Steven Pinker is a black box who occasionally spits out ideas, opinions, and arguments for you to evaluate.

This is a very weird way to look at people.

Anyone can have an original idea, not just "genuises". I don't understand outsourcing your thinking, creativity, and your right to free association because some guy had a good idea once.

(And I don't think my dad, the inventor of toasters strudle, would approve of this)

I have simpler policies. If someone I'm listening to is annoying and wrong more often than not, then I stop fucking listening to them.

I'm not sure when people started to think that they had to go about life listening to stupid opinions of annoying fuck wads they disagree with. But you absolutely do not have to live life that way.

Steven Pinker is a black box who occasionally spits out ideas, opinions, and arguments for you to evaluate. If some of them are arguments you wouldn’t have come up with on your own, then he’s doing you a service. If 50% of them are false, then the best-case scenario is that they’re moronically, obviously false, so that you can reject them quickly and get on with your life.

Yes. And. The worst-case scenario is: the black box is creating arguments deliberately designed to make you believe false things. 100% of the arguments coming out of it are false - either containing explicit falsehoods, or presenting true facts in such a way as to draw a false conclusion. If you, personally, cannot reject one of its arguments is false, it's because you lack the knowledge rhetorical skill to see how it is false.

I'm sure you can think of individuals and groups whom this applies to.

(And there's the opposite issue. An argument that is correct, but that looks incorrect to you, because your understanding of the issue is limited or incorrect already.)

The way to avoid this is to assess the trustworthiness and credibility of the black box - in other words, how much respect to give it - before assessing its arguments. Because if your black box is producing biased and manipulative arguments, assessing those arguments on their own merits, and assuming you'll be able to spot any factual inaccuracies and illogical arguments, isn't objectivity. It's arrogance.

The problem mister Alexander here makes is to assume geniuses exist, or that original ideas are rare. They don't and they are not. Spend more than 15 minutes with any toddler and you'll easily reach those 100 new original ideas. Humans are new ideas machines, it's what we do. It is spontaneous, not extraneous, to us. To assume otherwise is very cynical and disingenuous. Every person has the capability to be a genius, because genius is just a social label granted to extremely narrow interpretations and projections of an individuals abilities in an extremely concrete set of skills or topic. For example, re-contextualize with a diagnosis of autism and now suddenly they are not a genius, they have an hyper-fixation.

Also, the premise that every idea, specially brand new, can be judged and ruled as good or bad in a vacuum, right out of the gate, is also very stupid. The category of genius is a very recent concoction, stemming from the halls of Victorian moral presumptions and the newly developed habit of nobility of worshiping the writings they didn't understand of people they had never met. This is what motivates the myth that genius whatever is always positive, in the popular mind. But, Goebbels was a genius at propaganda, everything that we do today in publishing is based on stuff he invented. That doesn't mean all his ideas were worth listening to, and were he alive and you followed him on Twitter (lets be honest, he would have a Twitter), that would shed a rather poor light on you.

Because, and this is the important part, humans are not a loose collection of isolated ideas. We are not modular, freely separable and reconfigurable beings. We are holistic, evolutive and integral. Sure, we might be different things to different people (privately) and audiences (publicly) at different points in time, but our own sense of identity and being is not divisible. Steven Pinker is perfectly capable of simultaneously being a liberal, atheist and intelligent linguist; a mediocre intrusionists psychologist who forgot how history works; and a stupid mysoginist and racist. All at the same time, and never stop being a single integral person. It doesn't require an imaginary score of good to bad takes ratio. That's a stupid premise. You don't keep a broken clock around in the off chance it might be right twice a day. Use a more holistic sense.

Remember, what's behind the user name is (still more often than not) a full person, not a black box (except if it is a bot, of course).

I understand and see why he didn't touched the moral aspect of his own argument. It is because any moral analysis completely dismantles his premises. Morality is the most important thing separating humans from animals and machines. Of course if someone is an evil POS it you should block and cancel their ass. It's Karl Popper all over again, if we don't rule out bad takes in the off chance there will be a good take, we end up with a Nazi bar.

pinker is a very bad guy and we should not be lionizing him for any reason