Steven Pinker Wants to Repair Campus Culture

https://www.browndailyherald.com/2021/03/12/reed-21-steven-pinker-wants-repair-campus-culture/

by andyxor • 5 years ago

56 118 5 years ago

browndailyherald.com

xyzzyz• 5 years ago

The overall trends on crime and life expectancy haven’t all of a sudden reversed.

They very much have, though, at least in the US.

Out_of_Characte2• 5 years ago

Sources? Googling both only disproves both your claims.

User23• 5 years ago

Murders certainly increased markedly in major cities in 2020.

qsort2• 5 years ago

To parent's credit, the CDC did report a decline in life expectancy at birth from 2014 to 2017, but the decline was of of a couple decimal points total, which is well within standard error.

Claiming "trends are reversing" is, in fact, FUD.

tptacek8• 5 years ago

Pinker is the wrong person to do it. A lot of baggage.

If this is a story you're generally enthusiastic about, a better person to pay attention to is probably John McWhorter (also a linguist!). I don't cosign all that much of what McWhorter has to say about this topic, but he has much better bona fides.

andyxor2• 5 years ago

who's the right person to do it, with no 'baggage'?

tptacek8• 5 years ago

It really is a lot of baggage. Another person who would strongly agree with the idea that campus culture has become corrupted is Charles Murray. But you can see immediately why Charles Murray couldn't be the figure that reform unified behind! Pinker is, like, 650-750 milliMurrays. He gave a statement that had the intended effect of getting Epstein his sweetheart sentence! Just fatally compromised, for a bunch of reasons.

Beyond the Epstein stuff, and to calibrate the Murrayometer, I'd suggest searches like [Pinker Hsu], [Pinker Bell Curve], [Pinker "Groups and Genes"], [Pinker UCSB shooting], [Pinker "Richard Haier"]. You might be fine with all these search results! I'm saying: you're not going to be building a lot of bridges with this resume.

gpanders• 5 years ago

What baggage, specifically?

tptacek8• 5 years ago

See below (and ideally reply there, if you're moved to, thanks).

ojnabieoot4• 5 years ago

This is probably the most compelling reason to view Pinker as a less-than-good-faith actor here: https://newrepublic.com/article/68044/sex-ed

In 2005 then-Harvard president started a firestorm when he suggested that women were underrepresented in STEM fields because of genetic differences in academic ability. Pinker argued that people were being too politically correct, and suggested that the (true) fact of genetic differences between men implies that there could be a genetic difference in cognitive ability.

But the assumed “fact” that women were statistically less skilled than men in STEM fields was already starting to disintegrate in 2005, as boys were falling behind academically and girls were accelerating, a trend continuing in to 2021. It is ridiculous to think that women somehow got better STEM genes in the space of 40 years. Sociological and political/economic factors are clearly responsible for the change and current discrepancy.

So the idea that the difference is “genetic” is horseshit and has been horseshit since long before 2005. Specifically, it is a bold scientific claim that contradicted current and 2005-era understanding of human biology, and requires far more evidence than some economist’s musing. Summers was wrong (factually and morally) to suggest otherwise and Pinker was wrong to defend it.

Note that Pinker didn’t merely defend Summers’s right to make unfactual remarks. Pinker defended Summers on the merits. I think he continued to defend these views as recently as 2014. In my view this (along with Pinker’s general reactionary tendencies) gives people a good reason to suspect that he’s a sexist jerk who can’t be trusted to engage with “cancel culture” issues honestly.

rayiner7• 5 years ago

I kinda feel bad for John McWhorter. On Twitter, he gets attacked as a sell-out to his race (including by white people!) for strongly holding what are basically widely held center-left positions. It's thankless work.

tptacek8• 5 years ago

I wouldn't feel too bad. McWhorter has deliberately picked the fights he's in (see for instance his longstanding feud with Ta-Nehisi Coates) and deliberately associated with IDW-types specifically, I think, to troll leftists. It's too bad, because I think he's got a lot of important stuff to say about figures like Ibram X Kendi.

(Like I said, I think McWhorter is worth paying attention to. Also, he has one of the great podcasts.)

MisterBastahrd• 5 years ago

McWhorter is a cultural hobbyist who throws bombs for attention.

tptacek8• 5 years ago

I think that's also a little bit true, yes.

notahacker• 5 years ago

Aside from baggage, the article strongly suggests that Pinker has no clue about how to do it. Not only does he not offer a solution, but he hasn't even diagnosed the problem correctly. No Steven, your students are not signalling hostility to certain viewpoints because of 'Marxist critical theory and postmodernism'... even most politics students don't bother to read Adorno or Derrida and if they did they wouldn't find any suggestions to deplatform Charles Murray. And then he apparently suggests the discussion of these very marginal theories he dislikes within universities is also why some conservatives and libertarians don't find scientific consensus on global warming credible, as if the other side of the political spectrum had always trusted scientific theories whose implications conflicted with their core values until the woke left came along!

