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> I’ve noticed that everything Pinker writes bears the scars of the hostile mistranslation tactic. Scarcely does he say anything before he turns around and say

> I’ve noticed that everything Pinker writes bears the scars of the hostile mistranslation tactic. Scarcely does he say anything before he turns around and says, “and here’s what I’m not saying”—and then proceeds to ward off five different misreadings so wild they wouldn’t have occurred to me, but then if you read Leon Wieseltier or John Gray or his other critics, there the misreadings are, trotted out triumphantly; it doesn’t even matter how much time Pinker spent trying to prevent them. > I’m depressed, more generally, that for centuries, the Enlightenment has been met by its beneficiaries with such colossal incomprehension and ingratitude. Save 300 million people from smallpox, and you can expect a return a lecture about your naïve and arrogant scientistic reductionism.

scandox 9y ago
I'm very sympathetic to Aaronson's position in this review, but I think these two comments reveal the problematic aspect of his position: * In his mind (and that of many others) the Enlightenment is about this special group of people who bestowed gifts on normals. I'm sure he'd challenge that characterisation, but I think that's what it amounts to. So instead of this idea being inclusive it becomes an us and them, in which the us is constantly expecting gratitude, while slightly missing the fact that society as a whole always has to be the enabler for what they do - even when it appears to be resisting them! * That aggressive mistranslation explains away the other POV. I think there is mistranslation but let's ask WHY intelligent people are doing that: because they believe that Pinker (et al) have a dangerous subtext, or that their ideas trend in a specific direction. And there is something in that because consider the tension Aaronson feels: he agrees with Pinker that what happened in the past is good, but feels it is leading to disaster. So - if it was so good - why have we ended up in such a bad place? Enlightment people cannot simply say: "it's not our fault we've tried to stop this". They need to accept that maybe something in their ideas and way of approaching things is part of the problem.
- Arnt 9y ago
  In his mind, as I see it, the Enlightenment is about this special group, whose membership is defined by doing enlightenment things for us all. Some of the 2m apps on Google Play are written to achieve some goal for you and not interrupt you or grab your attention. I think the people who write such apps are great, and do something very good in a small way. Now, who are these people? That set of people is defined by the good thing they do. Saving 100m people's lives is a bigger act than writing a good smartphone app. The principle is the same: The membership of the group is attained by doing.
- whatyoucantsay 9y ago
  > "while slightly missing the fact that society as a whole always has to be the enabler for what they do - even when it appears to be resisting them!" Even when society was drowning and burning them to death for heresy? There are a multitude of examples of this, if you care to read histories of the Inquisition. I will give you a starting point—Google "Giordano Bruno" > "They need to accept that maybe something in their (enlightenment) ideas and way of approaching things is part of the problem." :/ > "but let's ask WHY intelligent people are doing that: because they believe that Pinker (et al) have a dangerous subtext, or that their ideas trend in a specific direction." The reasonable answer is because they're highly ideologically motivated, not nearly as intelligent and certainly not as ethical as Pinker.
  - thraway180306 9y ago
