Talk:Steven Pinker

Painful, very painful to read

Boys, I know it hurts when your loved one is criticized, but the wording on the LSA letter is an embarrassement. Is there any chance you could tone it down? It is blatantly POV. Weidorje (talk) 13:45, 19 September 2021 (UTC)

The "anon IP" editor from Brighton, Massachusetts, has removed the words "was signed by hundreds of academics". Are you saying that's not correct? Thanks. Martinevans123 (talk) 13:52, 19 September 2021 (UTC)

Please do not create a new thread to discuss the same issue that was discussed in the previous thread; this is the third such thread you opened. Moreover, if you have any concerns with the current wording, please mention them explicitly. Asserting "it is blatantly POV", without supplying any evidence or examples, is not conducive to a fruitful discussion. Pablo Stafforini (talk) 14:46, 19 September 2021 (UTC)

Ooh, "evidence" would indeed be fruitful. What kind of evidence would please you? Weidorje (talk) 06:45, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

Ooh, if you can't manage evidence, how about some examples? You understand what the word "examples" means? Martinevans123 (talk) 08:26, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

Of course, here's one example of POV:

In 2020, an open letter to the Linguistic Society of America was written requesting the removal of Pinker from its list of LSA Fellows and its list of media experts.[96][97]. Academics, including geneticist Charleen Adams[98], evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne[99], linguist Barbara Partee[100], computer scientist Scott Aaronson[101], and others criticized the letter and expressed strong support for Pinker.[102][96] Conor Friedersdorf, writing in The Atlantic, criticized the letter for engaging in guilt by association and for creating a "chilling effect" on the speech of non-tenured academics,[96] and Mother Jones called it "factually flawed" and "dishonest".[102] On July 9, 2020, the executive committee of the Linguistic Society of America issued a statement reaffirming its commitment to intellectual freedom and professional responsibility.[103][104]. The executive committee of the Linguistic Society of America issued a letter stating that the group "is committed to intellectual freedom and professional responsibility. It is not the mission of the Society to control the opinions of its members, nor their expression. Inclusion and civility are crucial to productive scholarly work. And inclusion means hearing (not necessarily accepting) all points of view, even those that may be objectionable to some."[103]

and here's the other:

In 2020, an open letter to the Linguistic Society of America requesting the removal of Pinker from its list of LSA Fellows and its list of media experts was signed by hundreds of academics.[96][97] The letter accused Pinker of a "pattern of drowning out the voices of people suffering from racist and sexist violence, in particular in the immediate aftermath of violent acts and/or protests against the systems that created them", citing as examples six tweets and a phrase used in his 2011 book.[98] Pinker said that through this letter he was being threatened by "a regime of intimidation that constricts the theatre of ideas".[99][100][101] Several academics criticized the letter and expressed strong support for Pinker.[96][102] Conor Friedersdorf, writing in The Atlantic, criticized the letter for engaging in guilt by association and for creating a "chilling effect" on the speech of non-tenured academics,[96] and Mother Jones called it "factually flawed" and "dishonest".[102] The executive committee of the Linguistic Society of America issued a letter stating that the group "is committed to intellectual freedom and professional responsibility. It is not the mission of the Society to control the opinions of its members, nor their expression. Inclusion and civility are crucial to productive scholarly work. And inclusion means hearing (not necessarily accepting) all points of view, even those that may be objectionable to some."[103]

Good? Weidorje (talk) 13:55, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

Would you care to highlight the part(s) you consider to be "POV"? It all looks like a series of facts with good sources. Thanks. Martinevans123 (talk) 14:01, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

Of course. When you're truly, deeply, madly in love, you will believe anything. Weidorje (talk) 14:30, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

No-one's in love. We're not "boys", either. Thanks. Martinevans123 (talk) 15:03, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

Public intellectual?

