Bad News About That Pro-Pinker Mother Jones Piece: It Doesn’t Make Any Fucking Sense
Daniel King, a copy editor at Mother Jones, wrote this smug little sigh of an op-ed calling the authors and signers of the LSA open letter “dishonest on facts, closed to counterevidence, masochistically cannibalizing.” What fun! I probably wouldn’t have had to read it at all if Pinker hadn’t gloated about it on Twitter, but he did, so I did, and now here we are.
You may find the tone of this article abrasive, even rude. It is that way on purpose. I am meeting the venerable and brilliant scholars who oppose the letter on their own terms. There will be cursing, there will be insults, and there will be goofery. It’s a Dr. Green special (just ask my students).
Sadly, I think it’s important to cite sources, maintain logical consistency, and give specific examples, which means this isn’t going to be as easy of a read as King's middle-school-entrance-exam-reject of an essay.
First, let’s start with the basic premise. King is suggesting that the LSA letter is bad and the signatories should feel bad. So what is actually the deal with the LSA letter? Buckle in, kids, it’s not going to be brief.
What the letter asks for
The only thing — literally the only thing at all — that letter asks for is “the removal of Dr. Steven Pinker from both our list of distinguished academic fellows and our list of media experts.”
Basically, when someone is wondering, “Who are some current respected linguists?” or “Who should I consult before I publish this thing about language?”, if they go to the Linguistic Society of America website, Pinker is one of the names they will see. The letter says, “Hey, let’s not do that anymore.”
Why the letter asks for it
To quote from the letter itself, the signatories think that he shouldn’t be on those lists anymore because Pinker’s “behavior as a public academic is not befitting of a representative of our professional organization,” and “that the LSA’s own stated goals make such a conclusion inevitable.”
Basically, the LSA shouldn’t promote him as a representative of their community because he has repeatedly done things the LSA itself says are not okay. That means even if you think the LSA’s value system is bad, it’s not a valid argument to blame them for taking the megaphone away from someone who undermines those values.
So the two basic claims are: (1) he’s unprofessional and (2) he undermines the LSA’s stated goals. Are those claims true? Let’s find out!
Is he unprofessional?
In the human-resources sense of the word, yes.
The guy who is a signatory of the Harper’s letter against cancel culture did, himself, write a public letter in an attempt to get someone fired for making an extremely substantiated sexual harassment claim against his friend. That’s not professional in the slightest, my dude. Maybe the letter’s authors should have included this, maybe not. I’m not going to tell them what to do.
In the scientific/academic sense, also yes.
As a public academic, it’s Pinker’s job to communicate about academic topics. It’s also his job to make sure the things he says, and his amplification of statements by other people, are true and based in solid reasoning. At the very least he should be reasonably sure that they’re true. The open letter to the LSA, and Princeton lecturer Maria Esipova’s elaboration (and her other one), point out a few of the most recent times he’s misrepresented the contents and reliability of claims he’s retweeting.
Rather than relitigate the letter’s claims point by point, I’m going to go in-depth about just one of them. Hopefully by the end you’ll agree that this one is plenty, if only because you don’t want to read another five of my summaries.
Many people cannot believe that Pinker would endorse spurious claims built on faulty logic. I think Pinker is a smart person who knows about basic logic, so it does seem hard to believe. But he really, actually, in real life did say that “[t]he idea that the UCSB murders are part of a pattern of hatred against women is statistically obtuse.” Elliot Rodger, who committed mass murder after posting a video specifically announcing that his actions were motivated by his belief that women are monsters for not having sex with him, and who is lionized by large groups of incels to this day… isn’t part of a pattern of hatred against women. Yep. Logic.
Not only is Pinker’s claim factually incorrect, it is also a misrepresentation of the claim he and the author of the linked article are attempting to refute. To claim that a pattern exists isn’t even the same thing as claiming a statistical preponderance. Nobody’s saying most women die of misogynist murder. They’re saying several recent murderers have been inspired by misogynist discourse. Pinker’s use of the phrase “statistically obtuse” is, in this case, obscuring the claim he is attacking. If you told me you’d noticed that sometimes you catch people saying “good morning” when it’s the afternoon, and I called your statement statistically obtuse, I’d look like a complete dip. Ipso facto. Cogito ergo dip.