    burning them to death for heresy Do you have any examples of actual burning? Of someone who was going around enlightening and got burned for science. Only example I know, Giordano Bruno was as much a scientist as today's theologians and Templeton-sponsored cosmologists; got on the hook for spreading pantheism. Galileo and Copernicus besides not being burnt were also wrong. Church decided to shun them not because of their philosophy (unlike Bruno they were doing surprisingly little theology for the ire that met them), but calculations rightly evaluated to be wrong. In case of Galileo also obnoxious activism asking for persecution. The heresy part came in because of dogma that proper science is god-inspired and thus should be at least somewhat reasonable, which this stuff wasn't at the time (recall, Newton was an alchemist first, the first scientist a second). I can perfectly imagine stuff like this going on in today's groupthink grant system, between suicides of tenured faculty and Prasher turned taxi driver despite Nobel-grade work. ideologically motivated Do you realize that this is tautological? Where do you think ideologies come from if not from reason? Do you, in your arbitrary intelligence, realize that every presumption came to be for a reason? Phenomenon of tradition illustrates that pretty well, even if original reasoning was lost.
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    - 9y ago
- mcguire 9y ago
  "...while slightly missing the fact that society as a whole always has to be the enabler for what they do - even when it appears to be resisting them!" Anyone care to imagine what the results of the industrial revolution would have been without the Luddites and unionized workers fighting against "progress"? It's hard to think of anything more dystopian than technocrats (or whatever your favorite term for the "special people") given the complete power to shape the future they way they would like. I have the same kind of ambivalence to the "mistranslation" issue.
  - falcor84 9y ago
    This is a direction of thought I find quite interesting. And I'd like to ask you what you think would have happened if it were the technocrats who shaped or world. The only type of scenario that comes to my (not very well-read) mind is the one in A Brave New World, which is in my opinion one of the most benevolent possible dystopias. What is it that you have in mind? And how much worse is it, especially compared to the other forms of human suffering we're facing?
    - mcguire 9y ago
      A Brave New Worldis pretty good, as an end state, but here's the question: Who are you going to tell, "We're going to engineer your children to be content, healthy slaves without the ability to perceive their own chains?" Do you tell them beforehand? Might as well pick someone you don't like, right? STEMmies are also big supporters of the flavor of the month club. Every vein of inquiry gets hopped on as The Truth until it plays out and something new comes along. Scientists and engineers are as political as anyone else and more than happy to put their own goals above anything else. Really, the problem of technocracy is that it is the same as any other semi-totalitarianism, except that it is coated in a veneer of "reason" that you cannot argue with.
- mannykannot 9y ago
  I do not see how those two quotes imply a particular opinion of how the enlightenment happened - as far as I can tell, they merely say that the enlightenment (however it occurred) has benefitted a lot of people, yet some of beneficiaries can't stop complaining about it. As for the hostile mistranslators, if they cannot find the presumed dangerous subtext within the work, they should honestly recognize that they cannot find it (which would not prevent them from stating their concerns, just as Aaronson stated his pessimism), rather than pretend that it is there. Ultimately, doing the latter merely reflects badly on both their critical analysis skills, and, to a degree, their ethics.
  - thraway180306 9y ago
    If I were to make a mathematical argument sloppy enough to be open to hostile mistranslators and then on top of that address reviewer's psychology instead of holes she might tried to poke, text would get outright desk rejection on resubmission. In science the odium lies on the philosopher to put forward his idea robustly. Not on the reviewers to understand it in the most favourable light and then... believe?
    - mannykannot 9y ago
      The scope of mistranslations is boundless, so this will not work - and what principle absolves the willful mistranslators of this obligation, anyway?
      - thraway180306 9y ago
        So you advise to scope on the reviewer hypothetical beliefs and personality next time? That is bound to succeed and show my analytical prowess? Even in uncharitable (and possibly mistranslated by me being critiqued!) case her points are baseless and manufactured?
