"One aspect that annoyed me was Pinker’s political positioning. He says, in not so many words:
Conservatives are stupid and anti-science
The academy is too much of a left-wing monoculture
But if conservatives are stupid and anti-science, why shouldn’t the academy be a monoculture?"
You could frame it another way: conservatives are stupid and anti-science because academy is a monoculture. I'm not saying I agree with the premise, but the two statements could make sense if you position the causality this way.
But I wonder if it really is true that conservatives are more anti science than liberals? Obviously impossible to measure, but even crudely it seems both have their blind spots.
The two non-COVID19 issues that show a partisan divide in "trusting the science" I can think of are climate change where liberals trust the science more and group differences/blank slate vs genetic determinism stuff where conservatives trust the science more.
On COVID19, perhaps liberals trust the science more on vaccines (now that a liberal is in office) and conservatives trust the science more when it comes down to the ambiguous effects of many NPIs.
Am I missing something that would drastically shift the balance here?
I don't think it's right to say that either side trusts the science more on some issue. It is that both sides pick and choose the parts of science that they like. For example, on climate change the left talks about Science a lot, but they just ignore (or even try to cancel) the parts of the science that go against their positions. There's lots of unscientific and even anti-science rhetoric on both sides.
Indeed, both have their blind spots. As Carlo Cipolla argued decades ago, there are too many stupid people everywhere (see his The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity). I have yet to read Pinker's new book but I'm not surprised that a Harvard professor, despite being tenured, thinks he has to make clear he belongs to the tribe that controls his university. Leftists have been looking for that sort of submission for a long time everywhere, and finally they have succeeded in the U.S. as they had much earlier in other countries. The main difference between new and old, pre-1980 leftists is that the new ones think they have learned why the old ones failed and have been trying a new strategy to grab power (the new ones focus on how young people are "educated"). So far they may be succeeding but the political game is never ending and has no rules. Arnold wants to encourage and engage in a Great Debate about Rationality but keeping politics out of it because he fears the barbarians will retaliate against him and his family. His fear is rational.
Re the 'lecture' syle, he does declare upfront that the book grew out of the lectures he was giving and the realization there was a wider appetite for the subject. I agree it doesn't read as easily as his previous books, but is still very important addition to the topic in that it will reach a wider audience and it lays out key aspects that can be further explored by others in future (eg how to get more people understanding and applying Bayseian reasoning). The associated BBC podcast he has done is excellent (particularly the recent one with Galef talking about the Scout Mindset).
Pinker’s “Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature” (the full title should always be noted) is indeed his best work for the lay public on these topics. I have long recommended the first 100 pages as a concise history of the preceding 50 years of academic conflict over socio-biology. His summary of E.O.Wilson’s treatment is a good one. However the greater part of the book is broadly political. In these matters, that has been his style; it remains his style. Nevertheless, that book stands out because at that moment Pinker stood on the threshold of a new era in the biological sciences boiling up out the labs. And having heard from colleagues working in those labs, he issued a plea to his fellow political travelers in social sciences and humanities to pay attention to the wave about to crash on their shore. I doubt that he imagined the response that has unfolded.
>>But if conservatives are stupid and anti-science, why shouldn’t the academy be a monoculture?
Presumably the answer is that (1) centrist, libertarian and more eclectic points of view aren't stupid and anti-science, so more of those should be included and (2) a stupid, anti-science body of views can be *correlated* with reasonable views on other topics that don't have much to do with science, so it may be worth having some anti-science conservatives in the academy despite their flaws.
I am not so sure that groups of people are likely to be more rational than individuals. It seems to me that the wisdom of crowds is largely overrated in many respects, perhaps not least because connected crowds are largely steered by a few individuals who are followed because they are appealing, not because they are logically consistent. The very poor performance of institutions seems to bear that out, and really the only question is whether the institutions doing badly is a recent phenomenon or a more standard one which we just didn't notice so much before.
For a group to be more rational, it has to operate to provide checks against irrationality rather than reinforcements of it. We expect certain institutions to provide such checks, including journalism and academia. I see the institutional decline is real, not entirely an artifact of our noticing more. Certainly the case with academia.
I think "journalism" and "academia" are a bit too broad to be institutions in this case. Although in the case of journalism, I am not sure that decline is recent... Orwell notably got inspired to write about that after returning from the Spanish Civil War to find every newspaper was lying about it.
