Steven Pinker on the Troubling Way Students Get Social Status Today
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- čas přidán 9. 06. 2024
- Steven Pinker describes our evolution from a culture of dignity to a culture of victimhood and details the epidemic of self-censorship at Harvard, where professors at the highest levels of their fields are afraid to speak their minds. He says the consequences will be a collective delusion and distrust in institutions.
Full interview here: • Ep. 5 Steven Pinker on...
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I feel the Cookie monsters pain.
This bit is just one fantastic observation made by Pinker in the hour long video. Thanks for posting. I can't wait for Pinker's next book. Highly recommend Enlightenment Now.
It was really an honor to talk to him. He makes things simple but his ideas are always well thought out and often profound
I think he missed one of the biggest issues of today: everyone is treated like an expert regardless of their knowledge, skills, qualifications. The mainstream media regularly goes to non-experts for opinions on any topic of the day, and in fact seem totally unwilling or unable to qualify who is an expert on a topic. Everyone on social media is apparently an expert without even an attempt at offering an ounce of credibility.
Facts matter, but so does assembly and understanding of those facts. Cherry picking facts can lead to incorrect assessments. Lived experience may make you as much of an expert as a novice tennis player is at tennis.
Wait is that the hand puppet of the cookie monster in the background? My son loves it, and since we told him it's the cookie monster when he says there's a "monster" hiding in his room, he's much less afraid in the dark.
Steven Pinker is the perfect example of an enlightened centrist who considers politics like a chess game, one entirely without stakes that can be solved as a matter of diversion from worthier intellectual activities. Had he the barest notion of history, he would not be nearly so glib.
Perhaps if woke culture was viewed as a symptom of past culture we might gain some insight. Helicopter parenting is a form of trauma resulting from parents who experienced the opposite latchkey upbringing, a different form of trauma but often glorified as freedom, and different still from the trauma of the generation before that dealing with war and before that economic depression. Each new generation thinks they have it right until they realize how much their worldview is shaped by the missteps of the one before. The difference is the current generations want to talk about all of this, but they are young and still impulsive, but they are talking about real problems that need to be addressed.
I liked being a latchkey kid. I don't see anything traumatic about being able to do your own thing while still having discipline that provided boundaries that kept you from making improper use of the freedom you had.
Well-put, but a questionable premise. I think you are committing a kind of reverse presentism, suggesting we are prisoners of our past not an improvement on it. While there are undoubtedly emotional and ideological hangovers from past generations, the suggestion that young people are more vocal in articulating legitimate concerns arising from unresolved cultural traumas is dubious. The emotional distortions around all of the hot button issues obscure the very real facts of progress, and many of the issues du jour are deranged. Facts: far fewer blacks are killed than whites by police each year, and the actual numbers are quite low; based on lifetime work history, hours served, and occupations chosen, women do not earn less than men; anthropic influence on climate change is real, but by many metrics, including the rebound of the Great Barrier Reef, things are not at all dire or catastrophic; gay marriage is legal, and almost no one anywhere on the political spectrum gives a damn about someone's sexual orientation; America is, in fact, the most diverse and lease racist country in the world: broadly speaking, people do not object to living next door to or intermarriage of those with different ethnic backgrounds. Most importantly, gender self-ID is pure fabrication, a distorted artifact of the clinical / medical / cultural complex, starting with John Money and continuing through the lunatic theories of Marxist academics, and finally spread as a mind virus through social media. These are not real issues. Pinker's overarching concern for decades has been the lack of critical thinking, and the susceptibility to fallacies and cognitive distortions that make us susceptible to myside bias and vulnerable to sclerotic politics.
“P is for Pinker , that’s good enough for me… oh Pinker, Pinker, Pinker starts with P, yeah!”
Professor Pinker is very insightful about the dangers of suppressing differing points of view. He misses one reason for the move away from free speech and that is the rise and dominance of Neo-Marxism in colleges. Suppressing conservative points of view date back to the 1960's with Repressive Tolerance advocated by Herbert Marcuse. He hints at it in his points on being a victim.
Also, I am pleased to see Professor Pinker dressing like a professor and not a plumber.
@@acbulgin2 We are hardly still in the early 60's. There has been a sea-change in who controls most American universities since the 1990's.
Consensus, conschmensus
At what point in human history did people not self-censor? 🤔 At what point in history did people not face repercussions for saying things that other people didn't like? 🤔
To be fair universities have always had radical students, who spend more time protesting than actually learning. That's not a 2020s problem, students like that have always existed. They are still a minority, luckily.
How? They should be studying. If you have time to protest you're either failing or the classes you are taking are worthless.
@@ruthhorowitz7625 Most protests take place over an afternoon. A few days at most. This is such a dumb thing to suggest, no undergrad spends 100% of their waking time studying.
