4 ms·

The forehead-slappingly stupid attempt to cancel Steven Pinker

perl4ever 6y ago
What Pinker apparently has said, and is a popular opinion these days that I see all over the place, which some people see as extremely racist and others don't, is that police killings being proportional to arrests is evidence against bias in using deadly violence, given there is an interaction in the first place. It seems like a complete non sequitur to me, is the problem. Even with strict framing where you don't look at/think about bias in the arrests. One can imagine a world where anywhere from 0% to 100% of killings were justified, but regardless having the exact same number of deaths. The casualty number logically tells you nothing about whether any of the actions were appropriate or necessary. So rightly or wrongly, it makes sense to me if a lot of people think nobody could be this obtuse and assume bad faith. Especially when, you know, it's someone widely believed to be smart.
- wutbrodo 6y ago
  It seems like you've misunderstood the conversation about these killings. The mainstream of the discourse about police killings of black men is rooted in the notion that they're being killed because policing is a malevolent, explicitly racist institution whose racism manifests in a proclivity to kill black men at higher rates than white men. This is what a very large fraction of my affluent, nominally-educated social circle believes, and it's dominated the conversation about these protests. This isn't a new line; the original round of BLM protests were even more statistically illiterate on the point than the current ones. I've always found it ludicrous for people to tar a statement as offensive on grounds of being a non sequitur and thus in bad faith. This relies on being confident that both you and the accused have an aligned and 100% accurate sense of the discourse, and that there's no way that any reasonable number of Pinker's more than half million followers could hold the belief he's addressing. (Not that it matters, but since this is a pretty high-emotion subject, I'll just lay my cards on the table: As far as I can tell, the notion that police kill unarmed men _at all_ is abhorrent. I am and long have been a strident supporter of greater limits on the police (and carceral system), but fantasizing that police killings are racialized is just going to lead you to the same blind alley of pseudoscience and IATs that BLM is in. That doesn't mean that I think the racial skew is a non-problem: the higher arrest rate is largely mediated through a higher crime rate in the black community, a problem whose roots lie in a much larger racial justice problem that is similarly disserved by misinterpreting reality).
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    No, I haven't misunderstood the conversation; I'm not interested in it at all, just in one specific point about what Pinker specifically wrote. I guess that's not what you want to talk about, but I wish you wouldn't reply to me if you don't want to engage.
    - wutbrodo 6y ago
      It appears you've also misunderstood my comment (or I've misunderstood yours). Your claim is that Pinker's comment was a non sequitur, as arrest-proportional killings don't convey information about whether the killing were necessary. But in the context of a conversation that assumes that the population-relative skew of killings is driven by racism, it's not a non sequitur at all: it provides evidence against the ubiquitous, confident claim that the population skew is due to explicit racism by the police. It's still possible that a black men being arrested has a higher chance of being killed _relative to the necessity of doing so_, but nobody has even tried to make that case statistically. If I've misunderstood your point, perhaps you could clarify, instead of giving a petulant, low-effort response.
      - perl4ever 6y ago
