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Although I agree with several of your points, I'm not sure I understand what you mean by meta. I do think that we need to have a more general (meta if you will

Although I agree with several of your points, I'm not sure I understand what you mean by meta. I do think that we need to have a more general (meta if you will) conversation about the outrage and pitchfork actions resulting from social networks (twitter in particular), so I agree with Pinker there. I also strongly disagree that in a piece like this he needed to demonstrate that he has "a willingness to “dismiss and downplay racist violence”", especially if that accusation is based on a tweet citing a NYT article. If that's the only basis for the assessment (I have not seen the other tweets and was not familiar with Pinker before reading this article), then it's absolutely ludicrous. I then agree with his following point, that if citing an article like that in an argument, or disagreeing with a subpoint of a large issue (in a tweet even) can get 500 academics to write a letter to get you dismissed from a fellowship, then we are in very dangerous territory. Your points about the "I'm not comparing it a witch hunt, but it looks like a witch hunt" are well taken and annoyed me a lot as well.

eesmith 6y ago
By "meta", I mean Pinker doesn't talk about the actual issues at hand. 1) One explicit criticism was a stated "willingness to “dismiss and downplay racist violence”". Rather than address the criticism, the article goes into Pinker's meta-discussion about the methods of criticism. A stronger counter-argument would be to first demonstrate why the criticism is meritless. I also do not know the larger context, but nkurz's point was that this was a good article, and I disagree with that assessment. 2) I don't like how there's a lack of concrete examples of cancel culture. Instead, there's a second-hand argument about against cancelling (without listing those who were canceled), and an argument about chilling effects (without describing which arguments are being chilled - something that Pinker could do by proxy, as he says he is secure in his position). If we do go into a discussion about "the outrage and pitchfork actions resulting from social networks", then we need to define terms, backed by specific examples. We have have the Black Lives Matter movement, which have a tragically long list of names and examples of people, which vividly support their thesis that Black Lives have mattered much less than they should. Terms are important. Is what happened to Kaepernick the results of "outrage and pitchfork actions resulting from social networks"? Or is cancel culture something that only happens to bigots and entitled people? If someone quits their job because of public outrage over a legal but distasteful opinion, is that automatically cancel culture? Eg, if someone is fired for promoting unionization on Twitter, is that cancel culture? Having a definition also lets us judge how long "cancel culture" has been here. In my own reading of the topic, liberty means the right of criticism, and very severe penalties are the natural result of some unfavourable opinions - (paraphrasing John Staurt Mills there; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23794480 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23794480 ). By leaving the details blank, Pinker lets people read into the argument whatever viewpoints they want. Which is why I do not think this that good of an article. The lack of a real definition is also my fundamental problem with this entire topic of "cancel culture."

eesmith 6y ago

By "meta", I mean Pinker doesn't talk about the actual issues at hand. 1) One explicit criticism was a stated "willingness to “dismiss and downplay racist violence”". Rather than address the criticism, the article goes into Pinker's meta-discussion about the methods of criticism. A stronger counter-argument would be to first demonstrate why the criticism is meritless. I also do not know the larger context, but nkurz's point was that this was a good article, and I disagree with that assessment. 2) I don't like how there's a lack of concrete examples of cancel culture. Instead, there's a second-hand argument about against cancelling (without listing those who were canceled), and an argument about chilling effects (without describing which arguments are being chilled - something that Pinker could do by proxy, as he says he is secure in his position). If we do go into a discussion about "the outrage and pitchfork actions resulting from social networks", then we need to define terms, backed by specific examples. We have have the Black Lives Matter movement, which have a tragically long list of names and examples of people, which vividly support their thesis that Black Lives have mattered much less than they should. Terms are important. Is what happened to Kaepernick the results of "outrage and pitchfork actions resulting from social networks"? Or is cancel culture something that only happens to bigots and entitled people? If someone quits their job because of public outrage over a legal but distasteful opinion, is that automatically cancel culture? Eg, if someone is fired for promoting unionization on Twitter, is that cancel culture? Having a definition also lets us judge how long "cancel culture" has been here. In my own reading of the topic, liberty means the right of criticism, and very severe penalties are the natural result of some unfavourable opinions - (paraphrasing John Staurt Mills there; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23794480 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23794480 ). By leaving the details blank, Pinker lets people read into the argument whatever viewpoints they want. Which is why I do not think this that good of an article. The lack of a real definition is also my fundamental problem with this entire topic of "cancel culture."