Complaining that students are being 'indoctrinated' by ideas he thinks are bad doesn't half sound like the censorious elements he's complaining about as well...

Edit: I do wish people who apparently disagree with my post would venture a defence of Pinker's "its the postmodernists" thesis. It's a marketplace of ideas...

soared2• 5 years ago

The article pitches Pinker as a man who sees the bright side of things and that liberalism is going too far on college campuses by practicing their beliefs. While he may have a point, he’s not remotely the unbiased good hearted guy the article intros him as. From Wikipedia:

In 2020, an open letter to the Linguistic Society of America requesting the removal of Pinker from its list of LSA Fellows and its list of media experts was signed by hundreds of academics.[96][97] The letter accused Pinker of a "pattern of drowning out the voices of people suffering from racist and sexist violence, in particular in the immediate aftermath of violent acts and/or protests against the systems that created them", citing as examples six tweets and a phrase used in his 2011 book.[98]

Pinker said that through this letter he was being threatened by "a regime of intimidation that constricts the theatre of ideas".[99][100][101] Several academics criticized the letter and expressed strong support for Pinker

joshuaissac• 5 years ago

The article is criticising what it calls a "wave of illiberalism", which would be the opposite of liberalism going too far.

api• 5 years ago

He had me until he threw in Charles Murray.

I want to believe these bold defenders of classical liberalism and enlightenment values, but I am not oblivious enough to the subtext. I can see what they're trying to wedge into the discussion.

It reminds me of the old 2000s intelligent design "wedge strategy" to sneak literalist creationism into schools and academia, only now it's biological racism that's got to be wedged in there. If you don't like over-zealous woke-ism, stop making them look reasonable by trying to sneak ideological racism in the back door.

It reminds me of the Monty Python dead parrot sketch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9SMUzj-_4Q

"We're not racists... we're... pining!"

If they wanted to talk about the biological basis of human behavior, there are a million better researchers in this area than Charles Murray that do not have the baggage. Try one of these people:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C36&as_yl...

Oooh look, "ethnic differences in brain structure" returns 10+ pages of papers by people who apparently are not being "cancelled." That's strange for a topic that you're supposedly not allowed to study. Maybe they're not being cancelled because they are just doing science and not trying to soft pill people on ideological racism.

These people think blacks are intellectually inferior to other races. That's what they think and they need to admit it or shut the fuck up. That is a dead parrot.

Analemma_• 5 years ago

The other explanation is that this new wave of illiberalism “is just the cumulative effect of several generations” of professors having indoctrinated their students in an ideological mixture of postmodernism and Marxist critical theory. Unfortunately, we have just reached the tipping point.

A friend of mine quipped recently that you can always tell who is behind the curve on their critiques of colleges when they say things like this. For several years now the actual dynamic has been that the undergraduates arrive and tell the professors what to think.

In other words, whether you agree with the students or not, Pinker isn't going to have any success here because this culture is formed long before anyone gets to college.

mushbino2• 5 years ago

To be fair, times change and professors tend to be from a much different generation than the students. During the Vietnam war many professors thought the students were going too far in protesting. Professors can teach the students HOW to think and the students can teach the professors WHAT is important to them. Ideally, it's a two way street. If not then the professors are being left behind by the times.

soared2• 5 years ago

Im very liberally biased but when college students are getting into politics it’s tough to just say hundreds of thousands of students are wrong. I don’t think culture on college campuses can “slide downhill”. These are the people who are educated and the most invested in the future. If they don’t like something, we may want to listen.

leetcrew• 5 years ago

the idealism that is common among college students is admirable, but I don't think it's at all tough to say thousands of students are wrong. about half of college students came straight from high school and have had little experience of the world outside of controlled environments designed, for better or for worse, specifically for them. many are at the very cusp of realizing just how much they don't know. I cringe to think of the simplistic and absurd positions I and my fellow students held and advocated for in college.

baumy• 5 years ago

it’s tough to just say hundreds of thousands of students are wrong

Can you share your reasoning behind this statement? I don't find it remotely tough. If anything, it seems like the most sensible default position.

At risk of sounding glib - have you met many 18-20 year old college students?

throwaw4ybio• 5 years ago

Pinker traces the origins of this dynamic all the way back to 1975 and the publication of E.O. Wilson’s “Sociobiology,” when Wilson and other biologists “would get shouted down” for expressing the view that genetic and other evolutionary considerations determine, in part, social organization.

