Very difficult to discuss this book because Pinker isn't wrong, he's just an asshole. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t... - ThreadSky

michaelhobbes.bsky.social • 375 days ago

Very difficult to discuss this book because Pinker isn't wrong, he's just an asshole.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-better-angels-of-our-nature/id1651876897?i=1000646375925

Comments

veleda-k.bsky.social•375 days ago

I was under the impression this book was poorly cited and generally bad history. Will be interesting to listen to the episode.

pluplubasch.bsky.social•374 days ago

You’re not wrong!

eleventimezones.com•375 days ago

It's a shame he's such a good writer. He's been selling people on bullshit ever since The Language Instinct (I'm referring here to his "semantic bootstrapping" theory that is wrong but now taken as a given by people who read the book). SMH

born2bemild.bsky.social•373 days ago

As a non-native, The Language Instinct has a special place in my heart because it was the first popular science book I read all the way through *in English*. However, Pinker *is* an a***hole and I'd love to read (or listen to) a well-founded criticism of it, 30 years on.

eleventimezones.com•373 days ago

Most of it still holds up, research-wise, but everything he wrote about "semantic bootstrapping" is his own theory that he basically states as fact. I wrote my dissertation refuting it!! But it's a very in-the-weeds academic fight. When he strays outside of language he is actively offensive

born2bemild.bsky.social•373 days ago

I seem to remember the claim that the Jewish surname "Goldwasser" is a euphemism for "urine", which didn't ring true to my 22 yo self with a passing interest in onomastics but, alas, this was several years before I had internet at home so I just parked that factoid at the back of my head.

born2bemild.bsky.social•373 days ago

Another thing that made me go "Huh?" was something along the lines of "Black people don't be talking to babies and they *still* learn to talk".
But yeah, a lot of it made sense to me. Which is why it was so disappointing when he increasingly wrote stuff that ... didn't.

alwaysroldy.bsky.social•373 days ago

Loved the @goingmedieval.bsky.social name drop! She’s amazing.

mydearladydisdain.bsky.social•373 days ago

This looks fascinating - is there a transcript anywhere? np if not (and thank you for doing transcripts of maintenance phase, it makes my life so much easier!)

johnpfaff.bsky.social•375 days ago

When NNTaleb tore into this book and made some good points—basically, the mean number of realized deaths has fallen, but the potential variance has risen, since the risk of “black swan” global-reaching catastrophes has risen—it was … really hard to know who to cheer for.

johnpfaff.bsky.social•375 days ago

Definitely a “ground open up and swallow them both?” sort of moment.

jumbanho.bsky.social•374 days ago

Taleb has never seen a situation without black swans 😀

eleanorcercis.bsky.social•375 days ago

Nnt?

johnpfaff.bsky.social•375 days ago

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan.

Smart guy. And very VERY aware of that fact.

bbbozzz.bsky.social•375 days ago

Not speaking about NNT in particular, one big problem with intelligence is really smart people tend to be less aware of their own fallibility than they are of the fallibility of others. Relatedly, really smart people tend to have more ways to make mistakes.

cajsa.bsky.social•373 days ago

My pet peeve is the person who is quite brilliant in their field assuming that brilliance transfers to every field.

johnpfaff.bsky.social•373 days ago

Like the field of physics:

lukas.blue•374 days ago

Although - he is also very publicly against the idea of IQ as a useful measure, and has spent a lot of time ripping into crypto-eugenicists. Doing God's work there.

legomyrstan.bsky.social•375 days ago

Not sure if it was from book or just result of conversation but there was sentence about brain evolution in last 500 years. Seeing medieval as barbaric is very much consequence of enlightenment mentality that seen itself as heirs of Greek and Romans

legomyrstan.bsky.social•375 days ago

Which is very much in contrast how people seen themselves in medieval. It’s something that poison the way in which a lot of people think about medieval especially in English speaking sphere and it’s connected to same conclusions that drive ie. Rhodes during scramble for Africa

legomyrstan.bsky.social•375 days ago

Not sure which year this book was written in but Russia expanded its territory by conquer in 2008 in Georgia, 2014 in Ukraine, arguably Transnistria in 1992

legomyrstan.bsky.social•375 days ago

I would argue with book being Euro-centric it’s west-Euro-centric which omits majority of modern conflict regions. Like for example Armenia and Azerbaijan which have at least 3 wars since 1991

jumbanho.bsky.social•375 days ago

I thought it was interesting how you pointed out his missing the Enlightenment as the time when scientific racism was enabled, and how scientific racism justified a lot of horrors (chattel slavery, colonialism); interesting because of Pinker's own turn towards scientific racism.

