I have been reading the intricate shell game that is Steven Pinker‘s The Blank Slate. Thought-provoking shell game, but shell game nonetheless, prone to rapid escalations from fish-in-barrel-shooting to global generalization in seven-league leaps of Randian proportion. I’ve kept reading it for one reason: its occasional aha-generating moments are really fun (and normally in the form of citations from other thinkers.) In that sense the book is a footnote to its bibliography.
Allow me to cite, however, the first citation that has made me put the book down to write a blog post. He cites a writer called J.C. Wakefield as follows:
A good definition of a disease or disorder is that it consists of suffering experienced by an individual because of a malfunction of a mechanism in the individual’s body.
Now, hold on. That is an immeasurably lousy definition of disease and disorder, on the scale of David Gelernter’s definition of vivid imagination. By this definition, brain death is not a disorder. Early-stage HIV infection is not a disease. They’re not causing suffering, right? At least not unless you expand suffering to something like “eventual diminution of lifespan”, or “elimination of the potential for experience of happiness”. But maybe his argument doesn’t rely on the suffering bit, or maybe it permits this sort of wide definition. He proceeds to explain why violence is not a disorder:
But as a writer for Science recently pointed out, “Unlike most diseases, it’s usually not the perpetrator who defines aggression as a problem; it’s the environment. Violent people may feel they are functioning normally, and some may even enjoy their occasional outbursts and resist treatment. (Emphasis added)
I’m not making a claim about the pathology of violence. That’s not the point. The point is that if you are willing to start with assumptions this flawed, where do your arguments lead? Apparently, if this book is testament, the effect is arguments such as Neural models with distributed intelligence function better than top-down models. Leftism is top-down and utopian. Conservatism, with its free economic agents pursuing their own ends, is distributed. Therefore, the validity of Conservatism is supported by artificial intelligence research. The only difference is that he takes ten pages to state this thesis.
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[...] Are some of his theories speculations correct? Maybe. It is almost certain that some things labelled “political correctness” at some times and in some places are inconsistent with some facts of evolutionary development. Well, duh. But it’s not binary, and it’s not monolithic. Why is he willing to make such a facile statement as “human nature is simply not politically correct”? Not quite sure — but one can be certain that this willingness to dichotomize and falsely generalize characterizes his entire approach to the subject matter. And I must note that Steven Pinker, who has different horses in the race, has quote-reasoned-unquote his way to opposite conclusions, such as that the validity of political conservatism over political liberalism is confirmed by the observation that artificial intelligence software with distributed rather than top-down organization function better I did not make that up). [...]