Thinking of copping. Is pinker worth reading?

now that's convenient given their record

I agree, these books are not peer-reviewed and usually contain a lot of mistakes and inaccuracies....
Concerning Pinker, his arguments against blate slate and standard social science model have been rather influential, especially in the field of evolutionary psychology. They are definitely worth checking out but I think the book is already outdated, so you might consider reading something else about the mind. Also if you are going to read Pinker, check this one out to get the other side of the story

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>shit cover
>meme font
were they even trying?

Nice bait.

I'll tell you how a usual behaviourist session looks like.

You get a few tests which you solve over an hour or so. You get a diagnosis. They tell you what you're doing wrong. They tell you to stop doing it and to become more aware of what you're doing in order to stop doing it. Become MINDFUL. Meditate and eat more hazelnuts. Fixed! Now you're a good robot.

I'm telling you this from first hand experience. My psychoanalyst helped me to help myself, so I guess that counts.

Inb4 hurr durr he indoctrinated u hurr durr nice Plebbit spacing

This guy gets it.

yeah, psychology is a meme discipline with only about 10% of the studies being replicable, doesn't make psychoanalysis any better

>My psychoanalyst helped me to help myself
and yet, here you are

>muh science
>science can give me an objective point of view
Did you finish high school? A lot of great science shit can't be empirically tested. For example, Hawking radiation is only praised because it fits into theory very well. I'd develop this further, but I didn't eat for the last 16h and don't have the patience to do it. Check our empiricism vs rationalism and then check out why science even has credibility. There's a lot of theory that was created just to give science some credibility. Hell, the entirety of maths and logic are held up by only our made up axioms which we then use in physics and other "muh objective science truths".

>pinker

no lol

i guess the ramblings of a dead german who never cured anybody are to be taken more seriously than science by those standards

I read Words and Rules and enjoyed it but it is kind of pop-sci. It's a good general audience linguistics book

Also read OP's pic related and it's OK, but Pinker is entirely wrong about linguistic relativity.

Go out and come back only after you read an introductory book on epistemology.

he thinks all words are equal?

>m-m-muh justified belief

except for hebrew words of course

No but in all seriousness, he is strongly opposed to what he calls neo-Whorfian hypothesis. Continuation of the theories of Benjamin Whorf

for anyone whos interested...Pinker isnt a significant name in Linguistics. I think hes famous, like most poplectuals, for being able to go on TV and be quite presentable (most academics are drooling aspies)

evo psych has to be below gender studies in the scholarly pecking order. You can just make any shit up off the top of your head and opine about how it must have be evolutionarily advantageous, and now youre doing just as well as any body else in the world.

I agree that it is not a hard science and "just so stories" are extremely common. Nevertheless, it is still better than gender studies, because
1) It is based on the evolutionary theory which is a fact.
2) You can actually come up with falsifiable hypotheses and test them.
Evo psych does a good job in terms of explaining why people crave for sugary/fatty/salty food or why almost everyone has a hard time giving a public speech etc.
But when Jordan Memerson starts talking about lobsters and hierarchies, that's definitely far-fetched, and it is not entirely clear when evo psych stops being science and becomes pseudo-science.

memerson being a retard aside, the lobster thing has nothing to do with evo psych, it doesn't try to explain why there are hierarchies evolutionary, just that hierarchies exist, are old, and we use the same systems to calibrate human hierarchies as those crabs do

so with whom would you recommend to start if I want to get into linguistics? (except for Chomsky, obviously). thanks!

read a book and invent your own linguistics

>lol how we can even begin to understand natural selection and how it relates to psychology?? that's so weeeird omg
>looool is that actually trying to breed dogs with different behaviors?? behaviors are like magic dude, you can't even touch them xD
exact science=/=valuable intellectual pursuit

Saussure

>lol how we can even begin to understand natural selection and how it relates to psychology?? that's so weeeird omg
According to evolutionary psychologist, by making things up.

