CapitalistImperialistPig

Leading arts professors keep saying so. Pinker has a theory why: The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the twentieth century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling, and insulting art. The other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship. And they’re surprised that people are staying away in droves? Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (p. 416). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. One trouble, he says, is that their art is based on a discredited theory of human perception, based on - you may have already guessed - the idea of the mind as a blank slate, instead of one with lots of built in categories including detectors for pretentious bullshit. OK, he didn't actually say the very last bit, but I think he at least hinted at it.

Pinker starts his chapter on children with the so-called three laws of behavioral genetics: The First Law: All human behavioral traits are heritable. The Second Law: The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of the genes. The Third Law: A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families. The laws are about what make us what Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (p. 373). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. The pillar of the Second Law is the evidence showing that siblings reared in the same family are at most only slightly more similar than siblings raised apart. He concludes from this that parenting choices have very small effects on children's development. It seems to me that he is leaving out a very crucial aspect of the unique environment of a child reared with a sibling. There is only so much social/emotional ecospace in a ...

One gender feminist idea that has gained a lot of credence even among those who ought to know better is the claim that "rape is not about sex." Instead, claimed Susan Brownmiller, the apparent originator of this theory: From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function . . . it is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear. Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (p. 361). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. This notion may be transparently silly, but the corollary that "rape is not about sex" has achieved rather wide currency, despite the fact that it is perfectly analogous to the equally ridiculous "bank robbery is not about the money." Instead, I guess, it's part of a hundred thousand year plot to keep bankers in their place. Here is Brownmiller in its defense: BROWNMILLER ASKED A revealing rhetorical q...

Pinker: As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin’s anarchism. I laughed off my parents’ argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8: 00 A.M. on October 17, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. By 11: 20 A.M. the first bank was robbed. By noon most downtown stores had closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that had competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authori...

Our moral sense licenses aggression against others as a way to prevent or punish immoral acts. That is fine when the act deemed immoral truly is immoral by any standard, such as rape and murder, and when the aggression is meted out fairly and serves as a deterrent. The point of this chapter is that the human moral sense is not guaranteed to pick out those acts as the targets of its righteous indignation. The moral sense is a gadget, like stereo vision or intuitions about number. It is an assembly of neural circuits cobbled together from older parts of the primate brain and shaped by natural selection to do a job. Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (p. 270). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. And so that moral sense is a sword with a double edge. On the one hand, it helps maintain a society. On the other, it also licenses the suicide bomber and the assassin of politician you disagree with.

Pinker: But each child should to want the parent to dole out twice as much of the investment to himself or herself as to a sibling, because children share half their genes with each full sibling but share all their genes with themselves. Given a family with two children and one pie, each child should want to split it in a ratio of two-thirds to one-third, while parents should want it to be split fifty-fifty. Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (p. 248). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. If the reasoning here sounds a bit dubious to you, you aren't alone. Maybe Pinker needs a bit more stat work. Supposing the child in question really really wants to maximize the chance of the largest numbers of his genes surviving, then the computation is bound to be a bit more complicated. The real question is the dependence of each fitness function on the share of pie, and perhaps more importantly, the mutual dependence of the fitness functions of the ...

Humans come pre-equipped with some intuitions about physics, biology, psychology, probability and other things, says Stephen Pinker, as well as natural propensities to learn other things, like how to walk and our language. Those intuitions aren't necessarily correct for a modern society, and some critical skills are not easy to learn naturally. The job of schooling, he says, is to teach those ways in which the modern world doesn't fit our intuition and those skills not included in our natural learning program - like how to read and write. He thinks modern schooling is not exactly very well suited to its task. The obvious cure for the tragic shortcomings of human intuition in a high-tech world is education. And this offers priorities for educational policy: to provide students with the cognitive tools that are most important for grasping the modern world and that are most unlike the cognitive tools they are born with. The perilous fallacies we have seen in this chapter, for ...

Many people avoid flying, though car travel is eleven times more dangerous. They fear getting eaten by a shark, though they are four hundred times more likely to drown in their bathtub. Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (p. 231). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. But how likely am I to be eaten by a shark in my shower?

I'm slogging through Stephen Pinker's The Blank Slate , and it is a bit of a slog - a couple of my relatives have pronounced it long-winded. This book is now about 13 years old, and I'm not sure how much the present is like the situation back then, but he is fighting what he believes is a deeply misguided attack on Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology, mainly (but not only) from the academic left. So far, his heaviest fire is aimed at scientists who really should know better: Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, Stephen Jay Gould, and Leon Kamin. Lewontin and Rose, in particular, are doctrinaire Marxists and derive their opposition from Marxian pipe dreams of human perfectability. The core of their opposition is derived from the belief that a genetic human nature can be used to justify racism, sexism, genocide and other evils. Pinker's response has three points: the facts show that there is a genetic human nature, that doesn't justify any of the aforementioned ev...