Dispatches from “Enlightenment Now:” Intellectuals

One of the blog posts I’m working on demands that I give Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now an in-depth skim, and it’s dredging up all sorts of secondary things. I might as well take advantage of that, and spread the misery around.

For instance, are we sure Pinker isn’t a secret far-Right plant?

Intellectuals hate progress. Intellectuals who call themselves “progressive” really hate progress. It’s not that they hate the fruits of progress, mind you: most pundits, critics, and their bienpensant readers use computers rather than quills and inkwells, and they prefer to have their surgery with anesthesia rather than without it. It’s the idea of progress that rankles the chattering class — the Enlightenment belief that by understanding the world we can improve the human condition.

Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Penguin, 2018. pg. 43.

His hatred for “intellectuals” is astonishing, especially since the blurb for Enlightenment Now calls him one. Isn’t the whole thesis of the book that we should all become more enlightened, more intellectual? And yet it contains an endless parade of scorn for those who are known for their intelligence.

At various times Western intellectuals have also sung the praises of Ho Chi Minh, Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Kim II-sung, Pol Pot, Julius Nyerere, Omar Torrijos, Slobodan Milogevié, and Hugo Chavez.

Why should intellectuals and artists, of all people, kiss up to murderous dictators? One might think that intellectuals would be the first to deconstruct the pretexts of power, and artists to expand the scope of human compassion. (Thankfully, many have done just that.) One explanation, offered by the economist Thomas Sowell and the sociologist Paul Hollander, is professional narcissism. Intellectuals and artists may feel unappreciated in liberal democracies, which allow their citizens to tend to their own needs in markets and civic organizations. Dictators implement theories from the top down, assigning a role to intellectuals that they feel is commensurate with their worth. But tyrannophilia is also fed by a Nietzschean disdain for the common man, who annoyingly prefers schlock to fine art and culture, and by an admiration of the superman who transcends the messy compromises of democracy and heroically implements a vision of the good society.

pg. 451

Though intellectuals are apt to do a spit take when they read a defense of capitalism, its economic benefits are so obvious that they don’t need to be shown with numbers. They can literally be seen from space. A satellite photograph of Korea showing the capitalist South aglow in light and the Communist North a pit of darkness vividly illustrates the contrast in the wealth-generating capability between the two economic systems, holding geography, history, and culture constant. Other matched pairs with an experimental group and a control group lead to the same conclusion: West and East Germany when they were divided by the Iron Curtain; Botswana versus Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe; Chile versus Venezuela under Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro — the latter a once-wealthy, oil-rich country now suffering from widespread hunger and a critical shortage of medical care.

pg. 95

This evidence-based take on the Enlightenment project reveals that it was not a naive hope. The Enlightenment has worked — perhaps the greatest story seldom told. And because this triumph is so unsung, the underlying ideals of reason, science, and humanism are unappreciated as well. Far from being an insipid consensus, these ideals are treated by today’s intellectuals with indifference, skepticism, and sometimes contempt. When properly appreciated, I will suggest, the ideals of the Enlightenment are in fact stirring, inspiring, noble — a reason to live.

pg. 11

In 2016, a majority of Americans named terrorism as the most important issue facing the country, said they were worried that they or a family member would be a victim, and identified ISIS as a threat to the existence or survival of the United States. The fear has addled not just ordinary citizens trying to get a pollster off the phone but public intellectuals, especially cultural pessimists perennially hungry for signs that Western civilization is (as always) on the verge of collapse.

pg. 196

Intellectual culture should strive to counteract our cognitive biases, but all too often it reinforces them.

pg. 53

(The myth, still popular among leftist intellectuals, that IQ doesn’t exist or cannot be reliably measured was refuted decades ago.)

