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by mlthoughts2018
2662 days ago
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> “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. |
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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.