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.
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.