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Psychologist and writer’s appearance on Aporia condemned for helping to normalise ‘dangerous, discredited ideas’
The Harvard psychologist and bestselling author Steven Pinker appeared on the podcast of Aporia, an outlet whose owners advocate for a revival of race science and have spoken of seeking “legitimation by association” by platforming more mainstream figures.
The appearance underlines past incidents in which Pinker has encountered criticism for his association with advocates of so-called “human biodiversity”, which other academics have called a “rebranding” of racial genetic essentialism and scientific racism.
Pinker’s appearance marks another milestone in the efforts of many in Silicon Valley and rightwing media and at the fringes of science to rehabilitate previously discredited models of a biologically determined racial hierarchy.
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Looks like there’s some fair degree of distaste for Pinker here. The man is a revolutionary figure in science, and has an extremely long and fruitful career. I am a fan of Steven Pinker, and have been for many years. He’s like Chomsky in some respects, in that he will talk to anyone if he finds the discussion fruitful. It seems that for people like this, truly deep and boundless thinkers, it’s not scary to talk to people with bad ideas. It’s not even scary to explore some bad ideas. That’s how you sort them all out, ya know.
I get that some folks may not like the ideas that Pinker and Chomsky express. Hell, neither do I. But they deserve your respect. They are on the front lines of thought, and have been all of their long and productive lives.
Hm, I generally had a decently positive opinion of Pinker. Is this a case of him not knowing what this was and getting ambushed? Or did he know what was up going in?
This is who he is. Check out evolutionary psychology. He’s a proponent of this theory that has strong tendency towards racial biases.
Er, evolutionary psychology is a whole field of study with its own journal with hundreds of published studies. If you’re going to claim that a whole branch of psychology is racist you’re going to need to provide some evidence to back those claims up, because that wikipedia article has nothing more damning in it than the following suggestion that there are critics who think there might be some ethical problems with how it’s sometimes used, but that’s not a condemnation of the value of the science itself.
Critics have argued that evolutionary psychology might be used to justify existing social hierarchies and reactionary policies. It has also been suggested by critics that evolutionary psychologists’ theories and interpretations of empirical data rely heavily on ideological assumptions about race and gender.
But that’s like saying a wrench is a weapon because it can be thrown at someone’s head; that’s problem with the user, not a problem inherent in the tool.
well yeah if you cherrypick a two sentence synopsis you can make anything sound ridiculous.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_evolutionary_psychology
…criticisms include disputes about the testability of evolutionary hypotheses, cognitive assumptions such as massive modularity, vagueness stemming from assumptions about the environment that leads to evolutionary adaptation, the importance of non-genetic and non-adaptive explanations, as well as political and ethical issues in the field itself.
those are all pretty significant criticisms.
regarding the racism specifically, you need to read between the lines. of course they’re not going to outright admit they are being racist. But when you are dealing with unfalsifiable/non-empiracle hypotheses, while over-emphasising biology (race/sex), that’s not science, that’s politics wrapped in a scientific facade.
Yeah, that information was not on the page you linked me. I didn’t realize it was reasonable to expect people to go spelunking in your links to find the actual information you’re trying to gesture vaguely at without laying it out explicitly in the first place for some reason.
Also, other than vague ‘political and ethical issues’ none of that has anything to do with racism, which was your initial claim.
Idk, I mean I’m not a fan of Pinker (his whole book on why violence has declined seems to ignore structural violence all around us, especially lower classes, and heavily supports capitalism) but evolutionary psychology seems pretty legit to me?
Geographically isolated groups of a single species will show variations of behavior and psychology that is affected by their environment and genetic predispositions – that seems like a pretty reasonable take.
Yeah, when people take that to racist extremes, its problematic. You can’t assume a person’s quality because, when it comes to individuals in a particular, geographically originated group, you don’t know where they landed on the spectrum re: genetic predisposition, and then you don’t know their current environment either. It all comes out in the wash. I don’t really think that means evolutionary psychology is total bunk, though. Its useful to put humans along with other animals when we think about their how their behavior and psychology are affected by evolution.