        mannykannot 9y ago
        Too much willful misinterpretation defeats the purpose of critical analysis, and where would that leave the humanities? - it would leave them wallowing in irrelevant self-referentiality, where everyone is talking past everyone else.
- jedharris 9y ago
  I'd like to see evidence that Pinker thinks it is about "this special group of people". What I have read in the book doesn't support this. He of course gives examples of the most remarkable people but goes on to say they depended on an immensely larger group of collaborators. For example the process of eliminating smallpox depended on hundreds of thousands of people including health workers, government functionaries and the patients themselves. Regarding the motivations of the mistranslators: I think those commentators are frustrated romantics who actually reject the enlightenment view that people can understand and improve their world. Look at John Gray's books on Amazon; he argues that progress isn't possible -- he's quite passionate about that! I have had discussions with people who take this position -- typically very intelligent academics. They rely on "anecdata" -- a blizzard of examples of bad stuff. Something like Pinker's blizzard of data and charts would naturally make them very very angry -- as much because of the reliance on statistical thinking as because of the subject. As to why these people are so passionately devoted to romantic (anti-enlightenment) values: I'm not at all sure. I think they have a visceral dislike for analytical treatments of human issues, but I don't have a deeper sense of why that is.
  - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    I think it's because the fruit of the Enlightenment proved to be dehumanizing (despite the humanism in the Enlightenment itself). We got the clockwork universe - the universe as a machine. That was all right. But out of it we got machines (computers) that changed everything, including society. Some of the ways that society changed made it less personal - less real human contact. For some people, that's a real loss. They miss the past form of society. One could call that a romantic longing. Then we started putting humans into the "machine" category. That's also a loss of a romantic (or romanticized) past, but now the loss is intellectual or philosophical.
- psyc 9y ago
  It's not about a special group of people. It's about a cluster of ideas whose time had come. Some attack 'the enlightenment' by attacking its luminaries. Attacking people is facile. People are hypocritical and contradictory. Critiquing the people leads nowhere. Critique the ideas instead. The main idea is reason (usually in contrast to superstition or traditions not motivated by truth). Some have attacked harmful applications of reason. Again, facile. People want to do bad things. Critique the applications and the motives for them before critiquing reason. Why intelligent people misread things isn't a tough question. 1) They have an ideological agenda. 2) They are intelligent-clever, not intelligent-wise. Intelligent-clever people can generate an infinite stream of intelligent-sounding doubt. It's mostly noise and a waste of time to engage with.
justin66 9y ago
I've seen Neil deGrasse Tyson discuss the near necessity today of preempting misinterpretation by explicitly explaining what you're not saying. I believe it was during an interview with Sam Harris that's available at least in part on youtube. The reality is that it works to some degree with people who are just in a hurry and might be inclined to misunderstand your argument due to carelessness. In the case where someone is using your work as a prop and they could just as easily be using someone else's work in its place, that sort of writing or speaking does not provide much protection.
haZard_OS 9y ago
I see the same phenomena in response to Sam Harris. I would blame shortened attention spans for the misreadings (which seems the fashionable scapegoat today) but even other academics spout nonsense with regards to Pinker and Harris. I am, I confess, deeply puzzled by the responses I read and hear about these two (and a few others).

