Steven Pinker explains the cognitive biases we all suffer from and how they can short-circuit rational thinking and lead us into believing stupid things. Skip to 12:15 to bypass the preamble.
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Garbage psuedointellectual analysis.
Absolutely ridiculous to compare the Warren Commission to established scientific theories. Months before Kennedy’s assassination, Allen Dulles, the man who turned the CIA into an organization that specialized in assassinating world leaders and covering it up, was fired by JFK. After his death, Dulles was placed on Warren Commission, in charge of investigating the event. Aside from this blatant conflict of interest, the commission proceeded to make an absolute joke of the proceedings, with key evidence such as the bullet that killed him having a breach in the chain of custody. There are real causes to be suspicious of the official story, and it’s not really possible for anyone to conduct an independent investigation, basically the whole thing requires the assumption that Dulles is above suspicion.
Science does not do that. In science, you don’t have to trust any one individual, because experiments are meant to be replicated and subject to peer review. By placing these things on the same level, Pinker is lending credibility to the US government and intelligence community at the expense of science.
He then goes on to lend credence to ridiculous COVID conspiracy theories and minimizes far-right, pro-Trump conspiracy theories, including Alex Jones.
Then he starts talking about Russia, “You see that Russia has tsars, then the Soviet Union, then Putin, so there’s this historical continuity there,” which an absolutely insane thing to say, arguing that Russians are just innately prone to rejecting “Enlightenment values” and to “authoritarianism.” It’s an extremely trite and lazy analysis which simply doesn’t care about the vast historical differences between those three forms of government of the vastly different philosophical framework behind each. Has Stephen Pinker considered the possibility that the reason smart people believe stupid things is that overconfidence causes them to make broad sweeping judgements about fields outside their expertise without doing a thorough investigation?
Stopped watching as they start going into AI, not worth my time.
So who really killed Kennedy?
Likely Lee Harvey Oswald, but that doesn’t mean that he was acting alone. The fact that he was killed before he could testify could indicate a cover-up.
I believe that Dulles orchestrated the assassination. The CIA had been assassinating democratically elected leaders in every far corner of the globe, if they were willing to overthrow the government of Guatemala over some bananas, I find it hard to believe that they didn’t have a plan for what to do in the event that a US president went against their interests.
Dulles had both the means and motive to pull it off and cover it up afterwards, that doesn’t conclusively prove he did it, but it’s enough to establish reasonable suspicion.
So you genuinely believe the conspiracy theory that the CIA was behind the Kennedy assassination?
That’s got to be the OG of conspiracy theories.
I do. That something is a conspiracy theory does not make it false, conspiracies do happen. For a long time, it would’ve been a conspiracy theory to say that the CIA was behind the 1953 Iranian coup, for instance. They covered it up for decades before finally admitting to it. The person who first broke the Watergate story was a woman named Martha Mitchell, who was branded as crazy and delusional before it was revealed that she was right. The government’s illegal mass surveillance program was long dismissed as a conspiracy theory before Edward Snowden came forward with proof.
Placing these sorts of things on the same level as things that are scientifically proven to be false is harmful, both because it gives undue credibility to the government, and detracts from the credibility of science. There are scientific means of proving that the moon landing was real, that 9/11 was not faked, that the earth is not flat, that evolution happens, etc. But those things are categorically different from reasonable speculation about what intelligence agencies may be up to behind closed doors, in the absence of conclusive proof.
I can’t say I’m a big fan of Pinker. RationalWiki goes over the multiple reasons: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker
The biggest (non-personal) one though is that Evo Psych is garbage.
Oh my, what happened to rationalwiki? Reading that you wouldn’t have the first clue about who Pinker is or what contributions he’s made. It’s just a list of quote articles from critics of varying levels of note.
His work on linguistics and cognition is seminal. I would heartily recommend “the language instinct” and “rationality”.
On evo-pysch, lots of garbage gets published because the tabloids love “women enjoy shopping because science” stories, and the field itself suffers from charlatans that grift in it. The principle behind it, namely that animal behaviour is subject to evolutionary forces, however is of course true.
