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Jandila comments on Factions, inequality, and social justice - Less Wrong
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So he said something empirically true as far as he could tell ("there is research indicating...") but connotationally-loaded (the equivalent of a statement like "All Jews are apes"), in a public forum (billing it as "an attempt at provocation" no less). At best, it's inept communication; at worst it's deliberate shit-stirring and then as a result...
What, people got angry at him? And it didn't come to much except that there were some people angry at him? Seriously, look at what happened in this article you're citing. The guy got a large number of people griping his direction, a lot of support, not even the administrative equivalent of a slap on the wrist, and Stephen Pinker passionately defending him with confused comments about "the difference between a university and a madrassa" (protip, Pinker: a university is a madrassa, because madrassa means "school.")
All of this, while also being implicated in a conflict of interest scandal, and losing the university lots of money on derivates? This is simply amazing job protection. It's not like he was removed forcibly from his position -- the guy resigned a year later, with a year's paid sabbatical and a university-subsidized million-dollar loan on his house! Whereupon he was immediately given a prestigious position as professor at another university and management over a hedge fund, and even put onto the National Economic Council until more conflicts of interest did him in.
This is your example of the PC brigade denying someone a job?
I'm pretty sure Pinker was aware of that. He's relying on the connotations of words. His point (which seems valid) is that the ideal of a university as it is commonly understood allows more free inquiry and statements that may turn out to be wrong, as opposed to for example an institution which has a large amount of theological dictation about what may be studied or proposed.
(For what it is worth, I think almost everything that Summers said was wrong, and is demonstrably wrong given the differences between American and Western European university demographics, but it does seem like he was attacked in an essentially ideological fashion.)
Edit: I do however agree with a fair bit of your analysis, I think that what happened to Summers was to a large extent connected to other ongoing problems, and is in many ways pretty removed from any strong notion of censorship. There were a lot of problems with his administration and focusing purely on these comments misses how many things were going wrong, and misses how he was in practice actually treated.
Really? I doubt most Anglophones, even educated ones, know that -- certainly the way the term is bandied about in the English-speaking press as though it were synonymous with "Extreme Islamist Indoctrination Centre" would make me guess that he's less likely to be aware of that; it seems like very few people I hear using the term that way realize that a madrassa is often explicitly secular.
That's not totally accurate. While in some dialects of Arabic 'madrassa' simply means 'school' in both secular and religious settings, in other dialects the word refers only to where religious Islamic teaching takes place, and not secular schools.
Well, I did, and my impression is that Steven Pinker is in general substantially more educated than I am, especially where issues of culture are concerned. So I would assign a high prior to him knowing any piece of cultural knowledge that I would. (Although I probably know substantially more Arabic than a random English speaker).
At the same time, there's another relevant direction here: Words can have different meanings than they do in their native tongues, and it isn't unreasonable to use in English the word madrassa just to mean the Islamic universities even though in Arabic the word just means university. In that context, the intended meaning of Pinker's statement is clear. In that context, a possibly more relevant worry is the use of an Islamic example as the go-to rather than say a yeshiva where the point would work even better since both Hebrew and Yiddish have common, distinct words for universities v. schools devoted to religious study. But in that context, Pinker's point is probably balanced by general pithiness given how much most Americans know (I suspect a lot more have heard the word madrassa than have heard the word yeshiva for example).
He cited a list of forager societies in Angels of Our Better Nature that didn't include any foragers, so I wouldn't be inclined to give him too much credit there. He sourced it from someone else, but the fact he didn't recognize the inapplicability certainly didn't convey much confidence about that.
Can you expand on this or cite? I know there was some controversy or whether some of the groups he described as foragers were foragers, but I'm not sure what you are talking about.
I've discussed this with several posters on LW in the past so while searching for my previous citations, I found this much better summary of the issue:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2i6/forager_anthropology/
The distinction being made here is that foragers practice immediate-return food acquisition and usually don't build up much of a surplus; they are nearly always mobile (simply because most biomes vary in their productivity) with the few exceptions who occupy especially-rich areas where they can be sedentary posing some other confounds that may warrant treating them as a distinct type of society (though this is not yet a part of mainstream consensus within the field).
The societies Pinker cited had either been engaged in traditional forms of agriculture or horticulture, which are quite distinct patterns of resource acquisition and social organization, or had experienced pronounced discontinuities with their traditional resource base for some time after colonization (it would essentially be like inferring about a traditional Native American society from a poor reservation community of today).
Thanks, That's apparently talking about one of the lists in The Blank Slate rather than Angels, but for purposes of your point works just the same.