In general though, I am leery of mentally working with institutions larger than the individual set of rules organization, i.e. a company or group, not a group of companies. I would describe the fall of academia to be the fall of a group of institutions, in this case a group that is most of those institutions. Likewise journalism, government, corporations, social clubs, whatever.
I think the distinction is important, because institutions provide those checks against irrationality (or don't) through the rules they implement. Not all members in the bigger group are going to implement the rules or enforce them the same way, and as journalism and academia demonstrate, the larger group has very little ability to enforce rules upon the individual groups. Academia went to hell not because there was a board of directors of academia that decided "We should start being awful" but because an ever increasing number of colleges and universities decided to behave in such a way that started being awful, and attempted to force other institutions within academia to adopt their rules as well.
I also think you misunderstood me about institutional decline. I don't think that it is an artifact of us noticing it more but in fact is not so bad, but rather the institutions have long been very bad and we just didn't notice it. In other words, it isn't that suddenly our wonderful institutions have been bad and we shouldn't trust them, but rather we had been trusting them way too much before.
What explains the vast difference in tone between Pinker in recent interviews and in his latest book? Initially I thought it might be catering to Hanania’s audience, which leans right, but he offers many criticisms of the left in his NYT interview.
Perhaps the circle of confidants who discussed the book with him and the institution that published it pushed him in the direction he ultimately took. This would speak to your point about the necessary role of sociality in promoting rationality.
Keep in mind that there is long lag between composition and publication. Probably the first draft of the book was written while Mr. Trump was still in office. And perhaps even before the death of George Floyd put the Woke movement into overdrive.
Yeah, he offers many criticisms of the left in his Hanania interview, but his beefs there vs. QAnon-ers, chemtrails proponents, and "the vax deniers who come down with COVID" (as “irrational”, or “not sane”), are every bit as demagogic as were Adolf's beefs vs. the Jews.
See my comments, and those of Hyperdupont, on the Hanania post page, and also see my comment on Arnold's post about keeping-up-with-the-fits-no-11 .
I think the word you're looking for to describe Pinker's style of writing is "patronising".
"One aspect that annoyed me was Pinker’s political positioning. He says, in not so many words:
Conservatives are stupid and anti-science
The academy is too much of a left-wing monoculture
But if conservatives are stupid and anti-science, why shouldn’t the academy be a monoculture?"
You could frame it another way: conservatives are stupid and anti-science because academy is a monoculture. I'm not saying I agree with the premise, but the two statements could make sense if you position the causality this way.
But I wonder if it really is true that conservatives are more anti science than liberals? Obviously impossible to measure, but even crudely it seems both have their blind spots.
The two non-COVID19 issues that show a partisan divide in "trusting the science" I can think of are climate change where liberals trust the science more and group differences/blank slate vs genetic determinism stuff where conservatives trust the science more.
On COVID19, perhaps liberals trust the science more on vaccines (now that a liberal is in office) and conservatives trust the science more when it comes down to the ambiguous effects of many NPIs.
Am I missing something that would drastically shift the balance here?
I don't think it's right to say that either side trusts the science more on some issue. It is that both sides pick and choose the parts of science that they like. For example, on climate change the left talks about Science a lot, but they just ignore (or even try to cancel) the parts of the science that go against their positions. There's lots of unscientific and even anti-science rhetoric on both sides.
Indeed, both have their blind spots. As Carlo Cipolla argued decades ago, there are too many stupid people everywhere (see his The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity). I have yet to read Pinker's new book but I'm not surprised that a Harvard professor, despite being tenured, thinks he has to make clear he belongs to the tribe that controls his university. Leftists have been looking for that sort of submission for a long time everywhere, and finally they have succeeded in the U.S. as they had much earlier in other countries. The main difference between new and old, pre-1980 leftists is that the new ones think they have learned why the old ones failed and have been trying a new strategy to grab power (the new ones focus on how young people are "educated"). So far they may be succeeding but the political game is never ending and has no rules. Arnold wants to encourage and engage in a Great Debate about Rationality but keeping politics out of it because he fears the barbarians will retaliate against him and his family. His fear is rational.
