How Bad is That LSA Letter, Though?
Wherever I look these days, I see the claim that the letter to the LSA had no logic to it at all, that it was full of misconstrued or manipulated claims, and that the evidence in it didn’t make the case for its request.
So, I thought I’d dedicate one post just to dealing with the contents of that letter. It will contain some repetitive information if you’ve read my other piece (you know the one), but uh, with fewer swears, so the civilized among us can read it in comfort. Plus, at the end, I’ll engage with some of the criticisms people have made when declaring the letter a product of “the voices…of mobs with minds set on ritual purification.”
We still don’t know who the authors were, and that’s a good thing. The signatories have gotten a lot of hate over the last month, including relentless harassment and threats of professional blacklisting, so I can only imagine how much worse it would be for the people who actually wrote it.
Clearly, anonymity was the smart choice. Not knowing who they are, I will have to guess the motivations behind each section. But I’ll do my best.
What the letter asks for
Quite a few of the op-eds circulating gets this part wrong. Many of them just say the letter asks the LSA to strip Pinker of the honor of being a distinguished academic fellow. What it actually 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.”
So far, the LSA has granted the media experts request and has promised to create some process for deciding how to deal with the fellowship request.
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 (as opposed to reaching out to him just because he’s a famous smart guy), 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. He doesn’t collect any salary or prize money based on his status as a distinguished fellow, so I guess the loss there is that he’ll have to go delete it from his CV. A hassle, to be sure.
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.
Is he unprofessional?
In my other piece, I argue that his behavior toward Monica Morisson is good evidence that he has behaved extremely unprofessionally. That behavior is not described in the letter, for better or for worse. Instead, the letter argues that he’s unprofessional because “Dr. Pinker has a history of speaking over genuine grievances and downplaying injustices, frequently by misrepresenting facts, and at the exact moments when Black and Brown people are mobilizing against systemic racism and for crucial changes.”
This sentence posits that in order to behave professionally, you have to honor the grievances and injustices of those who experience them, and you have to represent the facts as honestly as possible. Let’s take those two requirements separately:
“speaking over genuine grievances and downplaying injustices”
This accusation requires two things to be true: this behavior must be unprofessional, and it must be something he’s done.
Is it unprofessional? If you don’t believe that speaking over grievances and downplaying injustices makes a public academic unprofessional, I don’t think I have the time or space to convince you here. I’ll just say that in his capacity as a public scholar, Pinker often remarks on social phenomena. For example, just yesterday he has tweeted about (among other things) self-censorship in universities, the Moralistic Fallacy, and a post suggesting that all the “serious talent” has left universities for the private sector. A person positioning himself as someone to listen to on psychological topics such as these also invites a responsibility to be cautious about how he represents issues that impact the mental well-being of the public.
Has he spoken over grievances and downplayed injustices? Later in this post, I will go through each of the pieces of evidence provided by the letter, and I will note when one of them constitutes this behavior.
“frequently misrepresenting facts”
Misrepresenting facts could be outright lying, or it could be displaying facts that are technically true but in a way that misleads the public. As above, when I go through the six bullet points of the letter, I’ll note when it’s a misrepresentation.
Do Pinker’s actions contradict the LSA’s Statement on Racial Justice?
The main claim of this letter was that Pinker has behaved in a way that contradicts this statement, released June 3, 2020. The claims above relate to that statement, but there is more to it that the letter doesn’t quote specifically, e.g., this part: “linguists must be active participants in creating an intellectually inclusive community.”
In the description of the six bullet points, I will demonstrate that he has posted articles that make unfounded claims denying the existence of sexism and racism, both of which are often tackled in linguistics research, a practice that directly contradicts the LSA statement’s requirement that members create an intellectually inclusive community. These 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. This is where the burden of proof lies, and arguments about any other aspect of Pinker’s behavior, while interesting, are not relevant.
The six points
If the thesis is that Pinker uses his platform to mislead the public and undermine good scholarship (a thing that is listed as an important part of being an LSA member), those six examples in the letter actually do provide solid evidence.
1. He tweeted that cops don’t kill Black people disproportionately (the exact quote from his own tweet is, “Police don’t shoot blacks disproportionately”).