I've heard people say that human sexual preferences haven't been shaped by evolution whatsoever lmao

oh another good one I heard was that the physical differences between men and women were 'accidental byproducts' of their reproductive differences and no indication of men and women having evolved to do different things day to day

so did the dog breeders. they had a hypothesis and then they bred the kind of dogs they wanted.
we can't "test" this stuff with humans but I'm sure it's floating around in the minds of some policy makers.
we live in a competitive environment and if our understanding of evopsych (in the sense that we know how to affect selection pressures) is better than someone else's we'll also be able to outcompete them. that's just reality.

> uses an evolutionary perspective to explain a current phenomenon which is prevalent in many groups and societies.

If it is not EP, what is it then?

>and we use the same systems to calibrate human hierarchies as those crabs do

We very obviously do not though

Humans aren't fucking dogs and you can't make the comparison for a billion reasons. Can't wait for this meme field to die.

he explains nothing, he just points that the phenomenon is old

explaining something through EP would look like, we have hierarchies today because we encountered situations X, Y, Z during our evolution which made them useful or more useful than not having them. Just pointing to them existing is not EP

>you can't make the comparison for a billion reasons
Reason no. 1: It upsets you
Reason no. 2: It has counterrevolutionary political implications
Reason no.3: It is sexist and racist

Shall we continue

>we can't "test" this stuff with humans
don't worry, the chinese have no such problem with it, we'll find out when our new chad chink overlords start being created

Ah yes yes, how could I forget the evil cabal of demonic leftists who are against FACTS and LOGIC and prefer FEELINGS! The noble pursuits of the brave evolutionary psychologists are hampered in every place because it utsepts the politically correct status quo and they can't handle the TRUTH (and not because it relies on dubious epistemological claims 95% of the time).
>This is what the followers of the second psychobabblical cult of modernity actually believe

there is approximately zero chance that the Chinese haven't been running eugenic programs for decades already

There is a whole field of comparative biology where the whole job is to draw comparisons between the species. If it is possible on the genetical and morphological level, what makes you think that it is not the case on the behavioral level? A simple example is conditioning, discovered by Pavlov. Applies to virtually anything which has brains.

daily reminder that Leftists openly say that combatting racism is more important than studying race differences, and the latter should just be entirely abandoned so that it doesn't threaten the former

Retard

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t. cultists of a dying cult
Because evopsych makes unfalsifiable and unverifiable assumptions 95% of the time. Also dogs don't have cultural transmission and selection.
Evo bio is much better.

>t. cultists of a dying cult
Can anybody project any more lmao.

Tell me do you think there is a possible connection between modern Western 'equality' and the Christian dogma that all men are created equal. If not where do you think this peculiar and quite unprecedented denial of reality comes from

Where the fuck did I say anything about equality you dumb fucking faggot

'equality' is the reason behind the widespread animosity towards sociobiology, pretensions of epistemological rigor notwithstanding

>One of the biggest insights of psychoanalysis is that we don't actually want our lives to be improved.

"want" is not a scientific term in neuroscience

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salience_(neuroscience)#Neuroanatomy

psychoanalysis is culturally charged pseudoscience, you don't get thousands of years of development in science, agriculture, and sociology because people didn't want their lives to improved, Jungian bipolar hysterics is Victorian garbage

Whites should not be following the advice of or doing anything other than ignoring these jewish gatekeepers.

White leftists are only doing what their jewish thought-masters tell them to do.

Ah yes, the cabal of demonic vampires, I forgot.

I've agreed already that not all papers which get published are worth it. But what about the 5% left-overs with reasonable hypotheses, proper science, correct statistics etc? I think that they tell us a lot about human nature to justify the existence of the field...
>Also dogs don't have cultural transmission and selection.
What kind of selection are you talking about?

your mind is incredibly lacking in nuance. Imagine that Fundamentalist Protestants controled all the universities, do you think there might be a serious controversy over the subjects of evolution and geology? Research would still take place, but it would be dangerous and stifled.

No conspiracy is necessary, simply a belief system that has verifiably taken hold of the middle and upper classes in the last couple centuries.

sociobiology is not a science, spending resources on researching sociobiology is an inherently constructivist act, you could either spend money on publishing racial IQ differences or you could spend that money trying to figure out how to improve nutritional outcomes among impoverished peoples, the first act is wankery, the second act is social activism

So you think it is a priori completely impossible that groups of humans differ in average cognitive ability? You don't think this information is at all relevant to the government of the people in question?