Two things that might serve as food for thought:

1) I guarantee that know-it-all, newly-minted young adults getting mad at professors didn't start in 1975, though simultaneous social shifts (e.g. things like the anti-Vietnam-War movement) might have made it more socially acceptable for the youngins to speak up in those places.

2) People complaining about being oppressed on campus because of their ideas frequently seem to have the same weird idea. Whereas, no one goes and yells at Lee Smolin when he bags on string theory.

Out_of_Characte2• 5 years ago

On your second point. It does seem interesting that any publication or statement that can be cancelled must be rooted in a certain field where morality can be injected. String theory or astronomy, although complex, is completely abstracted from human society.

Genetics, IQ and Psychology all share parts of their work with things that are intrinsically connected to human society. IQ specifically is also designed to remove any bias to any particular group, culture, language or schooling. and even then the field does not escape the 'cancel culture' with countless articles having been written about discrimination that author of the bell curve supposedly displayed.

Speaking out against discrimination and immorality has always been a virtue but the burden of proof has disappeared and there is no apparent consequence against defaming/cancelling someone innocent. I've never been a fan of libel laws because it can be used to silence opposition but I dont see many other ways to prevent the creation of these authorities by mob rule without proof.

hellomyguys• 5 years ago

Holding powerful people accountable isn't a bad thing. Attacking people who have little power over relatively small things and not allowing them room for growth and reflection is a bad thing. And even for the people with little power who did pretty bad things, we must allow them to be forgiven too. You can't have criminal justice reform without this.

We need to discuss this issue with the nuance of the above.

azinman2• 5 years ago

I think the bigger issue here is the scale provided by the internet. That combined with the lack of investigation or skepticism means people read a tweet and assume that’s all they need to know.

lamontcg• 5 years ago

Yeah this is very obviously punching down on 18 year olds who have simplistic ways of expressing their politics and who don't actually have a lot of power.

altcognito• 5 years ago

Pinker:

1. People are claiming victimhood to seize power

2. I am a victim of censorship!

3. You must listen to me!

That's pretty awesome to fit that in one paper.

bhouston2• 5 years ago

This is a discussion about the Overton Window moving in ways that one disagrees with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

There was always an Overton Window and it has always been moving around. And often people (usually older people) do not like when they have opinions which are being excluded from the Overton Window when previously they were acceptable.

I find that it is best to be specific about what should be in and what should not be in the Overton Window rather than being general.

Why? Discussions of "cancel culture" seems to me to pretend to be meta discussions on whether the Overton Window should exist, but usually they are actually about whether certain topics should be within it. I find that this is a bit of a deception and used to disavow that you are unhappy with the current position of the Overton Window with regards to very specific issues, usually because if they discussed the specifics of their concern, it would actually fall outside of most people's Overton Window - thus the need to argue the meta route.

krona• 5 years ago

There was always an Overton Window and it has always been moving around.

Has it always been getting narrower, though? That seems to be what's changed more than anything. What happens when nothing can be discussed?

sudosysgen7• 5 years ago

Has it been getting narrower, or do you feel as if it does as you slide closer to the edge, relatively?

I don't know, both are possible. But there are a lot of people that claim it's getting smaller but really it's that they're failing to cover up ideas that were always unacceptable.

mattnewton6• 5 years ago

It may seem narrower to people who's views are sliding out of the window, but I see no evidence that the overton window in the US is any narrower now than say, the 1950's.

If anything it feels like it has effectively widened, or at least fundamentally changed to lose some of it's bite, since there is no longer truly national media and everyone can quickly find a bubble with a window that fits their views.

samlevine• 5 years ago

What happens when nothing can be discussed?

At that point, not discussing anything clearly means that you're a witch.

bhouston2• 5 years ago

If the old Overton window (A) and new Overton window (B) are like circles in a Venn diagram and you are determined to stick in the old one, you will find that the intersection between it and the new Overton window is shrinking (A intersects B).

This phenomenon explains why old people who do not want to change with the times will find that their Overton window is shrinking.

yanderekko8• 5 years ago

I find that this is a bit of a deception and used to disavow that you are unhappy with the current position of the Overton Window with regards to very specific issues, usually because if they discussed the specifics of their concern, it would actually fall outside of most people's Overton Window - thus the need to argue the meta route.

I think a lot of the concerns about "cancel culture" in particular is that there's an unusually large (and growing) chasm between the Overton Window that exists in certain elite "captured" institutions and the Overton Window that exists in broader American society - and that the enforcers of this "vocal minority" Overton Window are unusually zealous about trying to punish heresy in their captured spaces.

