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> Pinker kinda wrecked his own credibility back in the oughts. I have no particular interest in Pinker, but after reading that article I fail to see the issue.

• PaulHoule 5y ago
  The issue I have with Pinker is that he comes to sweeping moral conclusions about the prospects of humanity. Your legitimacy for doing that comes out of your own moral leadership, not just having a prestigious position. I can forgive Pinker (as a person) for hanging out with immoral people like Dershowitz. But, what would be a better way to prove you are a terrible judge of character? At the same time I'd say that he should keep his mouth shut about most of what he talks about because he's discredited himself. As I see it there is a nihlism and self-centeredness in all of Pinker's post-2000 work such that the stuff he wrote for Epstein's defense is consistent with the general trend as opposed to being an exception. Sure, his consistent moral position is to tell the World Economic Forum what it wants to hear when they want to hear it. (E.g. if mainstream culture was Jonestown, Pinker would be Jim Jones.)
  • ch4s3 5y ago
    I was only commenting on the Vice article.
  • akhmatova 5y ago
    The issue I have with Pinker is that he comes to sweeping moral conclusions about the prospects of humanity. Fine, whatever, but that's not what you were alluding to up above vis-a-vis Pinker and Epstein. Which was basically a smear.
    • adultSwim 5y ago
      Steven Pinker flew on the Lolita Express and aided in Epstein's 2007 legal defense.
      • akhmatova 5y ago
        Steven Pinker flew on the Lolita Express Back in 2002, long before the statutory rape findings were widely known -- if the were known at all beyond a select circle, which this (given the voluminous roster of LE ridership) by itself does not prove that Pinker was a part of. aided in Epstein's 2007 legal defense. Apparently unknowingly. Again, unless you have information that would indicate otherwise.
        • adultSwim 5y ago
          Who did he think the girls on the plane were?
          • akhmatova 5y ago
            So you "know" there were girls on the plane he was on. How exactly? Were you on the plane yourself?
            • adultSwim 5y ago
              I'll meet you in the middle and say that the perpetrators of these crimes have not been exhaustively investigated and exposed.
        • PaulHoule 5y ago
          I see what he wrote for Dershowitz as just as sophomoric as what he said in his own defense later and the books he writes. For me it comes together in a gestalt. I have a lot of reasons to suspect connections between language and cognition, not least of which is experience with animals and birds which have definite and divergent mental models w/o language. (A female cardinal and a red-breasted grosbeak come to my window. The cardinal believes its reflection is another bird and attacks it for hours unless I am in the room in which case it flies away. The grosbeak catches the eye of its reflection and catches my eye and doesn’t mind even if I am close to the window because it understands the situation.) Any kind of taking language too seriously winds you up in intellectual wastelands like structuralism and post-structuralism. Pinker’s theme of “it’s getting better all the time” compares unfavorably to Simon, Petroski and similar writers in the 1970s who were up against Watergate, Patricia Hearst, Disco, etc… If he took responsibility for something I could forgive him but as it is he’s the #1 public intellectual that makes me want to believe in the Lizardman theory.