In a very unprofessional move for an academic, Pinker presented the link as if it came from a credible source (i.e., without critiquing it or at all hinting that it might have issues). The author of the article is Heather Mac Donald. Mac Donald doesn’t seem to publish academic work at all, which is fine, she just writes op-eds in a newspaper run by a conservative think tank, and sometimes other places too. She wrote some books. She is certainly not a linguist and has nothing of value to say about linguistics (especially the part of her article where she whines that white people can’t use the n-word, which embarrassingly includes a citation of some tangentially related linguistic research in a way expressly disavowed by its author, and which Pinker also endorsed on Twitter). So why is Pinker even interested in her work at all? Because her beliefs fit neatly within the worldview presented by Pinker’s more recent books, which are popular but easily debunked nonsense all about how the world is getting better, actually. It would be so convenient for that thesis if you could show systemic sexism and racism were not really happening. Hence, citing the vague opinion pieces of Mac Donald as if they have something to say statistically.
So Pinker has publicly attempted to torpedo someone else’s career because she said something he didn’t like, even though it was true. He has publicly signal-boosted Mac Donald multiple times despite it being very, very obvious that she makes unfounded claims and despite other, more scrupulous linguists, warning him of such. ~ p r o f e s s i o n a l ~
Do Pinker’s actions contradict the LSA’s stated goals?
The Linguistic Society of America actually makes lots of statements about what they believe and how they want to operate. One of them was a “Statement on Racial Justice” released June 3, 2020. In it, you will find the statement, “linguists must be active participants in creating an intellectually inclusive community.” Does Pinker’s behavior listed above, which is just one tiny sliver of the whole picture, seem like he’s been doing anything like that?
I don’t think campaigning against a student who has experienced sexual harassment is creating an intellectually inclusive community. I also don’t think signal-boosting articles that make unfounded claims denying the existence of sexism and racism, both of which are often tackled in linguistics research, is creating an intellectually inclusive community. I think both of those actions constitute weaponizing his fame and status as an academic to drown out the voices of people who are actually doing good research.
This is important. The whole crux of the letter is that its authors don’t want Pinker to be held up as a good example of an LSA member because he doesn’t do the things the LSA says members should do. Regardless of your stance on “free speech,” that’s really not an egregious ask.
Who is harmed by the action?
I’m not sure how many media people are consulting Pinker in their articles because they saw his name on the LSA lists, but those people will ask someone else in the future. That’s it. Pinker will still be allowed to tweet as much as he wants, publish whatever books he wants, and do as many public appearances as he wants. He just won’t have this particular feather in his cap. For someone whose Twitter bio doesn’t even mention the word “linguistics,” it just doesn’t seem like that much to ask.
So, what’s the problem with King’s piece?
Well, like Pinker, King doesn’t seem to be overly concerned about accurate representations. Here are a few things he said about the letter, with specific refutations. Pulling together this many receipts is going to be dull and boring, but I’m fine with that. It’s what makes me such a fun person at parties. Here’s the opening line:
“So much for factual accuracy, sound reasoning, moral clarity, and transparency, or any other value that academics aim to uphold.”
Factual accuracy: if you look, the letter has many many hyperlinks to evidence that actually does demonstrate the intended point. To pretend that there isn’t factual accuracy in a letter that is replete with relevant sources both academic and journalistic is, to be clear, an unethical misrepresentation of the truth. What is it called when people do that? Oh! Lying.
Remember, the thesis of the letter is that Pinker’s actions contradict the LSA’s statement on racial equality. That’s where the burden of proof is.
Sound reasoning: If the thesis is that Pinker uses his platform to undermine good scholarship (a thing that is listed as an important part of being an LSA member), those six examples in the letter provide extremely solid evidence.
- He tweeted that cops don’t kill Black people disproportionately while linking to an article that says “African-Americans are being killed disproportionately and by a wide margin.” This is a misrepresentation of the article in service of an encouragement to ignore research that might show that racism is relevant to police shootings.
2. He tweeted that “[f]ocus on race distracts from solving problem,” another explicit claim that research about racism in police killings is not valuable.
3. On page 107 of his 2011 book, the Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker describes a series of examples meant to demonstrate that a “flood of violence from the 1960s through the 1980s” made regular people take steps to protect themselves from danger. In service of this claim, he represents murderer Bernhard Goetz as a “mild-mannered engineer” and calls his victims “muggers” (an extremely contested claim), neglecting to mention relevant information about the well-known racist beliefs that actually motivated him to kill some children for asking him for money. Pretending Goetz was thinking about violence and not “sp*cs and n****rs” (Goetz’s words) obfuscates patterns that other researchers have been trying to communicate. So yeah, this point ALSO serves the conclusion of the letter.
4. The UCSB murderer tweet I addressed above. By denying the existence of violence against women, he discourages his followers from believing the work of countless researchers trying to get to the bottom of misogynist violence. This horrifying ethical and logical failure was gorgeously dismantled by Dr. Maria Esipova in a piece cited in the letter. In service of its conclusion. As a logical and relevant piece of evidence. Oh my God, Daniel.
