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I was turned on to the idea that Pinker might be quite wrong on these claims by David Graeber and David Wengrow in "The Dawn of Everything". I haven't read Bett

I was turned on to the idea that Pinker might be quite wrong on these claims by David Graeber and David Wengrow in "The Dawn of Everything". I haven't read Better Angels of our Nature, and I haven't spent hours carefully verifying the Davids claims, but I must say, they certainly made it sound very convincing. Enough for me to feel like not reading Better Angels would not be a major loss in my life. I went to that wikipedia article you link there to see if that gets a mention, and the "Criticism" section is ginormous. So I'm not going to go out on a limb and say you shouldn't be recommending it at all, but I will say that based on the very large number of serious scholars who were apparently upset enough about many of the claims of the book that they then went on to write long serious things criticising it, perhaps in light of that you should reconsider whether it's as "data-backed" as you thought. It could have crap data, or good data poorly interpreted. The many critics seem to think both.

nickpinkston 2y ago
You should also see the criticism of "The Dawn of Everything", ie way overstating the veracity of certain history that they're trying to use to support Graeber's polemics on anarchism. In typical Graeber fashion, the book is very fun to read, but he's an unreliable narrator of history, which is why they could only get a no name historian to be involved in an attempt to add credibility. And FWIW, I'm also very skeptical of Pinker.
- sourcepluck 2y ago
  I wasn't saying we should dismiss Pinker because of that one book by the Davids, rather that we should be very sceptical of his work because of the absolute chorus of academics seriously contesting his methods, motivations, and conclusions. I have read one long criticism of The Dawn of Everything, I don't know if it's the one you're referring to, but I didn't find it very compelling. I've read several critics of Graeber otherwise though, and to me they roughly seemed to amount to: "we don't like what this person is saying." I mean, I could not find anything substantive in there, some direct, blatant issue with the scholarly work. Perhaps there's a tendency to get "over-excited" about some idea or other in his work, but I think readers (academic and laypeople) could consider forgiving someone for presenting their work with sincere excitement. The comment about David Wengrow you make there is especially odd - for one, you make it sound like he was thrown in to the project as an afterthought to add some clout, which is factually not what happened, they collaborated for years in emails for what was originally a small project, which grew larger organically in a sort of growing excitement. I wouldn't be big on bandying about academic records as proof of anything much, but he'd twenty plus years professional academic experience as an archaeologist, three books, a suitably voluminous number of essays and papers, etc etc. The usual "impressive academic" things had been done. So I don't get your dig there at all. Here, for the brave of heart: https://ucl.academia.edu/DavidWengrow https://ucl.academia.edu/DavidWengrow
  - lupire 2y ago
    Even so "Pinker is wrong" does not mean "opposite of Pinker is right". It means "we don't know." Proving that humanity was better at some specific era in history is a very tall order. Discrediting one claim does not credit any other.
  - nickpinkston 2y ago
    The main critique of the book that I've seen is that they use history that's quite ambiguous to tell a polemic story that supports Graeber's anarchist views. For instance, they take the upheavals at Teotihuacan as evidence that there was some kind of anarchist-ish revolution going on, when most scholarship believes that it's more likely an oligarchic system (with less emphasis on the monarch) who destroyed (from my memory) the temple/cult/district of the Feathered Serpent - a sub-group of their oligarchy. This is interesting, but is pretty consistent with how other Mesoamerican ruling classes selected their rulers (Aztecs, etc.) ie there was often an oligarchy who picked them, not the populous as a whole via an anarchist / direct democratic method. For Wengrow, I assume him working with the far-more-famous Graeber probably led to him to have some flexible interpretations of history, and I bet Graeber was pretty convincing + had a high power differential (implicitly) which could lead this to happen somewhat unknowingly.

nickpinkston 2y ago

You should also see the criticism of "The Dawn of Everything", ie way overstating the veracity of certain history that they're trying to use to support Graeber's polemics on anarchism. In typical Graeber fashion, the book is very fun to read, but he's an unreliable narrator of history, which is why they could only get a no name historian to be involved in an attempt to add credibility. And FWIW, I'm also very skeptical of Pinker.

sourcepluck 2y ago
I wasn't saying we should dismiss Pinker because of that one book by the Davids, rather that we should be very sceptical of his work because of the absolute chorus of academics seriously contesting his methods, motivations, and conclusions. I have read one long criticism of The Dawn of Everything, I don't know if it's the one you're referring to, but I didn't find it very compelling. I've read several critics of Graeber otherwise though, and to me they roughly seemed to amount to: "we don't like what this person is saying." I mean, I could not find anything substantive in there, some direct, blatant issue with the scholarly work. Perhaps there's a tendency to get "over-excited" about some idea or other in his work, but I think readers (academic and laypeople) could consider forgiving someone for presenting their work with sincere excitement. The comment about David Wengrow you make there is especially odd - for one, you make it sound like he was thrown in to the project as an afterthought to add some clout, which is factually not what happened, they collaborated for years in emails for what was originally a small project, which grew larger organically in a sort of growing excitement. I wouldn't be big on bandying about academic records as proof of anything much, but he'd twenty plus years professional academic experience as an archaeologist, three books, a suitably voluminous number of essays and papers, etc etc. The usual "impressive academic" things had been done. So I don't get your dig there at all. Here, for the brave of heart: https://ucl.academia.edu/DavidWengrow https://ucl.academia.edu/DavidWengrow
- lupire 2y ago
  Even so "Pinker is wrong" does not mean "opposite of Pinker is right". It means "we don't know." Proving that humanity was better at some specific era in history is a very tall order. Discrediting one claim does not credit any other.
- nickpinkston 2y ago
  The main critique of the book that I've seen is that they use history that's quite ambiguous to tell a polemic story that supports Graeber's anarchist views. For instance, they take the upheavals at Teotihuacan as evidence that there was some kind of anarchist-ish revolution going on, when most scholarship believes that it's more likely an oligarchic system (with less emphasis on the monarch) who destroyed (from my memory) the temple/cult/district of the Feathered Serpent - a sub-group of their oligarchy. This is interesting, but is pretty consistent with how other Mesoamerican ruling classes selected their rulers (Aztecs, etc.) ie there was often an oligarchy who picked them, not the populous as a whole via an anarchist / direct democratic method. For Wengrow, I assume him working with the far-more-famous Graeber probably led to him to have some flexible interpretations of history, and I bet Graeber was pretty convincing + had a high power differential (implicitly) which could lead this to happen somewhat unknowingly.