Enlightenment? Or entitlement? A response to Steven Pinker from a panel of TED Fellows

Linguist and psychologist Steven Pinker’s talk at the end of TED2018 Session 1 argued enthusiastically that humanity has, as a whole, made remarkable progress toward more prosperity, peace and happiness — backing up his assertions with charts that appeared to agree with his optimistic trajectory. But is that the whole story? We convened a roundtable of TED Fellows — including scientists and journalists — to articulate why they are troubled by some of Pinker’s ideas, as presented in his talk on Tuesday night, his larger body of work and, in particular, his attitude toward identity politics in the scientific field. Below, an edited transcript of the conversation

I watched Steven Pinker’s talk, and I listened to it again afterwards. If I hadn’t had personal run-ins with him, I would’ve thought most of what he said was okay. He presented a nice, sanitized version of his thoughts. So I can see how so many people aren’t fully engaged and critical of his larger body of work. Pinker presents a Western perspective of science in which brown people don’t exist — as if indigenous ways of knowing and non-Western canonized ways of science don’t exist. In his talk, he doesn’t even give it a nod, so it’s a less-than-complete story. –– Danielle Lee, evolutionary biologist

I just find that in his talk and in his work, he never unpacks his assumptions underlying the ways we interact with data. By not unpacking those, most people are not understanding how, then, his lens frames the data that he chooses — or the stories or the interpretations that he gets out of that data. That’s a larger issue in the sciences. There’s this idea that the scientific method is purely objective, and replicable. But it always starts with a subjective lens. — Michele Koppes, glaciologist

I do a lot of work in East Africa. The majority of my research on whitefly-borne cassava disease is there. Regarding cherry-picking data, what I experience on the ground around famine and electricity is very different from the picture Pinker presents. His electricity and famine slides didn’t seem to include African countries, but Africa was included in some others. The data didn’t add up. — Laura Boykin, computational biologist

The first graph he showed, to prove that news is so pessimistic now, was a graph starting in 1945. Yet almost all his other graphs started much earlier — 1300, 1751, and so on. Yes, of course — I think we can agree that life is a little better now than it was in the Middle Ages. That’s not the point that people have been making about how society has progressed since 1945. He ignores the stagnation that has happened — not just in the US, but around the world — when it comes to inequality. The number of people in jail, the fact that schools are still segregated as much as they were 40 years ago, don’t really fit into his narrative.

His critics all accept that we probably live better lives than we did in 1820, but that is entirely not the point. He gives very wealthy people an excuse to be like, “Well, things are fine, so I don’t have to do anything.” And as for his hypothesis that intellectuals don’t like progress, it’s entirely untrue: intellectuals just like to think about things with a little more nuance. — Trevor Timm, investigative journalist + free speech advocate

As humans — even intellectual ones — whenever we see a graph with some lines, everybody’s like, “Ah, science!” And it’s just not science. But it looks like it, and so you believe it. This is the problem with scientific integrity: you posit something, and you make it seem “objective” — which really just means positive toward your frame of reference — and everything else be damned. I thought it was interesting how he constructs this notion of, if you disagree, it’s because you don’t understand. So if someone has a counterpoint, it implies they have less understanding, less knowledge, and less critical thought — ”enlightenment,” as he says — than everybody else. So he’s now attacked everyone, and made it harder for folks to disagree, and also painted a skewed image.  — Jedidah Isler, astrophysicist

If you are going to present graphs and say, “Ooh, science,” I think maybe we should dig a little deeper into that, and say, “Let’s really look at the data.” Anybody who’s quantitative — and we have experts in this room—will tell us that you can’t just look at an average and say, “Yeah, that’s the whole story!” You have to look at things like the spread, and what is their distribution? How does it change over time? — Shohini Ghose, physicist

I just want to take it a little bit away from the book and the lecture, and talk about the science march. For me, in college as a zoology major, Pinker was one of my heroes with his book How the Mind Works. But there were some events around the March for Science and inclusivity that should have kept him from being here in the first place.  — Prosanta Chakrabarty, evolutionary biologist

I did not participate in the March for Science and I never officially supported it, precisely because I was waiting to see how its leaders were going to handle inclusiveness. There were people — just regular scientists — who came out early, saying, “Don’t you dare make this about inclusiveness and identity politics.” They were emboldened by Pinker, who came on hard supporting that stance.

