What stands out to me is that this looks low-effort, but stuff like the footnote thing, and some of the rather subtle though simple argumentation, seem fundamentally incompatible with being low-effort. This is what I see as most significant that something is off. And if you try and take the letter at face value or as an effort to be taken at face value, you would expect to see evidence of motivation/effort, since someone has to care enough to bother. That’s also why I doubt the humiliation aspect—if you want to show someone you can enforce absurdity, it’s usually a lot showier with more effort involved, and it would be more clearly absurd. This is more dumb than audacious. It could be incompetence, but the footnote also seems fundamentally incompatible with that. It’s just not a natural kind of shoddy work—more of a generic placeholder.
It’s not particularly brilliant, so I don’t think the letter itself is more than a pretext or experiment, if it’s a false flag thing. It’s not done in the way someone like Pinker would do it if he was trying to sell books or make himself a martyr or be well-guarded against future accusations. I wasn’t sure how sharp Pinker was at first (in a strategically alert sense, not an academic one), or how conflict-averse. After researching this, I’ve concluded he is quite sharp and not afraid of conflict—so it’s too slapped together for it to have been a big move on his part. It would have to be a small component of a larger move.
I think it is a mistake to assume there is much risk if the plan fails, or that it would have to be particularly complicated. A lot of this stuff is normal PR behavior, as ChristianKI says below. There’s a lot of mischief and “inexplicable” stuff that goes on daily on the Internet, and people barely notice many of the crazier things, let alone something like this, which is pretty boring.
What stands out to me is that this looks low-effort, but stuff like the footnote thing, and some of the rather subtle though simple argumentation, seem fundamentally incompatible with being low-effort. This is what I see as most significant that something is off. And if you try and take the letter at face value or as an effort to be taken at face value, you would expect to see evidence of motivation/effort, since someone has to care enough to bother. That’s also why I doubt the humiliation aspect—if you want to show someone you can enforce absurdity, it’s usually a lot showier with more effort involved, and it would be more clearly absurd. This is more dumb than audacious. It could be incompetence, but the footnote also seems fundamentally incompatible with that. It’s just not a natural kind of shoddy work—more of a generic placeholder.
It’s not particularly brilliant, so I don’t think the letter itself is more than a pretext or experiment, if it’s a false flag thing. It’s not done in the way someone like Pinker would do it if he was trying to sell books or make himself a martyr or be well-guarded against future accusations. I wasn’t sure how sharp Pinker was at first (in a strategically alert sense, not an academic one), or how conflict-averse. After researching this, I’ve concluded he is quite sharp and not afraid of conflict—so it’s too slapped together for it to have been a big move on his part. It would have to be a small component of a larger move.
I think it is a mistake to assume there is much risk if the plan fails, or that it would have to be particularly complicated. A lot of this stuff is normal PR behavior, as ChristianKI says below. There’s a lot of mischief and “inexplicable” stuff that goes on daily on the Internet, and people barely notice many of the crazier things, let alone something like this, which is pretty boring.
Maybe a GPT-2/3 ‘open letter to cancel a prominent public intellectual’ that was accidentally shared/published?
It was before that took off, but I’m pretty positive Pinker or a friend of his wrote it up as a pretext for interviews on the topic.