WTF is that? Tsugekumene (talk) 13:51, 26 November 2022 (UTC)

Public intellectual. Johnuniq (talk) 23:23, 26 November 2022 (UTC)

Pinker's long time support for race pseudoscience

This wiki ignores Pinker's long-time support for promoters of race pseudoscience in spite of the fact that in 2021, one mass-media outlet, the Guardian, finally asked him about his connection to Steve Sailer.[1]https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/sep/28/steven-pinker-celebrity-scientist-at-the-centre-of-the-culture-wars

This wiki even cites Sailer interviewing Pinker in 2002. Shortly after, Pinker would promote Sailer, a career-long proponent of the most extreme race pseudoscience and a professional racist, by including Sailer's badly-written article "The Cousin Marriage Conundrum" in a collection of "The Best American Science and Nature Writing" of 2004.

https://www.pinkerite.com/2021/11/steven-pinker-steve-sailer-and-cousin.html

I've been following Pinker's shameful career for years. Part of the shamefulness is the media's impulse to whitewash his activities on behalf of race pseudoscience.

[2]https://www.pinkerite.com Nancygerette (talk) 01:38, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

Go ahead and fix it. Just make sure that you stick to information explicitly stated in reliable sources. The Guardian is good, but I don't think that you should cite pinkerite.com because it looks like a self-published source.      — Freoh 01:57, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

A few sources mentioning Steven Pinker's relationship to Steve Sailer and the "human biodiversity" movement:

• Angela Saini's book, Superior: The Return of Race Science, mentions Steven Pinker in Steve Sailer's group starting as early as 1999.
• Pinker’s progress: the celebrity scientist at the centre of the culture wars (The Guardian)
• Nov. 19, 2009: Let’s Go to the Tape (The New York Times)
• How White nationalists mobilize genetics: From genetic ancestry and human biodiversity to counterscience and metapolitics (American Journal of Physical Anthropology)

The "Pinkerite" website would not qualify as a reliable source, being a self-published website. Hist9600 (talk) 04:38, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

Nancygerette, this also looks like a good source:

• Evans, Gavin (2019). Skin Deep: Journeys in the Divisive Science of Race. London. ISBN 978-1-78607-622-9. OCLC 1059232398.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)

This raises an obvious but tricky question: is someone a racist if they hold the idea that different population groups have different innate, average intelligence? A few of those advancing such views are indeed happy to own up to racism. One of those is Richard Lynn, the University of Ulster evolutionary psychologist, who has no hesitation about calling himself a 'racialist', a 'racist' and a 'scientific racist'. But most of those who advocate race science, including several who enthusiastically quote Lynn, deny they’re racists, preferring to view themselves as intrepid truth-tellers who follow science wherever it may lead. To say they are racists would put the likes of Steven Pinker, Andrew Sullivan, Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris and Nicholas Wade, along with older hands such as Charles Murray, in a particularly odious circle of hell. I would prefer not to go that far, because I do not know what goes on in their every secret place. It is perfectly possible that all or some of these men treat black, white, Asian and Hispanic people the same, perhaps even that they have close friends who are not white, and that their belief that some population groups are, on average, less intelligent than others has no influence on the way they treat individual people from any of these groups. What I will say, however, is that some of the beliefs they advance are indeed racist, and that the adjective 'scientific' does nothing to mitigate this verdict.

Despite overwhelming evidence that tests of Jewish IQ in early-twentieth-century America and late-twentieth-century Israel showed lower than average IQ, the myth of perpetually high Jewish IQ persists. Steven Pinker said the Jewish IQ advantage was 'long standing and has been around for as long as there have been IQ scores of Jewish populations'.

Pinker has subsequently dug in on his view that different populations might have different innate intellectual abilities, reiterating his Ashkenazi idea and tweeting in favour of other race science promoters such as Murray and Linda Gottfredson who had faced 'no platform' pressure. Gottfredson has a thirty-year history of race science, including being the author of the founding document of the modern version of this calling. Pinker described her as an 'expert on ... intelligence', referencing a story on the right-wing website Quillette to back her.

     — Freoh 18:22, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for your support Freoh. My apologies for not responding sooner, I had neglected to monitor this Talk.

I certainly didn't expect that Pinkerite.com itself would be cited in Wikipedia, but I have collected plenty of evidence there, from sources that even a Wikipedia editor would consider valid, concerning Pinker's two decades-long support for race pseudoscience and those who promote it.

Furthermore, Pinkerite.com does not exist purely to "attack" Pinker, as the logo featured prominently on the site makes clear - the site is "Steven Pinker, the Intellectual Dark Web and Race Pseudoscience." I explain clearly why Pinker was named: he was identified by Bari Weiss as the most mainstream individual connected to the IDW.

