Dishonest Zealots Attempt to Destroy the Career of Linguist Steven Pinker

Cognitive linguist Steven Pinker has had an illustrious career as a teacher and prolific author. His politics have often leaned to the left. None of this immunizes him from baseless attacks by hundreds of people who apparently don't see any value in Pinker's willingness to contribute his expertise to national conversations on critically relevant issues. They are unwilling to give fair readings to Pinker's statements. They also appear to be threatened by Pinker's use of germane statistics in order to shed light on complex claims involving police behavior and racism.

Here is the opening paragraph of a recent letter signed by almost 500 people, many of them grad students and undergrads, then sent to the Linguistic Society of America:

In reaction to this letter, Jerry Coyne, eminent Professor of Professor of Ecology & Evolution, concludes as follows at his website: "I’m really steamed when a group of misguided zealots tries to damage someone’s career, and does so dishonestly."

Linguist John McWhorter has also indicated his enthusiastic support of Steven Pinker:

Here is Jerry Coyne's full blog post, setting forth the numerous false accusations against Pinker coupled with the evidence clearly demonstrating that these accusations are false. Coyne's post is titled "The Purity Posse pursues Pinker."

I invite you to read both sides of this dispute.  I suspect you will be outraged at the way Pinker is being treated.  You might also wonder how it is that hundreds of people who claim to be highly knowledgeable in linguistics are such inept readers.  The phrase "social conflagration" might come to mind as you review the evidence.  The name Robespierre might periodically pop into your thought process.

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The Wrong Kind of Fireworks

Celebrating our freedom while 41 people are shot in one night in NYC.

The headline from the Daily News: "41 shot overnight in NYC with at least 4 dead in citywide explosion of gun violence." Then I noticed this headline: "16 Dead, at Least 67 Wounded in Chicago Shootings This Weekend."

Maybe the headlines should include the phrase: "Bullets: The other Pandemic." Epidemic shootings are terrorizing numerous city residents and this is absolutely unacceptable. Do our politicians not care or is the problem that they are pretending that there are no solutions?

There is a cycle of violence in many cities that begins with financially struggling families who are forced to send their kids to shitty schools. Then the cycle moves to 1.3M students who drop out each year. Stir in the lack of comprehensive and free birth control so that people can plan when they want to have families.

Unplanned pregnancy and childbearing are also implicated in the failure of many young women to finish their college education. Research shows that 61 percent of women who have children in community college don’t finish their degree, and less than two percent of teen mothers who have a baby before age 18 get a college degree by age 30.
Then comes street violence and deaths and then to prisons, where we've decided that the best thing we can think of doing is to park people in prison for 10 or 20 years each, before we dump them onto the streets, insisting that they can fend for themselves even though many employers want nothing to do with people with criminal records, especially violent criminal records.  Our politicians claim that it would cost too much money to improve things, even though the prison-industrial complex is extraordinarily expensive:  $33K per year per prisoner on average. 

I cannot think of a better formula for hurting adults and children than the above formula.

There doesn't seem to be any political will to fund new creative types of interventions into any of these steps. It's especially frustrating that we won't fund (and in fact, we've been cutting) interventions at the early childhood step even though that is the best place to invest. That, in fact, was one of the first posts I wrote for Dangerous Intersection. Still true today and still being ignored today. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

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The Two Starkly Different Meanings of “Black Lives Matter,” and Political Ideas That Must Never Be Criticized

"Black Lives Matter" is a simple looking phrase, but it functions as a Trojan Horse. Many people don't understand that there is a big difference between A) stating the obvious fact that Black lives do, indeed, matter and B) embracing the controversial political agenda of the Black Lives Matter organizations. Just because one believes A doesn't necessarily mean that one believes B, but this conflation flies under the radars of many people who embrace both A and B even though the only part that they have carefully considered is A.

Consider this excerpt from a recent news article about Nick Buckley, a man who has spent many years of his life helping desperate others through a charity he founded in 2011, Mancunian Way, based in Manchester, England. The problem started when Nick dared to write an article:

In the article the 52-year-old started by saying: “Of course black lives matter. Let’s get this obvious point over and done with at the beginning”, but went on to criticise the political agenda of the organisation BLM which sought to repudiate the values expressed by Martin Luther King.

I am sympathetic to Nick Buckley's clearly stated concerns. Like Buckley, I am concerned that some of the political ends of BLM sharply conflict with the wisdom of Martin Luther King. The fact that Nick Buckley dared to speak up about this critical issue cost him his job and that is a tragedy.

In some circles, the phrase "Black Lives Matter" has taken on the status of an unassailable fundamentalist religion, which is extremely unfortunate. Whenever this phrase is uttered, we should be asking whether the speaker is asserting A, B or both A and B.  Whereas A is self-evident truth to me, B is a complex set of ideas, many of them ill-defined and/or problematic.

Every idea, especially every political idea, should be open to vigorous criticism and discussion. There should be no exceptions, for the reasons carefully stated by John Stuart Mill in his work, On Liberty. To every claim I respond: "Let's test it." To the extent that any ideas are declared to be sacrosanct, off-limits to discussion and criticism based on science, statistical analyses and the diverse wisdom collected by thinking people from the beginning of time, our democracies are dead.

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Reddit: Don’t Be Hateful Toward Most People

Is Reddit concerned about Hate Speech or not? Here's the brand new Reddit hate speech policy. What's next? A new version of the Golden Rule?

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Edit 2020.06.30 11pm: Interesting ... Reddit has now changed the offending paragraph to read: "While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect those who promote attacks of hate or who try to hide their hate in bad faith claims of discrimination."

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Fairy Tale Week

Last week I found a big book of Grimm's Fairy Tales in my basement. Out of curiosity, I've been reading a few Grimm's Fairy tales each day for the past several days. More than a few of these stories involve people being desperately hungry or poor. On a regular basis, the wonderful ending is that the people end up with a comfortable house that includes a magic pantry that never runs out of food. These stories must have been written in desperate times. Reading them has reminded me how lucky most of us are that we are not chronically hungry and homeless.

Many of these fairy tales also seem bizarre, involving men actively coveting other mens wives, women treated like property, and families putting their kids to cruel tests. Reading these tales has reminded me that one of my daughters attended a Waldorf School in St. Louis County about 15 years ago. The teachers repeatedly told me that the ONLY thing I should ever read to my daughters, at least until 3rd grade, was Grimm's Fairy Tales. I refused to follow that advice. It strikes me as bizarre today as it did back then, and it was a factor in pulling her out of that school and enrolling her in a much better school. I suspect that they were expecting us to cherry pick for better quality fairy tales, avoiding the bizarre and pointless stories. Cherry picking is common, of course. I'm reminded of the many people who have insisted that I should read the Bible, focusing on the "good parts," not on the bizarre stories, such as the time God sent bears to kill 42 children for making fun of Elisha because he was bald. (2 Kings 2:23-25).

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