pg. 248

I used to think that Trumpism was pure id, an upwelling of tribalism and authoritarianism from the dark recesses of the psyche. But madmen in authority distill their frenzy from academic scribblers of a few years back, and the phrase “intellectual roots of Trumpism” is not oxymoronic. Trump was endorsed in the 2016 election by 136 “Scholars and Writers for America” in a manifesto called “Statement of Unity.” Some are connected to the Claremont Institute, a think tank that has been called “the academic home of Trumpism.” And Trump has been closely advised by two men, Stephen Bannon and Michael Anton, who are reputed to be widely read and who consider themselves serious intellectuals. Anyone who wants to go beyond personality in understanding authoritarian populism must appreciate the two ideologies behind them, both of them militantly opposed to Enlightenment humanism and each influenced, in different ways, by Nietzsche. One is fascist, the other reactionary — not in the common left-wing sense of “anyone who is more conservative than me,” but in their original, technical senses.

pg. 452

Pinker is apparently unaware of the right-wing think tank machine, which props up shady characters as “intellectuals” in order to advance the interests of wealthy donors. Those 136 “scholars and writers” include Newt Gingrich and Peter Thiel, FYI. The organizer of the manifesto is F.H. Buckley, a member of the Heartland Institute, and said Institute is notorious for promoting climate change denial. Steve Bannon may consider himself an intellectual, but belief is not the same as reality, and Michael Anton is arguably more ridiculous.

I know, I know, you could argue that Pinker’s focusing just on the “literary intellectuals” as per C.P. Snow’s “Two Cultures.” Sorry, that’s not plausible. Notice the lack of any qualifiers for some of these quotes, as well; Pinker is including a significant majority of all intellectuals in his tirades, at minimum.

[feels a tap on his shoulder]

Er, uh what-

What makes one person more intellectually able than another? Can the entire distribution of human intelligence be accounted for by just one general factor? Is intelligence supported by a single neural system? Here, we provide a perspective on human intelligence that takes into account how general abilities or ‘‘factors’’ reflect the functional organization of the brain. By comparing factor models of individual differences in performance with factor models of brain functional organization, we demonstrate that different components of intelligence have their analogs in distinct brain networks. Using simulations based on neuroimaging data, we show that the higher-order factor ‘‘g’’ is accounted for by cognitive tasks corecruiting multiple networks. Finally, we confirm the independence of these components of intelligence by dissociating them using questionnaire variables. We propose that intelligence is an emergent property of anatomically distinct cognitive systems, each of which has its own capacity.

Hampshire, Adam, et al. “Fractionating human intelligence.” Neuron 76.6 (2012): 1225-1237.

Whoa whoa whoa, what’s a study that refutes the idea of a single-factor measure of intelligence doing here?! Shoo! Go away, you’re off topic!

[hears something scamper away]

That’s better.

Howard Gardner’s brilliant conception of individual competence has changed the face of education in the twenty-three years since the publication of his classic work, Frames of Mind. Since then thousands of educators, parents, and researchers have explored the practical implications and applications of Multiple Intelligences theory–the powerful notion that there are separate human capacities, ranging from musical intelligence to the intelligence involved in self-understanding. The first decade of research on MI theory and practice was reported in the 1993 edition of Multiple Intelligences. This new edition covers all developments since then and stands as the most thorough and up-to-date account of MI available anywhere. Completely revised throughout, it features new material on global applications and on MI in the workplace, an assessment of MI practice in the current conservative educational climate, new evidence about brain functioning, and much more.

Gardner, Howard E. Multiple intelligences: New horizons in theory and practice. Basic books, 2008.

THAT’S IT!! I’m ending this blog post right now!

NOW You Can Celebrate

I’ve seen a lot of people jumping for joy about Ireland’s referendum, such as PZ Myers and Marcus Ranum. Problem is, the initial results were based on exit polling data, and they’re not always reliable. The people most likely to respond are the people most passionate about a subject, for instance. They also miss out on early voters, who don’t necessarily visit the polling booth, and voters that show up late. Nate Silver cribbed some excellent discussion of exit polls from Mark Bluemthnal, and while that info dates from 2008 and 2004, respectively, exit polls are routinely argued over well after the election itself. Hence why I sat on my hands.

