Psychologist and writer’s appearance on Aporia condemned for helping to normalise ‘dangerous, discredited ideas’
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.
Pinker’s appearance marks another milestone in the efforts of many in Silicon Valley and rightwing media and at the fringes of science to rehabilitate previously discredited models of a biologically determined racial hierarchy.
It’s kind of like string theory. It has a bunch of interesting conjectures but nobody can figure out a way to test any of it.
Take the “selfish gene” (the idea predates Dawkins). One of the theories states that it may be evolutionarily advantageous for an individual to sacrifice themselves for the group if they share enough DNA. They lose the DNA in their bodies but save the exact same DNA in the bodies of their extended family. That’s a nice idea and you can get the math to work out in game theory models but how do we test if that’s why ducks sometimes lag behind when a hunter tries to shoot them?
That’s not to say it can never be tested. There are other cases where we needed to wait for technological breakthroughs until theories could actually be tested.
I guess I’m a humanities guy so when someone writes about patterns of human behavior that could be survival adaptation, I think “hm that’s interesting, I’ll think more about it.”
I don’t think: but this theory can’t produce testable predictions!
It just seems like an anthropological concept, not a scientific theory we can write an equation for. But eh.
That makes sense. Not everything needs to be testable. There are many interesting and important ideas outside of science.
The main problem would be if someone wanted to set policy based on it. That includes the implicit experiment of, “If we adopt policy A we can expect outcome B.” If we haven’t tested that before turning it into a policy, the policy itself becomes the experiment, and then we need to be very careful about the ethics surrounding such an experiment.
I agree with everything you said. I’ll just add that the scientific method is not how we set policy in general, though perhaps it should be.
oh yea frank green was still pedaling that theory in all his talks, and many physicist already kind debunked it and said he had no actual evidence. ironically its interesting amongst conservatives. so basically pinker is the frank green of psychology.
Friendly spelling disambiguation:
Pedal: to turn a crank or lever by foot
Peddle: to sell
I think you mean the latter. When someone is promoting an idea they are selling others on it, not riding it like a bike.