User talk:Stevenpinker

Hello, Stevenpinker, and welcome to Wikipedia. Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you are stuck, and looking for help, just type {{helpme}} and your question here on your user talk page, and someone will show up shortly to answer. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! If you have any questions, see the help pages or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome!---Technopat (talk) 16:30, 10 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Greetings[edit]

Dear Professor Pinker, I just wanted to thank you for your recent edit to the article about yourself. I think the removal of that sentence was entirely reasonable, and I would have removed it myself if I had noticed it. But still I just wanted to note that some editors are very quick to take offense when celebrities edit their own biographies, especially when adding positive or removing negative material. Generally it is a good idea to start out by proposing removing the material on the discussion page. I would be personally interested in knowing what you think about the biography in general, as I have been somewhat involved in writing it, and have asked myself if it were to your liking (especially since I do tend to disagree with many of your views, and I have actively tried to avoid that bias showing in the article (I didnt add the sentence you removed)). If you have any suggestions for additional material or any comments on your general impression of the article please let me know. All the best, ·maunus · snunɐɯ· 20:15, 24 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Dear Maunus,

Thank you for your note. Please forgive me if this is not the proper way to reply to your kind note. Can you tell me the proper way to reply? It is not :obvious to this Wikipedia novice.

Best,

Steve Pinker

You are doing it right. Usually we use a colon to indent posts that respond to another post (I have done it in your post above), you can also use three tilde signs to give your post a signature and timestamp.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 20:55, 24 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, Maunus. Of course I agree with the wariness around letting people edit their own Wikipedia pages, and I have almost always resisted the temptation. In this case it seemed valid on quality grounds alone: a snide offhand comment after a talk does not seem worthy in an encyclopedia entry.

I appreciate the improved quality of the page, which now includes substantive scientific material instead of just the kinds of superficial controversies that attract the attention of the media. I will soon go over it more carefully, again being mindful of the need for Wikipedia pages to be objective.

Thanks, Steve.Stevenpinker (talk) 22:57, 24 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, a couple of years ago it was mainly gossip in the article, and I tried to make sure it included your actual work as well. If there is anything you think is misunderstood or misrepresented it would be great if you would point it out on the discussion page or at my discussion page User talk:Maunus. I am very happy that you are reaching out, and any questions or concerns you might have about wikipedia I will be happy to respond to. ·maunus · snunɐɯ· 23:12, 24 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Incidentally, some editors have argued on the discussion page that you espouse what they term "Human Biodiversity" views, which is a way of saying that you believe in a modernized genetically based conceptualization of biological race. And also that you have spoken favorable on Bell Curve type arguments regarding the relation between intelligence and ethnicity/ancestry. These statements have mostly been based on interpretations of minor statements of yours by third party bloggers such as Steve Sailer - so maybe it would make sense for you to clarify on the talk page whether that is a reasonable way to understand your comments on that controversial topic.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 23:19, 24 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

No, I have never espoused the position that there are genetic differences in psychological traits among races. In one magazine article (in The New Republic) I discussed one such hypothesis (Cochran & Harpending's theory of the intelligence Ashkenazi Jews) and in a blog post on Edge I discussed the scientific and ethical issues raised by such research, but I have never argued for or endorsed such theories.Stevenpinker (talk) 13:52, 25 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, thans that is a good clear answer, that should set the record straight at the article. ·maunus · snunɐɯ· 15:22, 25 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Dear Maunas,

Thanks for the invitation to comment on the accuracy of my page. Below are my comments. Let me know if you would like me to make the changes, though I imagine it's better protocol for someone else to make them.

Overall, the quality of the page is excellent, with good, neutral coverage of substantive content. Even the parts I don't like I have to admit are fair! I'm restricting my suggestions to factual accuracy, avoiding the temptation of positive spin-doctoring or PR.

pgh 1: I am a former Harvard College Professor, not a current one -- this appointment lasts for five years (in my case, 2008-2013.

pgh 2: "...the psychology of innuendo, and euphemism" can be reworded as "the psychology of cooperation and communication, including euphemism, innuendo, emotional expression, and common knowledge." This reflects the new turn in my research program, as evidenced in my last two major empirical publications: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25111301 and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Reed%2C+L.%2C+I.%2C+deScioli%2C+P.+%26+Pinker%2C+S.+(2014)+The+commitment+function+of+angry+facial+expressions.+Psychological+Science%2C+25%2C+1511-1517.

pgh 3: "Five of these ... describe aspects of the field of psycholinguistics." This is not really true of How the Mind Works or The Blank Slate. If you changed "psycholinguistics" to "cognitive science" it would include How the Mind Works. The Blank Slate is somewhat different: It examines the concept of human nature, its moral, emotional, and political implications, and the widespread tendency among modern intellectuals to deny that it exists.

pgh 3: The Sense of Style is not just a diagnosis of why so much writing is hard to understand, but a style manual with positive advice on how to improve it. Perhaps change to "offers a scientific and psychologically based argument on why so much writing is difficult for readers to understand, and a set of guidelines on how to improve it."

Biography, 1st pgh: My brother's name is Robert. My sister is also the author of The Village Effect. http://www.susanpinker.com/the-village-effect/ . Danielle Blau has a Web page here: http://harvardreview.fas.harvard.edu/?q=authors/danielle-blau

Penultimate pgh in Bio: The "primitive tribal stirring" quote is a bit misleading because it was immediately followed in the Times article by a "But..." and then "I found it just as thrilling to zoom outward in the diagrams of my genetic lineage and see my place in a family tree that embraces all of humanity."

Last pgh in Biography. I don't know what this means:"He sees atheism in the scientific community as more of a 'self-campaign'", and the following sentence seems like a non sequitur coming after it. It may make more sense to say, "He sees theism and atheism as competing empirical hypotheses, and states that ..."