tamarinsauce.bsky.social•375 days ago

Great episode! Amazing how off base he is all the time

fancycwabs.bsky.social•375 days ago

I’d be curious to hear your collective take on Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche, a joke book that became a template for male toxicity mostly because of just how popular it was in the dawn of the Reagan era.

technclycorrect.bsky.social•375 days ago

Walter, as anyone who's listened to this podcast knows, this isn't 'Nam, we know there are The Rules

tymatt.bsky.social•374 days ago

I’m only about half an hour in so far, but if Pinker is going to blame Southern crime rates on Scots-Irish immigration 300 years ago, shouldn’t he have to explain the discrepancy between the South and, like, Scotland / Ireland?

crouton.bsky.social•375 days ago

Thank you for teaching me that there's a lot of death in my family because of the legacy of herding crawfish across the mountains of Louisiana.

saraabi.bsky.social•372 days ago

"Davos view of the world where people in power are trying to abstract everything out... to avoid joining the fight to address the problems we have now." My dude GENOCIDE IN PALESTINE IS THE PROBLEM WE HAVE NOW.
90 minutes on ethnocentrism, colonialism, genocide, nothing to say about this? One word?

saraabi.bsky.social•372 days ago

Good episode as always but it was more than a little jarring to hear yall spend an hour and a half talking about the reduction in violence in the modern era and not once mention the most horrifying act of genocide/ethinic cleansing the world has seen in a generation happening RIGHT NOW in Palestine

amdiamanti.bsky.social•374 days ago

Good episode, but I have to admit, about midpoint when you mentioned covering the book further in the next episode I though "oh no, there's MORE of this shit?!" 😄

patriciaanne.bsky.social•375 days ago

They did find the body in the library...

Books can kill..

- Said clue

mini-e.bsky.social•375 days ago

Although I never bothered to read the whole book, I always suspected its main premise was too simplistic. Perhaps it was not Pinker’s intention, but to me the book embodied the typical Western man’s optimistic attitude that dismissively says to an oppressed person “it’s not thaaat baad”

justawren.bsky.social•374 days ago

My favorite part so far is Peter quietly laughing to himself at his own joke about 52 min in.

dermotcasey.bsky.social•374 days ago

Fantastic episode and that’s just a brilliant summary

schoenen.bsky.social•375 days ago

A better lede could not have been written.

drsleeps.bsky.social•375 days ago

He is kinda wrong though

zclaude.bsky.social•375 days ago

Have you read Dawn of Everything? Really does a good job of filling in some of Pinker's blindspots

jumbanho.bsky.social•374 days ago

Wait, are you suggesting that there are societies outside of western Europe?

dcsein.bsky.social•373 days ago

The real point here is that DK64 had too many damn things to collect!

tyschalter.com•375 days ago

I can't believe he took pains to point out a massive drop in large- and medium-scale war in the global west after World War II--and yet also takes pains to avoid mentioning that was *a direct result OF* World War II? Or that WWI was a major cause of WWII?? Or the Cold War, at all???

tyschalter.com•375 days ago

Like he looks at WWI => WWII => Cold War, remedial 20th-century history, and goes "This is randomness, we are projecting patterns and narratives onto noise.

Meanwhile, I have proved with data that humans today are innately better at controlling their inner caveman than they were 300 years ago"

kathleenflint.com•375 days ago

I also found it weird that he drew these humanity-wide conclusions while explicitly stating he was only referring to the global west and "developed" nations

tyschalter.com•375 days ago

I found that less "weird" than "predictably shitty," ha ha, but I've been listening to too many episodes of this podcast XD

I actually think his theory might hold up better if he looked at how other civilizations and cultures evolved on other timelines, but that's not the story he wants to tell

kathleenflint.com•375 days ago

Lmao "predictably shitty" is probably the better term, it just felt kind of glossed over (bc it was predictably shitty)

jm6k.bsky.social•374 days ago

he's not wrong?

tuckerdrake.bsky.social•374 days ago

Any thoughts about leaded gasoline being responsible for high crime rates? https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health/

michaelhobbes.bsky.social•374 days ago

It's probably a piece of the puzzle but my understanding is that it doesn't hold up to international comparisons. Different countries had different approaches to lead and phased it out at different times and yet the crime drop is nearly universal.

dribbon.bsky.social•374 days ago

I think the real lesson of these big questions is: any really big trend requires multiple contributing factors.
Any search for "the reason" will always fall short.

guiltypanacea.bsky.social•374 days ago

Huh, you mean there's no single easy answer I can plug into my terrible airport book??

hearing-girl.bsky.social•375 days ago

Idk, he repeatedly attempts to calculate rates without having any way of knowing the denominators - I'm pretty comfortable calling that wrong! 😅

(But yes, "there have been zero uses of nukes post-WWII" is the peak of "meaninglessly correct"!)

kaelik.bsky.social•374 days ago

Look you can't say the 20th century is the most violent century because in the 20th century, except for during the big war where we used nukes, no one has ever used nukes.