The Eighth Amendment, which grants an equal right to life to the mother and unborn, will be replaced. The declaration was made at at Dublin Castle at 18:13 local time. The only constituency to vote against repealing the Eight amendment was Donegal, with 51.9% voting against the change. […]

Reacting to the result, the taoiseach (prime minister) Leo Varadkar, who campaigned in favour of liberalisation, said it was “a historic day for Ireland,” and that a “quiet revolution” had taken place. Mr Varadkar told crowds at Dublin Castle the result showed the Irish public “trust and respect women to make their own decision and choices.” He added: “It’s also a day when we say no more. No more to doctors telling their patients there’s nothing can be done for them in their own country, no more lonely journeys across the Irish Sea, no more stigma as the veil of secrecy is lifted and no more isolation as the burden of shame is gone.” […]

Mr Varadkar said he understood that those who had voted against repeal would be unhappy. He said he had a message for them: “I know today is not welcome and you may feel this country has taken the wrong turn, that this country is not one you no longer recognise. “I want to reassure you that Ireland today is the same as it was last week, but more tolerant, open and respectful.”

OK, NOW it’s time to raise my hands. I’m a bit puzzled why declaring mothers and fetuses to have equal rights was considered an argument against abortion, given that we live in a universe where the Violinist argument exists, but no matter: this is a solid victory for human health, and a boon for the impoverished and/or unlucky.

An Unexpected Non-Surprise

Shoot, are you Canadian or not? For those not, I’ll give a one-paragraph primer on Canadian politics.

There are two main parties on the federal level: the Liberals (centre-Left) and the Conservatives (centre-Right), who swap power every five to ten years. There are also a constellation of lesser parties, of which the New Democratics (Left) have enjoyed the most success in recent years. Each province has localised versions of the federal parties, though their ideological relations can vary widely from place to place; for instance, Alberta’s New Democratic Party is currently fighting with their British Columbia counterparts over an oil pipeline, British Columbia’s right-wing party are the Liberals, and Quebec…. they’re off doing their own thing.

Ontario, our largest province, tends to follow the federal system quite closely. The Ontario Liberal party has been in power for nearly fifteen years, and as you’d expect that’s led to corruption scandals. Given that centrists hold an electoral edge, and the two Left-ish parties split the progressive vote, the most likely outcome would be a switch from the centre-Left Liberals to the centre-Right Progressive Conservatives during this year’s election.

Except, mere months before the election, the PC leader stepped down over sexual assault allegations. This triggered a scramble for a new leader, which turned ugly when the disgraced leader tried to regain power, only to bow out again as the negative press mounted. Nonetheless, that wasn’t enough to tank the PC’s poll numbers and their success at the polls seemed much more likely than not.

So you can imagine most people’s disgust when a Trump clone by the name of Doug Ford managed to win the PC leadership in a mysterious upset. Oh joy, a “belligerent bully” who wished to run government like a business on policies that made no sense would be in control of our largest province. I was in a state of despair.

Then, unexpectedly, the least surprising thing happened.

CBC's Ontario poll tracker, showing a PC nosedive and an NDP rise.

The controversial leader generated controversy and acrimony, which has led to a dip in popularity for the PC’s (official colour: blue). Rather than switch to the scandal-plagued Liberals, though, PC voters are switching to the cleaner NDP (official colour: orange). Fearing a split of the progressive vote could put the PC’s into power anyway, Liberal voters (official colour: red) are shifting over to the NDP too. (Green party voters are off doing their own thing).

That movement hasn’t been enough to assure an NDP victory, as CBC’s Poll Tracker still figures the PC’s have a 95% chance of a majority or minority government. But with two and a half weeks to go, no shortage of new PC scandals, and press coverage that’s overjoyed at the change in fortunes, this could create a bandwagon effect that puts a coalition of two Left-ish parties into power.

