By Steve Sailer
09/28/2021
Earlier, by John Derbyshire: Did Race Denialism Kill Jeffrey Epstein?
From The Guardian:
Pinkerâs progress: the celebrity scientist at the centre of the culture wars
How the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker became one of the worldâs most contentious thinkers
by Alex Blasdel
Tue 28 Sep 2021⌠Many critics allege that Pinkerâs recent remarks are part of a longer history of comments and behaviour that have come dangerously close to promoting pseudoscientific or abhorrent points of view. To take a single example: the journalist Malcolm Gladwell has called Pinker out for sourcing information from the blogger Steve Sailer, who, in Gladwellâs words, âis perhaps best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people.â
Hereâs the abhorrent and pseudoscientific information Pinker sourced from my blog:
Pinker used my analysis of two decades of NFL draft picks for his 2009 NYT review of a Gladwell book in which the then-superstar New Yorker writer had claimed:
The problem with picking quarterbacks is that [U. of Missouri quarterback] Chase Danielâs performance canât be predicted. The job heâs being groomed for is so particular and specialized that there is no way to know who will succeed at it and who wonât. In fact, Berri and Simmons found no connection between where a quarterback was taken in the draft â that is, how highly he was rated on the basis of his college performance â and how well he played in the pros.
Unsurprisingly, I found that while drafting quarterbacks is hard, NFL teams do much better than random.
Pinkerâs review did permanent damage to Gladwellâs then-inflated reputation, so Gladwell lashed back in a letter to the Times arguing that I had cooties.
Back to the Guardian today:
Angela Saini, a science journalist and author of Superior: The Return of Race Science, told me that âfor many people, Pinkerâs willingness to entertain the work of individuals who are on the far right and white supremacists has gone beyond the paleâ. When I put these kinds of criticisms to Pinker, he called it the fallacy of âguilt by associationâ â just because Sailer and others have objectionable views, doesnât mean their data is bad. Pinker has condemned racism â he told me it was ânot just wrong but stupidâ â but published Sailerâs work in an edited volume in 2004,
That was my January 2003 article âCousin Marriage Conundrumâ that predicted the failure of Bushâs nation-building war in Iraq due to Iraqâs little known high rates of cousin marriage exacerbating its clannishness. Pinker has good taste as an editor.
and quotes Sailerâs positive review of Better Angels, among many others, on his website.
⌠âDepending on how much of a sense of humour you and your editor have, hereâs an answer to the question, âAre there downsides to being famous?ââ Pinker emailed me after I asked him about Epstein, Sailer, McGinn and others. âYes. Journalists ask you to explain why youâve been âassociated withâ various people, out of the thousands youâve interacted with over the decades, whoâve done something wrong.â
Jeffrey Epstein and me are up there together as wrongdoersâŚ
(Colin McGinn was a mild-mannered philosophy professor who got proto-MeTooed in 2013 by a young ladyâs boyfriend who felt her professor was becoming overly familiar in their banter.)