Research and Theory, 3rd pgh. "He presented evidence against connectionism..." sentence: Change "where a child would have to learn all forms of all words and would simply retrieve each needed form from memory" (not a fair characterization of the other side in this debate) to "where a child only learns associations between patterns of sound in the input and the output, without combining morphemes"

Bullet points: I listed these points not just as "defensible conclusions" but as "defensible conclusions that may have political and social implication.

"The sexes are not identical.." discussion is confusing, because the points are out of order. Better to write "The sexes are not statistically identical; their interests and talents form two overlapping distributions."

Next bullet point: "Even in a perfectly fair economic system..."

Popularization section, Words and Rules pgh. The summary of Yang's review doesn't make much sense to me, and I wonder if it wouldn't make more sense just to mention and link to the review, noting that it was critical and from a Chomskyan viewpoint.

The Better Angels of Our Nature" section, Item #3. Not "allowing the proletariat to question conventional wisdom" but something more like "allowing ideas to spread and more people to question conventional wisdom." (I did not mention "the proletariat" and doubt that they were influential in these changes.

Item #4 is incoherent, ungrammatical, and factually wrong. This should be changed to something like "The 70-year period following World War 2 in which great powers and developed states stopped waging war against each other."

"Public debate" section, pgh. 2. An additional and more complete citation to my defense of Summers is here: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/sex-ed . Also, the debate was not run by Edge.org but by Harvard's Mind, Brain & Behavior Initiative; Edge just ran a transcript.

last pgh in Public Debate section is a non-sequitur (the question was about epigenetic changes, the answer about genetic changes). Better would be, "Pinker said it there was no reason to believe the decline was caused by genetic changes, since many examples happened too rapidly to be the result of natural selection, though that did not mean they were a result of epigenetic changes in the technical biological sense; they are the result of changes in social institutions and norms as interpreted by the emotional and cognitive faculties of the brain."

Awards and Distinctions. I have also received honorary doctorates from Mt. Allison University and Albion College. I'm also an elected fellow of the AAAS, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, APA, APS, LSA, AAPSS, and Cognitive Science Society. I've won the APA's William James Book Prize three times (for The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and The Blank Slate), the APA's Eleanor Maccoby Book Prize (for The Blank Slate), the Cundill Recognition of Excellence Prize in History (for The Better Angels of Our Nature), and the International Award from the Plain English Campaign (for The Sense of Style).

Bibliography: Visual Cognition, Connections and Symbols, and Lexical and Conceptual Semantics were all edited, not authored, by me

Bibliogrpahy: Hotheads was a bit of marketing ephemera and should be omitted.

Bibliography: "Selective compilation of articles..." is obsolete and should be replaced by "Compilation of Articles and Other Works, hosted at Harvard faculty pages", linking to http://stevenpinker.com/publications

Articles and essays. The list is arbitrary and obsolete. I'd omit the Ullman et al.; Pinker (2003); Jackendoff & Pinker (it's a reply to a reply of our article, rather than the actual article itself), and add these:

Pinker, S. (1979). Formal models of language learning. Cognition, 7, 217-283. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0010027779900015

Tarr, M. J. & Pinker, S. (1989) Mental rotation and orientation-dependence in shape recognition. Cognitive Psychology, 21, 233-282.http://jemebius.home.xs4all.nl/Papers/Tarr-Pinker-1989.pdf

Pinker, S. & Ullman, M. (2002) The past and future of the past tense. Trends in Cognitive Science, 6, 456-463. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12457895

Pinker, S. (2004) Why nature and nurture won’t go away. Daedalus, 133, Fall, 5-17. http://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/nature_nurture.pdf

Pinker, S. & Jackendoff, R. (2005) What’s special about the human language faculty? Cognition, 95, 201-236. http://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/2005_03_pinker_jackendoff.pdf

Pinker, S., Nowak, M., A. & Lee, J. J. (2008). The logic of indirect speech. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA, 105(3), 833-838. http://www.pnas.org/content/105/3/833.full.pdf

Sahin, N. T., Pinker, S., Cash, S. S., Schomer, D., & Halgren, E. (2009) Sequential processing of lexical, grammatical, and articulatory information within Broca’s area. Science, 326, 445-449. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19833971

Pinker, S. (2010) The cognitive niche: Coevolution of intelligence, sociality, and language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA, 107, 8893-8999. http://www.pnas.org/content/107/Supplement_2/8993.full.pdf

Thomas, K. A., DeScioli, P., Haque, O. S., & Pinker, S. (2014) The psychology of coordination and common knowledge. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 107, 657-676. http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2014-33187-001/

Pinker, S. (2009) My genome, myself. New York Times Sunday Magazine, Jan. 11. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/magazine/11Genome-t.html?pagewanted=all

Pinker, S. (2012) False fronts in the Language Wars. Slate, May 31, 2012. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_good_word/2012/05/steven_pinker_on_the_false_fronts_in_the_language_wars_.html

Pinker, S. & Mack, A. (2014) The world is not falling apart. Slate, Dec. 23. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/12/the_world_is_not_falling_apart_the_trend_lines_reveal_an_increasingly_peaceful.html

Pinker, S. (2014) Why academics stink at writing. The Chronicle Review, Sept. 26. :http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Academics-Writing-Stinks/148989/

Stevenpinker (talk)

Dear Dr. Pinker, thank you very much for this thorough review. I cannot promise that all of your suggested changes will be made, since they will require me to find support for the changes in published sources, but most of them look immediately actionable in terms of added fairness and accuracy. All the best.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 20:23, 1 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Many thanks, Maunus. If there's anything I can do to track down sources or otherwise make it easier, don't hesitate to be in touch. Stevenpinker (talk)