Steven Pinker’s latest book — which I have no interest in ever reading, despite the fact that it’s getting reviewed all over the place — contains some interesting exercises in glossing over ugly truths.
— Adia Benton (@Ethnography911) February 28, 2018
You know, in everything I’ve ever read on the Tuskegee syphilis study — and there are lots of books and papers on the subject — no one ever suggested that the doctors infected the patients with syphilis. They didn’t need to. The truth was damned horrifying. The doctors in that study intentionally neglected to treat a treatable disease, allowing it to run its terrible course, just to see what would happen. They also failed to give the patients the information that would allow them to elect to go to a different doctor for treatment, because that would have defeated their purpose of watching spirochetes eat the brains of black people.
There is nothing forgivable in the facts of the story. Scientists watched human beings suffer and die to sate their sick curiosity and to get a few publications. It did not generate new knowledge, because we already had lots of information on the course of the disease. The information did not prevent harm to anyone, because we had an effective treatment already.
But hey, let’s put a happy spin on it! At least they didn’t intentionally infect anyone with the disease. There, it doesn’t sound as awful now, does it? It could have been so much worse! We can take this approach to everything. Sure, the US bombed villages in Viet Nam with napalm and Agent Orange and high explosives, but at least we didn’t nuke them. See how good and progressive we are? Oh, yeah, we may have prisoners held without due process in Gitmo, and we may have tortured them a little bit, but at least we didn’t infect them with syphilis or shoot them out of cannons or throw them into vats of acid. We could have, but because we didn’t, you need to respect our restraint and our growing humanity.
I don’t get Pinker. I can’t figure out what his aim is. He’s not in the New Atheist group, explicitly, even though there is a ton of Harris in his work (or vice versa). He clearly loves to play that Charles Murray “intellectual racist” game (even Gladwell has called him out on this), but unlike Murray, he isn’t enthusiastically pushing right wing politics (as defined in our current culture).
It’s bad pseudoscience, and he does write a lot about the failures of modern academia – in his mind – but he isn’t one of these “Cultural Marxism” people.
He’s awful, but I can’t really figure what his aim is.
I’m curious if people who know him better see the agenda.
Fucking hell, I guess the better angels in his nature are just as imaginary as the Catholic ones.
I’m sorry but what kind of crap is this? Is this meant to pass for an article or some kind of rational critique of Pinker’s book?
First you declare that you will not read the book, then you pass judgement on it, based on a tweet that someone else wrote about a book you haven’t read. Not even based on the book itself! How do you know the context in which Pinker described the study? You just leap to conclusions based on a second-hand account, then throw in some other irrelevant analogies to give the gullible reader the impression that Pinker’s book is defending unethical practices.
I used to like this blog, but your vendetta against Pinker has crossed the line from pathetic to just plain vindictive. What exactly is your motive?
Perhaps, Mr Wilford, you can provide the context that excuses that trivializing of the ethical issues in the Tuskegee study. As you & I both noted, I haven’t read the book or even expressed an interest in reading it, so maybe you can share the brilliant context that justifies his statement, and persuade me to change my mind.
In what possible context would that excerpt be okay? Is it in a chaper titled “Stupid thomgs I don’t actually believe” or some such?
Stupid things*
@5
“Here’s the sort thing an asshole – which I totally am not – would write…”
“I don’t need to eat the whole egg to know it’s rotten.”
That pretty well summarizes why I’m discouraged from reading the book. If that sort of dishonesty made it in there, why should I bother?
I’m beginning to find Pinker a loathsome individual. I loved his initial book The Language Instinct but really his subsequent books, his idiotic defence of evolutionary psychology, that terrible piece he wrote explaining poverty with thermodynamics and his general pandering to racists, all covered with a thin veneer of “skepticism”, “rationality” and “free inquiry” and delivered with self assured smugness are making him intolerable.
The creepy whig history motherfucker is a racist ass chud. Who could have expected this?
Well, I haven’t read the book yet, but I intend to. I just object to criticising it based on nothing more than a quote taken without context on twitter. I will withhold my judgement until I have read it, as any sensible person should.
James Wilford, #11
It’s not based on nothing more than the quote.