        It seems you are suggesting it's possible for killings to be driven by racism, but for the skew of killings not to be driven by racism. It's a very fine distinction, which I am not interested in validating or invalidating, but I'm thinking it's not relevant to why Pinker's tweet was ill-received when he wrote: "Data: Police don't shoot blacks disproportionately." and "Problem: Not race...". He just wasn't that finely tuned.
        wutbrodo 6y ago
        > It seems you are suggesting it's possible for killings to be driven by racism, but for the skew of killings not to be driven by racism. Well more precisely, I'm happy to accept that population-disproportionate killings of black men are due to racism, but understanding the facts is important to understanding how that racism manifests. Ie, if it matches the arrest rate and/or the violent crime rate, we're facing a much broader racial justice problem than simply throwing an IAT at every cop in the country. I don't understand why Pinker's tweet wouldn't be interpreted in that light.
throwawaysea 6y ago
I commented about the coming cancellation of Steven Pinker 6 days ago, as it has been developing for a little bit on social media and follows several other campaigns to censor and oppress other professors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23788095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23788095. The charge of “scientific racism” leveled against Pinker is simply rhetorical warfare, waged using an emotionally charged term like “racism”. The pursuit of objective, quantitative, rational, scientific analysis is now under attack using this label. It is the mob burying their head in the sand, unwilling to yield when reality disagrees with their ideological stance. It is anti-science. But these days, even being objective and scientific is seen as offensive to the progressive mentality. And I mean this literally, as seen in the recent Smithsonian chart that they took down (https://www.newsweek.com/smithsonian-race-guidelines-rational-thinking-hard-work-are-white-values-1518333 https://www.newsweek.com/smithsonian-race-guidelines-rationa...). Cancel culture isn’t a recent trend - there are entire websites dedicated to cancel culture on college campuses, such as https://www.thecollegefix.com/ https://www.thecollegefix.com/. Free thought, free inquiry, and open debate are under attack from those that want only their worldview to prevail. It is a direct threat to a free society and much has been written about it recently from Quillette (https://quillette.com/2020/07/01/on-steve-hsu-and-the-campaign-to-thwart-free-inquiry/ https://quillette.com/2020/07/01/on-steve-hsu-and-the-campai...) and Harper’s (https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/ https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/) and others. I’m not sure how to fight back except to create direct consequences for those pursuing cancellation. Perhaps we need to shame and demand the firing of everyone who signs such letters, demanding censorship and cancellation of others.
- eesmith 6y ago
  The "Open Letter to the LSA" by what what you describe as "crazed and radicalized students at Harvard" asks: > to remove Dr. Pinker from the LSA fellows list and the list of media experts falls within the purview of the LSA because of the goals that the LSA has set for itself ... > We want to note here that we have no desire to judge Dr. Pinker’s actions in moral terms, or claim to know what his aims are. Nor do we seek to “cancel” Dr. Pinker, or to bar him from participating in the linguistics and LSA communities (though many of our signatories may well believe that doing so would be the right course of action). If that's "cancel culture" - how do I tell the difference between "cancel culture" and any other sort of advocacy which results in removing someone from a couple of lists? Because I've been trying hard to understand what "cancel culture" means, and the descriptions of it don't seem to make any sense.

