Tuesday, August 27, 2013

David Hume could out-consume

We learn, via Pharyngula and Crooked Timber and the passage of several weeks, that Steven Pinker is forging ahead with his project of making Richard Dawkins look less like a mouthy git in comparison.

The iron-cast rule of reading Pinker is that you will find yourself exclaiming "This is all my bum!" at regular intervals. Indeed, experienced and well-prepared Pinker readers install a sound file on their computers, to automate the process.

Readers are referred to the House of Substance for great moments in Steven Pinker jackassery.* But has the slackard proprietor updated his archives with the latest Pinkerisms? HAS HE BOGROLL. Nor has he created an animated GIF of a scampering Pinker, such as could accompany a sound-track of Yakety Sax.

Anyway, the current effusion is an Open Letter rather than a book, in which Pinker urges academics from the huge-manatee faculties to worry less about Science attempting to engulf them into its monolithic Borg-like one-size-fits-all methodology, and also to embrace the monolithic Borg-like one-size-fits-all methodology of Science, because it is far superior to their own bestial practices. In it we learn that "Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Leibniz, Kant, Smith" were all (a) cognitive neuroscientists, and (b) evolutionary psychologists. No, really, I am not making this up.

I am happy to argue that Hume was really a Theravada Buddhist, who analysed the phenomenology of experience in terms of 'bundles' rather than 'Skandha' only because he didn't know Sanskrit...** but an Evolutionary Psychologist malgré lui? That is all my bum.

Pinker fantasises about going back in a time machine and humbling the great minds of the past with his superior knowledge:
I often long to travel back in time and offer them some bit of twenty-first-century freshman science that would fill a gap in their arguments or guide them around a stumbling block. What would these Fausts have given for such knowledge?
Our sources inform us that Pinker's SF / fantasy novels remain unpublished because the level of wish fulfillment and the Mary-Sue characterisation is more than even Baen Books could accept.
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* My special favourite is uncharacteristic in that Pinker concedes the possibility of some limits to his knowledge, although he does so in the context of ascribing the same ignorance to everyone else:
Note that assertion #1 is meaningless because the definition of 'short-term memory' renders it untestable; a moment's checking confirms that #2 is flatly wrong; as indeed is #3. You would have thought he could have got at least one right.

** Hume totally espoused the doctrine of anātman, which is why his tomb is an empty shell.

13 comments:

OBS said...

You'd think he could've used a lot fewer words to ask to borrow the Riddled time machine.

Yastreblyansky said...

1. I love the idea of Pinker's unpublishable SF so much I almost want to write it.
2. Can't think why he doesn't include the greatest evolutionary psychologist of all, Rudyard Kipling.
3. Somebody must have said this already, but just in case: The Kenny G of Cognitive Psychology!

Substance McGravitas said...

What would these Fausts have given for such knowledge?

Wormy cheese?

Dragon-King Wangchuck said...

These thinkers—Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Leibniz, Kant, Smith—are all the more remarkable for having crafted their ideas in the absence of formal theory and empirical data.

I guess that my carnal relations with Pinker's mom also counts as science despite the lack of formal theory and empirical data. Believe me, there's quite a great deal of "animal instincts being infused into bosoms."

fish said...

You obviously just didn't understand his brilliance. Hopefully David Brooks will write a column explaining it to you. He is well read in neurobiology evolutionary psychology.

fish said...

I am in love.

Smut Clyde said...

I am in love.
I thought of linking to that review but there was too much incivility.
The Pharyngula link contains some splendidly deranged commentary from Pinker defenders.

Dragon-King Wangchuck said...

Re: rotating objects in four dimensions

That's nothing. Rotating fifth dimension objects usually results in the Age of Aquarius.

fish said...

I can't comment on pharyngula so I will rant here instead:
But the heart of the scientific method has been with mankind much longer than the ability to carefully describe it and use math to quantify it. When the first group of hunter gatherers asked a prisoner from another tribe to try a new berry first to see if they got sick or died, they were applying the scientific method. The hypothesis was that they this potential new food was actually poisonous. The control group was the members of the tribe who didn’t try the new food. There was no blinding, no math, but it was fundamentally learning about the natural world through experimentation. It was science. And even if that bit of prehistoric lore is utter fiction, even if it was apes who first figured out what they could and couldn’t eat and passed down that knowledge, it still basically holds.

NO NO NO!!! I sentence this person to reading Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery for all of eternity...

Smut Clyde said...

reading Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery for all of eternity

Fish is harsh.

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

Our sources inform us that Pinker's SF / fantasy novels remain unpublished because the level of wish fulfillment and the Mary-Sue characterisation is more than even Baen Books could accept.

They didn't like his novel that featured him as a centaur banging Captain Kirk?

Smut Clyde said...

What would these Fausts have given for such knowledge?
Wormy cheese?


That is Gnostic heresy, sir!!

fish said...

They didn't like his novel that featured him as a centaur banging Captain Kirk?

Okay, I would read that.