In the article he links to, you will find the quote, “African-Americans are being killed disproportionately and by a wide margin.” I have seen multiple defenses of this tweet that focus on his claim that the problem isn’t race. That’s not the sentence in question here. The sentence, “Police don’t shoot blacks disproportionately” is exactly, precisely, word-for-word the opposite of the relevant sentence in the article. Any claim that this isn’t a misrepresentation is a total denial of facts. This serves the letter’s thesis by providing an example of a time Pinker misled the public. It also demonstrates that he’s willing to encourage people to ignore research that suggests racism is relevant to police shootings, which is another count of unprofessionalism.
Downplaying injustices: check
Misrepresenting facts: check
Undermining research: check
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.
By saying “police kill too many people, black & white,” Pinker is claiming again that police do not kill Black people disproportionately. While he didn’t say this directly (like he did in the last tweet), a reader can understand that statement as an implicit response to the idea that police kill too many Black people. Sort of like how saying “all lives matter” doesn’t seem that terrible a thing to say, unless you remember that it’s an implicit response to “Black lives matter.” If Pinker is supposed to be representing linguists, he needs to be careful about inviting implicatures like that. A cognitive scientist, or someone who works with psycholinguistics, will be fully aware of how conversational implicatures work, and should not be harnessing them to imply that police violence impacts Black and white people in comparable ways. As we know, that could not be further from the truth. By making that claim, he is again misrepresenting the truth.
Not only that, but the article he links to doesn’t actually ask the reader to stop focusing on race. So why is Pinker framing it that way? When you tweet a link to a story, it’s important to make sure everything you say in that tweet is a reasonable comment on that story. When Pinker says “focus on race distracts from solving problem,” he is implying that this claim is in the article. In fact, the article says this: “Police violence is tangled up with racism and systemic injustice. We desperately need to do more to address that,” then it goes on to explain how the procedures from plane crash evaluations could also be helpful in decreasing officer-involved injuries and death. Not instead of, but in addition to the extremely important factor of racism. Just like the previous tweet, Pinker’s statement cannot reasonably be understood to be supported by the linked article, even in the most charitable of interpretations.
Downplaying injustices: check
Misrepresenting facts: check
Undermining research: check
3. He made some odd choices when describing violence in his book.
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.
Even more troubling, Pinker continues to refer to the kids as muggers to this day, despite the established issues with that claim.
Downplaying injustices: check
Misrepresenting facts: check
Undermining research: check
4. He made some strange and misleading claims about the UCSB murders.
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. This is not a defensible claim by any logical standard.
Not only is Pinker’s claim factually incorrect, but he and the linked article misrepresent the claim he is attempting to refute. This is commonly referred to as a strawman argument. You pretend your opponent is claiming something simple and obviously false, then debate that instead of what they actually said. 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 not even claiming that most women who are murdered die of misogynist murder. They’re saying several recent murderers have been inspired by misogynist discourse, i.e., there’s a pattern. 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 a pattern that sometimes you catch people saying “good morning” when it’s the afternoon, and I called your statement statistically obtuse, it should be obvious that my logic was faulty from the start. On top of all of that, if you call an argument “statistically obtuse” and then link to an article, you’d think there would be some statistics in it. There aren’t, other than a couple of percentages describing how many men are killed annually, which has nothing to do with whether or not a pattern of hatred against women exists.
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 problem is, that source has a lot of very glaring issues. The author of the article is Heather Mac Donald. Mac Donald 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 laments 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 by Mac Donald as if they have something to say statistically.
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.
Downplaying injustices: check
Misrepresenting facts: check
Undermining research: check
5. He misrepresented the statements and research of a fellow academic in service of his claim that racism is declining.
This one is might be the most egregious of the six.
Here, in Dr. Esipova’s words, is essentially what this 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! Not that he’s optimistic about the decline in racism. Again, 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 I don’t know what is.
Downplaying injustices: check
Misrepresenting facts: check
Undermining research: check
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.
Pinker’s defenders have argued that it’s unfair to criticize him for using a dog whistle like “urban” here. The problem is that it’s not under debate anymore whether “urban” is a dog whistle. It has been very well documented at this point that it is. The thing about dog whistles is that they are by definition plausibly deniable, so once there is enough data to say with confidence that a phrase qualifies, use of it either demonstrates ignorance of that fact or intentionally veiled racism.
If Pinker didn’t know it was a dog whistle, then he is demonstrating that he’s unaware of the linguistics research on that topic. If he did know, then he’s being racist on purpose. Either way, he’s demonstrating that he is not qualified to represent linguists as a media contact, nor is he deserving of the title of “distinguished fellow” in an association representing linguists.