[3]https://www.pinkerite.com/p/who-is-behind-pinkerite.html

As such, he deserves more scrutiny than the more extreme individuals associated with the IDW - and again, identified by Weiss herself - like Stefan Molyneux and Alex Jones.

[4]https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opinion/intellectual-dark-web.html

Pinker was asked in an interview in the Guardian about his support for Steve Sailer, an extreme racist, and while Pinker tried to hand-wave that away with his usual "guilt by association" the article goes on to point out that Pinker did not merely "associate" with Sailer, he advanced his career.

[5]https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/sep/28/steven-pinker-celebrity-scientist-at-the-centre-of-the-culture-wars

And I should add that the article Pinker chose to include in "The Best Science and Nature Writing" of 2004 was not very good at all, which I explain here:

https://www.pinkerite.com/2021/11/steven-pinker-steve-sailer-and-cousin.html

Which makes me suspect Pinker did it as a personal favor, rather than the quality of the piece.

The fact that there is such outrage that I dared to mention Pinker's support for race pseudoscience makes me wonder how partisan some editors at Wikipedia are, on behalf of Pinker. We already know that Pinker's PR people monitor his Wiki entry.

[6]https://www.pinkerite.com/2019/11/steven-pinkers-pr-machine.html Nancygerette (talk) 15:35, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

Furthermore, Pinker is making his third appearance, this July, at the annual conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research which has been criticized for its association with eugenics, and should be criticized for its long-time and ongoing support for race pseudoscience, or if you prefer, "hereditarianism."

[7]https://www.pinkerite.com/2023/06/steven-pinker-at-2023-racist-rodeo.html

Last year there was a controversy because Emil O. W. Kirkegaard was disinvited from the 2022 conference due to the complaint of another invited speaker, over Kirkegaard's promotion of race pseudoscience.

[8]https://a-abdellaoui.medium.com/how-to-keep-flies-away-from-our-picknick-7867151f6e69

Outside of ISIR, Kirkegaard was known as an unaccredited, racist crank - [9]|noted by geneticist Adam Rutherford in this tweet. - but apparently he was good enough for the ISIR for a long time. [10]http://programme.exordo.com/isir2018/

Which should make clear the disreputable nature of ISIR. Nancygerette (talk) 16:15, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

A clue is that someone has made a website (pinkerite.com) dedicated to attacking Pinker. (Personal attack removed) Basing material in this WP:BLP article based on a website like that is not going to happen. Johnuniq (talk) 02:25, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

I never suggested Pinkerite be cited directly, but rather, Pinkerite.com provides plenty of evidence for Pinker's promotion of race pseudoscience, from Wikipedia-acceptable sources. The fact that you made a personal attack against me is absolutely typical of Pinker fans - they never actually address the issues I raise, but rather express their outrage that anybody would be "crazy" enough to dare criticize Pinker at all. This is how race pseudoscience manages to flourish - too much respect for "celebrity intellectuals" like Pinker to even dare broach the subject. Nancygerette (talk) 16:23, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

None of this looks WP:DUE or appropriate for a WP:BLP; it's a lot of guilt-by-association using almost entirely non-academic sources and in general is not what Wikipedia is for. Crossroads ^-talk- 23:34, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

What do you mean? Gavin Evans is an academic, and he addresses beliefs that Pinker is directly promoting.      — Freoh 23:53, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

The source is not from an academic peer-reviewed publisher, and his field is journalism rather than anthropology or something of relevance. We don't cite journalists for things like physics if we can help it, same goes for other fields. It's not due weight; we don't add every complaint about someone to their BLP. Crossroads ^-talk- 00:27, 28 January 2023 (UTC)

How does it not deserve due weight? There are a bunch of reliable sources above that talk about it, and I haven't seen any sources that contradict this information.      — Freoh 00:56, 28 January 2023 (UTC)

If the matter has been covered in multiple reliable sources, then there can be little doubt that it is relevant. Associating with white nationalists and scientific racists, citing them, promoting their work, and having those connections written about in a variety of reliable sources, including The Guardian, The New York Times, academic articles, and books on scientific racism, is certainly relevant (not merely a "complaint").