In the 1500s they were dropping nukes all the time!

hearing-girl.bsky.social•374 days ago

There were 55 whole years in the 20th century where we could have been using nukes and weren't, which basically proves that humans have naturally progressed toward peace over a millennium or so!

apig.bsky.social•375 days ago

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

stomachtax.bsky.social•374 days ago

I was wondering whether you guys not totally eviscerating an author would lead to a boring episode, but this was still really good! I’d be up for more like this, if you run out of pure hate fodder

erichwithanh.bsky.social•375 days ago

Top-notch Donkey Kong 64 joke!

acastroaraujo.bsky.social•375 days ago

The “resisting our impulses” take on “civilization” sounds like a rehash of shitty freudianism. Thanks, I hate it 😭

gateshawk.bsky.social•374 days ago

I am the walrus

brewaskew.bsky.social•375 days ago

97 minutes? Oh hell yeah. Like they say in the movie "Bring It On"... "Let's go."

raymanwithaplan.bsky.social•375 days ago

It's a two-parter!

pasuht.bsky.social•375 days ago

Excellent episode as always. Especially the 90s videogame references ofc.

bostonphotographer.bsky.social•375 days ago

Michael Hobbes streamer arc.

raoulduke1976.bsky.social•373 days ago

When is this available on the Patreon?

arreffbee.bsky.social•375 days ago

I nearly choked when you said it was 900 pages

evandoyle.com•375 days ago

Waking up to a new IBCK episode this morning remains the best part of my day so far.

ben.vampirefriday.org•374 days ago

Killed me with the Donkey Kong 64 reference. That is content that is made for me.

yolandafay.bsky.social•374 days ago

You made an interesting comment about editing the text Peter read to remove "deca"...I always assumed the quotes read are verbatim from the book being discussed.

michaelhobbes.bsky.social•373 days ago

99% of them are! Every once in awhile we'll break a long sentence into two or some other minor tweak to make them easier to read out loud. In this case Pinker wasn't even hyphenating the term and I didn't want to get bogged down in a long explanation of why he was using it.

jumbanho.bsky.social•373 days ago

Does he mention the Taiping Rebellion in China that killed ~30 million before Marxism that was surely instigated by colonialism?

wangleberry.bsky.social•373 days ago

It feels like a word that a 12-year-old boy would make up

chutneycaelyn.bsky.social•373 days ago

I’m pretty sure Dekamegamurders is a Power Rangers villain

mikecowburn.bsky.social•373 days ago

No way. I just assumed you were kidding! 🙃

spaceturtleart.bsky.social•373 days ago

'Decamegamurder' is such a weird term, why not just use 'mass murders' or 'purges' or 'massacres' like most people do.

darrelplant.bsky.social•373 days ago

And why the ‘k’?

tdawry.bsky.social•373 days ago

I assumed this was a joke

cheweycarapace.bsky.social•373 days ago

Non-Patriated Ubermurders

pers1stence.bsky.social•348 days ago

Listening to part 1, I have a question....does the author only look back at US/Euro cultures and maybe one "uncontacted tribe" (in the Amazon, maybe)? Does he look at history/trends on the Indian subcontinent or China or Middle East or Africa at all??

jesuswelpd.bsky.social•375 days ago

thank u for the lebowski ref. michael

psubowler.bsky.social•375 days ago

I'm only half way through the episode but please tell me Pinker attributes the decline in violence in some way to the advent of firearms like this guy.

czedwards.bsky.social•374 days ago

Yeah, but he’s not correct, either.

So just an asshole on all axes.

spookiepie.bsky.social•373 days ago

Just here to confirm that the Donkey Kong 64 reference did, in fact, greatly resonate

whiplashchick.com•375 days ago

I'm just here for the late 90s shareware jokes.

nickmoon.bsky.social•374 days ago

The Grope C**t Lane in York was renamed Love Lane in, I think, the 19th century. It now runs behind a private girls’ school.

bryanquinn1981.bsky.social•375 days ago

After listening to part 1, I eagerly await the new version of the musical Candide with the revised book by Dr. Steven Pangloss.

markmaguireb.bsky.social•375 days ago

I was reading this on the 2am bus home. A drunk guy was roaming around. He grabbed the book: “WHAT’S THIS?”. I said sit down, I’ll tell you. I began my outline. “ARE YE JOKIN’? THINGS ARE GETTIN’ BETTER???” He simmered down, he was homeless, on his way to his sister’s. I never finished reading it.