Text is originally from the NYT review here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/books/review-enlightenment-now-steven-pinker.html
I’d suggest that book reviews can be quite a good guide to whether or not you should actually read the book…!
danimal
Thanks for that link.
I really didn’t want to read the book after PZ’s quote of a quote but now having read the review I really, really don’t want to.
James Wilford @11: What sort of context would make defending the Tuskegee studies not-horrific?
The NYT does quote it in a fairly cherry picked manner to make it sound much worse. Pinker makes a callous statement when he says it “may have been defensible by the standards of the day” – this is a poor choice of words for sure but was not really related to the point he was trying to make. He clearly states in the same paragraph that it was an unethical study and uses the words “universally deplored breech” in describing it. This was not mentioned in the NYT piece.
This tweet shows the full passage from the book:
https://twitter.com/Woolgatherist/status/969110138220052480
Lmao, so his point is that while the Tuskegee studies were “eh kinda bad maybe idk”, it’s bad to use them to characterize science as having bad parts because the smallpox vaccines were SO GREAT 11!1!
That’d be perfectly sensible, if “The Tuskegee Studies” and “Preventing Smallpox” were the only two things ever done in the name of science.
They aren’t, his point is myopic at best and idiotic at any closer scrutiny, and he’s a buffoon.
I seem to recall repeatedly being told that there was some bad study done in the USA where scientists intentionally infected people with a sexually transmitted disease…
I checked on google and it looks like that was the “Guatemala syphilis experiment“.
Apparently, You cannot quote Pinker the same way you cannot quote Harris the same way you cannot quote Peterson.
No, really, that whole page doesn’t add anything. Sure, he calles it a “universally deplored breach” (though a universally deplored breech is also fitting), but he does not provide any evidence that it was indeed universally deplored or when that particular deploration happened.
He further claims it’s a “one time failure to prevent harm”, which is
a) stretching the definition of “preventing harm” quite a bit, as the researchers didn’t negligently forget to do something but intentionally withheld treatment and information from the people who trusted them
b) obviously and absolutely untrue, as Tuskegee isn’t a one time event, but one in a long history of unethical experiments on people of colour in the name of “science”.
Of course it’s all on par with Pinker’s main hypothesis that the West has become oh so good. Remember that this is the man who claims that the 20th century was exceptionally peaceful if you just ignore the two world wars and that the Vietnam war was an internal Vietnamese dispute in which the USA merely lent support which is why the deaths cannot be blamed on the USA.
If you read the passage from the book he says in the first sentence that he’s talking about someone else’s poor comparison of Smallpox Vaccine and Tuskegee Study. He’s saying it is unfairly pessimistic to compare those two as if they indicate that science as a whole is a toss up because these two good and bad things balance themselves out.
Brian Pansky
One time event, doesn’t count.
See, you can move thatr goalpost eternally.
Next you’ll post about the Contraceptive trials in Puerto Rico which were done without anything that you could call informed consent and I’ll point out that at least they didn’t force the women to have sex in front of the researchers and dismiss it.
Totally true, I haven’t even read the book I’m just being a devil’s advocate. I don’t think he’s in any way trying to say that unethical experiments are ok, he’s just saying that amplifying the bad things from the past and taking the good for granted is something people tend to do.
I have never been a fan of Pinker since noting his remarkable lack of curiosity (for a scientist) regarding ape science language studies, which he dismissed as ‘highly-trained animal acts’. As far as I know he never even went to visit Washoe or other signing nonhuman great apes to see for himself what they were capable of. He flat out tells a falsehood in The Language Instinct when he claims that his daughter proclaiming the word ‘pink’ to describe a sunset was something a sign language proficient chimpanzee could never do. I worked with Washoe and the other chimpanzees in Ellensburg, and they frequently signed to themselves about flowers and toothbrushes in magazines, precisely the kind of behavior he falsely proclaimed was impossible for a nonhuman great ape. I never understood how Pinker could so blithely put his high-falutin human exceptionalist theory above the actual facts of the matter.
@20
Right, and I’m saying the person he’s responding to is correct, because those were just two examples out of a large set, that includes a very large amount of horrific abuses done in the name of “science.”
