this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2023
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You might think that if you listen to Steven Pinker, The World’s Most Annoying Man.
Yeah, I liked that book but I'm not sure I should believe anything that comes out of his mouth.
A friend of mine had an interesting basis for dismissing Pinker.
They saw a discussion panel which included Pinker and noticed that in all the discussion and Q&A he didn’t express a single thought that wasn’t already in his book or speech.
The basis is that any person intelligent and thoughtful enough to be an academic let alone a public intellectual has myriad thoughts and ideas that don’t make it into publication and should spill over in conversation. They reasoned that Pinker is just a clever nerd that got lucky in academia, and I’ve always figured that they’re right (having never thought of that way of thinking about it myself).
Incidentally I’ve seen Penn (of Penn and Teller) reason similarly about how dumb Trump is.