Re the 'lecture' syle, he does declare upfront that the book grew out of the lectures he was giving and the realization there was a wider appetite for the subject. I agree it doesn't read as easily as his previous books, but is still very important addition to the topic in that it will reach a wider audience and it lays out key aspects that can be further explored by others in future (eg how to get more people understanding and applying Bayseian reasoning). The associated BBC podcast he has done is excellent (particularly the recent one with Galef talking about the Scout Mindset).
Pinker’s “Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature” (the full title should always be noted) is indeed his best work for the lay public on these topics. I have long recommended the first 100 pages as a concise history of the preceding 50 years of academic conflict over socio-biology. His summary of E.O.Wilson’s treatment is a good one. However the greater part of the book is broadly political. In these matters, that has been his style; it remains his style. Nevertheless, that book stands out because at that moment Pinker stood on the threshold of a new era in the biological sciences boiling up out the labs. And having heard from colleagues working in those labs, he issued a plea to his fellow political travelers in social sciences and humanities to pay attention to the wave about to crash on their shore. I doubt that he imagined the response that has unfolded.
>>But if conservatives are stupid and anti-science, why shouldn’t the academy be a monoculture?
Presumably the answer is that (1) centrist, libertarian and more eclectic points of view aren't stupid and anti-science, so more of those should be included and (2) a stupid, anti-science body of views can be *correlated* with reasonable views on other topics that don't have much to do with science, so it may be worth having some anti-science conservatives in the academy despite their flaws.
I am not so sure that groups of people are likely to be more rational than individuals. It seems to me that the wisdom of crowds is largely overrated in many respects, perhaps not least because connected crowds are largely steered by a few individuals who are followed because they are appealing, not because they are logically consistent. The very poor performance of institutions seems to bear that out, and really the only question is whether the institutions doing badly is a recent phenomenon or a more standard one which we just didn't notice so much before.
For a group to be more rational, it has to operate to provide checks against irrationality rather than reinforcements of it. We expect certain institutions to provide such checks, including journalism and academia. I see the institutional decline is real, not entirely an artifact of our noticing more. Certainly the case with academia.
I think "journalism" and "academia" are a bit too broad to be institutions in this case. Although in the case of journalism, I am not sure that decline is recent... Orwell notably got inspired to write about that after returning from the Spanish Civil War to find every newspaper was lying about it.
In general though, I am leery of mentally working with institutions larger than the individual set of rules organization, i.e. a company or group, not a group of companies. I would describe the fall of academia to be the fall of a group of institutions, in this case a group that is most of those institutions. Likewise journalism, government, corporations, social clubs, whatever.
I think the distinction is important, because institutions provide those checks against irrationality (or don't) through the rules they implement. Not all members in the bigger group are going to implement the rules or enforce them the same way, and as journalism and academia demonstrate, the larger group has very little ability to enforce rules upon the individual groups. Academia went to hell not because there was a board of directors of academia that decided "We should start being awful" but because an ever increasing number of colleges and universities decided to behave in such a way that started being awful, and attempted to force other institutions within academia to adopt their rules as well.
I also think you misunderstood me about institutional decline. I don't think that it is an artifact of us noticing it more but in fact is not so bad, but rather the institutions have long been very bad and we just didn't notice it. In other words, it isn't that suddenly our wonderful institutions have been bad and we shouldn't trust them, but rather we had been trusting them way too much before.
"we had been trusting them way too much before."
Maybe so, but as the Deep State grew in power (e.g. after 9/11), this crowd's unaccountability could spur more institutional decline everywhere.
What explains the vast difference in tone between Pinker in recent interviews and in his latest book? Initially I thought it might be catering to Hanania’s audience, which leans right, but he offers many criticisms of the left in his NYT interview.
Perhaps the circle of confidants who discussed the book with him and the institution that published it pushed him in the direction he ultimately took. This would speak to your point about the necessary role of sociality in promoting rationality.
Keep in mind that there is long lag between composition and publication. Probably the first draft of the book was written while Mr. Trump was still in office. And perhaps even before the death of George Floyd put the Woke movement into overdrive.
Yeah, he offers many criticisms of the left in his Hanania interview, but his beefs there vs. QAnon-ers, chemtrails proponents, and "the vax deniers who come down with COVID" (as “irrational”, or “not sane”), are every bit as demagogic as were Adolf's beefs vs. the Jews.
See my comments, and those of Hyperdupont, on the Hanania post page, and also see my comment on Arnold's post about keeping-up-with-the-fits-no-11 .