You have to wonder how people are so willing to damage their reputations. I just can't imagine stooping so low as to invite Pinker on to my podcast.
so hes trying to "rebrand racism by whites as something else"?
No hes playing the eugenics angle. Its the same shit psychology majors tried to do with criminals. “You can find the criminal through the brain” is there motto until the researcher found out one of the psychopaths was related to him and then it turns out it was himself. Its bullshit science backed by schizos in the field.
i distinctly heard about years ages ago. kinda like with string theory, nonsensical.
bigotry is a hell of a drug. you either recognize it and call it quits, go into rehab trying to fix the way you think, or you destroy everything in your life trying to justify and accommodate it.
This is who Pinker is as evidenced by his being a major proponent of evolutionary psychology.
Even in academia you will have bigots who will work really hard to legitimize their biases. Seems like they go harder on the bigotry research the older they get.
I’m not familiar with evolutionary psychology but I clicked the link and checked out the page. It seems… not an immediate and total brand of evil? It’s a very broad concept at the high level: that features of human psychology can be survival adaptations and say something about the conditions during our evolution. I read the reactions and criticisms section too and I can see how some sus claims about biological essentialism could be taken too far.
But I guess my point is that just invoking the term and posting the Wikipedia page do not seem to be the immediate character assassination you seem to want them to be. “Look at this guy! He believes our psychology is informed by survival adaptations during our evolution! What a bigot!”
I don’t get it. I think I would need you to say more about what specific cases he has made under this umbrella that you find objectionable. Because on the face of it, it doesn’t seem crazy to say that people have an instinct to be helpful to one another because that turns out to be a positive population evolutionary trait.
I teach evolutionary psychology and show a scene from.Planet Earth where birds of Paradise dance for mates. Food's plentiful, so going "hey, girl. I can get food." Isn't an asset. They gotta do a silly dance to attract a mate in such a food-loaded environment, instead.
I guess you can spin that kind of stuff to poorly explain human behaviors, but from everything I've read and prepped, it's a very broad but innocuous field of psych, if relatively nascent.
It's kind of like string theory. It has a bunch of interesting conjectures but nobody can figure out a way to test any of it.
Take the "selfish gene" (the idea predates Dawkins). One of the theories states that it may be evolutionarily advantageous for an individual to sacrifice themselves for the group if they share enough DNA. They lose the DNA in their bodies but save the exact same DNA in the bodies of their extended family. That's a nice idea and you can get the math to work out in game theory models but how do we test if that's why ducks sometimes lag behind when a hunter tries to shoot them?
That's not to say it can never be tested. There are other cases where we needed to wait for technological breakthroughs until theories could actually be tested.
I guess I’m a humanities guy so when someone writes about patterns of human behavior that could be survival adaptation, I think “hm that’s interesting, I’ll think more about it.”
I don’t think: but this theory can’t produce testable predictions!
It just seems like an anthropological concept, not a scientific theory we can write an equation for. But eh.
That makes sense. Not everything needs to be testable. There are many interesting and important ideas outside of science.
The main problem would be if someone wanted to set policy based on it. That includes the implicit experiment of, "If we adopt policy A we can expect outcome B." If we haven't tested that before turning it into a policy, the policy itself becomes the experiment, and then we need to be very careful about the ethics surrounding such an experiment.
I agree with everything you said. I’ll just add that the scientific method is not how we set policy in general, though perhaps it should be.
oh yea frank green was still pedaling that theory in all his talks, and many physicist already kind debunked it and said he had no actual evidence. ironically its interesting amongst conservatives. so basically pinker is the frank green of psychology.
Friendly spelling disambiguation:
Pedal: to turn a crank or lever by foot
Peddle: to sell
I think you mean the latter. When someone is promoting an idea they are selling others on it, not riding it like a bike.
Hm, I generally had a decently positive opinion of Pinker. Is this a case of him not knowing what this was and getting ambushed? Or did he know what was up going in?
This is who he is. Check out evolutionary psychology. He’s a proponent of this theory that has strong tendency towards racial biases.
Er, evolutionary psychology is a whole field of study with its own journal with hundreds of published studies. If you're going to claim that a whole branch of psychology is racist you're going to need to provide some evidence to back those claims up, because that wikipedia article has nothing more damning in it than the following suggestion that there are critics who think there might be some ethical problems with how it's sometimes used, but that's not a condemnation of the value of the science itself.