WP:DUE requires that all reliable sources be represented. Not that they all be excluded because the authors are not all anthropologists, or some other arbitrary made-up criteria. That would be as silly as claiming that all sources for the life of Albert Einstein must be authored by physicists. Hist9600 (talk) 00:41, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

Letter to the LSA again

I've trimmed the paragraph on the 2020 open letter, trying to bring a measure of WP:DUE balance: [11]. To me it seems odd that a brief quotation from a letter signed by *hundreds* of academics would then be counterbalanced by a WP:MANDY-type denial by Pinker, and a sentence stating that "several academics criticized the letter and expressed strong support for Pinker", and a separate sentence for one of his defenders, and a long, bland quote from the LSA denying responsibility. I hope we can agree that my edits are a step in the right direction, but if not I'm happy to discuss. Generalrelative (talk) 00:15, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

Guardian article

I've searched the article and talk page archive for discussion of the Guardian "long read" article "Pinker’s progress: the celebrity scientist at the centre of the culture wars" by Alex Blasdel and found nothing. The picture it paints of Pinker as "one of the world’s most contentious thinkers" appears to be somewhat at odds with the overall tone of this BLP, and even its "Public debate" section, which appears to downplay the controversy surrounding this figure. Thoughts on using this source to discuss some of Pinker's controversies in greater depth? Is there good reason to believe that Basdel's view is outside the mainstream? Generalrelative (talk) 01:27, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

In general the source is certainly usable, of course in accord with WP:Due weight and so forth. The much stronger claim that Pinker is "one of the world’s most contentious thinkers" appears in what seems to be part of the headline, so I would be very leery of a broader reframing around that specifically, or even of including that at all without much better support from other sources. Crossroads ^-talk- 02:33, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

For sure. What I'm most interested in is the discussion of the various controversies given in the final 1/3 of the article, following the sentence "Everything, of course, is not amazing." I agree that we would need more than just this article to, for instance, state that Pinker is a "contentious thinker" in the lead, but it is true that the body of Basdel's article substantiates the message of its sub-headline. Generalrelative (talk) 03:09, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

For a bit more perspective on the notability of Pinker's controversies, see this piece from the Harvard Crimson, especially the statement:

As students at the university where he teaches, we certainly knew about his scientific work, but we were also aware of the controversy he has engendered. Pinker, it seems, eventually did not know what to make of us, either. In our final interview, it became necessary to ask Pinker to respond to his harshest critics — what he made of being called a scientific racist, a sexist, and a defender of others who are racist and sexist — which prompted him to send us an email reiterating, on the latter point, “this is untrue.” On the whole, Pinker is remarkably accessible to students — he responds to all of our messages within a matter of minutes. “Any professor who said no at a request to meet with students would be derelict in their duties,” he tells us. Most of the interactions that students have with him will be in the context of the coursework he teaches. And yet, his persona in the culture wars looms.

(Emphasis added of course.) Generalrelative (talk) 03:21, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

This piece in Chronicle of Higher Education is also informative on his connections to the "Intellectual Dark Web" and discusses criticism from John Gray, Nassim Taleb and Samuel Moyn. Generalrelative (talk) 03:32, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

I don't want to get too much into the weeds of behavioural matters that are not best discussed in this place, but I do think it might be helpful to explain to anyone new to the article that there has been an extensive history of disruption with regard to this and some other Pinker-related articles that goes a long way to explaining the afore-mentioned issues with tone in certain sections. Specifically, there is almost no question that the LTA HeadlyDown was, for a protracted period a couple of years back, heavily attacking Pinker-related articles through POV pushing with socks. I was going to raise the matter at ANI and SPI about two years back, but I first took the matter of my suspicions up with a former Arb who had dealt with HD extensively--and from that moment forwards, the sock farm went quiet--apparently realizing the jig was up, as they say--and so I never pursued the matter further. Incidentally, Generalrelative, HeadlyDown's LTA page was blanked (and I think reference to them in the LTA indexes were eliminated) last December by another LTA that you blocked a few months later, so it's possible those two sock clusters are linked, though it does seem they have very distinct areas of interest. (Nevermind, it looks like that other LTA blanked about a hundred such LTA report pages that same day, possibly to mask the one they were actually intent on hiding. Those edits should all probably be reverted.)

