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.
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.