5. This one is maybe the dumbest tweet Pinker has ever twote (twitten?). I don’t know. There’s a lot of competition.
Here, in Dr. Esipova’s words, is essentially what this wet fart of a post boils down to: “Things are actually going great re racism, sexism, etc., because GRAPHS.” Even though those graphs are barely even tangentially related to whether or not things are going great.
Secondly, the linked article…. doesn’t talk about the graphs. They’re not in it. Read that again. Those graphs are not in that article.
Thirdly, the main point of Pinker’s tweet, that Lawrence Bobo is cautiously optimistic about race relations, is a grievous misrepresentation of what he said in the article. He said he is optimistic because people are talking about and protesting the HUGE AMOUNT of racism that exists! This is honestly impressive: while citing and linking Dean Bobo’s article, Pinker is directly contradicting its message. If that doesn’t serve the logical conclusion that Pinker does the opposite of the LSA’s mission to “actively work to promote equity and social justice in ways that benefit underrepresented scholars and communities of color” then like, what do you want, dude?
6. Pinker uses the phrase “urban crime” even though it isn’t in the articles he links, to further obfuscate the role of racism in the issues at hand.
Employing that phrase also runs counter to overwhelming linguistic evidence that suggests it’s a bad idea. Again, speaking over and working in opposition to fellow scholars. Wait, does that follow logically from the original claim that Pinker’s public speech contradicts the mission of the LSA? Sure does!
As the letter says, the reason someone would be removed from those LSA lists would be if they were bad LSA members. A bad LSA member is someone who doesn’t do the things the LSA says we should do. Pinker doesn’t do the things the LSA says we should do. Boom, logic.
Moral clarity: fortunately for me the letter doesn’t make any claims to a moral high ground. Its thesis is that Pinker doesn’t do what the LSA says members should do. That’s not a moral argument, so the letter-writers are not required to provide “moral clarity.” This is the problem. King and the other detractors frequently make use of strawman arguments: they claim that the letter is making all sorts of statements that it can’t substantiate, but if you go look at the letter you can see that its thesis has a very limited scope and therefore only has to prove a short list of things to be true.
Transparency: I don’t know what else you call all of those citations, all of which go where the letter-writers say they go.
What else did King’s “good news” article claim?
“The letter objected to six tweets he wrote over the years — tweets so politically radioactive that they should be piously disavowed by all liberal-minded linguists, the letter claims.”
Is it not hilarious that when Daniel King stuck a hyperlink on the word “letter,” the link goes not to the letter itself but to Jerry Coyne’s public tantrum about it? This is the guy who accused the letter writers of not being transparent? OOF.
King is claiming that the six tweets represent the entirety of the evidence against having Pinker’s name included on the two lists published by the LSA. Of course, that is disingenuous: to list every single thing Pinker has done that would merit this action would be overkill. They listed these six statements as examples of a pattern. You know, examples? The things you need to make an argument?
King also says the letter lists six tweets. It’s five tweets and a book. But okay. Mr. facts and honesty over here.
In this sentence, King is also suggesting that the letter writers’ issue with Pinker is that his politics are super duper garbage. I mean, they are, but that is not at all what the letter is about. As described above, each and every example, which is carefully cited and described, serves the claim that Pinker is not a good LSA member because he uses his enormous platform on Twitter and his cushy publishing deal to try to convince people of untrue things and misrepresents actual relevant research. It’s not about being a good “liberal” (which, incidentally, Daniel, that word does not mean what you think it means). It’s about being a good scholar.
“The letter’s signatories said his tweets were insufficiently respectful of their politics.”
Where, dude? In the paragraph explaining that while his politics are garbage, the reason we don’t want him in the LSA lists is that he’s consistently lied about and derided people presenting valid evidence? Yikes.
Hey, when someone really really famous behaves in a way that communicates, “do not get your information from those people, get it from me and my buddies,” I don’t care what their politics are. Neither do the letter‘s authors. We care that he’s pointing his audience away from the people who are trying to share useful facts. We care that the LSA says it’s important to not do that, while also promoting this person who is absolutely and irrefutably guilty of such.
“Imagine that. On Twitter. There’s a word for maneuvers like this: dishonesty.”
King accuses the letter writers of dishonesty. If you’ve stuck with me this long, you can probably see that it would be terribly redundant of me to explain why the letter writers actually did exercise honesty, or that King is guilty of the exact lack of transparency (see the complete lack of examples in his piece) and dishonesty (see the weird hyperlinking practices) he sees in them. Doctor, heal thyself.
[paragraph listing people who have written rebuttals to the letter]
Maybe you’ve read those rebuttals, maybe you haven’t. They are largely also guilty of the same kind of willful misunderstanding of the facts laid out in the letter. They also create a straw man of liberal moral outrage when the letter is in fact a well-reasoned and supported indictment of Pinker’s lack of professionalism and unethical science communication. It shouldn’t be surprising that a lot of very well-respected scholars who are entrenched in the academic establishment would want to rush to the defense of someone like Pinker, who is well-connected and famous. Pinker represents the right of high-status academics not to be questioned, which many of these people have a stake in protecting.
