Thread by @ElonBachman

I expect Pinker's "Rationality" book will be terrific, but I'm also going to have fun pointing out the places where he shoe-horned his politics into his thesis

E.g. calling this "Fake news" is disingenuous when there was a *true* story where people were called "deplorables"

Here he offers a straw man of Right-wing prejudice

But in reality, people have extremely accurate stereotypes of which groups (including some immigrants) disproportionately commit crime

Here Pinker claims COVID panic was rational

But even if you underestimated spread by 100x (as I did), you could look at Chinese and Korean data in Feb 2020 and know that COVID was harmless except to the already moribund

Pinker is silent on hospitals having been empty

As I pointed out elsewhere, Pinker succumbs to his own base rate fallacy by dwelling disproportionately on A) fringe delusions, B) delusions on the Right

What about all the mainstream delusions of the Left?

I did a text search for "racism", and it looks like @sapinker has fallen for possibly the reigning delusion of our time: that a dozen killings of unarmed civilians in a country of 330 million is evidence of "systemic racism"

It's more or less the same theme throughout

On the same page he revels in this third tier piece of Republican buffoonery, he hurries past the entire trans hysteria by saying "You can get in a lot of trouble if you try to lay out necessary and sufficient conditions for "woman""

So the impression that Pinker gives is that, yes, the People of Science™️ have some fringe members who get carried away sometimes, but Trump (who he mentions constantly) represents a class of modern day Scopes Monkey plaintiffs

More disingenuous covering for the irrationality of his own team

The reason the Left yaps about AI "bias" is not, as Pinker claims, because neural nets are opaque

The reason is that neural nets confirm the prejudices we *already have* about gender and race

"Zounds! By what alchemy of silicon did this computer arrive at the bigoted notion that Asians are good credit risks?"

--Nobody ever

Neither here nor there, and an easy stats mistake to make, but Pinker is wrong to laugh at people who think they're more likely to be killed by a tornado than by asthma

92% of people don't have asthma, and most of those people are at *some* risk of a tornado death

Ok, so Pinker actually knows the stats on the non-existence of racism in policing

I guess he said the woke obeisances about "systemic racism" elsewhere in the book to avoid getting cancelled

Pinker has "Long TDS"

Also, COVID didn't cause poverty, lockdown did

Also, the one thing journos are NOT guilty of with regards to COVID is underselling the vax

At last Pinker pursues the dictums of rationality to their logical end, and concludes:

-Discrimination is evil, except if it's against males

The divide-by-zero-error of Wokeness leaves his circuits smoking, and he hastens on to another topic

This book is not *bad*

He does a good job of covering Bayes and cognitive psych, while steering clear of all the cog psych stuff that failed to replicate

But it's a distinctively sub-par production from a first rate mind

I thought Pinker had the TDS mostly out of his system after the intro chapters, but he goes on to make himself perfectly retarded on the subject of COVID because orange man bad:

If you're going to write a book mocking people for being irrational, you should not recite the myth that markets don't provide lighthouses, nor the myth that masks work to stop respiratory viruses

Mr. Rationality confidently declares that the Wuhan lab hypothesis is a "cockamamie conspiracy theory"

Glad that's cleared up!

Pinker sums up the book thus:

You are too stupid to draw your own conclusions, so outsource your thinking to academia and the press