@@jamie6692 no, they also work. I've been a student, worked at a university, no one has time to protest unless they are doing a fluff worthless degree.
@@ruthhorowitz7625 I certainly agree. I'm doing computer science and business studies, a dual major. I have barely time to meet up with friends, let alone protesting
Students ... perhaps. Even professors sometimes, or maybe often.
The issue in the 2020s has been more the administrators who have, at a minimum, failed to do their jobs and protect the freedom of belief, speech, and expression of both students and faculty in exploring ideas, debating, hearing alternative views, and diversity of opinion.
At worst, we got administrators who were themselves radical or who capitulated to the "mob" of radical students and faculty by actively punishing, threatening, firing, or otherwise serving to silence students and faculty that disagreed with the radicals.
That is somewhat new in universities. The closest parallel I think are schools and periods of religious protectionism trying to silence "heresy", but that wasn't radicals forcing their ideas on people; it was the majority religious silencing the radicals. Perhaps similar elements during McCarthyism.
What is unique here is the tyranny of the radicals upon the majority: radical students + radical faculty + radical/capitulating administrators.
I can understand his point about victimhood on an individual level when individuals claim something to get brownie points. But i don't agree that it's what's happening on a collective front where i think whole groups really are the victims of generations of policies that have left them disadvantaged.
Ok. Now, who are these groups, and what is the evidence for your claim? You had better present a very strong case, since Pinker has exhaustively sharted an illustrated gains made, especially in the last century, in The Better Angels of Our Nature. Irony: progressives don't like progress.
Your opinion matters less than you think
PC speech makes it ok to assume the worst in another person’s intentions. Also it may seem like PC speech is left wing or supports democratic hierarchies but in fact is used as a tool of the right wing, dominance hierarchies, as a violence or the threat of violence against its perceived challenges to its power.
Your comment is a bit incoherent. Your first premise is that PC speech is inappropriately utilized to villainize others by assuming bad intentions. Ok. It's well-known that this is a tactic utilized by the Left. You then proceed to claim that it is actually a tactic employed by the Right to check challenges to its power, yet you didn't clarify the relationship between the two claims. Are you suggesting that people on the Right are weaponizing PC speech against the Left to hoist them with their own petard? Perhaps, and fair enough. However, your construction suggests that the Right, in fact, have most of the power, as if to say that political correctness, whatever its flaws in assuming the worst, is justified as a challenge to conservative authority or some such. This seems a bit simplistic and Manichean. Also, as George Carlin put it so well: political correctness is fascism pretending to be manners. The Left control the culture and every truth-seeking and sense-making institution within it has been corrupted by their ideological cant.
@@willmercury Well I was not making one argument I was making two. The first is not really an argument, just an unsupported opinion. By saying it is used by the right I am not saying it is not used by the left. Does dominance hierarchy dominate our culture more than democratic hierarchy? You bet your sweet bippy it does.
If you want to subscribe to an echo-chamber or support the Cookie Monster being squished in this video, please subscribe to the channel. Also here’s a link to the full interview: czcams.com/video/QtX1ZYlugsU/video.htmlsi=Qg4aqAQhQ8iZ0csn
Damn, I thought we had past the wort of the woke fever
Sadly, no. The downstream effects of this cultural derangement will be felt for generations.
@@willmercury I bet in 10 years or so all the woke fanatics will DENY that they were ever saying or doing the things they say and do
Does ....victimhood criticisms apply to a minority of Jewish students who feel "uncomfortable" about demonstrations asking for pease in Gaza ?
Hush, you're not supposed to apply right wing talking points about freedom of expression when the expression is misaligned with right wing agenda.
@@anttiasikainen3124 ..🧘..true ....But ..I don't care about labels... I care about what it is correct ..
And this is case - there is so much hypocrisy ..
By all means you can demonstrate for peace in Gaza, but you should do be able to do it without harassing your Jewish classmates.
@@CanadianMonarchist This is not true,,
If it happened it was the usual fringe element which acts in a non sensical way in every demonstration the last 400 years..
The vast majority did not act that way ,... it was an excuse .. to stop the demonstrations ..
@@CanadianMonarchist If that had happened it was from fringe elements .. the vast majority was peaceful.. respectful...
He should take his own advice
Why? What did Pinker do to you? Can you show me on the doll where he touched you?
@@portostrengthunion I think you’re confusing my relationship with Stephen Pinker with your own childhood
@@alexhoffmanjazz aww did you like your own comment? That's cute.
@@portostrengthunion no that was your mom. Don’t be jealous.
@@alexhoffmanjazz my mom's dead. That's so cool how you got her corpse to like your comment. It's good she did because no one else thought your comment was worth much.