Stephen Pinker is in the news again, and again, not in a good way.

The Harvard psychologist and bestselling author Steven Pinker appeared on the podcast of Aporia, an outlet whose owners advocate for a revival of race science and have spoken of seeking “legitimation by association” by platforming more mainstream figures.

The appearance underlines past incidents in which Pinker has encountered criticism for his association with advocates of so-called “human biodiversity”, which other academics have called a “rebranding” of racial genetic essentialism and scientific racism.
…

Patrik Hermansson, a researcher at UK anti-racism non-profit Hope Not Hate, said that Pinker’s “decision to appear on Aporia, a far-right platform for scientific racism, provides an invaluable service to an extremist outlet by legitimising its content and attracting new followers”.

He added: “By lending his Harvard credentials to Aporia, Pinker contributes to the normalisation and spread of dangerous, discredited ideas.”

This is just the latest controversy that Pinker has found himself in. Just recently he, along with Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, resigned from the board of the Freedom From Religion Foundation because the foundation removed a blog post by Coyne.

[Coyne] insisted sex is binary, that trans women are more likely to be sexual predators (using misleading statistics), argued that trans women shouldn’t be allowed to counsel women who have been physically abused, rejected even the possibility of trans women playing women’s sports at any age, and said trans women shouldn’t be placed in women’s prisons (even though the alternative is disastrous).

Along the way, he just ignored the countless ways the trans community is under attack, largely by people making similar arguments.

None of this was shocking to those of us who have watched him go from a defender of science to an amplifier of right-wing propaganda.

Like Dawkins and Coyne, Pinker argues that their voices are being censored by ‘the left’, a strange argument to make for people with very prominent public platforms who have no trouble getting media attention and speaking and writing gigs. Some academics have criticized Pinker for allying himself with the powerful.

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. 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 of Pinker’s tweets. Pinker said in reply that through this letter, he, and more importantly, younger academics with less protection, were being threatened by “a regime of intimidation that constricts the theatre of ideas.”

Nathan J. Robinson has provided a scathing critique of Pinker, describing him as The World’s Most Annoying Man.

You know, of course, what the most grating and infuriating human behavior is. It is not when another person is simply being unreasonable. It is when that person is constantly insisting that they are Just Being Reasonable, and wondering why you’re acting so crazy and irrational, while they themselves are in fact being extremely goddamn unreasonable. It is not when they are just wrong, but when they top it off by patronizingly explaining your own views to you, purporting to refute them, while not having the faintest understanding of what those views actually are.

Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker is that guy. He thinks many people are very unreasonable, and makes sweeping claims about their irrationality and moral imbecility, but often doesn’t bother to listen to what they actually say. While insisting for page upon page on the necessity of rationality, he irrationally caricatures and mocks ideas he hasn’t tried to understand. Then, when the people who believe those ideas become upset, he sees this as further proof of their emotion-driven thinking, and becomes even more convinced that he is right. It is a pattern displayed by many of those who are critics of “social justice” and the political left. (For an entire book about this, see The Current Affairs Rules For Life: On Social Justice and Its Critics.) Pinker, however, takes it to an extreme: Nobody has ever tried to look more Reasonable while being so ignorant and condescending.
…

Those of us who react negatively to Pinker’s work do not do so because we are statistically illiterate, or “lack the conceptual tools to ascertain whether progress has taken place,” or because we hate progress. Rather, Pinker is controversial because he is dismissive and contemptuous of anyone who disagrees with his highly debatable propositions, and he presents dubious political opinions as mere objective analysis of data.
…

One thing that pisses some of us off about Pinker’s work is that, while he presents himself as “such a nice guy,” in the words of the Chronicle, a person who just loves Facts and Data, he peppers his books with nasty, utterly irrational swipes at those to the left of him.
…

Pinker is supposedly “such a nice guy,” a person who is restrained and moderate and reasonable, who laments that politics has gotten so vicious and tribal. And yet in his books, you find him comparing environmentalists to Nazis and campus anti-bigotry initiatives to Stalin’s purges. Those he disagrees with are “quasi-religious,” “authoritarian,” they push “emotionally charged but morally irrelevant red herrings.” Al Gore and the Unabomber belong together. When anthropologist Jason Hickel critiqued Pinker’s theses in the Guardian, Pinker snapped that Hickel was a “Marxist idealogue” while leaving many of Hickel’s arguments unaddressed. Is this what the Chronicle called Pinker’s “relentless friendly persuasion, a kind of indefatigable reasonableness”?