Downplaying injustices: check
Misrepresenting facts: check
Undermining research: check
What do these six bullet points tell us?
As the letter says, the reason someone ought to 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. That’s all there is to it.
When I first saw the letter, I needed to decide whether it made a reasonable request with good evidence. I vetted each of the pieces of evidence myself, separately from the claims of the authors. I didn’t want to add my name unless I was confident it was an appropriate ask with good support. Ultimately, whether or not it was originally clear based on the argumentation in the letter, each of these six examples is good evidence for the three claims that would necessitate Pinker’s removal from the lists. Each of them is an example of Pinker downplaying injustice, misrepresenting facts, and undermining research, which makes him unprofessional in that this behavior contradicts the LSA’s statement on how members should act.
Now that some time has passed, I’ve seen some quite passionate criticisms of the letter. I’d like to address some of the most common ones now.
Why dig through six years of tweets? Isn’t that cherry-picking and offense archaeology?
First, not all the tweets above are old. One is from 2015, one is from 2017, and three are from 2020. This is not “archaeology,” but a selection of examples across six years showing a continuing and longstanding pattern of twisting facts so he can trick the public. Look at the tweets about race and police violence: they appear in 2014, 2015, and 2020. Clearly, Pinker is still perpetuating these myths today.
Second, Pinker commits these same offenses every day, even after the letter’s publication. This isn’t just about those six tweets and that one passage from the book. Here is a tweet from two days ago, which contains a glaring misrepresentation of the facts:
The “campaign against Pinker,” i.e., the letter to the LSA, did not flop. Pinker has been declaring victory after a vague statement from the LSA shortly following the letter’s submission, but the LSA issued another statement soon after, clarifying that it had not rejected the letter at all; in fact, they were granting one of the two requests and would be creating a process to evaluate how the process for granting fellowships will work. Neither Pinker nor any of his defenders have acknowledged this fact, despite being alerted to it numerous times. In fact, they continue to tell the world that the LSA repudiated the letter.
As for the misleading statements about police violence, he has not stopped perpetuating those myths, either. In an interview just a few days ago, Pinker argued against defunding the police. He made several completely unfounded claims that contradict the research of experts in this area. This kind of behavior is indicative of the sort of wild claims way outside Pinker’s area of expertise that the letter condemns.
Finally, the idea that looking at his social media is petty or irrelevant is not a valid criticism at all. His public-facing scholarship is expressed through his social media, his website, and his blogs. The LSA considers social media to be a significant aspect of public scholarship. His behavior on Twitter is inarguably a relevant part of his unprofessionalism.
It’s not cherry-picking or offense archaeology to say that Pinker has been doing this for years, all the way up to today. That’s just establishing a pattern, one that he seems all too comfortable continuing.
Why did they seize on two words out of a whole book?
The example from Pinker’s book has been criticized as weak, as well. In an interview with Reason, Pinker said, “It was totally disingenuous to use that adjective as an insinuation that I thought that it was okay for a vigilante to shoot some muggers. It’s quite obvious from the context that I do not think that it was okay, but I was trying to give people a vignette of what it was like to live in American cities at the time.”
While I believe I have explained the logic behind objecting to the Bernie Goetz example in the book (no, it wasn’t just about the phrase “mild-mannered”), I think it’s important to look at the bigger picture.
The book The Better Angels of our Nature was so filled with inaccuracies and faulty logic that the history journal Historical Reflections was compelled to release a special issue devoted entirely to “critiquing the methodology and conclusions of Pinker’s best-selling pseudohistorical study.” Senior editor Linda E. Mitchell wrote that Pinker’s claims in the book are “not just problematic and controversial, they are patently tendentious.” So it’s not just a couple of words about Goetz. It’s the whole book. Goetz was just the example the letter’s authors chose, and I agree that there were better examples available. Just because I wish they had picked a different example to support their claim doesn’t mean their whole claim is wrong. That’s not how examples work.
How can we expel him for not meeting some undefined moral standard? Isn’t this supposed to be science?
Much has been made of the paragraph that describes some of Pinker’s moral indiscretions unrelated to the letter’s aim. Here is the paragraph in question:
While I do not know the intentions of the letter writer, it seems clear to me that this paragraph was devised in order to explain why it’s not relevant to the very specific argument of this letter to discuss Pinker’s troubling statements on race science, gender essentialism, rape, and Epstein. It is likely there to prevent criticism that they are glossing over that issue. I feel relatively confident in this explanation, in part because when I have presented it to Pinker’s defenders in conversation, they don’t appear to have a rebuttal for me (it tends to end the conversation, for some reason).
