# "Intellectual Dark Web" Stupidity Omnibus **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [January 4, 2019, 1:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/intellectual-dark-web-stupidity-omnibus/827193 "2019-01-04T13:53:38Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 297
**Author:** ![orcenio](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/orcenio/32/1036_2.png) [@orcenio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/orcenio)\ **Post date:** [September 30, 2021, 1:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/intellectual-dark-web-stupidity-omnibus/827193/297 "2021-09-30T13:37:55Z")
A post of mine from 12 years ago: > [@NYTimes: In Which Steven Pinker eviscerates Malcolm Gladwell](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nytimes-in-which-steven-pinker-eviscerates-malcolm-gladwell/517564/28): > > [Gladwell responds to Pinker](http://gladwell.typepad.com/gladwellcom/2009/11/pinker-on-what-the-dog-saw.html), calls him out on his “IQ fundamentalism” and ties with well known Internet racist Steve Sailer: > > > [@](#): > > > > It is always a pleasure to be reviewed by someone as accomplished as Stephen Pinker, even if—in his comments on “What the Dog Saw” (Nov. 15)—he is unhappy with my spelling (rightly!) and with the fact that I have not joined him on the lonely ice floe of IQ fundamentalism. But since football has been on my mind these days, I do want to make one small observation about his comments. > > > > > (snip)quarterbacks taken in positions 11 through 90 in the draft actually slightly outplay those more highly paid and lauded players taken in the draft’s top ten positions. I found this analysis fascinating. Pinker did not. This quarterback argument, he wrote, “is simply not true.” > > > > > > ```auto > > > I wondered about the basis of Pinker’s conclusion, so I e-mailed him, asking if he could tell me where to find the scientific data that would set me straight. He very graciously wrote me back. He had three sources, he said. The first was Steve Sailer. Sailer, for the uninitiated, is a California blogger with a marketing background who is best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people. Sailer’s “proof” of the connection between draft position and performance is, I’m sure Pinker would agree, crude: his key variable is how many times a player has been named to the Pro Bowl. > > > > > > ``` > > It seems that Gladwell’s blog is now flooded by Sailer blog readers… > > I’m not a fan of Gladwell for the same reasons that he was criticized by Pinker (it’s too much close to popular journalism and less of scientific analysis for me to enjoy), but like **susan** I don’t like Pinker’s sickening polemics. I find that Pinker [is](http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker_rose/pinker_rose_p1.html) [a gene](http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker_rose/part2/part2_p1.html) [ce](http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/jun/18/iq-steven-pinker-blank-slate)[nt](http://reason.com/archives/2002/10/01/biology-vs-the-blank-slate)[ric](http://books.google.ca/books?id=7rJ5gI1LbXoC) [fundamentalist](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/magazine/11Genome-t.html); a point of view which IMO leads him to [reactionary](http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/2005_01_19_crimson.html) [anti-leftism](http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/11.14.02/work-0246.html) and to an [uncomfortably close](http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_3.html#pinker) [relation with racists](http://www.vdare.com/sailer/pinker_progress.htm). Steven Pinker is well known for advocating teaching “race science” (19th century racialism with vague 21st century genetic possibilities and implications) as a real, **and imperative** , on-going scientific debate. There are clear ethical concerns of propagating age-old harmful racism by rehashing popular racialist (and genetically essentialist) assertions as an never ending _de jour_ debate. It becomes even more insidious when those advocating these racialist ideas reject the requirement of establishing causal links, or genetic correlates to behaviour, or any objective racial framework (the idea of essential racial categories are always explicitly advocated while no rigorous attempt is made to delimit these categories). It still amazes me how much people will cloak themselves as lone, besieged bastions of rationality and scientific freedom, all in the hopes of completely avoiding addressing the real world issues of racism and the ethical concerns that flow from their fixations and advocacy. Either way Pinker sometimes acknowledges a lack of evidence with the racialists that he gives his favour to (check out his [supportive tweet](https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/462666861725749248) of Nicholas Wade’s horrible race book) but he also says very dumb things in support of indefensible racist, wack-jobs like his decades long relations with OG internet Alt-Righter Steve Sailer (as I mentioned in my above 12 year old post and from yesterday’s [article below in the Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/sep/28/steven-pinker-celebrity-scientist-at-the-centre-of-the-culture-wars) ). > Many critics allege that Pinker’s recent remarks are part of a longer history of comments and behaviour that have come dangerously close to promoting pseudoscientific or abhorrent points of view. To take a single example: the journalist Malcolm Gladwell has called Pinker out for sourcing information from the blogger Steve Sailer, who, in Gladwell’s words, “is perhaps best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people”. Angela Saini, a science journalist and author of Superior: The Return of Race Science, told me that “for many people, Pinker’s willingness to entertain the work of individuals who are on the far right and white supremacists has gone beyond the pale”. When I put these kinds of criticisms to Pinker, he called it the fallacy of “guilt by association” – just because Sailer and others have objectionable views, doesn’t mean their data is bad. Pinker has condemned racism – he told me it was “not just wrong but stupid” – but published Sailer’s work in an edited volume in 2004, and quotes Sailer’s positive review of Better Angels _,_ among many others, on his website. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/intellectual-dark-web-stupidity-omnibus/827193)._