What Pinker apparently has said, and is a popular opinion these days that I see all over the place, which some people see as extremely racist and others don't, is that police killings being proportional to arrests is evidence against bias in using deadly violence, given there is an interaction in the first place.
It seems like a complete non sequitur to me, is the problem. Even with strict framing where you don't look at/think about bias in the arrests. One can imagine a world where anywhere from 0% to 100% of killings were justified, but regardless having the exact same number of deaths. The casualty number logically tells you nothing about whether any of the actions were appropriate or necessary.
So rightly or wrongly, it makes sense to me if a lot of people think nobody could be this obtuse and assume bad faith. Especially when, you know, it's someone widely believed to be smart.
It seems like you've misunderstood the conversation about these killings. The mainstream of the discourse about police killings of black men is rooted in the notion that they're being killed because policing is a malevolent, explicitly racist institution whose racism manifests in a proclivity to kill black men at higher rates than white men. This is what a very large fraction of my affluent, nominally-educated social circle believes, and it's dominated the conversation about these protests. This isn't a new line; the original round of BLM protests were even more statistically illiterate on the point than the current ones.
I've always found it ludicrous for people to tar a statement as offensive on grounds of being a non sequitur and thus in bad faith. This relies on being confident that both you and the accused have an aligned and 100% accurate sense of the discourse, and that there's no way that any reasonable number of Pinker's more than half million followers could hold the belief he's addressing.
(Not that it matters, but since this is a pretty high-emotion subject, I'll just lay my cards on the table: As far as I can tell, the notion that police kill unarmed men _at all_ is abhorrent. I am and long have been a strident supporter of greater limits on the police (and carceral system), but fantasizing that police killings are racialized is just going to lead you to the same blind alley of pseudoscience and IATs that BLM is in. That doesn't mean that I think the racial skew is a non-problem: the higher arrest rate is largely mediated through a higher crime rate in the black community, a problem whose roots lie in a much larger racial justice problem that is similarly disserved by misinterpreting reality).
It appears you've also misunderstood my comment (or I've misunderstood yours). Your claim is that Pinker's comment was a non sequitur, as arrest-proportional killings don't convey information about whether the killing were necessary.
But in the context of a conversation that assumes that the population-relative skew of killings is driven by racism, it's not a non sequitur at all: it provides evidence against the ubiquitous, confident claim that the population skew is due to explicit racism by the police. It's still possible that a black men being arrested has a higher chance of being killed _relative to the necessity of doing so_, but nobody has even tried to make that case statistically.
If I've misunderstood your point, perhaps you could clarify, instead of giving a petulant, low-effort response.
It seems you are suggesting it's possible for killings to be driven by racism, but for the skew of killings not to be driven by racism.
It's a very fine distinction, which I am not interested in validating or invalidating, but I'm thinking it's not relevant to why Pinker's tweet was ill-received when he wrote: "Data: Police don't shoot blacks disproportionately." and "Problem: Not race...". He just wasn't that finely tuned.
> It seems you are suggesting it's possible for killings to be driven by racism, but for the skew of killings not to be driven by racism.
Well more precisely, I'm happy to accept that population-disproportionate killings of black men are due to racism, but understanding the facts is important to understanding how that racism manifests. Ie, if it matches the arrest rate and/or the violent crime rate, we're facing a much broader racial justice problem than simply throwing an IAT at every cop in the country. I don't understand why Pinker's tweet wouldn't be interpreted in that light.
I commented about the coming cancellation of Steven Pinker 6 days ago, as it has been developing for a little bit on social media and follows several other campaigns to censor and oppress other professors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23788095.
The charge of “scientific racism” leveled against Pinker is simply rhetorical warfare, waged using an emotionally charged term like “racism”. The pursuit of objective, quantitative, rational, scientific analysis is now under attack using this label. It is the mob burying their head in the sand, unwilling to yield when reality disagrees with their ideological stance. It is anti-science. But these days, even being objective and scientific is seen as offensive to the progressive mentality. And I mean this literally, as seen in the recent Smithsonian chart that they took down (https://www.newsweek.com/smithsonian-race-guidelines-rationa...).
I’m not sure how to fight back except to create direct consequences for those pursuing cancellation. Perhaps we need to shame and demand the firing of everyone who signs such letters, demanding censorship and cancellation of others.
The "Open Letter to the LSA" by what what you describe as "crazed and radicalized students at Harvard" asks:
> to remove Dr. Pinker from the LSA fellows list and the list of media experts falls within the purview of the LSA because of the goals that the LSA has set for itself ...
> We want to note here that we have no desire to judge Dr. Pinker’s actions in moral terms, or claim to know what his aims are. Nor do we seek to “cancel” Dr. Pinker, or to bar him from participating in the linguistics and LSA communities (though many of our signatories may well believe that doing so would be the right course of action).
If that's "cancel culture" - how do I tell the difference between "cancel culture" and any other sort of advocacy which results in removing someone from a couple of lists?
Because I've been trying hard to understand what "cancel culture" means, and the descriptions of it don't seem to make any sense.
There is some debate as to whether cancel culture is real and what its exact definition is. This article from RealClearPolitics discusses it and includes links to some opposing views as well: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/07/15/cancel...
