Pinker is wrong: We should "go there"

In his new book, Steven Pinker steel-mans the case for not discussing race and IQ. He isn't persuasive.

Written by Bo Winegard.

Few topics inspire bad arguments as reliably as race differences in intelligence. So often have I responded to them that I have plausibly been accused of obsession. But as long as the bad arguments persist, someone must respond. Consider it a public service.

The latest comes from Steven Pinker’s new book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows… It deserves attention precisely because it comes from Pinker, a celebrated academic and an outspoken defender of free speech and open inquiry. This is not some indignant progressive who made a career of castigating “racist pseudoscience”, but a rational centrist who has long argued against the left’s denial of human nature.

Pinker announces that he is presenting “the best case I can think of for limiting intellectual expression,” so we shouldn’t necessarily take the ensuing argument as his settled view. Even so, at least one fellow skeptic, Michael Shermer, said on his podcast that he was “pretty convinced by the argument.” Whether Pinker agrees with it himself, it evidently persuaded at least one other person and thus deserves scrutiny.

Pinker concedes at the outset that he “cannot muster an argument for censorship or punishment.” What he can do, however, is “envision a case for a different policy: don’t go there.”