The debate evolved a new hashtag called #MarginSci, which specifically focused on people from marginalized groups talking about why we needed inclusiveness in the March for Science. The march flip-flopped on the issue: basic inclusion — not even necessarily ethnic inclusion, but making sure the march would be accessible to people who had mobility issues, and so on.

Pinker came out saying that he thought that diversity and inclusion were simply identity politics, and that they were a waste of time. He attacked individuals as not authentically scientists. He made it clear that he was anti-identity, anti-inclusiveness. A few months later, he doubled down and said he would spend his career ruining us professionally for the work the we did with diversity and inclusion, because he’d thought we tried to break March for Science up. We didn’t — loads of us just backed away and didn’t participate.

He’s technically a scientific hero saying publicly we were all ridiculous for wanting to make science inclusive, to fight for science and where it stands in policy, and fighting for individual scientists and funding. His stance is that “identity politics” (he uses this phrase as a pejorative) — in other words, those of us who acknowledge and are proud of our identities and want our whole selves included — distracts from science, that it’s not a part of the scientific context, and it’s the antithesis of objectivity and merit in the science process.  — DL

Pinker frames science as this beautiful, pure thing: if you allow any form of identity discussion into it, it’s not science. To him, science is pure: the person, the practitioner, should not be in that argument. Those who do are at war on science.

I’m a geographer-glaciologist, and my work says we should have an inclusive, diverse range of voices in glaciology, to address the fact that this field really so far has had white male Western voices only. I use the phrase “feminist glaciology,” and that’s been the thing that Pinker’s had a hard time with, and pushes back on it in his book and in articles he writes. What’s sexier than to point out a war on science, and then point to feminist glaciology? It sure sounds ridiculous when you frame it that way.

If you read his book, there is no actual argument with the work I do. But he grabbed an example of an academic article that I coauthored with Glacier Lab members, slapped it in his book, and said, “Here is a war on science.” When I spoke with him last night, he didn’t know who I was — it’s not my work, it’s not me. He just used it as another example of this war on science. Glaciology has a very long history of marginalizing or erasing any other voices: not just women’s voices — indigenous voices, all voices. But that doesn’t mean that those voices didn’t participate, they just tended to get dismissed. If we don’t look at that, not only in glaciology, but across science, what is it that we’re actually making today? — M Jackson, geographer + glaciologist

May I just add to that point? Regarding the idea of the impunity of science: I haven’t read the whole book, but of particular concern to me was acknowledgement of the history of statistics. Pinker made the point that eugenics was almost a side tangent — and that it wasn’t the aim of science, and science is good. Having worked quite a lot on this history, the origins of statistics are in eugenics. Pinker briefly mentioned Galton, but when Galton and Pearson developed statistical regression, it was to study “regression to mediocrity.” Pearson held a chair in eugenics. He said the scientific approach was to improve nations by making sure people came from the “better stocks” and to wage war against “inferior races.” It’s important to have that historical context when we’re talking about scientific ideas. Science is not always a pure, objective thing. All those arguments for eugenics were data-driven and statistical, but we’ve got to acknowledge where modern statistical ideas came from, and their uncomfortable background. — Adam Kucharski, infectious disease scientist

Context matters, and I don’t think that’s part of his worldview at all. I think that even for Pinker to acknowledge that there’s more than one way to think about science is to acknowledge that identity matters. There isn’t a positioning of himself within that greater discourse because he already views himself as an objective scientist. Therefore he doesn’t need to try and unpack these other ideas. If you even try to engage with him and have a conversation that involves context mattering, or identity mattering, you get pushed aside because none of that is “pure science.” — MJ

He gives us two options: either you’re a pessimist, or you’re part of the new enlightenment. He never gives us the scientific third option — which is that he could be wrong. As a scientist, I am always thinking, “I could be wrong.” You’re not a good scientist if you can’t admit that. — LB

