.

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