scandox 9y ago

I'm very sympathetic to Aaronson's position in this review, but I think these two comments reveal the problematic aspect of his position: * In his mind (and that of many others) the Enlightenment is about this special group of people who bestowed gifts on normals. I'm sure he'd challenge that characterisation, but I think that's what it amounts to. So instead of this idea being inclusive it becomes an us and them, in which the us is constantly expecting gratitude, while slightly missing the fact that society as a whole always has to be the enabler for what they do - even when it appears to be resisting them! * That aggressive mistranslation explains away the other POV. I think there is mistranslation but let's ask WHY intelligent people are doing that: because they believe that Pinker (et al) have a dangerous subtext, or that their ideas trend in a specific direction. And there is something in that because consider the tension Aaronson feels: he agrees with Pinker that what happened in the past is good, but feels it is leading to disaster. So - if it was so good - why have we ended up in such a bad place? Enlightment people cannot simply say: "it's not our fault we've tried to stop this". They need to accept that maybe something in their ideas and way of approaching things is part of the problem.

Arnt 9y ago
In his mind, as I see it, the Enlightenment is about this special group, whose membership is defined by doing enlightenment things for us all. Some of the 2m apps on Google Play are written to achieve some goal for you and not interrupt you or grab your attention. I think the people who write such apps are great, and do something very good in a small way. Now, who are these people? That set of people is defined by the good thing they do. Saving 100m people's lives is a bigger act than writing a good smartphone app. The principle is the same: The membership of the group is attained by doing.
whatyoucantsay 9y ago
> "while slightly missing the fact that society as a whole always has to be the enabler for what they do - even when it appears to be resisting them!" Even when society was drowning and burning them to death for heresy? There are a multitude of examples of this, if you care to read histories of the Inquisition. I will give you a starting point—Google "Giordano Bruno" > "They need to accept that maybe something in their (enlightenment) ideas and way of approaching things is part of the problem." :/ > "but let's ask WHY intelligent people are doing that: because they believe that Pinker (et al) have a dangerous subtext, or that their ideas trend in a specific direction." The reasonable answer is because they're highly ideologically motivated, not nearly as intelligent and certainly not as ethical as Pinker.
- thraway180306 9y ago
  burning them to death for heresy Do you have any examples of actual burning? Of someone who was going around enlightening and got burned for science. Only example I know, Giordano Bruno was as much a scientist as today's theologians and Templeton-sponsored cosmologists; got on the hook for spreading pantheism. Galileo and Copernicus besides not being burnt were also wrong. Church decided to shun them not because of their philosophy (unlike Bruno they were doing surprisingly little theology for the ire that met them), but calculations rightly evaluated to be wrong. In case of Galileo also obnoxious activism asking for persecution. The heresy part came in because of dogma that proper science is god-inspired and thus should be at least somewhat reasonable, which this stuff wasn't at the time (recall, Newton was an alchemist first, the first scientist a second). I can perfectly imagine stuff like this going on in today's groupthink grant system, between suicides of tenured faculty and Prasher turned taxi driver despite Nobel-grade work. ideologically motivated Do you realize that this is tautological? Where do you think ideologies come from if not from reason? Do you, in your arbitrary intelligence, realize that every presumption came to be for a reason? Phenomenon of tradition illustrates that pretty well, even if original reasoning was lost.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - 9y ago
mcguire 9y ago
"...while slightly missing the fact that society as a whole always has to be the enabler for what they do - even when it appears to be resisting them!" Anyone care to imagine what the results of the industrial revolution would have been without the Luddites and unionized workers fighting against "progress"? It's hard to think of anything more dystopian than technocrats (or whatever your favorite term for the "special people") given the complete power to shape the future they way they would like. I have the same kind of ambivalence to the "mistranslation" issue.
- falcor84 9y ago
  This is a direction of thought I find quite interesting. And I'd like to ask you what you think would have happened if it were the technocrats who shaped or world. The only type of scenario that comes to my (not very well-read) mind is the one in A Brave New World, which is in my opinion one of the most benevolent possible dystopias. What is it that you have in mind? And how much worse is it, especially compared to the other forms of human suffering we're facing?
  - mcguire 9y ago
    A Brave New Worldis pretty good, as an end state, but here's the question: Who are you going to tell, "We're going to engineer your children to be content, healthy slaves without the ability to perceive their own chains?" Do you tell them beforehand? Might as well pick someone you don't like, right? STEMmies are also big supporters of the flavor of the month club. Every vein of inquiry gets hopped on as The Truth until it plays out and something new comes along. Scientists and engineers are as political as anyone else and more than happy to put their own goals above anything else. Really, the problem of technocracy is that it is the same as any other semi-totalitarianism, except that it is coated in a veneer of "reason" that you cannot argue with.