No, he says that there is no point in that at all. The variation within the groups is larger than between them. Therefore, you can't make any predictions about a given individual based on her race.

>you think it is a priori completely impossible that groups of humans differ in average cognitive ability
you're putting words into my mouth

researching that is wankery when you could improve cognitive ability through research in actual neuroscience and nutritional programming

cognitive measures normally measured by mathematical IQ tests are going to be made obsolete by AI/AI-augmented-human work, which I would rather have research money go into than racial science wankery

>You don't think this information is at all relevant to the government of the people in question?

it's unproductive wankery

well that's true, but it was the retarded left that opened "le 50/50 outcome" can of worms that brought this shit

if you probe them long enough very few leftists are actually for equality of outcome, they're equality of opportunity, barely, you're creating a boogeyman red-haired banshee sjw strawman

No but you can make a prediction about what that group is going to do as a group, which is very relevant to policy.

For a completely hypothetical example with no relation to reality, if a certain group were conspicuously lacking in individuals with very high cognitive ability, and you told this group that the reason they were performing so poorly was that a different group was beating them down such that they didn't even have a chance, you would potentially engender quite a bit of ethnic hostility, that might possibly manifest in a slew of racially motivated robberies, beating, rapes, and murders, that you would then have to also attribute to the evil oppressive behaviors of the second group.

Such an example is clearly fiction, but what exactly would be your proposed solution to a situation where it is literally impossible to have the two groups perform the same way per capita?

yes but the very fact you're spending money wanking on predictive policy rather than active policy will itself affect outcomes to a very large degree

even Obama brought up "le wage gap", and minority quotas are a thing.

it's not a twitter conspiracy, it's current policy

>active policy
In our hypothetical here Group A is simply incapable of behaving like Group B, no amount of active policy can change this because it is genetic.

if you think you're except from being in a genetic group that is not below another genetic group in terms of pro-social and intelligence you're delusional and you should worry about people better than you by your own standards making the same arguments for your own policing in the same way you look at minorities

>no amount of active policy can change this because it is genetic.
CRISPR became public literally a few years ago, I wouldn't discount it so soon

also most cognitive defects are due to nutritional and environmental factors not genetic ones, a malnourished uneducated asian kid performs worse than a truly healthy educated black male statistically

btw like
said, you are in Group A for some elite group better than you by your own standards

Based on your hypothetical example, I would propose some sort of a segregation policy (e.g. ghettos, reservations etc. arranged for the first group followed by sterilization/annihilation ). We shan't forget that selection on a group level is a very real thing.

>ghettos, reservations, sterilization

you mean like Veeky Forums lol

This is not an argument this is some kind of veiled threat lol. But in any case yes, of course the smartest people should be in charge in my opinion, and I'm aware that that is not my race.

Singapore crudely manages something like this with their Han elite

policies like affirmative action makes no sense unless you believe in proportional outcome and assume that all the deviation from that proportional outcome is due to discrimination

>This is not an argument this is some kind of veiled threat lol.

the argument here is that you're proposing anti-social behavior, which is going to manifest itself in other ways, which may include your own doom

It's not anti-social at all, there is literally no sane metric by which racial segregation was not more pro-social than what Detroit or Baltimore have become

>there is literally no sane metric by which racial segregation was not more pro-social than what Detroit or Baltimore have become

this is some armchair-tier sociology and at this point you're not making well educated analyses of the current situation you're just projecting an obsession with race when there are much more complex variables involved than you are capable of considering intellectually

/thread

Yes, the ebil cabal.
>your mind is incredibly lacking in nuance.
KEK

Baltimore's problems were caused by segregation, the guy killed by the police that caused the riots was mentally disabled by lead paint in segregated districts created by government housing loans for whites only during the early and mid 20th century

Consider for a moment that I am perfectly capable of understanding those more complex variables and I find the anti-racist explanations shall we say wanting in consistency.

Obsession with race is not peculiar to people who believe that the races differ, it is everyday blasted in the mainstream, and it is of utmost importance that you be racially aware if you want to preserve your physical safety, by avoiding doing things like visiting black neighborhoods as a white person.

