From Greg Mankiw I saw this newspaper article by Steven Pinker, "In defense of dangerous ideas: In every age, taboo questions raise our blood pressure and threaten moral panic. But we cannot be afraid to answer them."
I believe pinker to be correct on this one. He is right on point. I disagree in some parts of your critic and I believe pinker address all these problems you pose in his full article, but I'l agree with the tables :). Check out my comments on this article on http://encefalus.com/philos...
Not sure that Andrew actually read the article that Pinker wrote. Perhaps he just read it with too much cognitive bias as to what he wanted it to be about. BTW, the link to Pinker's article no longer works, try here : http://pinker.wjh.harvard.e...Pinker just had 4 points (1) some questions are considered to have too much emotional weight to be be asked in polite society (make your own list, he never claimed his was the most important or that it was exhaustive) (2) there is a case for saying they should be asked nevertheless (3) there is a case for saying they shouldn't (4) don't rely on academia to debate points 2 & 3.What's so difficult about that ?
Sceptic, brilliant counter-response. Pinker's claim that his list is randomly generated is laughable on its surface. It clearly itself reflects biases of a rather conventional, American sort. There's also a working-the-refs ("It's middle class white guys that are oppressed") subtextual feel to the whole thing.
Andrew, great post. I think what pissed you off most about Pinker's list was the same thing that pissed me off: that it was poorly thought out, reasoned, and articulated. A great contrast to your published writings in this blog and on your own.
P-Ter: There's a bit too much indirection re "Andrew's other web site" for me to locate sources. I don't have a URL for Andrew's site, though I might be able to Google for it if I knew more about him. Would you (or Andrew!) be kind enough to provide the link implicit in the text you cut and pasted (the "click here")? Thanks.
P-Ter: There's a bit too much indirection re "Andrew's other web site" for me to locate sources. I don't have a URL for Andrew's site, though I might be able to Google for it if I knew more about him. Would you (or Andrew!) be kind enough to provide the link implicit in the text you cut and pasted (the "click here")? Thanks.
FYI, Pinker's response (posted on Andrew's other website), addresses many of these issues:
I appreciate the careful analysis of the individual questions, but I think the posting missed the point of the article. The questions at the beginning of the piece were not offered as a set of research topics that should be high-priority areas of study for the social sciences. Nor were they a list of my pet peeves or private concerns (presumably no one has that many pet peeves!). They were just examples – as many examples as I could recall -- of scholarly questions that have elicited intemperate, emotional, moralistic, or illiberal responses. The piece was an analysis of the free-speech and academic-freedom issues surrounding how the scholarly and journalistic communities should handle questions of that ilk, not a recommendation that that those issues are the ones most worthy of study, or even ones for which I particularly cared about the outcomes. Your noting that they were not all empirical issues in the social sciences is beside the point – universities also have departments of philosophy, government, law, bioethics, which evaluate moral and analytical questions as well as empirical ones. As for your rhetorical question, “I'm still confused about what's dangerous about saying that `women, on average, have a different profile of aptitudes and emotions than men?’,” click here.I agree with you, by the way, about the superiority of graphs over tables in conveying statistical information.
Taboo vs. Boring:What are examples of people calling taboo when it's really that no one is interested? Pinker's Biblical history and Native American examples may fall under this, or rather, self-selection may bias who is interested.
I think there's a third category of topics about which there's a lot of policy debate, but no one actually wants to know relevant facts. It may be easy to mistake a bias against research in general with a taboo against your research, especially if you're in the minority.
I think that the important thing with respect to many of Pinker's questions is that they have great relevance to many other questions that are the subject of a great deal of attention and which cannot plausibly be answered usefully without reference to his questions.I often feel that way about a number of other questions.
If you go back and read the Pinker article, I don't think he's suggesting that these topics have been under-researched; I think he's claiming that these topics have been researched, and the results ignored because they threaten certain commonly held opinions that are too touchy to discuss in public. For example, the first question -- all neuroscientists know that women and men have different mental capabilities, think differently, and so on. But bring this up during a dinner party, and see what happens. Chances are, this is the result of the calcification of opinion that occurs in many people as they get older -- Pinker writes, "In my experience, today's students -- black and white, male and female -- are bewildered by the idea, common among their parents, that certain scientific opinions are immoral or certain questions too hot to handle." But I bet that when these same students are middle-aged adults, alot of them will feel the same.
I believe pinker to be correct on this one. He is right on point. I disagree in some parts of your critic and I believe pinker address all these problems you pose in his full article, but I'l agree with the tables :). Check out my comments on this article on http://encefalus.com/philos...