I’m hoping the Ontario political landscape follows the usual rules of politics, and rejects the typical Liberal-Conservative tango.

Sam Harris “Corrects” the Record

Whelp, less than thirty-eight hours after my blog post Sam Harris finally deleted that old video. However, spotting that made me realise I’d missed his explanation for why he edited the episode. That was probably by design, the description to the podcast episode drops no hint that it’s there.

As before, I’ve done some light editing, but also included time-stamps so you can check my work.

[3:17] Just a little housekeeping for today’s episode. A few episodes back, I presented audio from an event I did with Christian Picciolini in Dallas, and that was a fun event, I enjoyed speaking with Christian a lot […]

[3:51] But unfortunately, in that podcast, Christian said a few things that don’t seem to have been strictly true, and as the weeks have passed and that podcast has continued streaming I’ve heard from two people who consider his remarks to have been unfairly damaging to their reputations. This is a problem that I am quite sensitive to, given what gets done to me, by my critics. Somewhat ironically, Christian seems to rely on the Southern Poverty Law Center for much of his information, but this is an organization, as many of you know, which is undergoing a full moral and intellectual self-immolation. In fact, Christian is confused enough about the stature of that organization that he retweeted an article from the SPLC website wherein I am described as a racist recruiter for the alt-right. […]

We’re barely a minute in, and Harris has badly distorted the record. One of Picciolini’s tweets references the Southern Poverty Law Center, true, but he also cites tweets by David Duke, The Daily Stormer, Wikipedia (and before you start, I checked the citations and it’s legit), Joe Rogan, YouTube recordings of Molyneux, and his experiences talking to families with Molyneux-obsessed members. Yet that one reference to the SPLC somehow translates into “much of his information?”

Harris also misrepresents that SPLC article. They didn’t declare him to be a recruiter, self-declared members of the alt-Right said that Sam Harris helped lead them to the alt-Right.

[Read more…]

Another One

One downside to floating around atheist/skeptic communities so long is that I’ve seen a lot of people leave. The most painful departures are the ones where people get frustrated with their peers over their inaction or inability to comprehend, or burn out from having to explain concepts that shouldn’t need explaining. These cases always leave me self-conscious of my own silence and inaction, wondering if I’d help stem the tide if I became more active.

For four years I have written and given talks about the same core message: Movement atheism must expand its ambitions to include the interests and needs of communities systematically disenfranchised in ways far more harrowing than merely existing as an atheist (within the US context).

Little changed in the five years that I was a part of organized secular communities. To what degree things have changed is debatable. For me, the point is that these spaces haven’t evolved to the point that they are welcoming or even ideal for certain groups of people.

Over time, I was able to better understand how this resistance to change that infests these spaces has a lot to do with select donors sustaining these spaces as well as those occupying executive and board leadership positions.

The thing is, the writing was always on the wall. It just took a considerable amount of time for me to admit it to myself.

Ouch. Sincere Kirabo has come a long way since 2015, when he earned a scholarship from American Atheists. He’s also been a writer for The Establishment, Huffington Post, the Good Men Project, and Everyday Feminism. He was the Social Justice Coordinator for the American Humanist Association until a week ago. He remains frustrated with the inaction of leaders within the atheist/skeptic movement. How could you not, when you’re dealing with shit like this:

Sexism continues to be a huge problem with this movement. And by “problem” I mean that it exists and most men choose to either deny it, minimize it, or blame victims.

I’m directly and indirectly connected to countless women who were once a part of this movement and have since left. It’s sad and disgusting and infuriating that there are whisper networks within secular circles so that women can warn each other about certain men rumored to be sexual harassers or abusers.

And yes, several women have reported instances of sexual misconduct and even rape to me. I’m not at liberty to discuss these incidents in any detail, but I will say that all three cases involve men who were at one point connected to organized humanism or atheism.

A lot of people have dropped out of the movement for a lot less.

