NYTimes: In Which Steven Pinker eviscerates Malcolm Gladwell

[orcenio]

Gladwell responds to Pinker, 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.”

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 a gene centric fundamentalist; a point of view which IMO leads him to reactionary anti-leftism and to an uncomfortably close relation with racists.