I’m also not a utilitarian that thinks human lives saved vs human lives ruined is a good metric that proves that science has totally done more good than harm. Every time science hurts someone in its name, it’s violating ethics in a way that can’t be ameliorated by doing some good things in exchange.
“I have never been a fan of Pinker since noting his remarkable lack of curiosity (for a scientist) regarding ape science language studies, which he dismissed as ‘highly-trained animal acts’. ”
Far many other beliefs, I can understand a political agenda being behind them. There’s no excuse for this though. Anyone who’s ever had pets in their life knows that they aren’t just mindless robotic automata, they are living beings with unique personalities of their own. My parents have a couple of dogs, sisters from the same litter raised together since birth. When one of them jumps into my lap, I can tell which it is just based on her behavior without looking.
Fucking parrots can spontaneously name things based on previously learned concepts, like Alex calling a new kind of nut he was given a “cork nut”. Anyone here unfamiliar with the Grey Parrot studies, read “Alex & Me” by Irene Pepperburg. It’s absolutely fantastic.
Some people take the radical empiricist approach of demanding proof that animals have consciousness. For anyone that accepts evolution though, that question needs to be turned on its head. Prove that they don’t. Why should humans be so fundamentally unique psychologically?
Mark Dowd @25:
Or when, because he couldn’t pronounce “apple” due to his lack of lips, he invented the word “banarry” for it. Banarry being a combination of “banana” (for its taste or size, can’t remember which) and “cherry” (for its shape and color).
@25
Why exactly does belief in evolution necessitate proving a negative and violating epistemology? If you’re going to claim that species x has trait y, you have the responsibility to demonstrate that.
#24
Getting philosophy 101 on me.
I agree it’s not a great argument that because science has killed fewer than it has saved, science is necessarily good and we should keep doing it. The argument he should be making is that the horrors were not caused by science itself, but by scientists who were unethical. Similar to how atheists like us always remind people it isn’t atheism that caused some deranged atheist to do something bad.
For the record, I think Pinker is wrong too, but the idea that it’s wise to assert that ideas are true until proven false is just moon logic
@28
I mean, I’m explaining my beliefs with the most accurate terms I have?
Right, but the fact that they were specific scientists acting unethically doesn’t make them not count as scientists. The history of science is indeed a huge toss-up, because of all of the scientists acting unethically.
Atheists as a group have a huge problem with letting deplorables and alt-light people become figureheads, even if those people didn’t become deplorables/alt-light because of their atheism.
The first time I became aware of the infamous Tuskegee study was seeing a NOVA episode in the mid-90s. The report was horrifying. The study continued after World War II. One of the scientists, confronted with a comparison to Mengele, rationalized, “We are not Nazis.”
I’m with Steve Bruce @9… I liked “Language Instinct” and stuck with him through “How The Brain Works.” After reading “The Blank Slate” though, I was pretty much done… The red flags were piling up and his strawmanning and overreaching started to drown out whatever points
he was trying to make.
This passage from the NYT review was the part that struck me as the most incisive description of the problem with Pinker:
Even putting the best possible gloss on his seemingly constant need to defend racists (sorry “racial realists”) – there is, after all, at least some difference between saying “we shouldn’t dismiss scientific results a priori just because they make us uncomfortable” (true!) and “those Bell Curve guys made some pretty good points!” (not really!) – the fact he KEEPS GOING BACK THERE doesn’t say anything good about him no matter how you spin it. He seems deadset on finding the most truly inexcusable shit he can and making excuses for it. The worst part is, I still tend to think his heart’s in the right place, it’s just he can’t stop picking at this particular mental scab. It’s so stupid, blind, and unnecessary. You don’t have to justify every single horrible thing done in the name of progress in order to defend the idea that scientific progress is, in the aggregate, a good thing.
Alex rich
The devil really doesn’t need advocates. He’s either that supreme evil in which case you really shouldn’t argue his side or a fucking revolutuionary who objected to god’s tyrrany in which case he’s really pissed about being seen as the supreme evil.
Two things:
a) He’s obviously blatantly downplaying them, using the “people of their time” argument. This is a pretty funny argument since he considers the better outcomes to be the “true science” and not just a product of their time as well.
b) I don’t think that this is a reasonable conclusion. I think the whole point of the original statement (I haven’t seen the original statement the colleague supposedly made and Pinker has a horrible reputation of strawmanning the opposition, so I’m reasonably interfering) is that science has always been both: a great motor for human progress, but also a something that served the powers that be, that justified horrible human rights abuses and helped carrying them out*.