I do not mean to dwell too much on the tone of Pinker’s writing, but it’s important to see how dishonest centrist critics of social justice rhetoric can be. Pinker treats the left as hysterically overstating its case, of calling everybody racists and despoilers, even as he brands them Nazis and Stalinists.
…

It’s important to see that Pinker is unreliable, and not simply a neutral presenter of The Data, because his books are bestsellers and are widely praised as brilliant. Yet they reinforce many right-wing talking points and accepting some of their conclusions would have extremely destructive political consequences. I actually agree with perhaps 80 percent or more of what is contained in Enlightenment Now, insofar as it is simply presenting statistics showing that crime has dropped and we are not presently in a world war, or making arguments for secular humanism and democracy. But he also (1) staunchly defends the inequality produced by free-market capitalism, (2) is irrationally dismissive of the scale of the risks facing humankind, (3) trivializes present-day human pain and suffering, (4) whitewashes U.S. crimes and minimizes the dangers of U.S. military aggression, (5) repeats right-wing smears about anti-racist and feminist ideas, and (6) has a colossal ignorance about the workings of politics and the struggle necessary to achieve further human progress.

The trajectory of Pinker’s career provides an illustration of the trap that academics can fall into when they become public intellectuals, giving their opinions on topics that are increasingly further away from their original specialities. Pinker’s own field is cognitive psychology and how children acquire language skills but that is very far from where he is now.

Scholars in academia tend to be highly specialized, having deep knowledge about a fairly narrow field of study. In that field they are often respected by their peers. But they also usually have broader interests in many areas and this can result in some of them becoming called upon to express views on these other areas as well, and pretty soon they can become what is known as a ‘public intellectual’, one who gives their opinion on a wide variety of topics. While their research training gives them the tools to study those areas beyond a superficial level, they do not have the same depth of knowledge that they have in their own field. But they are sought after because their academic prestige gives their words more weight than others who do not have those credentials, even if the latter are more knowledgeable about that specific area. It definitely helps if one is affiliated with a prestigious institution, since that also rubs off on them.

As a result, these public intellectuals wander farther and farther afield, accepting offers to speak on all manner of topics about which they really are not experts. It starts with them shifting from writing papers in scholarly journals to writing books and articles aimed at making their fields understandable to lay audiences. If those popularizations are successful, they get asked for their opinion on related topics and over time, they start writing and giving talks on a vast variety of topics, far, far removed from their original speciality. The attention they get can be addictive and they can become celebrities, attracting book offers and large speaking fees and, if they are not careful, pretty soon they are rubbing shoulders with people who advocate terrible ideas but use them to mainstream those ideas..

I write from personal experience. I am by training a theoretical nuclear physicist. Although nowhere near as famous as Pinker, I have become a very, very minor public intellectual in that I write a blog and have written articles and books on a wide range of topics, far removed from my original specialization. I can trace the path of how that happened quite clearly. It began almost immediately after I returned to Sri Lanka to rejoin the faculty of the University of Colombo after being away for a few years in the US obtaining my PhD. I was surprised at how the same people who had known me before as just another guy now treated my opinion on pretty much any topic with much greater respect, even though I had not really changed that much or advanced my knowledge in areas other than physics. It has continued even to this day in that in almost any setting other than academic circles where doctorates are commonplace, people are unduly impressed upon learning that I have a physics doctorate..

I admit that it is flattering but I hope I am self-aware enough to also be amused at how people think that merely having a physics PhD makes me into some kind of all-purpose oracle. However much you try to tell people that that is not the case, it has little effect. Despite my disclaimers people still seek my opinion on things in which I am not an expert and take me more seriously than I perhaps deserve. I have no problems in sharing my views and in giving them I try to make clear my limitations but I never modify my views just to be more acceptable to the audience.

I am not saying that you should never engage with those who have very opposing views. That can be useful in expanding your message to new audiences by reaching those of your opponent, provided you are very clear about why you disagree with those views. But sometimes people tend to temper their views in these forums in order to seem more agreeable to the host and their audience, adopting some form of both-siderism where they also criticize their allies, so as to not spoil their chances of being invited again. But if you claim to be of the left and yet find yourself frequently being criticized by others on the left but not by those on the right, and if you find yourself being repeatedly invited by those whose views you strongly disagree with and being quoted approvingly by them, it may be good for you to pause and reflect on why that might be so, and not simply dismiss your critics as being dogmatic and irrational.