Pinker vs. the AAAS on the politicization of climate change
whyevolutionistrue.com
whyevolutionistrue.com
https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5pn87/free-speech-crusader-...
We all know who started the politicization of climate change
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_cont...
It's unfortunate that the position "I'm OK, You're OK, They're not OK" sells so well politically. I just imagine 30,000 years from now people have built a Dyson Sphere and evolved considerably and there is still some group of "people" who are talking incessantly about how awful it was that Harvard was "woke" even though everybody else has long forgotten what Harvard was.
I have no particular interest in Pinker, but after reading that article I fail to see the issue. It seems like he was being harassed on the basis of having been in the same room as Epstein a few times. I can see blocking people mentioning you and such a disreputable person as a not totally unreasonable response.
I can forgive Pinker (as a person) for hanging out with immoral people like Dershowitz. But, what would be a better way to prove you are a terrible judge of character? At the same time I'd say that he should keep his mouth shut about most of what he talks about because he's discredited himself.
As I see it there is a nihlism and self-centeredness in all of Pinker's post-2000 work such that the stuff he wrote for Epstein's defense is consistent with the general trend as opposed to being an exception. Sure, his consistent moral position is to tell the World Economic Forum what it wants to hear when they want to hear it.
(E.g. if mainstream culture was Jonestown, Pinker would be Jim Jones.)
Fine, whatever, but that's not what you were alluding to up above vis-a-vis Pinker and Epstein. Which was basically a smear.
Back in 2002, long before the statutory rape findings were widely known -- if the were known at all beyond a select circle, which this (given the voluminous roster of LE ridership) by itself does not prove that Pinker was a part of.
aided in Epstein's 2007 legal defense.
Apparently unknowingly. Again, unless you have information that would indicate otherwise.
I have a lot of reasons to suspect connections between language and cognition, not least of which is experience with animals and birds which have definite and divergent mental models w/o language. (A female cardinal and a red-breasted grosbeak come to my window. The cardinal believes its reflection is another bird and attacks it for hours unless I am in the room in which case it flies away. The grosbeak catches the eye of its reflection and catches my eye and doesn’t mind even if I am close to the window because it understands the situation.)
Any kind of taking language too seriously winds you up in intellectual wastelands like structuralism and post-structuralism.
Pinker’s theme of “it’s getting better all the time” compares unfavorably to Simon, Petroski and similar writers in the 1970s who were up against Watergate, Patricia Hearst, Disco, etc…
If he took responsibility for something I could forgive him but as it is he’s the #1 public intellectual that makes me want to believe in the Lizardman theory.
That he's so well credentialed and respected may trigger a preference cascade. Then we can get back to science.
This is just a man appealing to pleas so as to ignore the roaring fire in front of him.
When politicization touchs science we don't get "politics" with a pinch of science. We get science with too much politics.
Science with too much ego is politics. With some ego, is science. Without ego, is the beauty nature, pure comprehension and knowledge.
That is a good way to describe legacy admissions policies at major universities.