Geographically isolated groups of a single species will show variations of behavior and psychology that is affected by their environment and genetic predispositions – that seems like a pretty reasonable take.
call it reasonable or plausible or whatever you want, but for it to be science it needs empirical evidence and predictive value. Failing that you just have “reasonable” hypotheses, and one person’s “reasonable” is another person’s racist/sexist/transphobic/whatever, especially when the hypotheses emphasize nature over nurture. That’s the problem with evolutionary psychology.
This is who Pinker is as evidenced by his being a major proponent of evolutionary psychology.
Even in academia you will have bigots who will work really hard to legitimize their biases. Seems like they go harder on the bigotry research the older they get.
I’m not familiar with evolutionary psychology but I clicked the link and checked out the page. It seems… not an immediate and total brand of evil? It’s a very broad concept at the high level: that features of human psychology can be survival adaptations and say something about the conditions during our evolution. I read the reactions and criticisms section too and I can see how some sus claims about biological essentialism could be taken too far.
But I guess my point is that just invoking the term and posting the Wikipedia page do not seem to be the immediate character assassination you seem to want them to be. “Look at this guy! He believes our psychology is informed by survival adaptations during our evolution! What a bigot!”
I don’t get it. I think I would need you to say more about what specific cases he has made under this umbrella that you find objectionable. Because on the face of it, it doesn’t seem crazy to say that people have an instinct to be helpful to one another because that turns out to be a positive population evolutionary trait.
It’s kind of like string theory. It has a bunch of interesting conjectures but nobody can figure out a way to test any of it.
Take the “selfish gene” (the idea predates Dawkins). One of the theories states that it may be evolutionarily advantageous for an individual to sacrifice themselves for the group if they share enough DNA. They lose the DNA in their bodies but save the exact same DNA in the bodies of their extended family. That’s a nice idea and you can get the math to work out in game theory models but how do we test if that’s why ducks sometimes lag behind when a hunter tries to shoot them?
That’s not to say it can never be tested. There are other cases where we needed to wait for technological breakthroughs until theories could actually be tested.
I guess I’m a humanities guy so when someone writes about patterns of human behavior that could be survival adaptation, I think “hm that’s interesting, I’ll think more about it.”
I don’t think: but this theory can’t produce testable predictions!
It just seems like an anthropological concept, not a scientific theory we can write an equation for. But eh.
That makes sense. Not everything needs to be testable. There are many interesting and important ideas outside of science.
The main problem would be if someone wanted to set policy based on it. That includes the implicit experiment of, “If we adopt policy A we can expect outcome B.” If we haven’t tested that before turning it into a policy, the policy itself becomes the experiment, and then we need to be very careful about the ethics surrounding such an experiment.
I agree with everything you said. I’ll just add that the scientific method is not how we set policy in general, though perhaps it should be.
I teach evolutionary psychology and show a scene from.Planet Earth where birds of Paradise dance for mates. Food’s plentiful, so going “hey, girl. I can get food.” Isn’t an asset. They gotta do a silly dance to attract a mate in such a food-loaded environment, instead.
I guess you can spin that kind of stuff to poorly explain human behaviors, but from everything I’ve read and prepped, it’s a very broad but innocuous field of psych, if relatively nascent.
Evolutionary psychology is pseudoscience to affirm conservative beliefs. It’s unfalsifiable conjecture
Yeah that’s not what it is.
he’s been anti vaxx and pretty transphobic for years so not surprising
You have to wonder how people are so willing to damage their reputations. I just can’t imagine stooping so low as to invite Pinker on to my podcast.
bigotry is a hell of a drug. you either recognize it and call it quits, go into rehab trying to fix the way you think, or you destroy everything in your life trying to justify and accommodate it.
so hes trying to “rebrand racism by whites as something else”?
No hes playing the eugenics angle. Its the same shit psychology majors tried to do with criminals. “You can find the criminal through the brain” is there motto until the researcher found out one of the psychopaths was related to him and then it turns out it was himself. Its bullshit science backed by schizos in the field.
i distinctly heard about years ages ago. kinda like with string theory, nonsensical.
