(Text) Steven Pinker essay: 

Pandemic of Poppycock

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 Pinker argues there are four parts to the best explanation of the current Pandemic of Poppycock:

• Reason is inference deployed in service of a goal. But the goal need not be to gain objective understanding of the world. It could be to win at chess, or just to prove that your opinions, or those of your group, are right.

• Reason is guided by deeply rooted folk intuitions developed in pre-scientific times to help us navigate human life. We intuit dualism, ergo immortal souls and life after death. We intuit purpose in the universe, extrapolating from the way we live our own lives. And we intuit purpose (conspiracy) in our potential enemies. Unfortunately it is true that our enemies may really be out to harm us, and that in our due vigilance false positives may be less costly than false negatives.

• We often don't trust the right 'experts'. None of us justifies all his or her beliefs by reason, we need to find others in whom we repose trust. Political tribalism brings vulnerability here, but tribalism is a deep-rooted human trait, not easily discarded.

• Distal and testable beliefs. Testing is how we form the beliefs we use in everyday life. We also hold beliefs that are difficult or impossible to test. Many of these don't normally impact us practically, but sometimes they do become important, and often they are important for others we don't normally meet, but who may come knocking.

How to advance rational beliefs? Pinker says stop politicising our truth-seeking institutions, because it stokes the crippling my-side bias. Universities, scientific societies, scholarly journals, public-interest nonprofits have increasingly been branding themselves with woke boilerplate and left-wing shibboleths. The institutions are then blown off by the centre and right which make up a majority of the population. The results have been disastrous, including resistance to climate action and vaccination. The defence of freedom of speech and thought must not be allowed to suffer that fate.

 

The creed of universal truth-seeking is not the natural human way of believing. Submitting all of one's beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is cognitively unnatural. The norms and institutions that support this radical creed are constantly undermined by our backsliding into tribalism and magical thinking, and must constantly be cherished and secured.

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(Video) When Erika Christakis emailed students for whom she had pastoral responsibility suggesting they might want to reflect on whether Yale students really wanted close guidance from the University administration on what Halloween costumes were permissible on campus, the resulting student reaction induced her to resign her job. Her husband Nicholas, one of the University's most distinguished professors, tried conversing with students.

 

 

(Text) Idealogy stomps all over chemistry in a new paper

 

 

(Text) Bizarre Cornell course on black holes conflates astronomy and ideology

(Don't miss the paragraph at the end where the AI robot, chatGBT is asked to shed some wisdom. If you don't know about chatGBT you have a treat in store. It's an AI service that provides extended written answers to questions you may ask. Really cool. Sign up and give it a try: https://chat.openai.com/chat )

 

 

(Text) Poppycock down under: Indigenous electrical wiring in New Zealand

 

 

(Video) Dealing with poppycock:

John McWhorter is a black professor of linguistics at Columbia University, New York. He has interesting views on affirmative action and wokism.