When I was reading the Book Review yesterday morning I had to explain to my wife what I was laughing my ass off about.
I’ve read lots of the essays in this book in The New Yorker already. There is a danger in this kind of essay, which even John McPhee fell victim to, which is spending so much time with a few scientists that you become convinced of their possibly way out there views. it is especially a danger when you don’t know enough about a subject to have a working bullshit detector.
My favorite example. After “A Soul of a New Machine” some guy spend a bunch of time with some AI grad students at Berkeley, and built up their fairly boring research to sound like a big thing. The payoff was that the paper that was the focus of the book got rejected at the AI conference. The writer had no clue what was really going on in AI work, and didn’t bother finding out - not even to the level of driving down to Stanford.
Actually he’s a cognitive scientist, which is a bit more of a hard science than psychology. ‘These are the parts of the brain that will activate when you bleach your…’
Isn’t Pinker at MIT, not Harvard? Did I miss a move, or am I experiencing a false memory?
Aaaaaaaaaand, apparently he left MIT for Harvard in 2003. So, yeah, I missed a move.
That a statement is cringe-worthy doesn’t preclude it being truthful, does it? Sometimes facts are not pleasant or politically correct. I say that in general; not specifically about any of Pinker’s comments because you have not mentioned any specific comment.
But I would be curious to know about these “highly uniformed” comments. Can you tell me just what Pinker was speaking about where he was uninformed? Why do you believe he was uninformed about this?
Cognitive science is just a broad range of disciplines that seem to work together in similar problems. The dude’s PhD is in psychology and has taught mostly in, you guessed it, psychology departments.
Gladwell responds to Pinker, calls him out on his “IQ fundamentalism” and ties with well known Internet racist Steve Sailer:
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.
“igon value” vs. eigenvalue is a bit more than a spelling error.
If you are going to pontificate on linear algebra it’s reassuring for the reader if you know how to spell basic concepts; at the very least it reassures them you’re worth reading.
This is very quickly degenerating into a cock waving competition.
Heh. If you’ve actually read his books you’ll find him very much a leftist. And wait, believing that genes and evolution matter is “fundamentalism” now? Gotta go tell those creationists that.
Chapter on criminal profiling. He has the glorious wisdom and brilliance of judgment to mention me and my book on cold reading, and in quite a favourable way. Proof, if proof were needed, that Gladwell really is a most wonderful author, whose shimmering talent and impressive taste in excellent source material, should serve as a lesson to us all.
Pinker on the other hand has written several books but has thus far signally failed to mention me at all. It is therefore entirely safe to conclude that he is a third-rate ‘pop science’ hack well suited to his natural home in the ‘discount’ bins of book stores, not to mention a disreputable bottersnike who can go and jump off a pier. In my considered and wholly impartial opinion, you understand.
And BTW, ‘bottersnike’ is actually a word.
I read through many of those links and I don’'t see that they support your point. Some are mere commentary by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. The comments by Pinker mainly serve as a reminder that genome studies are changing everything. The genetic evidence we now have is stronger than the socio-cultural evidence. That’s pretty much nothing more than a pendulum swing. It will swing back in a few years, just as it always does.
But it’s hard to read what Pinker actually says as proof of a right-wing bias.
http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_3.html#pinker
There’s real lynching material, there is.
If you want real biological determinism, try The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending.
Experts can disagree on many issues, and have their biases, sects, superstitions, and beliefs.
Are we supposed to take Pinker’s word because he’s an “expert”? In principle, he should be indicating what the empirical evidence shows, and how it shows it.
Pinker’s writing might be terrific in other areas, but that review might as well have been written by a witchdoctor, shaman or priest.
I take it you are talking about the Steve Sailer link? If so, I find that the racist is quite good at talking about subjects he knows nothing about. He is a blogger…
I really don’t have any idea on what you are saying here. Genetic evidence for what? Socio-cultural evidence for what? If you don’t name a trait, gene(s), nor an environment you really have no idea how they combine to contribute to a result. This is really my main bone to pick with those who draw some imagined “line in the sand” in the glorious gene-environment/nature-nurture war.
What are you talking about? Public opinion?
“Anti-leftist” not “right-wing”
Never claimed he lynched blacks. Just that he has close relations with racists (which by all accounts is true).
Heheh, oh you crazy Harpending; what will you be doing next?[
Well, to be fair Gladwell wasn’t pontificating on linear algebra. He was quoting someone else use the term “eigenvalues” and did not write it correctly. I just finished that section of the book.
ETA: I actually like both Gladwell and Pinker. I’ve read most of their books. They both make very good points.
Holy ad hominem, Batman!
I guess some people don’t know how to spell argumentum ad hominem.
Or the Annalee Newitz link.
Race and intelligence have been defined by cultural methods rather than genetic evidence for a long time. The meme that race doesn’t exist or that intelligence and race are not correlated have not been advanced because of genomic information. The contrary is also true. The Bell Curve based its correlation on verbal and written testing, not genetics. Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man countered with a variety of arguments based on inheritability but couldn’t support that by genetic testing, which wasn’t available. Genetic testing will change everything.
Of course not. I’m talking the scientific consensus. Scientists have been swinging back and forth between nature and nurture ever since Darwin. We are in a nature cycle today. That’s to be expected since what’s coming out of genome studies is incredibly exciting. In the short term everybody will be using (and overusing) these studies and ignoring non-genetic findings. In the long run, though, the balance will undoubtedly shift back.
Now you’re just being bizarre. I was making the accusation that Pinker is being lynched for his unpopular opinions. Remember that Gould was attacked throughout his career for being a Marxist. His reputation is currently in decline more because many of the things he espoused seem not to be true in the light of today’s knowledge but during his lifetime it was his politics that drew the heat.
Oh yes, from your link:
I didn’t say I agreed with the book or its authors. I’m using it as an example of the way that modern genome studies are being used to swing the conversation toward genetic evidence. They give dozens, possibly hundreds, of references to findings from genome studies that have to be addressed. Unless you read what’s out there, your understanding of the controversy will be limited. As yours seems to be.
Unless, of course, his ass is on fire.
It’s interesting how Gladwell inspires such true believer status in his readership. I knew he kind of had a cult figure status but I didn’t realize it was this deep.
Anyway, as long as we’re gonna judge by ad hominem, absent evidence to the contrary, I will side with Pinker all the way before Gladwell.