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That was my thought exactly. He zoomed in on the one wrong thing he could find and tried to associate the whole review with that thing. An honest reply would b
by MikeCapone 17y ago
That was my thought exactly. He zoomed in on the one wrong thing he could find and tried to associate the whole review with that thing.
An honest reply would be to say: Pinker got everything right except this football thing.
In this case, the "everything else" is of much higher importance than the football thing.
- neilc 17y agoHe zoomed in on the one wrong thing he could find Not necessarily: the key to getting a letter to the editor published is to make a single coherent point, and to express yourself well. A letter to the editor is not the right venue for a point-by-point refutation of someone else's work.
- MikeCapone 17y agoI agree, but he did have options. Why didn't he do it on his blog, then? Or say at the end of a letter: For a more complete response to pinker, see [URL]. We can conclude that he either had lots of other good arguments but chose to focus on that minor one, or that he didn't have good rebuttals for the other things.