Psychologist and bestselling writer Steven Pinker is among the main defenders of educational freedom and liberal values of …
source
Psychologist and bestselling writer Steven Pinker is among the main defenders of educational freedom and liberal values of …
source
If he is such an advocate for free speech, then maybe he can explain what exactly was he doing on lolita express?
If Harvard was a boat it's members are stood so far to the left it would capsize! Always right lol.
The problem with this universities is liberalism.
Butchers, bakers, candlestick makers…tinkers, taylors, spies….Gill-spies that is. Fishy huh.
A first person chat bot is not a gimmick, just as a programming language is not just a gimmick. Ask the chatbot to write a program that can do things the chatbot can not do, run it and think again.
The problem that made it a gimmick is that it can only solve problems that you think it may possibly be able to solve. Because you never try the others.
Pinker does not go far enough. He is a very intelligent man who simply won"t call it what it is: Harvard and the other "elites" are guilty of hypocrisy and "intellectual liberal inbreeding"
There is no diversity of thought allowed, free speech is only an illusion and they act the same as Red China and Mao's little Red Book era.
Pinker should have the courage to admit it, instead of hedging his shots.
Why does Nick think he's so funny interrupting all the time.
I discovered a couple of years ago SP – or one of his staff – had blocked me on twitter, as a devotee of his work and reader of his books I was mystified. I worked out it must have been because some fairly tepid criticism I’d made of Israel, it was disappointing. There are too many in the US pretending that by opposing Israel’s wholesale slaughter of Palestinians that you are pro-Hamas. The tiny fringe of idiots are used as a shield to smear anyone with the “anti-semitistm”. It’s untrue and absurd.
I approve of camera nerds.
Academia has been allowed to self manage for a long time. They took it for granted as a right to do whatever they want. The state of Florida has been forced to take back that privilege. The onus of evidence should always be on academia(who receives funding and privilege from society)to prove to society that they are worthy of trust. Simple social contract.
Universities have gotten completely out of hand. They are bloated and ideologically off their rocker. Government involvement in student loans and no over checks have allowed them to become unreasonably priced and no longer places that are true places of learning.
This does not mean all departments but sadly these insane departments yell the loudest
If there was any evidence for such thing as 'Wagner's' law, then one might wonder where Pinker thinks the US stands – where commerce is fully linked to almost continuous global warfare (at least) since WW2. I'd presume that very few of his theories will survive the contact with reality.
I am astonished that Pinker is still making the old argument for how things got better. This is clearly observational bias. While Equality/lack of warfare etc are valid and valuable criteria it is obvious that is has been the strategy of the colonial powers (now called the 'Global north') to exteriorize all that to other countries of the Global South. I am sure once proper quantitation has been done for all of that, not much has changed globally -only its localization on this globe. On issues of warfare Pinker's thesis has been thoroughly debunked already by historians across many cultures. The latest cost that Pinker does not factor in is the energy contribution of all these 'improvements' onto the Earth's current climate catastrophe!
The middlemen and money lenders can also become corrupt. They are in the perfect position to exploit information inequality to extract rent.
Obviously dividing the political aspirations of n millions into "left" and "right" is so monumentally stupid it almost beggars belief. Talk about being captured by oligarchical propaganda
On violence, it is also violent to use money and influence to install a person into power, have them occupy an office, and for there to be no requirement that they eloquently defend their position / institutional power. This corruption will be particularly profound when this power is asserted at critical moments eg. When an extreme fringe of the Israeli government is fighting an illegal war to achieve an illegal endgame and those with power are there because they rode the historical wave of monied power of evangelical end of days Zionism
Pinker is right to put hope in sorting out individuals in the hope they'll create better institutions, but we are all trapped in historical nonsense that is more profound now than straight after the biggest blood bath in human history
Very convenient. Nobody knows how it came to be. Nobody bears any responsibility. No need to find out how it came to be.
What took you so long Mr Pinker? The rot must have been present for quite some time and you were there all the time.
Many admire Prof. Pinkerton for his radical ideas that are nothing new. I’m far less impressed. His position is largely filtered through his alumni donor cocktail parties. Universities today are largely money making scams that are preoccupied with profits and not making the US more competitive globally. The Professor prioritizes beating the drum for the dog and pony show status quo and not fulfilling the roll of educator.
How refreshing to listen to two grown ups talking rationally about academic issues.
Greed!