My bandwidth has been depleted and there’s no way that I can fully recover and advance the causes that mean the most to me until I remove myself from spaces that preserve/propagate elitist rationalism, complacency, and general white nonsense.

I know some are interested in knowing what’s next for me. At this time, all I will say is that I and several others are in the process of building a platform dedicated to cultivating Black humanist culture with a focus on creating a world that honors the “radical” idea of free Black people. Details will follow in the near future.

… so it’s to Kirabo’s credit that he’s not dropping out of the movement. He’s switched from working for change within existing orgs, to creating his own organisations that are less problematic. I heartily approve, though had Kirabo dropped out instead I’d also approve. Even if the change in tactics doesn’t work, it’ll at least create a safe space for people to promote secularism without having to hold their nose over casual bigotry.

The Two Cultures, as per Steven Pinker

As I mentioned before, C.P. Snow’s “Two Culture” lecture is light on facts, which makes it easy to mould to your whims. Go back and re-read that old post, absorb C.P. Snow’s version of the Two Cultures, then compare it to Pinker’s summary:

A final alternative to Enlightenment humanism condemns its embrace of science. Following C.P. Snow, we can call it the Second Culture, the worldview of many literary intellectuals and cultural critics, as distinguished from the First Culture of science.[12] Snow decried the iron curtain between the two cultures and called for greater integration of science into intellectual life. It was not just that science was, “in its intellectual depth, complexity, and articulation, the most beautiful and wonderful collective work of the mind of man.” Knowledge of science, he argued, was a moral imperative, because it could alleviate suffering on a global scale …

[Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Penguin, 2018. Pg. 33-34]

C.P. Snow went out his way to criticise scientists for failing to incorporate literature into their lives, and never ranked one culture as superior to another. Nor did he label them “First Culture” or “Second Culture.” And it wasn’t increased knowledge of science in general that would remove suffering, it was the two cultures intermixing. Pinker is presenting a very different argument than C.P. Snow, at least on the face of it.

But hang on, there’s a footnote right in the middle of that passage….

[12] Snow never assigned an order to his Two Cultures, but subsequent usage has numbered them in that way; see, for example, Brockman 2003.

[Pg. 456]

How is it “following C.P Snow” to call it “Second Culture,” when you acknowledge C.P. Snow never called it “Second Culture?!” What’s worse, look at the page numbers: that acknowledgement comes a full four hundred pages after the misleading phrasing. How many people would bother to flip that far ahead, let alone make the connection to four hundred pages ago? But all right, fine, maaaybe Steven Pinker is just going with the flow, and re-using a common distortion of C.P Snow’s original argument. The proof should lie in that citation to Brockman [2003], which fortunately is available via Google Books. In fact, I can do you one better: John Brockman’s anthology was a mix of work published in Edge magazine and original essays, and the relevant parts just happen to be online.

Bravo, John! You are playing a vital role in moving the sciences beyond a defensive posture in response to turf attacks from the “postmodernists” and other leeches on the academies. You celebrate science and technology as our most pragmatic expressions of optimism.

I wonder, though, if it’s enough to merely point out how hopelessly lost those encrusted arts and humanities intellectuals have become in their petty arms race of cynicism. If we scientists and technologists are to be the new humanists, we must recognize that there are questions that must be addressed by any thinking person which do not lie within our established methods and dialogs. …

While “postmodern” academics and “Second Culture” celebrity figures are perhaps the most insufferable enemies of science, they are certainly not the most dangerous. Even as we are beginning to peer at biology’s deepest foundations for the first time, we find ourselves in a situation in which vast portions of the educated population have turned against the project of science in favor of pop alternatives usually billed as being more “spiritual.”