Pinker seems to dismiss the bad as regretable errors and the good as the true nature of science, which is nothing but wishful thinking in my eyes.
*All weapons function because of science. Once we moved from stones you found lying around, people used their thinking skills in figuring out how to kill better. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are as much science’s legacy as the smallpox vaccine.
Porrivil Sorrens
While you’re technically correct, the point is that evolution is a gradual process. To believe that consciousness somehow appeared in humans in a pretty complex form without it having precursors in other species is like the creationist idea that the eye could not be a product of evolution because it’s really complex.
This is the nerve he seems to be hitting. People can’t differentiate between “These bad things weren’t so bad compared with all the good” and “These bad things weren’t so bad”
@33
I agree completely, I’m just reluctant to agree to a heuristic like “we need to throw out empiricism and require critics to prove a negative.”
I don’t think humans are on principle the only beings with consciousness, but the time to believe that other species do is when they can be shown to have consciousness, not to just assume so because it would be odd if they didn’t.
Porivil Sorrens
I think the very educated and experienced peopel here have lonked to a lot of evidence in support of that hypothesis.
@36
Right. I’m not saying that they haven’t. As I’ve said repeatedly, I don’t think that consciousness only exists in humans. I’m just rejecting that it’s a good thing to change your standards to “believe until proven false”.
alex rich @34:
He winds up coming across like the well-meaning idiots who tell grieving parents that “things happen for a reason” or that scene in Breaking Bad where Walter starts verbally flailing while addressing his students regarding a recent plane crash*, comparing it to the Lockerbie bombing and rambling about how very much worse it could have been – why, we should all be grateful it was only a few dozen dead!
Even if such statements are technically true in some sense or another, they remain completely off-putting and unhelpful.
*[mouse over for spoiler-ish note]
“we may have prisoners held without due process in Gitmo, and we may have tortured them a little bit, but at least we didn’t …”
Come on, PZ, you can do better than this. I propose “…, but at least we didn’t lynch them like we did with another category of the American population.”
@16AlexR: thanks for the full quote. It shows that PZ’s criticism was right given “it equate a one time failure to prevent harm to a few dozen people with the prevention of hundreds of millions of deaths per century in perpetuity.” Given “liberté, fraternité, egalité”, that famous slogan that’s so well correleated to the Enlightenment SP actually displays an anti-Enlightenment attitude here. This quote makes clear that according to SP some people are less equal than others.
“I don’t think he’s in any way trying to say that unethical experiments are ok,”
I don’t think anyone on this page accused SP of this. I do think however that you made @21Gilliel unpleasantly happy – happy because you so nicely confirmed G’s comment and unpleasantly because I suspect she’d rather wish you had not.
@33 Gilliel: “Hiroshima and Nagasaki are as much science’s legacy as the smallpox vaccine.”
The Holocaust was possible thanks to scientific rationality as well. Given the hideous constraints
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint_(mathematics)
science did an “excellent” job optimizing the Final Solution. And I’m not only talking about Zyklon-B, also about the psychology involved to keep the victims quiet and cooperative until the very last moment.
If we want to avoid evil made possible by science SP is not helpful, to say it kindly. Exactly because the role of science (and hence scientists) in our age is so dominant we must be on our guard and not automatically welcome every new development.
Did he actually refer to the Tuskegee study as a “one time failure to prevent harm to a few dozen people” in the book, or is that someone else’s words? Right after giving the (I assume approximate, not necessarily exact) number of 600? That’s not “a few dozen“, that’s a few hundred.
Way to downplay the magnitude of a horrific study, there.
For future reference, the Tuskegee experiment can be defended this far:
When it started in 1934, it was designed to follow the progress of disease of people who had already been infected. There was no safe effective treatment, and the people who signed up for the study got health care and other benefits. There were already ethical concerns — why only black men, for instance? — but it was at least defensible.