However much this might bother you there are people who are not motivated by irrational hatred, and are not just too stupid to understand the sociological explanations, but that just disagree with them.

Baltimore's problems are due to black dysfunction.

go get an actual education is sociobiology or whatever and come back when you have some real research published rather than grabbing pdfs off stormfront

>Obsession with race is not peculiar to people who believe that the races differ
yes, it is

> are people who are not motivated by irrational hatred,

I don't believe you're irrational because you hate black people, I think you're retarded because you're getting your education from youtube debates

I mean, this should be obvious if you look at different african diasporas around the globe. the lead paint is such a trite lefticism, it makes me wonder wether they tailor-make these explanations for every nation or if they just feign ignorance. what about finland, netherlands, korea, norway, japan, china, australia, germany, sweden, the uk? are there equally "sophisticated" explanations for each place?

> tailor-make these explanations for every nation or if they just feign ignorance. what about finland, netherlands, korea, norway, japan, china, australia, germany, sweden, the uk? are there equally "sophisticated" explanations for each place?

yeah somali/west african migrants come from hundreds if not thousands of years of malnourishment, IQs rise with every generation of their stay in a healthy environment

The day there is a functional black city or country, without high amounts of violence and poverty, I will accept that i was wrong, or at least partially wrong.

Until then personal safety is more important than the uncomfortable position of disagreeing with the mainstream. I know none of you will ever agree with this, but I hope that you at least understand that practically speaking you have to behave as if you were racist.

not an argument!

Stop being retarded. Black dysfunction and low intelligence is a result of thousands of years of evolution. It's not something they are going to overcome with a better diet, and it's not the job of white people to raise up these savages anyway. Get real.

...and yet their IQs rise with every generation of nutritional and social stability improvement

seems like you're just pushing an agenda

>it's not the job of white people to raise up these savages anyway.

it's no one's "job", it's just prosocial behavior

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I only read The Blank Slate ages ago and liked it. Now it seems like he's trying to assuage liberals feeling the heat from recent developments.

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It doesn't matter, especially since their IQ is like ~70 to begin with and it's not their food they're eating, it's food we are giving to them, which is causing their numbers to grow to unsustainable levels. The best policy is to cut off that food and allow a natural malthusian re-centering to occur. The world needs fewer Africans, not more.

I do not get this logic, do you think black people are going to thank you? That's the most dumb and cuckolded virtue signaling which I've ever seen

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so stop talking about the lead when it's a global phenomenon :)
dude I'm stoked about your new hobby, don't get me wrong. I love that you want to nourish and breed super somalis that are clever enough to outcompete you on the job market (or simply make them smarter but not smart enough to threaten your social status?) but let's be honest about what we know

what are you going to do if you manage to raise their intelligence but not enough for them to overtake jews in finance and media? what are you going to do when they become a majority and still feel done wrong because of their "underrepresentation" in higher positions?

>breed super somalis that are clever enough to outcompete you on the job market

that's clearly not your concern because you idiots keep ignoring the issue of AI, but whatever dude, 1488 and praise Kek brother!

>this feeble attempt at neo-nazi counter-signalling
You are already evil white male if you subordinate the plight of poc to the potential problems of AI

shitposting won't make you taller or less lonely

Read something like this instead.

STOP ENGAGING THAT RETARD ABOUT RACE, Watching you people argue with that aut right soy monster no longer amuses me.

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>talking about the concept of the mind without ANY reference to the underlying neurobiology (he even mentions this critical omission in his book claiming that the structure of the brain is not important in order to understand the mind)
It is a splendid read to realize how "cognitive psychologists" see this world. "A state of the art " book which exposes the absolute incompetence and impotence of any psychologists who tries to say something about the topic. Leave the book for Cosmopolitan readers and read the Greeks. You'll derive more enjoyment and actually learn something.

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You're an idiot if you think race is anything other than the backbone of any conversation of this nature.

my concern would be to put us on a path of sustainable improvement. that path doesn't include turning the west into brazil and allowing all political movements to be hijacked by ethnic conflicts. you wouldn't get trump if you weren't actively trying to make whitey a minority.