[mlthoughts2018]

I'm sorry, but I'm baffled by the extended quote you pasted. It reads like a rhetoric 101 essay of a college freshman, deeply contrived and not hitting at any real point. Just meandering under the pretense that this is Serious Discourse.

[davidb_]

The quote was taken from: https://www.weeklystandard.com/adam-rubenstein/steven-pinker...

I posted it to give context to the "debate" Pinker was engaged in. I don't have much of an opinion on whether or not it is "Serious Discourse."

[jerf]

That's a summary statement. If you're interested in more details, Stephen Pinker elaborates more in his books.

On the flip side, there are some people who would still accuse him of being glib. On the flip flip side, though, the numbers often support Pinker.

Some of the people complaining have serious academic issues. But some people complaining are simply people who have incorporated some degree of doom-saying or even outright misanthropy into their core identity and find it offensive when someone makes an at-least-semi-decent argument against everything being inevitably doomed. Separating the two can be a challenge because there is a lot of overlap between the two sets.

[mlthoughts2018]

> “That's a summary statement. If you're interested in more details, Stephen Pinker elaborates more in his books.“

The details within Pinker’s books are irrelevant to my criticisms of this article and of the quote you pasted. Further, it’s also irrelevant that your pasted quote is a summary or not.

The issue is that it’s juvenile, contrived writing that isn’t rooted in any coherent position on anything. It’s a smattering of ideas that loosely touch on different things, but are presented as if together it constitutes some type of bigger picture about art and empathy, which it doesn’t.

[jerf]

My point is the only solution to that criticism is to elaborate on it more.

It reminds me of one of my favorite observations by Scott Adams (from long before he turned into a political commentator), which is that all characters start out as shallow caricatures. The only solution to that is giving the author time to elaborate; if you instantly and irrevocably label the character as a caricature and don't give that time, you'll never have find any characters that aren't caricatures. Similarly, yes, this quote may be shallow, but unlike a freshman essay where this is the conclusion, Stephen Pinker does elaborate, expand, and defend at some length. If you judged all arguments this way, you'd look around you and find that the world has nothing but shallow freshman arguments.