It appears exactly once in that reference, which falls well short of demonstrating common usage. Even more damning is that Pinker’s citation references the 2003 edition of the book. There’s a 2008 version, and it doesn’t have a single reference to a “Second Culture.” I’ve done my own homework, and I can find a thesis from 2011 which has that usage of “Second Culture,” but falsely attributes it to Snow and never brings it up past the intro. There is an obscure 1993 book which Pinker missed, but thanks to book reviews I can tell it labels science as the “Second Culture,” contrary to how Pinker uses the term. Everything else I’ve found is a false positive, which means Pinker is promoting one mention in one essay by one author as sufficient to show a pattern.

And can I take a moment to call out the contrary labelling here: how, in any way, is science “First” relative to literature? Well before Philosophical Transactions began publishing, we’d already had the Ramayana, the Chu Ci anthology, the Epic of Gilgamesh, The Illiad, Beowulf, and on and on. Instead, Pinker and friends are invoking “Second” as in “Secondary,” lesser, inferior. Unlike de Beauvoir, though, they’re not doing it as a critique, they honestly believe in the superiority of science over literature.

Pinker didn’t invent this ranking, nor was he the first to lump all the humanities in with the literary elites. I think that honour belongs to John Brockman. Consider this essay of his; read very carefully, and you’ll see he’s a little confused on who’s in the non-scientific culture.

Ten years later, that fossil culture is in decline, replaced by the emergent “third culture” of the essay’s title, a reference to C. P. Snow’s celebrated division of the thinking world into two cultures—that of the literary intellectual and that of the scientist. …

In the twentieth century, a period of great scientific advancement, instead of having science and technology at the center of the intellectual world—of having a unity in which scholarship includes science and technology just as it includes literature and art—the official culture kicked them out. The traditional humanities scholar looked at science and technology as some sort of technical special product—the fine print. The elite universities nudged science out of the liberal arts undergraduate curriculum, and out of the minds of many young people, who abandoned true humanistic inquiry in their early twenties and turned themselves into the authoritarian voice of the establishment. …

And one is amazed that for others still mired in the old establishment culture, intellectual debate continues to center on such matters as who was or was not a Stalinist in 1937, or what the sleeping arrangements were for guests at a Bloomsbury weekend in the early part of the twentieth century. This is not to suggest that studying history is a waste of time. History illuminates our origins and keeps us from reinventing the wheel. But the question arises: history of what? Do we want the center of culture to be based on a closed system, a process of text in/text out, and no empirical contact with the world in between?

A fundamental distinction exists between the literature of science and those disciplines in which the writing is most often concerned with exegesis of some earlier writer. In too many university courses, most of the examination questions are about what one or another earlier authority thought. The subjects are self-referential. …

The essay itself is a type specimen of science cheer-leading, which sweeps all the problems of science under the carpet; try squaring “Science is nothing more nor less than the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about anything” with “Most Published Research Findings Are False,” then try finding a published literary critic doing literary criticism wrong. More importantly, Brockman’s December 2001 essay reads a lot like Pinker’s February 2018 book, right down to the “elite” and “authoritarian” “liberal arts” universities turning their back on science. Brockman was definitely ahead of his time, and while only three of his works show up in Pinker’s citation list he’s definitely had a big influence.

This also means Pinker suffers from the same confusion as Brockman. Here’s some of the people he considers part of the Second Culture:

It’s an oddball list. Karl Popper is a member, probably by accident. Adorno was actually an opponent of Heidegger and Popper’s views of science. Essayists (Wieseltier and Gopnik) rub shoulders with glaciologists (Carey, Jackson), sociologists (Bauman), and philosophers (Foucault, Derrida). It’s dominated by the bogey-people of the alt-right, none of whom can be classified as elite authors.

Stranger still, Thomas Kuhn isn’t on there. Kuhn should have been: he argued that science doesn’t necessarily follow the strength of the evidence. During Kuhn’s heyday, many physicists thought that Arthur Eddington’s famous solar eclipse data fell short of proper science. The error bars were very large, the dataset was small, and some contrary data from another telescope was ignored; nonetheless, scientists during Eddington’s heyday took the same dataset as confirmatory. Why? They wanted General Relativity to be true, because it offered an explanation for why light seemed to have a fixed speed and Mercury precessed the way it did. Kuhn called these “puzzles,” things which should be easily solvable via existing, familiar knowledge. Newtonian Mechanics violated that “easy” part of the contract, GR did not, so physicists abandoned ship even in the face of dodgy data. Utility was more important than truth-hood.