“The cancellation letter is misguided, with half-quotes, miscitation, self-contradiction, and apparently false signature.”
Again, the idea that it contains half-quotes, miscitation, or self-contradiction is just King hoping against hope that you won’t read the letter and its citations yourself. If you trust him to have done the work, why should you go slog through it? But he’s clearly demonstrated that you can’t trust him to have done it.
Now, the false signature thing was an issue. Someone whose name was on the letter said they hadn’t signed it. Since it is a simple letter to an academic organization from its own members, the letter’s authors did not think it would even appear on the radar of non-linguists. Once someone notified them that they hadn’t signed, they changed their method for procuring signatures and gave everyone on the letter a chance to take their name off if they wanted, which is way more than I can say for the Harper’s letter signed by Pinker, Chomsky, and McWhorter. Glass houses and all that.
“We all want to hold villains to account, and should, but we’ll cast anyone for the role, facts aside. Why stick to facts when you can gesture in the right direction? Why think critically when you can throw your lot in with the loudest and the nearest?”
This is what we in linguistics call “dialogic voicing.” He’s imagining this to be what the letter writers and signatories were thinking. He has also packed a whole lot of character assassination in just a couple of rhetorical questions.
He’s suggesting that Pinker was a convenient villain because linguists just really wanted one — I, at least, could have been happy not to have any villains in linguistics. I’d rather have only admirable people. Sadly, we didn’t get that.
He’s suggesting that the authors knowingly misrepresented Pinker to make him look bad. Again, look at the evidence compiled. It’s all there, and it all makes him look exactly as bad as he is.
He’s suggesting that the authors’ arguments are vague and not thought through. Again I direct you to the evidence.
He’s suggesting that the signatories joined a mob of the loudest voices. Sadly, the most amplified voices seem to be those of the very powerful people, in linguistics and outside of it, slinging mud at the mild and unassuming letter a group of linguists sent to their own organization.
“You could call it the “common cause” fallacy, or the “traveling companion” bias, the idea that if you appear adjacent to bad, you too are bad, you see. The virus is airborne.”
Assigning a fallacy to someone else’s argument is a great way to sound like you are really good at analyzing stuff. It calls up ideas of logic and philosophy, making your claims sound both intelligent and important. If it’s not based in reality, though, it’s a cheap shot designed to make the other person’s arguments look bad when you don’t have actual, specific grievances to lodge. Guess which one I think this is.
Also, like, not for nothing, but a virus metaphor? In these strange and troubling times? What the fuck?
“If this is what linguistic letter-writing amounts to today — dishonest on facts, closed to counterevidence, masochistically cannibalizing — all our work is still ahead. But this is Recharge, a space for good news. The good is clear: There are those of us, on the left of the petition writers, who see right through it.”
This is the conclusion of the piece. For such a short article, it repeats the same bogus claims of dishonesty and lack of transparency an awful lot of times. Perhaps to fill space as compensation for its lack of specific arguments.
But hooray that Recharge is a place for positivity! I feel so much lighter and happier now that I know there’s a group of linguists I can hate guilt-free. Yippee!
And as one final fuck-you to anything coherent or sensible, King sneaks in a tasty little tidbit of a hyperlink. It will take you to John Mc-Fucking-Whorter’s tweet, which says this:
That link goes back to Coyne’s blog post, which is at the very least a detailed rebuttal to the letter. Still a lot of strawman arguments and Pinker ass-kissing. A lot of people sent me this tweet as evidence that I am in fact a disgusting whiny jerk for having anything to do with the open letter to the LSA. Don’t you doubt for one single solitary second that I was at all graceful about the fact that McWhorter signed that vague extended whine of a letter in Harper’s Magazine. I was a complete asshole about it. Hey. If McWhorter can curse, then so can I!
What is the fucking point?
This giant abomination of a post was my attempt to understand why everyone is so excited to pile on to a few linguists (some students, some new professionals, and some well-respected professors and researchers) who felt that Pinker maybe wasn’t such a great representative of us and the things we’re researching. Why they decided to describe us to their not-unsubstantial audiences as censor-mongers and outrage-obsessed harpies (or — thanks for the killer band name, McWhorter — erudite demons at the gates). Why they continue to object to this request that, when you actually look at it, is a tiny fraction of what Pinker deserves.
All we want is for other, better linguists to be the ones who represent us to the world.
But sure. Take the side of the massively famous guy with the documented history of actually silencing people and the very powerful friends. That’s so cool.