Critics have argued that evolutionary psychology might be used to justify existing social hierarchies and reactionary policies. It has also been suggested by critics that evolutionary psychologists' theories and interpretations of empirical data rely heavily on ideological assumptions about race and gender.
But that's like saying a wrench is a weapon because it can be thrown at someone's head; that's problem with the user, not a problem inherent in the tool.
You articulated my thoughts better than I did. Such a bizarre way to criticize Steven Pinker. Like criticizing Tom Cruise for being a part of a native plant gardening club.
Idk, I mean I'm not a fan of Pinker (his whole book on why violence has declined seems to ignore structural violence all around us, especially lower classes, and heavily supports capitalism) but evolutionary psychology seems pretty legit to me?
Geographically isolated groups of a single species will show variations of behavior and psychology that is affected by their environment and genetic predispositions -- that seems like a pretty reasonable take.
Yeah, when people take that to racist extremes, its problematic. You can't assume a person's quality because, when it comes to individuals in a particular, geographically originated group, you don't know where they landed on the spectrum re: genetic predisposition, and then you don't know their current environment either. It all comes out in the wash. I don't really think that means evolutionary psychology is total bunk, though. Its useful to put humans along with other animals when we think about their how their behavior and psychology are affected by evolution.
Geographically isolated groups of a single species will show variations of behavior and psychology that is affected by their environment and genetic predispositions – that seems like a pretty reasonable take.
call it reasonable or plausible or whatever you want, but for it to be science it needs empirical evidence and predictive value. Failing that you just have "reasonable" hypotheses, and one person's "reasonable" is another person's racist/sexist/transphobic/whatever, especially when the hypotheses emphasize nature over nurture. That's the problem with evolutionary psychology.
Eh, I don't necessarily disagree with your statement -- and sure, I'd probably agree that evolutionary psychology has a problem in that it's not super testable -- then again, what does my word mean since I'm a lay person.
It does fit into our understanding of evolution though, and it fits into how we analyze behaviors of other animals. Its clear that some portion of our psychology is genetic, and therefore evolutionary, and it only follows that there's is going to be variability in each individual's initial psychological makeup, even within geographically adjacent groups of individuals. . When you plop nurture on top, that variability becomes even wider. Idk, it seems kinda nonsensical to claim that one person can't be more genetically predisposed to feeling anxiety than another, right?
You can and should call out racists, but just because there are some racists who use evolutionary psychology to be racists, doesn't mean it's all bunk. Just like it doesn't make Darwinism all bunk when it's used by social darwinists to oppress others.
Edit: obviously anyone who says "this race is more likely to act like this because of this" is whack. I guess I'm thinking of evolutionary psychology on more of a macro scale, where it could be used to explain (colloquial "explain," scientific "hypothesize"), for example, why humans experience social anxiety, where feelings of shame or embarrassment come from, how we deal with rejection, or acceptance, etc. in a real scientifically grounded way.
genetic predispositions
I mean, that sounds pretty off.
How do you mean? A person can be genetically predisposed to be tall, but grow up to be short due to environmental circumstances (eg lack of nutrition during childhood)
Edit: I figured this would go without saying, but maybe not: this idea, I think logically, extends to things like dopamine thresholds in the brain, and other, erhm, neurotransmittal (word?) aspects of the body. Really, all aspects of the body start with genetic predisposition and then do or do not undergo changes corresponding with the environment. To be completely clear, I am not a scientist. If the science doesnt support this, then Id happily stand corrected
“University Professor at Presitgeous Uni” ≠ ethical person
I don’t know why we’re suprised cunts like this exists when academia is super heirarchical and research funding often comes from corpos or rich conservative families.
Harvard makes villains. Out of the names you recognize, how many are "good guys" and how many are "bad guys"? I like Lessig, but he knows he's making lawyers that will work for people he doesn't like.
he's been anti vaxx and pretty transphobic for years so not surprising
So, Pinker Than Thou, eh?
c/nominativedeterminism crosspost?
Looks like there's some fair degree of distaste for Pinker here. The man is a revolutionary figure in science, and has an extremely long and fruitful career. I am a fan of Steven Pinker, and have been for many years. He's like Chomsky in some respects, in that he will talk to anyone if he finds the discussion fruitful. It seems that for people like this, truly deep and boundless thinkers, it's not scary to talk to people with bad ideas. It's not even scary to explore some bad ideas. That's how you sort them all out, ya know.
I get that some folks may not like the ideas that Pinker and Chomsky express. Hell, neither do I. But they deserve your respect. They are on the front lines of thought, and have been all of their long and productive lives.
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