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.
this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2025
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Harvard author Steven Pinker appears on podcast linked to scientific racism
(www.theguardian.com)
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.
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.
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.
“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.