In an open letter, members of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) have demanded the writer's removal Steven Pinker, an experimental psychologist at Harvard, on the list of distinguished scholars and media experts.
They argue that Pinker's statements would encourage racism and sexism, and that they are, therefore, unworthy and dangerous for society.
The tweets
The cancel culture (from the original English cancel culture) designates the widespread phenomenon of withdrawing moral, financial, digital and social support from people or media entities considered unacceptable, generally as a consequence of certain comments or actions. Lisa Nakamura, from the University of Michigan, describe this culture as “an agreement not to amplify, advertise, or give money,” and compares it to the attention economy, concluding that “when you deprive someone of your attention, you deprive them of their livelihood.”
One of the most striking examples was that suffered by the Yale psychology professor Nicholas A. Christakis, as you can see in this video:
One of the publications that Pinker was asked to rectify dates back to 2015 and in it he claimed that police officers in the United States do not shoot African Americans disproportionately, according to statistics.
Data: Police don't shoot blacks disproportionately. Problem: Not race, but too many police shootings. http://t.co/HDoLJ3hT3p via @UpshotNYT
— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) October 17, 2015
In 2017, Pinker assured that mentioning that the Police in the United States kills more African Americans than whites, it distracts us from the real problem.
Police kill too many people, black & white. Focus on race distracts from solving problem, as we do w plane crashes. https://t.co/fUxJipp3Fr
— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) August 13, 2017
For the following tweet they accuse him of being sexist and misogynist:
The idea that the UCSB murders are part of a pattern of hatred against women is statistically obtuse | http://t.co/ZbWuSVLy6p
— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) June 1, 2014
This is the context: In 2014, a student murdered six women at UC Santa Barbara after posting a video online detailing his misogynistic reasons. It is alleged that, ignoring the author's own hate speech, Pinker called the idea that such a murder could be part of a sexist pattern 'statistically obtuse.'
First, a correction: the 2014 murders in Isla Vista by Eliot Rodger They involved four male victims and two female victims, not six women. But other than that, Rodger left a misogynistic manifesto and a YouTube video that clearly stated that he wanted revenge on women for rejecting him, and who he hated for it. But Pinker did not intend to deny that this murder was motivated by hatred of women, but rather to question whether it was part of a general pattern of hatred of women. That is a different question.
This example and many others They are the ones that we can find in the LSA letter that, in reality, distort Pinker's words because he is an uncomfortable academic.
Steven Pinker He is the author of some of the most important books I have ever read, such as The blank slate either In defense of the Enlightenment. Pinker can make mistakes, like any researcher. What is completely intolerable is that their statements are distorted or their opinion is censored for the simple fact that we do not like it or consider it to be erroneous. Opinions must fight in the arena of ideas, but it is smart to silence certain people before discussing their ideas.
The cancel culture It's dangerous, like we already pointed out a while ago, because it shows that we consider that there are things that we already know with complete certainty and that we are not willing to listen to a single criticism about them; with the addition, not at all trivial, that woke up It is demagoguery doped with Judeo-Christian guilt, that the Social Justice Warriors are counterproductive despite their good intentions and that freedom of expression is the sine qua non of civil society, without exceptions.
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The news
Cancel culture reaches Steven Pinker: because of these tweets they want to expel the LSA researcher
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.