Again, all of that is only indirectly relevant to the content issues themselves, but what I want to emphasize is that I believe there was and still is significant consensus among the legitimate participants in previous discussions that the criticisms section had essentially been leveraged to turn the article in a virtual attack page. The worst of the changes were pared back soon after the edits were originally made, but I don't think the section ever got a proper, well-thought-out, consensus process re-rewrite after the socks went quiet. By the way, just in case anyone is curious, I did consider, just because of how aggressively they were pushing for coverage of certain facts and their very small number of edits, whether Nancygerette is the latest Headly sock. Because of behavioural factors that I won't disclose here per WP:BEANS, I tend to believe that Nancy is not a sock (or at least not a Headly sock), but to be fair, their contributions are quite few in number, so grain of salt and all.

By the way, if anyone feels this is the wrong place to be discussing all of this, I'll take no offense to it being removed or moved to another forum, I simply wanted to make the goodfaith contributors here to realize all of this, because while a number of editors above were in the know on what was going on, the lack of a formal SPI and additional LTA logging means it did not gt recorded properly in the right spaces. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 12:40, 3 July 2023 (UTC)

Now, that editorial context out of the way, with regard to the content issues being discussed immediately above, I am somewhat divided. On the one hand, it's pretty clear that the "scientific racism" charges come from non-expert sources by way of culture war controversies. There's no indication in RS that I have seen that indicate that any major figures in the spheres of cognitive science, psychometrics, or genetics regard any of Pinker's positions or statements in the area of race and intelligence (which comments are mostly pretty reserved and noncommital) are "controversial". He doesn't really contribute research to that area himself, but he has (in interviews and forums) sometimes referenced well-known (but predictably controversial) research that suggests Ashkenazi Jews might have a slightly higher average IQ than any other identified racial group of its size. His support for it isn't full-throated, but more a kind of vague "well I think as scientists we have to be open to considering the possibility that there might be genetic populations with small advantages in intellect, but none of the research is conclusive" hand-wavy non-renuniciation. He hardly goes to the mat on the matter, but because of his belonging to the group in question, it's not the best look in the world. Then again, he does have a reputation as a major advocate for freedom of inquiry and a rejection of dogma: he's often unwilling to say that certain matters (such as those pertain to sexual dimorphism in behaviour) are completely settled issues, as a scientific matter, because of the complexity of the neuropsychological and genetic factors at play. And that, I think, is the biggest single reason why he has gotten enshrouded by the culture wars: it's less what he has to say and more what he refuses to say, because of a certain absolutist take and what you can and cannot endorse as an empiricist.

Anyway, bringing this back to the policy point I was aiming to address, my main concern is the quality of the sources: there's an element of MEDRS involved in these topics, and I have reservations about relying too heavily upon op-eds and mainstream coverage of his positions on scientific issues, and whether or not they are best described as controversial or extreme, or even for validating that these are positions that pinker has actually expressly supported. There's a lot of innuendo and vague implications in some of the sources in this space, and dearth of insight from field experts. On the other hand, looking at the newest crop of sources in particular, I do think there is WP:weight here such that we would be acting improperly as an editorial matter if we did not discuss the reputation he has with some in the mainstream. We really need to attribute this heavily and refine the wording to thread that needle, but much as I find the claims that he support scientific racism in any form to be inaccurate and unsupported by the record of his actual statements, there's just a few too many sources that do make that claim, or something like it. We just can't ignore that altogether, even if the question of exactly how how much of the criticism is WP:DUE remains an open question. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 12:40, 3 July 2023 (UTC)

You can also see above on this page several SPA accounts, of which McNulTEA was blocked. I also filed an SPA for another account but it wasn't enough evidence for them to take action: Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/McNulTEA/Archive (this also links to the AE report that led to the original block). I wonder if there's a connection there to the LTA. Crossroads ^-talk- 18:53, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

Probable: there is overlap on the POV pushing subject matter, a relatively small gap in the timing, and some other indicators (that again, I'd rather not reveal per WP:BEANS). But suffice it to say, yeah, I think these two you caught are likely related to Headly. The LTA report should probably be updated at some point, although I'll have to be careful how to present it with respect to the accounts that were not CU'd. If I find time to do it this week, I'll come back here and delete those portions of my comments above and leave a link instead, so this page isn't too cluttered with sock identification talk. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 01:32, 6 July 2023 (UTC)