Conversely, remember the neutrinos that seemed to run faster than light? If science advanced by falsification, physicists should have abandoned General Relativity in droves; instead, they dismissed the finding and asked the scientists who ran the experiment to try again. In this case, they didn’t want GR to be false, so contrary evidence was rejected. That might seem like a cheap example, since the experimental equipment was shown to be the real problem, but consider that we already knew GR was false because it’s incompatible with Quantum Mechanics. Neither theory can be true at the same time, which means there’s a third theory out there which has a vague resemblance to both but has radically different axioms. Nonetheless no physicist has stopped using GR or QM, because both are effective at solving puzzles. Utility again trumps truth-hood.

Kuhn argued that scientists proposed frameworks for understanding the world, “paradigms,” which don’t progress as we think they do. For instance, Newtonian Mechanics says the International Space Station is perpetually falling towards Earth, because the mass of both is generating attractive forces which cause a constant acceleration; General Relativity says the ISS is travelling in a straight line, but appears to orbit around the Earth because it is moving through a spacetime curved by the energy and mass of both objects. These two explanations are different on a fundamental level, you can’t transform one into the other without destroying some axioms. You’ve gotta chose one or the other, and why would you switch ever switch back? Kuhn even rejected the idea that the next paradigm is more “truthful” than another; again, utility trumps truth-hood.

It’s opposed to a lot of what Pinker is arguing for, and yet:

The most commonly assigned book on science in modern universities (aside from a popular biology textbook) is Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. That 1962 classic is commonly interpreted as showing that science does not converge on the truth but merely busies itself with solving puzzles before flipping to some new paradigm which renders its previous theories obsolete, indeed, unintelligible. Though Kuhn himself later disavowed this nihilist interpretation, it has become the conventional wisdom within the Second Culture. [22]

[Enlightenment Now, pg. 400]

Weird, I can find no evidence Kuhn disavowed that interpretation in my source:

Bird, Alexander, “Thomas Kuhn“, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.) URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/thomas-kuhn/>

Still, Pinker is kind enough to source his claim, so let’s track it down…. Right, footnote [22] references Bird [2011], which I can find on page 500…

Bird, A. 2011. Thomas Kuhn. In E. N. Zalta, ed., Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/.

He’s using the same source?! I mean, score another point for Kuhn, as he thought that people with different paradigms perceive the same data differently, but we’ve still got a puzzle here. I can’t be sure, but I have a theory for why Pinker swept Kuhn under the rug. From our source:

Feminists and social theorists (…) have argued that the fact that the evidence, or, in Kuhn’s case, the shared values of science, do not fix a single choice of theory, allows external factors to determine the final outcome (…). Furthermore, the fact that Kuhn identified values as what guide judgment opens up the possibility that scientists ought to employ different values, as has been argued by feminist and post-colonial writers (…).

Kuhn himself, however, showed only limited sympathy for such developments. In his “The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of Science” (1992) Kuhn derides those who take the view that in the ‘negotiations’ that determine the accepted outcome of an experiment or its theoretical significance, all that counts are the interests and power relations among the participants. Kuhn targeted the proponents of the Strong Programme in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge with such comments; and even if this is not entirely fair to the Strong Programme, it reflects Kuhn’s own view that the primary determinants of the outcome of a scientific episode are to be found within science.

Oh ho, Kuhn thought it was unlikely that sexism or racism could warp science! That makes him the enemy of Pinker’s enemies, and therefore his friend. Hence why Pinker finds it useful to bring up Kuhn, despite their contrary views of science, and for that matter why Pinker can look at Snow’s arguments and see his own: utility trumps truth-hood.