Why Steven Pinker’s Rationality may be the most irrational book of the year.
by the way—you can find an informative and briskly written book about types of reasoning and their applications. The trouble begins when you readthe words. Pinker can neither embrace polemic outright nor let it go . So instead of confronting his targets head on, the middle chapters engage in a kind of indirect culture warfare, dragging foes in as apparently incidental examples of irrationality or motivated reasoning. Where the shoe fits, fair enough.
It also produces some mystifying assertions, such as that the 2020 murder of George Floyd led to “the sudden adoption of a radical academic doctrine, Critical Race Theory”—and that both CRT and Black Lives Matter are driven by an exaggerated sense of Black people’s statistical risk of being killed by police.