Not sure that Andrew actually read the article that Pinker wrote. Perhaps he just read it with too much cognitive bias as to what he wanted it to be about. BTW, the link to Pinker's article no longer works, try here : http://pinker.wjh.harvard.e...Pinker just had 4 points (1) some questions are considered to have too much emotional weight to be be asked in polite society (make your own list, he never claimed his was the most important or that it was exhaustive) (2) there is a case for saying they should be asked nevertheless (3) there is a case for saying they shouldn't (4) don't rely on academia to debate points 2 & 3.What's so difficult about that ?
Here's a website you may find useful. http://www.addicted.com is a site for friends, families, and those who suffer from various addictions.
Sceptic, brilliant counter-response. Pinker's claim that his list is randomly generated is laughable on its surface. It clearly itself reflects biases of a rather conventional, American sort. There's also a working-the-refs ("It's middle class white guys that are oppressed") subtextual feel to the whole thing.
Andrew, great post. I think what pissed you off most about Pinker's list was the same thing that pissed me off: that it was poorly thought out, reasoned, and articulated. A great contrast to your published writings in this blog and on your own.
Wikipedia on workplace mobbing.
http://www.stat.columbia.ed...
Sorry about the double post. It seems to be a consequence of my trying to use the "back" function in my browser and re-POSTing unintentionally.
P-Ter: There's a bit too much indirection re "Andrew's other web site" for me to locate sources. I don't have a URL for Andrew's site, though I might be able to Google for it if I knew more about him. Would you (or Andrew!) be kind enough to provide the link implicit in the text you cut and pasted (the "click here")? Thanks.
P-Ter: There's a bit too much indirection re "Andrew's other web site" for me to locate sources. I don't have a URL for Andrew's site, though I might be able to Google for it if I knew more about him. Would you (or Andrew!) be kind enough to provide the link implicit in the text you cut and pasted (the "click here")? Thanks.
FYI, Pinker's response (posted on Andrew's other website), addresses many of these issues:
I appreciate the careful analysis of the individual questions, but I think the posting missed the point of the article. The questions at the beginning of the piece were not offered as a set of research topics that should be high-priority areas of study for the social sciences. Nor were they a list of my pet peeves or private concerns (presumably no one has that many pet peeves!). They were just examples – as many examples as I could recall -- of scholarly questions that have elicited intemperate, emotional, moralistic, or illiberal responses. The piece was an analysis of the free-speech and academic-freedom issues surrounding how the scholarly and journalistic communities should handle questions of that ilk, not a recommendation that that those issues are the ones most worthy of study, or even ones for which I particularly cared about the outcomes. Your noting that they were not all empirical issues in the social sciences is beside the point – universities also have departments of philosophy, government, law, bioethics, which evaluate moral and analytical questions as well as empirical ones. As for your rhetorical question, “I'm still confused about what's dangerous about saying that `women, on average, have a different profile of aptitudes and emotions than men?’,” click here.I agree with you, by the way, about the superiority of graphs over tables in conveying statistical information.
Taboo vs. Boring:What are examples of people calling taboo when it's really that no one is interested? Pinker's Biblical history and Native American examples may fall under this, or rather, self-selection may bias who is interested.
I think there's a third category of topics about which there's a lot of policy debate, but no one actually wants to know relevant facts. It may be easy to mistake a bias against research in general with a taboo against your research, especially if you're in the minority.
I think that the important thing with respect to many of Pinker's questions is that they have great relevance to many other questions that are the subject of a great deal of attention and which cannot plausibly be answered usefully without reference to his questions.I often feel that way about a number of other questions.
The Flynn effect appears to have run its course.http://www.gnxp.com/blog/20...http://www.gnxp.com/blog/20...
Why is mobbing increasing at many workplaces?I really don't understand what you are talking about here.
Once a topic is framed as "Would X be better?"...I see the potential for bias.
Surely Pinker is asserting that the taboo is one-sided, that only (the other) one-sided versions of the questions are currently acceptable.
If you go back and read the Pinker article, I don't think he's suggesting that these topics have been under-researched; I think he's claiming that these topics have been researched, and the results ignored because they threaten certain commonly held opinions that are too touchy to discuss in public. For example, the first question -- all neuroscientists know that women and men have different mental capabilities, think differently, and so on. But bring this up during a dinner party, and see what happens. Chances are, this is the result of the calcification of opinion that occurs in many people as they get older -- Pinker writes, "In my experience, today's students -- black and white, male and female -- are bewildered by the idea, common among their parents, that certain scientific opinions are immoral or certain questions too hot to handle." But I bet that when these same students are middle-aged adults, alot of them will feel the same.