Also, there's an amusing critique that is increasingly forceful in my view that this is all a way to create a new sort of social class divide. I went to school for a long time and although I do not adhere to the scriptures of wokism I am accultured to its mores and can adopt the requisite Taqiya-style practices to survive in a culturally-hostile environment. Many cannot do the same and are excluded from opportunities accordingly - look at how many cancellations are predicated on "it's not what they said but how they said it" to see this sort of shibboleth-like status filter in action.

jtbayly2• 5 years ago

I disagree. Many of those concerned about this do not hold any view that is currently suddenly outside the window. For you to claim that this is the case with is just a form of ad hominem.

Rather, what is going on is a slippery slope (in reality, not in fallacy) being recognized for what it is. People see that their friends, parents, neighbors, children, coworkers, and eventually themselves are quite possibly going to be labeled with a scarlet letter for holding any view whatsoever except what was decided at yesterday's HR meeting, which nobody has been notified of yet.

In other words, this is not a question of the Overton Window moving. This is a question of whether the Overton Window should become the Overton Pinhole.

qsort2• 5 years ago

The strongest objections to "cancel culture" (it's a bad term, but I'm not arguing semantics, let's just go along with it) are procedural.

Because the public often lacks the entire picture, "cancel mobs" are effectively operating a form of vigilante justice with imperfect information. While strictly speaking people do have a right to do so, when "cancelled" people suffer real-world consequences (pressure on employers to fire them, etc.), the entire thing starts getting scary, regardless of the merit of the accusation.

I'd also argue that, for a well-intentioned person, it's tactically stupid to engage in such behavior, because this circus allows truly bad actors to credibly claim they're being unjustly accused.

throwaway89434517• 5 years ago

Confusingly, cancellation proponents argue that they aren't enforcing justice, but only exercising their "freedom of association" which, they argue, includes depriving dissidents of income and healthcare. "Social Consequences" (TM).

throwaway89434517• 5 years ago

I don't think this is a very good characterization of the debate. Most importantly, the debate as far as I can tell centers around whether or not it is appropriate for your livelihood and access to healthcare to be at the mercy of a Twitter mob, specifically about whether or not threatening someone's livelihood, etc (namely by way of harassment campaign against one's employer) constitutes 'free speech'--more abstractly, the debate is about whether or not threats and harassment constitute free speech.

Further, I don't think the cancel culture debate is about the Overton Window as much as rank partisanship. For example, I don't think progressives would argue that nonviolent protest falls afoul of their OW, but they canceled (and defend the canceling of) a data scientist who so transgressed. Similarly, do progressives really think it's so offensive to publish a quote from a black man in the context of BLM in which he wished for more attention to other problems his community faces--is that actually outside of their OW, or is it more likely that the journalist's crime was publishing a viewpoint that failed to toe the ideological line? Similarly, the Hispanic utility worker who accidentally and absent-mindedly made the "OK" gesture from his truck--whose Overton window is that out-of-bounds of? Or the professor who said a Chinese word in appropriate context which sounded sort of like the N-word? Are these really outside of people's Overton window, or is this just overt bullying? In the other direction, the sitting Prime Minister of Canada has dressed in blackface so often that he's admittedly lost track, but he was somehow not cancelled? Is blackface really within the left-wing Overton Window, or are we observing ideological partisanship?

EDIT: Downvoters, I'm really interested in hearing your opinions!

yeetawayhn• 5 years ago

EDIT: Downvoters, I'm really interested in hearing your opinions!

Best guess is that they just very strongly disagree with your points but have no rebuttal. So a downvote has to do.

rayiner7• 5 years ago

I agree there's always been an Overton Window, but I think you're leaving out important context. When conservatives controlled culture, championing free expression was a way to expand the Overton Window to make it okay to say liberal things. To older liberals like Pinker, the change in tack comes across as hypocritical. (Of course, it's not actually hypocritical, insofar as we're talking about different individuals.)

camdenlock• 5 years ago

It’s pretty amazing how much time and effort is being spent on discrediting Pinker himself without even engaging with his ideas. Go read some of his books and then debate the contents.

sudosysgen7• 5 years ago

If you want to debate his ideas, state them and you can get a debate. Otherwise, the argument is mostly if he's in a position to "repair campus culture", and he isn't, as well as if it needs to be "repaired" at all.

Comevius• 5 years ago

I always found Pinker to be a wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle kind of thinker. His simplistic views are eloquent, but flawed, however somewhat easy to communicate, which makes him popular. A true celebrity intellectual.

Steven Pinker Wants to Repair Campus Culture

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