markmaguireb.bsky.social•375 days ago

I want to add I thought of the “somehow Palpatine returned” phrase a split second before Michael actually said it. 😂

mikehalls.bsky.social•375 days ago

Im sorry

cccaaatttt.bsky.social•374 days ago

blud think he Destroy Lonely 😭😭

fortydollarcandles.bsky.social•375 days ago

I read this book when it came out, and I cut it into THREE sections along the spine so I could carry it around 😎

joegordon.bsky.social•375 days ago

They sorta did that with this episode. 250p of notes for the first third. Next episode will be part 2. Sounds like we can’t wait to dunk on his nonsense in the last part.

glennf.com•374 days ago

It’s weird that he could have written a book that might have had similar conclusions and been accurate by using FACTS.

bquittman.bsky.social•375 days ago

I hope Guns, Germs & Steel/Collapse are on the list for future books. Both of them ALSO infuriate experts.

rethinkjeff.bsky.social•374 days ago

This is a problem with philosophers in general, but especially ones that don't say that's what they're trying to be.

contagonist.bsky.social•375 days ago

Pinker really said "except for Genocide Century, which is an outlier and shouldn't be counted"

lilvegan.bsky.social•373 days ago

Also a lot of the violence has been exported to the global south (imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism). Haven’t read the book so I don’t know if he addresses structural violence or « social murder » either.

raymanwithaplan.bsky.social•375 days ago

You better believe that Donkey Kong 64 joke landed. The game with the most collectibles ever

shotpoint.bsky.social•375 days ago

Any time you slide in a video game reference, know that there’s at least one guy on Bluesky that appreciates them 😂

drheck.bsky.social•375 days ago

I want you to know that I felt seen by your DK64 joke and it was funny. I also loved Peter’s reaction to you revealing you had 250 pages of notes

derbard.bsky.social•375 days ago

*The Chart* was plenty bad, but I was half hoping you were going to reveal the argument to be "being decapitated by Genghis Khan would spill as much three pints of blood, but a Gewehr 43 can result in as little as half a cup. So, 'bloodiest century' may be overstated!"

lachkent.bsky.social•374 days ago

yonszenshpensz.bsky.social•374 days ago

Proto-NIMBYs in 1700s London banned dense walkable public executions send tweet

rollwithheather.bsky.social•374 days ago

Can he be semi wrong and an asshole?

nickfleisher.bsky.social•375 days ago

Did he draw a firearm during league play?

bigmarmot.bsky.social•375 days ago

The Donkey Kong Country of podcasts

jephalopod.bsky.social•375 days ago

Calmer than you are

annihilatethisweek.bsky.social•373 days ago

I can’t believe you guys talk about Matthew White’s book in here. We were in a book club together when he got that book deal. Pinker was his main benefactor, found his website and got him an agent and everything. I can see now Pinker had an agenda there, but that book deal changed Matthew’s life…

annihilatethisweek.bsky.social•373 days ago

…so I really can’t be mad at it. That said, Matthew’s website about deaths throughout history dated back to the 90s and when the time came to turn it into a book he had a ton of trouble fact checking it because so often the citations he found would just in turn cite earlier versions of his own work.

annihilatethisweek.bsky.social•373 days ago

But you are right, he really is just a random librarian. I’m not sure his work can be blamed for how bad the Pinker chart is, either — some of the issues with the chart have way more to do with the way Pinker graphed the numbers than the numbers themselves being at issue. You did raise some good…

michaelhobbes.bsky.social•373 days ago

He seems like a nice guy! Our project isn't to blast people who are acting in good faith and make mistakes, Pinker is the one who used the chart to make a bunch of spurious political points.

jdvdub.bsky.social•373 days ago

The real point is that Pinker has a chair at Harvard and could have had a very bright research assistant run down these numbers for him from scholarly sources in less than a week.

wkimper.bsky.social•373 days ago

Also Pinker is the one leveraging his status as a Serious Academic Scholar while showing a reckless disregard for like basic undergrad-level evaluation of the quality of source material.

annihilatethisweek.bsky.social•373 days ago

…points Matthew overlooked in the episode. Either way, just wild to hear a guy I’ve known for 20 years come up on a podcast I listen to.

jblumenfeld100.bsky.social•374 days ago

My favorite part is where Pinker gives a bunch of counterexamples and says "Wow! Amazing how my thesis holds up despite these!" You just know that if he was trying make the opposite point he'd be using the same examples as proof.

nushpowell.bsky.social•374 days ago

Also his hair is dumb.

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