Harvard committed a form of institutional immolation when it first adopted affirmative action and similar measures that admitted students based on something other than merit. The most important fact of the matter is that Universities such as Harvard do not teach anything superior to any other university. What gave Harvard the stellar reputation was the quality not of the faculty but the quality of the students. At any institution of higher learning, the students pretty much teach themselves and lectures provide only guidance. When they admitted only the highest quality students based on merit, no matter what else may or may not be true about the school itself, future employers could bank on the fact that if a student graduated from Harvard they were high quality candidates for employment. This isn't true anymore and thus, Harvard is now becoming an expensive joke.
Things like this is why I regrettably stopped calling myself liberal or leftist, and I express my political association to be centrist. The same way how years ago I realized I had to stop calling myself a feminist, even though I've been explicitly interested and believing in gender equality for over 20 years. While arguably the true meaning of these concepts have not changed, as a pragmatic matter of daily life it became untenable to carry these labels, because they cause people to misjudge me and assume increasingly absurd things about me. The state of intellectuality today is, to a significant degree, a complete embarrassment…
The ruling class supports commerce and capitalism where the individual's motivation and mindset are about profiting off others not nuanced thinking. Identity politics, purity thinking and reactive behavior aids the right where class consciousness and nuanced debate and thinking on the other end of the right / left spectrum builds citizenship, democracy and community.
Mr Pinker goes well beyond my personal knowledge but I have see videos out here on the web from harvard people that promote eating sugar and do not eat fats. I lost all interest in this institution after reading this..
2:43 — No reason for a university to have a foreign policy sums up this institution core problem because this attitude extends across the entire spectrum.
VERY rewarding. Gillespie outstanding. Keeping it serious with some good humor
I attended two British Universities back in the 1970s/80s; and my fees were met by 'Major Award' grants from the Counties in which I lived. Then, at the end of the 1980s, into the 90s, grant funding for students was withdrawn; in favour of loans. This turned 'students' into 'customers': and the rot set in. Not only were the customers 'entitled' to a degree, like any other product; but standards were lowered to ENSURE there were few, if any, failures. Perhaps this is why I am gaining the impression that Steven Pinker tends to pussy-foot around the problem: why not ensure that students sign a Deed of Covenant with their university of choice; such that – if they partake in the curbing of freedom-of-speech – they are ejected from their course; with no refunds? What is wrong with discipline in these institutions?
Please see what ex president Gay tried to do to Harvard economist Roland Fryer. Her fascist efforts are likely how she ended up as president.
I'm hearing a complex person. I'm also seeing a unique set of people commenting here. I hope to read some of the writers PInker mentioned. Thanks. Difficult topic, but handled fairly well.
First, check ALL PhD professors at Harvard to screen them for plagiarism
Combining an ignorance of political and ethical values with the dim witted notion that a piece of paper entitles them to a six figure income😊
If the biggest ever donation to Harvard was from the Chinese communist Party, how could anyone send their children there?
And your departments are “cozy” with their donors, e.g. the Chinese Communist Party, which killed 30 million + Chinese people.
And the CCP has been implementing a “destroy America from within” policy for the past 30-40 years.
Harvard has morphed into Clown School.
While i find reading his books to be painful to read, he does have the old school pragmatic and fact driven approach.
Harvard has been a Nazi safe house for year's
Hans Rosling showed that academia is more bigotted than uneducated
and also his work with Gapminder that can show multidimensional funktionality over time
As for progress, it is a problematic term.
Steven Pinker is your typical CIA or Mossad promoted public intellectual – pro Israel, pro torture and a friend of Jeffrey Epstein. There are lots of these types at Harvard.
The field of psychology is actually VERY recent amd it curremrly is devloping at a mpr erapis momentum that ever before. When I taught hostory of pyschology classes and students would poke fun at Freud and Jung I wpuld remnind them of the prior state 50/ 100 years before them….I also po7mted out that Bedlam and other asylum systems cruel by todays standards were a vast improvement over burning the insane as witches….the word sophomoric exists for a very good reason…
If DEI is not working, try the reverse maybe – HIRING ON MERIT
Time to do it. HARVARD MUST get rid DEI and the Diversity Hires. The Road back, is through Meritocracy, not doling out toxic minority privileges
Why is one section of this video entitled "Why do progressives hate progress?" That section at 47:07 discusses Pinker's art installation.
Every POISON Ivy league "Indoctrination Center" — is nothing but a SOCIALIST CESSPOOL !
im sure a frequent epstein associate has a completely reasonable take on where the corruption in an institute of higher learning comes from