To me, cancel culture is the notion of introducing political/ideological/personal stances into various spheres where it doesn’t belong (is not directly relevant) and using it to suppress certain views, punish those who harbor those views, exclude certain lines of research/debate from being pursued, and instill fear (of reprisal) in those who might otherwise explore those areas. It is not focused on correctness of views or resolution of conflicting conclusions, but rather blind censorship, suppression, and use of fear.
In this case, the LSA recently introduced a “racial justice” policy and now the signatories of this letter are claiming that inclusion of Pinker is not aligned to this new policy. What does racial justice have to do with the LSA’s core field that isn’t already included as part of the pursuit of truth? Very little. It is the injection of a political and ideological view into a scientific sphere. Adoption of such a policy enables the weaponization of the organization’s structure/laws against Pinker.
The specific incidents (statements made by Pinker) that are called out in the letter are issues that can be debated without such a policy in place. The correctness of some claim (like “there is no racial bias in police shooting”) is worthy of scrutiny independent of this campaign to cancel Pinker. After all, isn’t that the point of research - to develop ideas, gather facts, form arguments, and compare against other findings? Why isn’t that sufficient - shouldn’t the truth set us free? Researchers and professors are both allowed to be wrong and allowed to form opinions that disagree with the prevailing sentiment. Without that there is no environment for honest learning and expansion of societal knowledge. But cancel culture precludes such exploration by taking ideological opinions as fundamental factual presumptions. And there is no room for error in these situations - someone like Pinker can have a lifetime of achievement and correctness and then be judged on a couple tweets by a random selection of engineers, grad students, and assistant professors.
As for Pinker’s specific claims - it is fairly trivial to validate them, or at least agree that there is substantial grounds to hold those opinion. The letter itself makes no serious argument against those statements that they find so problematic. I don’t want to derail this post by analyzing each claim, but my point is that it is about ideology not facts.
In my wrestling with the topic, I've tried to understand why certain things are called "cancel culture" while others are not.
For example, is the opposition to Colin Kaepernick part of cancel culture?
To go to your definition, we have to ask if standing up for the national anthem in order to play a football game is a sphere where it doesn’t belong - which is clearly true. People play football games all the time without an anthem. So the anthem is there for some other purpose.
We can see that the ritual around the activity - standing up for the anthem - suppresses the views of those who think the flag is not worth that respect. And we have court cases which show that in other circumstances, not standing for the flag is protected free speech and protected religious speech.
And we see how adherence to the ritual is used to punish those who harbor those with other views, where the "mob" reaction in this case includes Trump's call to fire those who refuse to stand.
Yet, while Kaepernick's case seems to fit your definition, that isn't what people seem to mean by "cancel culture."
(I could go on with other cases, but my comment is already too long.)
You write that they say that Pinker's views are "not aligned to this new policy". But all they are calling for is to have his name removed from a couple of lists where the LSA privileges some LSA members over others. They are not calling for him to be removed from the LSA, but only not given special ranking. Pinker himself says he's not worried this will cancel him.
So what does "cancel" even mean here? Is any loss of even minor status equivalent to "cancel"? Because it reads like the people involved are snowflakes who can't stand the least bit of possible negative consequences to their speech, and I can't figure out why anyone outside the LSA would care.
You write: "What does racial justice have to do with the LSA’s core field that isn’t already included as part of the pursuit of truth? Very little."
Now, I know squat about the LSA but your argument comes across as a 19th century view of science. Science ethics classes often use the Tuskegee syphilis experiment as an example where the 'pursuit of truth' lead to racial injustice. If truth sets us free, how were the African-American men involved any more free as a result of the study? And Guatemala considers its sibling experiments there to be a crime against humanity. So no, I don't think simple "pursuit of truth" is the right framework to think about this topic.
Again, I know squat all about the LSA. But going right to "must defend the unhindered investigation of truth" - which has been proven time and again to be wrong for other fields of science - just doesn't seem like a good defense.
You write "Researchers and professors are both allowed to be wrong and allowed to form opinions that disagree with the prevailing sentiment." I looked at William A. Jacobson essay you linked to. Jacobson writes that he faces "no adverse employment action because of my academic freedom and job security".
Since he's free to 'form opinions that disagree with the prevailing sentiment' - how is he "cancelled"?
And I see that elsewhere - Stephen Hsu resigned from his administrative position at MSU but retains his tenured faculty position. Yet that's still called part of "cancel culture" even though he can use his job to form opinions that disagree with the prevailing sentiment.
It seems like tenured positions are a strong weapon against being cancelled, so why aren't the people who complain about cancel culture also pushing for more tenured positions, and stopping the exploitative adjunct teaching position where people with opposing viewpoints aren't "canceled" so much as "don't have their contract renewed for the next term"?
But it feels like many of those who complain about cancel culture also want to remove tenure in teaching positions and increase uncertainty in the ability to express ideas - which comes across like "cancel culture" is (re-using your phrase) "simply rhetorical warfare".
It seems like a complete non sequitur to me, is the problem. Even with strict framing where you don't look at/think about bias in the arrests. One can imagine a world where anywhere from 0% to 100% of killings were justified, but regardless having the exact same number of deaths. The casualty number logically tells you nothing about whether any of the actions were appropriate or necessary.
So rightly or wrongly, it makes sense to me if a lot of people think nobody could be this obtuse and assume bad faith. Especially when, you know, it's someone widely believed to be smart.