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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I'm reattempting Duncan's Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons, an open access book.
I gave up on A Gentleman of Leisure about fifty pages in. It hadn't elicited so much as a chuckle.
Last year I bought my dad Steven Pinker's book When Everyone Knows that Everyone Knows..., about the concept of common knowledge. He enjoyed it and lent it to me. I wanted an easy read, so I started it on Tuesday. Richard Hanania's argument about the deficits of non-fiction books certainly applied here, and it did give the feel of being unnecessarily padded. In particular, even outside the chapter which was specifically about humour, there were an awful lot of references to sitcoms and jokes (I don't mean Pinker himself cracking jokes: I mean him reciting jokes told by other people to illustrate his points). I was also broadly familiar with most of the arguments he touched on. But for all that, it was absorbing enough that I'd finished it by Thursday evening.
Perhaps the only surprising part of the book came near the very end, in which, as part of a chapter about academic freedom more broadly, Pinker more or less outs himself as a HBD enjoyer. His argument, in effect, is that scientists should deliberately avoid investigating the question of whether there are differences in intelligence between the various ethnic groups, as it's simply something we don't need to know, and were it to be proven true, people would use that information to indulge their worst prejudices. I interpret this as a tacit admission that Pinker thinks that certain races are more intelligent than others, on average: if he didn't, why would he be advocating for intentionally burying our heads in the sand? This passage felt eerily familiar to me, and I realised that Scott (who wants to duel Pinker to the death) has already done the endorsing-HBD-without-technically-endorsing-HBD thing at least twice: once in Kolomogorov complicity and once in his review of Freddie deBoer's The Cult of Smart. (I'm curious if deBoer thinks scientists ought to investigate the question of whether races differ in average intelligence, and if not, why not.)
I received a gift, an adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird in comic book form. It occurred to me I haven't read the book itself since I was in secondary school, so this might be a fun way to reintroduce myself to it. A snack between meals before my copy of The Camp of the Saints arrives.
Freddie at least claims to believe that genetic racial differences don't exist and all disparities are because of historical disadvantages and social inequality. I don't know what his answer would be to "Why shouldn't we research it" but I assume he would assume no good could come of it. Maybe because like Pinker, he secretly knows what the results would be, or maybe because he assumes the research would be done in bad faith and produce untrustworthy results.
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