No one: Absolutely no one:John McWhorter: Joy is really just coded racism
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No one:
Absolutely no one:
John McWhorter: Joy is really just coded racism(How this clown is considered an expert on anything is just beyond me at this point)
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@tdverstynen This one lost my respect for him as well.
I loved loved his Great Courses on language - it really made me reevaluate my thoughts on language, what it does and why/how it is used in certain ways, especially to control and enforce class and power dynamics. I've listened to it a couple times, all 26 hours or so. I went through a John McWhorter period for a while, seeking out his stuff. Was super excited when he got this column.
That did not last long. He can not be more infuriating than about politics. He is an expert in his field and is entirely overconfident outside it. He's using language to enforce the class boundaries, rather than break them.
He is shaming people for being excited. He's calling out racism while ignoring that it's misogyny at play. People started to get excited over Hilary too, they just had to hide it. Pantsuit Nation, remember that? Now we don't have to hide it. With the adde excitement for a fresh face breaking new ground, for someone willing to fight.
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Yeah, this pattern of many academics in this heterodox space. Steve Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, and Nicholas Christakis are people who had great insights in a narrow domain who then embraced the image of a generalized genius as a brand. Incidentally they all share one thing in common. They all have the same literary agent named John Brockman. So, not to sound too like a conspiracy theorist, but my guess is that this type of pivot sells a lot of books because it fits with a cultural frame/stereotype that "elite" academics are general geniuses (instead of specialists).
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@tdverstynen @sewblue
@grimalkinaI’m optimistic it’s time for a rebrand. The genius narrative is so 1990s. The new era is about collective intelligence. Soon, marketing one’s self as a genius who is here to fix all the things will be regarded as misguided and foolish (hooray!).
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@NicoleCRust @sewblue @grimalkina
I am hopeful for that change too. I’m not sure the general genius has ever been true, but the stereotype is definitely harmful. So as those of us in the Ivory Tower, maybe it’s up to us to change the narrative
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@tdverstynen @sewblue @grimalkina
Imposing a strong filter (as I've been obsessing about this for over two years as I write my own book and I could go on and on ....)
My take is that we can and should applaud a brilliant high-level synthesis and explanation of the genius of an era. For example, just this morning I was on a zoom call with a director-of-a-fabulous-science-institute telling me about how Chaos by @jamesgleick changed his life, inspiring his career in complex systems. That book was first published in (checks notes) 1987! The fact that it inspired so many notable careers, and those folks are still talking about it decades later, is clear evidence that the book is important and matters.
What we shouldn't confuse ourselves about is the idea that an author is the source of all the ideas (as opposed to channeling the genius of a community). I have a very negative, visceral reaction to books that deliver a genius narrative as if the author ere the source, absent attribution of where it's actually coming from.
I get that it's a bit of cognitive dissonance - as scientists, it's to our benefit to hype the hype to get the papers published and grants funded. That's the thing we need to change, I suspect - the narrative!
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@NicoleCRust @sewblue @grimalkina @jamesgleick
I think Gleick’s Chaos inspired a whole generation of scientists (I am one of them too). Honestly he has been an inspiration for the book I am working on now.
Excited to read your book when it comes out. When will that be (roughly)?
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I think one of the great/beautiful challenges for us in thinking about valuing human achievement in our society is exactly on this -- how can we love, celebrate, elevate and marvel at amazing achievement but without calcifying into one way of seeing it, into overweighting those examples, into missing the layers of cumulative, collective intelligence, and into the aggregation of genius labels primarily to those with societal power. Big, big challenge
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@tdverstynen @sewblue @grimalkina @jamesgleick @computingnature @knutson_brain @jonny @neuralreckoning
Well ... since you asked and it also seems appropriate to launch with my Mastodon friends deep in a thread so let me add a few of those ...
But! Relevant to this thread - before you click, please know that I regard the book as full of an epistemic humility that isn't quite depicted by its summary (you know that authors sign off on but don't write titles and blurbs, right?). Note the "we" in the title. I mean that. The book is intended to channel the collective genius of our era.
Just posted:
Elusive Cures
A neuroscientist’s bold proposal for tackling one of the greatest challenges of our time—brain and mental illnesses
(press.princeton.edu)
(BTW: I'm really thrilled to hear you're working on a book, @tdverstynen).
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@tdverstynen @sewblue I think if you go back and reread The Language Instinct you will see a warning sign flashing which bugged me at the time: ridicule of alternative views on language.
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Honestly, that has been Pinker’s schtick for most of his book writing career. Even How The Brain Works was ridiculed because of the way it dismissed competing theories in order to select evidence to justify his theory. Fodor had to write a response book because Pinker’s selective use of evidence was so bad.
Incidentally, I had lunch with him earlier this year and saw the same thing. Pinker was going on his rant about liberal “cancel culture“ and I asked for an example of an academic who had been actually canceled by liberal backlash. He struggled to find examples, eventually settling on one of somebody who, when I looked them up later, had made some obscenely racist comments in her biology class that caused understandable backlash. But she still has her job. When asked for the converse example, liberal academics being canceled by right wing outrage, Pinker said he had never heard of any. Then the history professor sitting next to him rattled off a list of at least a half dozen names, by memory, of liberal professors who have lost their jobs or faced severe sanctions because their academic work spawned right wing outrage.
In the end, I just saw a small man who enjoyed riding aloft on his big reputation, but was relatively empty of meaningful content.
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@tdverstynen @sewblue yes - to my mind, there’s definitely an individual difference variable relating to how much a person is inclined to believe that others’ viewpoints might contain at least some useful information (let alone actually turn out to be right) that then gets amplified by all the adverse consequences of “fame”
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@tdverstynen @sewblue on Pinker’s books specifically I agree. And I always thought it was a real shame because they were great pop. science writing otherwise. The Language Instinct (to me) always seemed fantastic as a book explaining in an accessible way all kinds of arcane, technical, and esoteric aspects of research on language. It would have been so obviously even better had it not had that particular way of dealing with rival frameworks