Update: Pinker has an interview out with the NYT itself. Given that this is the NYT, it is about as favorable a piece as he could obtain. Even with all the insinuation, it’s pretty glowing. And they note the letter is weird (and also that the society’s leadership declined to take action against him).
But the letter was striking for another reason: It took aim not at Professor Pinker’s scholarly work but at six of his tweets dating back to 2014, and at a two-word phrase he used in a 2011 book about a centuries-long decline in violence.
...The origin of the letter remains a mystery. Of 10 signers contacted by The Times, only one hinted that she knew the identity of the authors. Many of the linguists proved shy about talking, and since the letter first surfaced on Twitter on July 3, several prominent linguists have said their names had been included without their knowledge.
Several department chairs in linguistics and philosophy signed the letter, including Professor Barry Smith of the University at Buffalo and Professor Lisa Davidson of New York University. Professor Smith did not return calls and an email and Professor Davidson declined to comment when The Times reached out.
The linguists’ letter touched only lightly on questions that have proved storm-tossed for Professor Pinker in the past. In the debate over whether nature or nurture shapes human behavior, he has leaned toward nature, arguing that characteristics like psychological traits and intelligence are to some degree heritable.
...
Because this is a fight involving linguists, it features some expected elements: intense arguments about imprecise wording and sly intellectual put-downs.
That last point could explain the odd selection of charges and wasn’t something I thought too much about, but I would still expect a group of linguists to find juicier material to pore over than that.
Yeah, I saw that too. Definitely good for Pinker and more suspicious data about the letter.
A very jaded perspective could be that this is indeed a false flag but the whole end goal is just that Pinker wants to write a book about the subject and needed a way to insert himself into the conversation.
That’s possible. It hardly seems necessary though—he could write the book without that pretext, though I get it helps. There have been sort of partial cancellation attempts already and that will probably continue—like the Epstein stuff, which to me it seems he should defend more vigorously. I get he may just want that to go away, but it seems absurd and dangerous to imply that he couldn’t comment to a friend and co-worker about his judgment of the statute in question, just because it could be used to defend a bad person in court. That seems like a really important thing to preserve—are we supposed to allow the prosecutors to interpret the statute incorrectly to arrest people for things that are not supposed to be crimes, just to avoid the possibility that the correct interpretation would result in an acquittal? We’re talking about analyzing the plain meaning of a common statute, which is pretty fundamental to get right. It wasn’t like Pinker testified as an expert witness, not that I would have seen anything wrong with that in the slightest. He’s already controversial enough to write a book on the suppression of free academic speech for sure. I also assume he’d have done a better job with the letter if he wanted to make it a dramatic story to sell books. He seems to have just wanted an excuse to do interviews on the topic, maybe in collaboration with concerned employees at the NYT and elsewhere, given how positive the response has been.
Update: Pinker has an interview out with the NYT itself. Given that this is the NYT, it is about as favorable a piece as he could obtain. Even with all the insinuation, it’s pretty glowing. And they note the letter is weird (and also that the society’s leadership declined to take action against him).
That last point could explain the odd selection of charges and wasn’t something I thought too much about, but I would still expect a group of linguists to find juicier material to pore over than that.
Yeah, I saw that too. Definitely good for Pinker and more suspicious data about the letter.
A very jaded perspective could be that this is indeed a false flag but the whole end goal is just that Pinker wants to write a book about the subject and needed a way to insert himself into the conversation.
That’s possible. It hardly seems necessary though—he could write the book without that pretext, though I get it helps. There have been sort of partial cancellation attempts already and that will probably continue—like the Epstein stuff, which to me it seems he should defend more vigorously. I get he may just want that to go away, but it seems absurd and dangerous to imply that he couldn’t comment to a friend and co-worker about his judgment of the statute in question, just because it could be used to defend a bad person in court. That seems like a really important thing to preserve—are we supposed to allow the prosecutors to interpret the statute incorrectly to arrest people for things that are not supposed to be crimes, just to avoid the possibility that the correct interpretation would result in an acquittal? We’re talking about analyzing the plain meaning of a common statute, which is pretty fundamental to get right. It wasn’t like Pinker testified as an expert witness, not that I would have seen anything wrong with that in the slightest. He’s already controversial enough to write a book on the suppression of free academic speech for sure. I also assume he’d have done a better job with the letter if he wanted to make it a dramatic story to sell books. He seems to have just wanted an excuse to do interviews on the topic, maybe in collaboration with concerned employees at the NYT and elsewhere, given how positive the response has been.