There’s an interesting 1974 article written by a black physician/researcher reviewing the impact of the Tuskegee experiment (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2609140/) that concludes that the study had significant scientific value despite flaws in both methodology and ethics. (It should not surprise anyone that he concludes that the greatest value of the study was in waking people up to ethical lapses in medical research — not exactly the scientific value the researchers were hoping for!)
The problem arose when penicillin became widely available in the 1950s but the researchers in charge of the experiment refused to offer it (or even acknowledge it) to their trial subjects because they felt it was more important to collect data on the progress of the disease than to treat the subjects in their trial. I don’t think anyone doubts that the trial would have been run completely differently if the subjects were white.
The result was decades of neglect, many preventable deaths, many preventable infections of spouses, and many children born with preventable congenital syphilis. It certainly wasn’t a “one time thing.”
Pinker is right about one thing — by the standards of the day, it was considered ethical by many people. The AMA notoriously defended the trial. But this is a useless defence of ethical lapses, particularly those as severe as the Tuskegee experiment. After all, the standards of its time argument is equally applicable to slavery, lynchings, the Japanese-American interments, the Trail of Tears, and so on.
And the valiant assistance of IBM, providing state-of-the-art information technology (Hollerith machines) for use in identifying and counting the intended victims. (See Edwin Black IBM and the Holocaust.)
chrislawson @41:
I thought Ehrlich’s “magic bullet” was effective, and had been around for 20 years by the time the trial started. Maybe not widely available, or easily administered?
It was just a continuation of heavy metal poisoning for treatment of syphilis using arsenic instead of mercury. Might have been tolerated better than mercuric chloride, but it still had problems.
Penicillin and later antibiotics were the real safe treatments.
Can you actually prove to me that humans have consciousness? (I’m not saying we don’t, I just don’t see how you’d prove it.)
@45
Proofs are a mathematical matter, not a psychological one. I certainly believe that there is sufficient evidence to accept the belief that humans are conscious beings.
It is possible to demonstrate that humans are on average capable of perceiving and acting in response to external stimuli and metaphysical concepts, which is enough for me.
I was on the community advisory board for the Seattle HIV Vaccine Trials unit for five years. The Tuskegee study is mentioned in our orientation for new CAB members, as an illustration of exactly what we do: advocate for the study participants.
How bad was it? The US government, who sponsored the study, told participants that they were looking for a cure for “bad blood,” a folk term used in the South to describe any unknown illness. In return for their participation, the men got a hot meal, a medical check-up, and burial insurance (i.e. if they died while in the study, their family would be given a box and a piece of ground to bury him in.) In fact, 300 of the men had stage 1 syphilis, and were told only that they had “bad blood.” Neither they nor their family was told that they had a (at the time) incurable sexually transmitted disease. The other 300 served as a control. The study started in 1934.
After penicillin had been proven effective against syphilis (in the equally horrific Guatemala Syphilis Experiment), there was no need for the study to continue. So the controls were cashed out, and the men with syphilis were retained. Now, the experiment was to watch and document the progress of the disease through its terminal stages. If the men wanted to try the new miracle drug, they were told no. Those who did manage to get ahold of penicillin were then billed for the years of medical care and food, an amount that was simply impossible for a sharecropper to provide. Those who could not pay were thrown into prison.
After passage of the Freedom of Information Act in 1972, the New York Times acted on accusations that had been around for decades, and began to investigate the study. In July 1974, they published an expose. A month later, Congress was holding hearings. In October, the study was finally ended, after 40 years.
Adding insult to injury, the United States sentenced Nazi doctors to death for doing less than what the US government did to these men and their families. And in 1968, an international conference ratified the Helsinki Protocols, which set the standard for ethical human medical experimentation; the US refused to implement them until 1986.
The Tuskegee experiment was done because poor black men were seen as expendable, and not worthy of being treated like human beings.
I think there’s typically more of a gray area to worry about (or maybe whole other directions to go in), which you’re not acknowledging here.
First, it’s not such a black or white thing, such that either you’ve got crystal-clear, rock-solid evidence for something, or else you’ve got no evidence for it at all.