That’s the ultimate form of privilege, when you don’t have to acknowledge what your positionality is, what your worldview is, and just assume and move forward. We all get to push back on that, but we’ve already been dealt with, really. We’re over here, we’re “pessimists.” — MJ

He takes that privilege even further. On one hand, he says it shouldn’t be contextual, but of course, he is absolutely framing his stance in the context of his take on a European Enlightenment that’s driven all science. He then cherry-picks and claims all that science as what’s good, objective science, but leaves out all the “science” that led to things like eugenics, the justification of slavery and so on. He uses his privilege, and leaves out parts of his own context. — SG

A lot of this stuff has already been named and studied. People have written about white normativity, and how whiteness is rendered invisible in a way that it is the norm: you never even have to talk about it. So when you’re talking about people, you’re talking about white people, right? And any other people get an adjective.

We are at a significant disadvantage in the sciences because we don’t have the language to call this out for what it is. The field has to know more about how people work, how politics work, how sociology works, in order to recognize when the data — or lack of data — itself imprints a powerful bias on the conclusions drawn. — JI

We’re also representing the sciences that he deems nonscience. There is a whole field in the social sciences of critical theory and critical studies that does exactly this, that looks at these power and privilege dynamics within the sciences. We’re doing this in the field of geography right now. But he pushes back on that, as though it’s irrelevant — he sees a hierarchy of purity in the sciences. The highest of the sciences are the physical and the chemical — physics, and then it trickles down from there. — MK

He doesn’t realize that he has this huge platform — a lot of it which he did earn — but that he was three steps up the ladder from everyone else when he started. He became a great scientist, but he had benefits that he believes everybody has access to: that science is a democracy available to everyone equally.

That’s why it’s so offensive when he picks on women, and people of color, or anyone else who he thinks has a level playing field. His not recognizing that science is not a level playing field is the biggest problem. That, and his stance that life is better for the Steven Pinkers of the world, so he thinks life is better for everyone. — TT

That part of his talk drove me bananas, the “happiness curve.” How do you define happiness? He never said explicitly, but you could tell he had a definition of happiness in his head that he thought was shared with everybody in his audience. But there was never any question of, what does that mean? How are you defining that? — MK

I think that’s dead-on. His big assumption is that human beings are data points, not complex interacting communities. — MJ

There’s one talk I heard in Vancouver years ago by the Dalai Lama. He said that we need to consider the morality of making people a statistic. And that’s what Pinker’s presentation was like — lumping the whole of humanity together, and lumping their suffering together. How ethical is it for us to do such a thing? That’s a question that will always resonate with me, whenever I see someone using statistics to average out human experience. Is that the moral system that we want? — MK

All knowledge that we’re creating is mediated through our human experience, and that’s an individual, or a community, or an identity—all human experience. And if we acknowledge that within science, I think that changes the fundamentals of science. I’m not arguing that gravity doesn’t exist, or the theory of evolution doesn’t exist. What I am saying is that the human participant within science matters, and acknowledging this is a great place to begin. — MJ

And the scientific method doesn’t happen in a vacuum. People are the ones who actually apply this made-up framework that we’ve decided to call the scientific method. What happens through that methodology is a product where the input is humans, and the output is interpreted by humans. — SG

A better approach than Pinker’s to understanding human progress and history would be to let people at the table talk who haven’t talked before. As Jedidah said, he’s not saying anything new. He represents the one demographic that has had the mic for thousands of days. It’s time to let other groups talk — particularly those who have been the most underrepresented, the most erased.

What would the soundscape be like, just hearing from people who have not been allowed to talk? We will discover folks who we didn’t even know existed. That’s also part of the lie — that certain groups don’t even exist, so they don’t have a voice, or they don’t participate in things. So the progress is: Let’s let other folks to the table, and stand back and listen. — DL

from TED Blog https://blog.ted.com/enlightenment-or-entitlement-a-response-to-steven-pinker-from-a-panel-of-ted-fellows/
via Sol Danmeri