Dear Linguistic Society of America,  This is an open letter by members of the linguistics community calling for the removal of Dr. Steven Pinker from both our list of distinguished academic fellows and our list of media experts. https://docs.google.com/document/d/17ZqWl5grm_F5Kn_0OarY9Q2jlOnk200PvhM5e3isPvY/preview?pru=AAABcz91i0c*5AVC2Br6mvzu8yBuQZsdXw

https://twitter.com/jasonhickel?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

Lol. Dude was like, id rather not be in 1918 during the Spanish Flu--face foward to COVID. Lol

+1 for dunking on Klein ... plz keep it up. It repairs my soul.

An hour of association fallacies instead of reasoned argument. e.g. Pinker is wrong to defend James Damore’s Google report because... Epstein was a child rapist. That is the first thing mentioned in response to Pinker’s points. No reason to listen to any more of these.

Hits differently (and quite harder) in a pandy-ravaged world...

On horseshoe theory, I would say that yes, the horseshoe has largely been built out. What's really going on is that as the Far Right and Far Left go deeper and closer to each other, the more that the horseshoe will be turned into a ring. You will then have the Ideal Centre, the political version of a bridge, the Centre Left/Neoliberal, the Centre Right/Neoconservative, the Far Left/Communist, the Far Right/Fascist, and then the Inferior Centre, the political version of a tunnel.

I would have appreciated less focus on the guilt by association and Pinker's unsavoury actions and more addressing the actual claim. I've no doubt the people who are promulgating it, but what is the response do the empirical data they site? I'm ready to be convinced it's wrong, but not really getting it here. Even the discussion of how the international economic system being dominated by the US hegimon: it's true, but the narrative from Gates and Pinker is that the key outcomes are measurably getting better regardless.

unwarranted ranting.... that's it. more than 15 minutes to it.... not even q so a single verifiable data. Sure you guys believe in Conjectures. SP is infallible... or is he a intellectual demigod.... definitely not.. but your arguments are weak.

We're told the world is getting better all the time. In January, The New York Times' Nick Kristof explained "Why 2017 Was the Best Year in Human History." The same month, Harvard professor and Bill Gates' favorite optimist Steven Pinker lamented (in a special edition of Time magazine guest edited by - who else? - Bill Gates) the “bad habits of media... bring out the worst in human cognition”. By focusing so much on negative things, the theory goes, we are tricked into thinking things are getting worse when, in reality, it's actually the opposite. 

For the TEDtalk set, that the world is awesome and still improving is self-evidently true - just look at the data. But how true is this popular axiom? How accurate is the portrayal that the world is improving we so often seen in sexy, hockey stick graphs of upward growth and rapidly declining poverty? And how, exactly, are the powers that be "measuring" improvements in society?

On this episode, we take a look at the ideological project of telling us everything's going swimmingly, how those in power cook the books and spin data to make their case for maintaining the status quo, and how The Neoliberal Optimism Industry is, at its core, an anti-intellectual enterprise designed to lull us into complacency and political impotence.

Our guest is Dr. Jason Hickel.

Episode 58: The Neoliberal Optimism Industry

Citations Needed is a podcast about the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. It is hosted by Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson, and produced by Florence Barrau-Adams.

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