Second, it’s often reasonable to adjust or revise your ideas about which proposition the evidence is supposed to be evidence for, after getting a better handle on which questions seem more interesting to you, which problems you think you want to solve, and so forth. Sometimes you just hadn’t formulated the question correctly, not clearly enough, not in a way that matters to you, or whatever the case may be. The problem here isn’t that you found out somehow (using observations or experiments) that the evidence fails to support some vague/irrelevant/incoherent/etc. proposition, thus you should eliminate the proposition from your repertoire. Instead, the issue can be that you needed to think a bit and be more careful about which specific claims you were going to evaluate with respect to the evidence, in order to study/predict/explain stuff that would turn out to be interesting, important, meaningful, useful, and so forth.
Now, getting to the main point…. You obviously don’t pop out of the womb, clad in armor, full of beliefs informed by all of the best science we have today. You have a whole lot of ideas that are just built up by your ordinary, everyday experiences, as you live your life, get a bit of an education, learn about ideas that others have, argue with them, change your mind and back forth, confuse or distract yourself in every way you can think of, and so on. Those things may very well be supported by some kind of evidence or another, but what that may be is not always very clear or explicit. You may never put much thought into it, or you may think that, after due consideration, it’s not really worth your time to investigate it more thoroughly. You’ve got a life, you’ve got a day job, etc. … maybe you’ve got no life and no job, but whatever your situation, you definitely don’t have that much time to cover all of that ground.
What people don’t do is drop all of that (i.e., practically everything you think you know about the world), until a scientist/expert comes along to confirm/disconfirm each and every item, or until the evidence falls into your lap by accident. Scientists are busy and aren’t doing that shit for you anyway, you might tell yourself. You’ll just go with what works, what seems reasonable or appropriate, etc. You are holding onto that stuff, for as long as you want, maybe to the grave. That’s the way it will stay, if nothing from science comes in and bites you in the ass about it, or if nothing very obvious in your life conflicts with it. Your experiences don’t seem to conflict with it, it doesn’t seem to be threatened by any of the arguments you hear, etc. You’ve simply got no very compelling reason to drop the idea, since it looks okay and doesn’t seem to be causing you much trouble in your life, even though you don’t have the kind of scientific evidence you may like to have to put it on a more solid footing.
I think that’s a decent approach to take most of the time, especially if you don’t have much expertise about it or don’t have the luxury of spending lots of your own time/money to settle the question (if that can even be done) in a more satisfactory way. I don’t think it would be helpful to tell people that they’re making a mistake when they do so. That seems like a fine and acceptable and practical way to go; and it isn’t a problem, as long as we try to remain at least dimly aware of the fact that that is the sort of thing we’re doing, that we may need to change what we’re thinking about X if we come across some science (or responsible academic work of whatever variety) that in one way or another does a better job of telling a story about X.
Still not interested in talking to you, CR.
But, for the record:
Is not a think I believe or have ever said. In fact, that would directly contradict with my response @45.
I don’t know what your problem is, but if others don’t have it and they get something out of #48 and maybe they show me where I’m going wrong, that’s good enough for me. Fair warning: I’m about to point out something that isn’t clear to me, which I think I’m allowed to do without asking for your permission. If you don’t want to read it, even though you’re being quoted, that’s okay. For all I care, you can just read your own comments or read nothing at all.
#35:
It’s not clear what you mean when you say “they can be shown” to have it, and until then, it isn’t time to believe that. When and how could that happen? Why is that the time, instead of some other time? Why do you seem to think that this time hasn’t already passed for non-human animals? Don’t we have sufficient evidence now? If we do, then what’s the point of raising the question? Is it a very special or different problem, compared to the case of other human minds, for which the evidence showing it presumably has already arrived (even though you don’t say precisely what that evidence is)?
@50
Reread the passage you literally just quoted, and then consider why asking this is a dumb question.
Spoiler alert: The thing you quoted literally says that I don’t think humans are the only conscious beings, as have the repeated posts I’ve made in this thread where I said the exact same thing (@37, @35, @29)
As mentioned above, I already said multiple times that I think non-human animals can be shown to have consciousness, and Pinker’s the one raising the question, not me.
See, this kind of shit is why I think talking to you is a pain in the ass. You consistently either don’t read my posts, or have the reading comprehension of a mentally challenged brick, so either way, nothing productive will ever be gained from talking to you.
For once, I agree with chigau, lay off the sauce.