What Pinker apparently has said, and is a popular opinion these days that I see all over the place, which some people see as extremely racist and others don't, is that police killings being proportional to arrests is evidence against bias in using deadly violence, given there is an interaction in the first place. It seems like a complete non sequitur to me, is the problem. Even with strict framing where you don't look at/think about bias in the arrests. One can imagine a world where anywhere from 0% to 100% of killings were justified, but regardless having the exact same number of deaths. The casualty number logically tells you nothing about whether any of the actions were appropriate or necessary. So rightly or wrongly, it makes sense to me if a lot of people think nobody could be this obtuse and assume bad faith. Especially when, you know, it's someone widely believed to be smart.

wutbrodo 6y ago
It seems like you've misunderstood the conversation about these killings. The mainstream of the discourse about police killings of black men is rooted in the notion that they're being killed because policing is a malevolent, explicitly racist institution whose racism manifests in a proclivity to kill black men at higher rates than white men. This is what a very large fraction of my affluent, nominally-educated social circle believes, and it's dominated the conversation about these protests. This isn't a new line; the original round of BLM protests were even more statistically illiterate on the point than the current ones. I've always found it ludicrous for people to tar a statement as offensive on grounds of being a non sequitur and thus in bad faith. This relies on being confident that both you and the accused have an aligned and 100% accurate sense of the discourse, and that there's no way that any reasonable number of Pinker's more than half million followers could hold the belief he's addressing. (Not that it matters, but since this is a pretty high-emotion subject, I'll just lay my cards on the table: As far as I can tell, the notion that police kill unarmed men _at all_ is abhorrent. I am and long have been a strident supporter of greater limits on the police (and carceral system), but fantasizing that police killings are racialized is just going to lead you to the same blind alley of pseudoscience and IATs that BLM is in. That doesn't mean that I think the racial skew is a non-problem: the higher arrest rate is largely mediated through a higher crime rate in the black community, a problem whose roots lie in a much larger racial justice problem that is similarly disserved by misinterpreting reality).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- perl4ever 6y ago
  No, I haven't misunderstood the conversation; I'm not interested in it at all, just in one specific point about what Pinker specifically wrote. I guess that's not what you want to talk about, but I wish you wouldn't reply to me if you don't want to engage.
  - wutbrodo 6y ago
    It appears you've also misunderstood my comment (or I've misunderstood yours). Your claim is that Pinker's comment was a non sequitur, as arrest-proportional killings don't convey information about whether the killing were necessary. But in the context of a conversation that assumes that the population-relative skew of killings is driven by racism, it's not a non sequitur at all: it provides evidence against the ubiquitous, confident claim that the population skew is due to explicit racism by the police. It's still possible that a black men being arrested has a higher chance of being killed _relative to the necessity of doing so_, but nobody has even tried to make that case statistically. If I've misunderstood your point, perhaps you could clarify, instead of giving a petulant, low-effort response.
    - perl4ever 6y ago
      It seems you are suggesting it's possible for killings to be driven by racism, but for the skew of killings not to be driven by racism. It's a very fine distinction, which I am not interested in validating or invalidating, but I'm thinking it's not relevant to why Pinker's tweet was ill-received when he wrote: "Data: Police don't shoot blacks disproportionately." and "Problem: Not race...". He just wasn't that finely tuned.
      - wutbrodo 6y ago
        > It seems you are suggesting it's possible for killings to be driven by racism, but for the skew of killings not to be driven by racism. Well more precisely, I'm happy to accept that population-disproportionate killings of black men are due to racism, but understanding the facts is important to understanding how that racism manifests. Ie, if it matches the arrest rate and/or the violent crime rate, we're facing a much broader racial justice problem than simply throwing an IAT at every cop in the country. I don't understand why Pinker's tweet wouldn't be interpreted in that light.

throwawaysea 6y ago

I commented about the coming cancellation of Steven Pinker 6 days ago, as it has been developing for a little bit on social media and follows several other campaigns to censor and oppress other professors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23788095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23788095. The charge of “scientific racism” leveled against Pinker is simply rhetorical warfare, waged using an emotionally charged term like “racism”. The pursuit of objective, quantitative, rational, scientific analysis is now under attack using this label. It is the mob burying their head in the sand, unwilling to yield when reality disagrees with their ideological stance. It is anti-science. But these days, even being objective and scientific is seen as offensive to the progressive mentality. And I mean this literally, as seen in the recent Smithsonian chart that they took down (https://www.newsweek.com/smithsonian-race-guidelines-rational-thinking-hard-work-are-white-values-1518333 https://www.newsweek.com/smithsonian-race-guidelines-rationa...). Cancel culture isn’t a recent trend - there are entire websites dedicated to cancel culture on college campuses, such as https://www.thecollegefix.com/ https://www.thecollegefix.com/. Free thought, free inquiry, and open debate are under attack from those that want only their worldview to prevail. It is a direct threat to a free society and much has been written about it recently from Quillette (https://quillette.com/2020/07/01/on-steve-hsu-and-the-campaign-to-thwart-free-inquiry/ https://quillette.com/2020/07/01/on-steve-hsu-and-the-campai...) and Harper’s (https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/ https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/) and others. I’m not sure how to fight back except to create direct consequences for those pursuing cancellation. Perhaps we need to shame and demand the firing of everyone who signs such letters, demanding censorship and cancellation of others.

eesmith 6y ago
The "Open Letter to the LSA" by what what you describe as "crazed and radicalized students at Harvard" asks: > to remove Dr. Pinker from the LSA fellows list and the list of media experts falls within the purview of the LSA because of the goals that the LSA has set for itself ... > We want to note here that we have no desire to judge Dr. Pinker’s actions in moral terms, or claim to know what his aims are. Nor do we seek to “cancel” Dr. Pinker, or to bar him from participating in the linguistics and LSA communities (though many of our signatories may well believe that doing so would be the right course of action). If that's "cancel culture" - how do I tell the difference between "cancel culture" and any other sort of advocacy which results in removing someone from a couple of lists? Because I've been trying hard to understand what "cancel culture" means, and the descriptions of it don't seem to make any sense.