This paragraph also addresses potential concerns about Pinker’s academic publications, which while the argument could be made that his recent work suggests that he’s not a knowledgeable representative of the current state of linguistics, isn’t what the letter is setting out to prove. That’s why it’s in this paragraph, explicitly setting it aside, to address the objections of people who might want Pinker removed for that reason.
As for the moral issue, here’s what Coyne wrote in one of his two blog posts defending Pinker:
Coyne and others have capitalized on the perceived ambiguity of how the letter frames “morality.” Sure, accusing Pinker of behaving immorally could be considered shaky ground. Something like infidelity or not tipping waiters is largely considered immoral, but it would be hard to argue for his removal from the LSA media and fellowship lists on the basis of moral failings like those. His moral failings as they directly impact his job performance as a science communication celebrity, however, are certainly fair game. There is a widespread myth that science exists in a moral vacuum. Even if you took the most stringent objectivist, modernist approach to science (i.e., if you take for granted the presupposition that the scientific method always produces objectively true results), you would still have to concede that it is a scientist’s responsibility to be honest about the results of that science. Accusing Pinker of immorality in his reporting of the facts is not saying that his claims are immoral in and of themselves, but that his misrepresentation of them is.
Fake signatures
I have seen quite a few people arguing that we should discount the entire letter and all its signatories because some fake names (and names of people who never signed it) appeared briefly on the list.
It is unfortunate that someone decided to sign for another person. It is equally unfortunate that some trolls signed using joke names. This all happened while the authors were still collecting signatures, after Pinker tweeted that it looked like “a satire of woke outrage culture.” Based on the timing and the obviousness of the fakery, I can only surmise that this was the doing of trolls hoping to invalidate the letter by sabotage. If this is the case (I can’t say definitively that it is, obviously) it only further speaks to the kind of underhanded malfeasance Pinker’s fans are comfortable with, and it’s disturbing that he hasn’t asked them to avoid dishonest tactics like this after they became apparent. Fortunately, the letter writers discovered the issue quickly and changed their method of collecting signatures, as well as giving everyone whose name appeared a chance to take it off before they sent the letter to the LSA. Because they truly did do their due diligence in making sure the letter in its final form did not contain fake signatures, and because even with this vetting there are more than 630 signatures, it’s hard to see how this temporary issue could invalidate the letter.
These accusations also ring hollow considering that the critics do not seem to be concerned at all about the issues with signatures on the infamous Harper’s letter (which Pinker, McWhorter, and Chomsky all signed, and for which they have received much praise). Signatories were apparently not given the chance to remove their name once they discovered that they were not in good company, nor were they told who all the signatories were before the letter was published. This is a crucial step in publishing an open letter, and it is extremely unethical of Thomas Chatterton Williams (the letter’s author) to mislead the signatories this way. Furthermore, a number of people (including Glenn Greenwald) were not allowed to sign despite wanting to, and possibly most egregious of all, Kaitlyn Greenridge reported that her name was added without her permission. All of these transgressions were discovered after the letter was published, while the issues with the linguists’ letter were fixed before the letter’s authors sent it off to the LSA.
Final Thoughts
Over the last month, the signatories of the letter have been the target of significant ire. The letter has been torn to shreds by people claiming that it’s an attempted canceling, a witch hunt, that it’s an incomprehensible list of trumped-up charges and cherry-picked minutiae mangled by the least charitable possible interpretations. Pinker’s fans have flooded the signatories’ social media accounts with these claims.
I understand that there are a few pieces of the letter that don’t make the argument totally clear. But the argument in and of itself is evidence-based, logical, and fair. The requests it makes are limited and reasonable. The signatories are legitimate and invested parties.
It’s unfortunate that the people who have come to Pinker’s defense have committed the same crimes they accuse the letter of, picking out the weakest phrases and creating strawman arguments to attack with glee. Ignoring facts that support the letter’s claims. Expressing demonstrable excitement at the idea of torching the signatories’ career prospects. Calling us “woke” (pejoratively), calling us Stalinists and McCarthyists, and then turning around to accuse us of using ad hominem attacks.
I understand that the letter upset some people, but that doesn’t mean the letter was “factually flawed” or evidence-free, nor did it fail. And pretending it was is exactly the kind of truth-bending Pinker is accused of. So I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised.