Pinker’s facts are usually in line, he’s an excellent researcher. I wouldn’t say he’s hiding anything behind a lie. He does something which is key to some kinds of legal work and is much harder to do.
What’s that?
When facts and evidence are divorced from context, they become impoverished and can be used to justify pathological conclusions. Where I come from we have a saying “It’s not what it is, it’s what it can be made to look like”. The best way to do that is with facts. Lies come with a price if found out, they’re generally not worth the risk. If you need a jury to see from a certain perspective, you give the evidence with the least amount of context possible, and that introduces the possibility of alternative interpretations of said facts. If your interpretation of said facts and evidence are proven wrong there is always plausible deniability that you were simply mistaken. Only the dim witted and those with no other recourse lie, Pinker is not a dimwit.
You can usually tell when Pinker is arguing objectively or when he’s got his blinkers on. When there is a need to downplay and divorce things from context, like the Tuskegee Syphilis study, it’s a simple rhetorical device that’s supposed to steer the reader into seeing those facts from a different perspective. Not so much a lie, it’s skeevy apologia of a pathological conclusion. The more need there is to re-interpret facts and evidence the more one needs to divorce the facts and evidence from context. This can actually reach absurd abstract proportions in some legal cases, but I digress.
What I’m driving at is, you’ve severely underestimated Pinker if you think he’s simply lying. Nobody anywhere says to themselves “What lies can I weave today” whilst nefariously twisting their mustache. He believes every word he’s writing, he’s the good guy and he’s going to try to convince as many people as he can of his pathological conclusions. Which is far more difficult to deal with than a liar.
it is not a case of letting the deplorables and assorted become the figure heads. One of the things that make them so deplorable in the first place is the compulsion to dominate by force of will or any other means if needed every interaction they are involved in. They are the only one that counts, they do not rest easy with anyone else in command how ever which is a weakness there has to bee some in command at all times
uncle frogy
“Perhaps, Mr Wilford, you can provide the context that excuses that trivializing of the ethical issues in the Tuskegee study. As you & I both noted, I haven’t read the book or even expressed an interest in reading it, so maybe you can share the brilliant context that justifies his statement, and persuade me to change my mind.”
Well, the part about the Tuskegee study was Pinker reporting on what a colleague thought–namely [she thought that] that “the Tuskegee study was an unavoidable part of scientific practice as opposed to [what Pinker agrees is] a universally deplored breach.” (Pinker, 2018, p. 401).
That’s the context Dr. Myers. Professor Pinker expresses dismay that people think that things like the appalling behavior over Tuskegee is an unavoidable part of doing science, and therefore go on to attack medical science in general. Is that enough to persuade you to change your mind?
#54
If this had been Pinker’s only argument, many people would have less of an issue even if they may have disagreed.
Where he went astray in many people’s minds is when he attempted to further support his argument by downplaying the seriousness of the Tuskegee study and trivializing it as if it was a total outlier to be discarded. He didn’t need to go there to make his point, but he couldn’t help himself.
Unfortunately, many people need to distinguish what is happening in their minds from what is happening out there in other people’s minds, on pages, and in the wider world.
There is no “further support…by downplaying the seriousness of the Tuskeegee incident” because what I have quoted is, literally, the last time Pinker mentions it. There is only one entry for the incident, page 401. The colleague he quotes (talking about Tuskegee) makes two separate but related mistakes:
1) To attempt to meaningfully compare one isolated unethical behavior with the entirety of medical science (like comparing 9/11 with the whole of Air travel)
2) To assume that such breaches are are essential to medical science
(like assuming that all flights tend towards 9/11 or that we couldnt have flying without 9/11)
Both are false, but for different reasons.
Might I suggest (radical though it is) that people stop cherry-picking, misquoting, or (in some recent egregious cases actually fraudulently editing) Steven Pinker to try to make cases?
From the outside it seems not just dishonest but unbelievably cowardly. Let him put his best case then respond to it. To do otherwise is to make people think that all the oppositon has is a fraudulent case. This may work in a protected environment surrounded by sycophants–but it doesnt work beyond that.
Indeed, it tends to simply erode trust and, in a world where many voices are competing for attention, it makes people (not unreasonably) reject anything that said person may go on to say as coming from an unreliable source.