mannykannot 9y ago
I do not see how those two quotes imply a particular opinion of how the enlightenment happened - as far as I can tell, they merely say that the enlightenment (however it occurred) has benefitted a lot of people, yet some of beneficiaries can't stop complaining about it. As for the hostile mistranslators, if they cannot find the presumed dangerous subtext within the work, they should honestly recognize that they cannot find it (which would not prevent them from stating their concerns, just as Aaronson stated his pessimism), rather than pretend that it is there. Ultimately, doing the latter merely reflects badly on both their critical analysis skills, and, to a degree, their ethics.
- thraway180306 9y ago
  If I were to make a mathematical argument sloppy enough to be open to hostile mistranslators and then on top of that address reviewer's psychology instead of holes she might tried to poke, text would get outright desk rejection on resubmission. In science the odium lies on the philosopher to put forward his idea robustly. Not on the reviewers to understand it in the most favourable light and then... believe?
  - mannykannot 9y ago
    The scope of mistranslations is boundless, so this will not work - and what principle absolves the willful mistranslators of this obligation, anyway?
    - thraway180306 9y ago
      So you advise to scope on the reviewer hypothetical beliefs and personality next time? That is bound to succeed and show my analytical prowess? Even in uncharitable (and possibly mistranslated by me being critiqued!) case her points are baseless and manufactured?
      - mannykannot 9y ago
        Too much willful misinterpretation defeats the purpose of critical analysis, and where would that leave the humanities? - it would leave them wallowing in irrelevant self-referentiality, where everyone is talking past everyone else.
jedharris 9y ago
I'd like to see evidence that Pinker thinks it is about "this special group of people". What I have read in the book doesn't support this. He of course gives examples of the most remarkable people but goes on to say they depended on an immensely larger group of collaborators. For example the process of eliminating smallpox depended on hundreds of thousands of people including health workers, government functionaries and the patients themselves. Regarding the motivations of the mistranslators: I think those commentators are frustrated romantics who actually reject the enlightenment view that people can understand and improve their world. Look at John Gray's books on Amazon; he argues that progress isn't possible -- he's quite passionate about that! I have had discussions with people who take this position -- typically very intelligent academics. They rely on "anecdata" -- a blizzard of examples of bad stuff. Something like Pinker's blizzard of data and charts would naturally make them very very angry -- as much because of the reliance on statistical thinking as because of the subject. As to why these people are so passionately devoted to romantic (anti-enlightenment) values: I'm not at all sure. I think they have a visceral dislike for analytical treatments of human issues, but I don't have a deeper sense of why that is.
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  I think it's because the fruit of the Enlightenment proved to be dehumanizing (despite the humanism in the Enlightenment itself). We got the clockwork universe - the universe as a machine. That was all right. But out of it we got machines (computers) that changed everything, including society. Some of the ways that society changed made it less personal - less real human contact. For some people, that's a real loss. They miss the past form of society. One could call that a romantic longing. Then we started putting humans into the "machine" category. That's also a loss of a romantic (or romanticized) past, but now the loss is intellectual or philosophical.
psyc 9y ago
It's not about a special group of people. It's about a cluster of ideas whose time had come. Some attack 'the enlightenment' by attacking its luminaries. Attacking people is facile. People are hypocritical and contradictory. Critiquing the people leads nowhere. Critique the ideas instead. The main idea is reason (usually in contrast to superstition or traditions not motivated by truth). Some have attacked harmful applications of reason. Again, facile. People want to do bad things. Critique the applications and the motives for them before critiquing reason. Why intelligent people misread things isn't a tough question. 1) They have an ideological agenda. 2) They are intelligent-clever, not intelligent-wise. Intelligent-clever people can generate an infinite stream of intelligent-sounding doubt. It's mostly noise and a waste of time to engage with.

justin66 9y ago

I've seen Neil deGrasse Tyson discuss the near necessity today of preempting misinterpretation by explicitly explaining what you're not saying. I believe it was during an interview with Sam Harris that's available at least in part on youtube. The reality is that it works to some degree with people who are just in a hurry and might be inclined to misunderstand your argument due to carelessness. In the case where someone is using your work as a prop and they could just as easily be using someone else's work in its place, that sort of writing or speaking does not provide much protection.

haZard_OS 9y ago

I see the same phenomena in response to Sam Harris. I would blame shortened attention spans for the misreadings (which seems the fashionable scapegoat today) but even other academics spout nonsense with regards to Pinker and Harris. I am, I confess, deeply puzzled by the responses I read and hear about these two (and a few others).