Steven Pinker engagement report

Best tweets

• Aug 20, 2026358x their median

  なんと動いてません https://t.co/On5qeeT6Y1

  41K4.7K42391023M viewsView on X
• Jan 26, 202655x their median

  I spoke with @LaulPatricia about Marxism: One is: What’s remarkable is that Marxism has been tried. Now, of course, defenders of Marxism say it hasn’t really been tried anywhere, but certainly the people who implemented it claimed they were implementing Marxism. And this is a massive experiment—a global experiment—with a very clear outcome. Namely, the Soviet Union was a disaster. The imposition of communism on Eastern Europe was a disaster. The imposition of communism in Venezuela was a disaster. The imposition of communism in Maoist China was a disaster. Disaster in terms of both poverty and oppression and genocide and stupid wars. So the world has told us what happens under communism, and it’s a sign of how out of touch intellectuals can be that there are still people who defend it despite the entire world giving a very clear-cut answer. One more is: would you rather live in North Korea or South Korea? Would you rather live in the old East Germany or West Germany? We have an experimental group and a matched control group in terms of culture, language, and geography, and the answer is crystal clear. So this is a sign of, I think, the pathology of intellectual life—that Marxism can persist. The other is, you did call attention to one of the appeals of Marxism, though, and more generally of heavy, strong influence of government guided by intellectuals, which is that there are certain kinds of reforms that you can state as principles. You can articulate them verbally as propositions—like equality, human rights, democracy—but there’s other kinds of progress that take place in massive distributed networks of millions of people, none of whom implements some policy. But collectively, there is an order, an organization that’s beneficial. So that can happen organically through, for example, the development of a language. No one designed the English language. It’s just hundreds of millions of English speakers. They coin new words. They forget old words. They try to make themselves clear. And we get the English language and the other 5,000 languages spoken on earth. Likewise, a market economy is something where knowledge is distributed. You don’t have a central planner deciding how many shoes of size 8 will be needed in a particular city, but rather information is conveyed by prices, which are adjusted according to supply and demand. And you’ve got a distributed network of exchange of information that can result in an emergent benefit. Now, intellectuals tend to hate that. They like rules of language—of correct grammar. They like top-down economic planning. They like cultural change that satisfies particular ideals described by intellectuals. And so rival sources of organization, like commerce, like culture—traditional culture—tend to be downplayed by intellectuals. And this can be magnified by the fact that many dictatorships give a privileged role to intellectuals, which may be why, over the course of the 20th century, and probably continuing to the present, there has not been a dictator that has not had fans among intellectuals—including the mullahs and ayatollahs of Iran, but also the communist dictators: Mao and Castro, even Stalin in his day. And every other dictator has had, actually, often fawning praise from Western intellectuals.

  7.0K2.0K05331.1M viewsView on X
• Aug 22, 202665x their median

  If you're an academic (and can prove it with an ORCID), consider signing a petition protesting the University of Ghent's suspension of a postdoc for exposing academic misconduct, a blatant violation of academic freedom (as always, regardless of your agreement with all of the whistleblower's views). https://t.co/bkZ98z609Q https://t.co/UrjFnA93Sk

  7.3K1.0K03001.1M viewsView on X
• Aug 20, 202622x their median

  Is Biology Allowed to Explain Anything? Even a sex difference as obvious as throwing strength? Robert Deaner & Mike Lombardo: "The strong Blank Slate—the idea that human psychology is largely written by culture—has been declared dead many times. Yet it refuses to stay dead. ... Today, biology is usually acknowledged. Nature and nurture interact. Fine. But the Blank Slate survives through two recurring moves. First, reasonable observations—that traits are plastic, parents influence children, experience matters, and development mediates behavior—are treated as though they rule out an innate contribution. They do not. Second, evidence that could challenge a socialization-only explanation is ignored, minimized, or sidestepped." https://t.co/rTpWIA0BO1

  2.5K371030721K viewsView on X
• Aug 17, 202616x their median

  "There’s a common view in left-wing and right-wing populisms that solving problems is very easy intellectually and you just need to defeat and disempower the bad people. This is not a view that would survive serious learning about the history of basically any policy topic. It’s actually quite hard to learn what works and why and to implement good ideas at scale. The Woke 1 problems of dogmatism, incuriosity, closed-mindedness, and sloppiness about the facts are not solved by switching the focus from identity to economics or by becoming right-wing. You need to actually behave less dogmatically, more curiously, more open-mindedly, and more rigorously, and I don’t see a lot of evidence that the discourse is moving in that direction." | Woke 1 is dead. We’ve learned nothing, by @mattyglesias https://t.co/flnKTmfIxV

  1.7K388048144K viewsView on X
• Sep 18, 202615x their median

  Is AI really going to kill us all? The scenarios are preposterous, and the presumption of inevitability encourages fatalism, panic, and distraction from the more mundane and realistic safety challenges. By @clairlemon https://t.co/QFkwoRNHmP

  1.8K188241299K viewsView on X
• Aug 11, 202615x their median

  Non-heterosexuals tend to have worse mental health compared to heterosexuals. Is this due to minority stress–stigma and discrimination? In a new study, we should that the answer is “mostly not.” Link to the article in the next post, followed by an explanatory thread. (1/n)

  1.7K2125544368K viewsView on X
• Aug 23, 202615x their median

  Much of the vilification of Israel acting in self-defense is unjust, but the terrorism against Arab villages in the West Bank by settler thugs, tolerated by the Netanyahu government, is horrific. It deserves harsh criticism pressure to stop it. https://t.co/D6FTyNODZL

  1.7K249018204K viewsView on X
• Sep 5, 202613x their median

  Powerful essay by Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib: "A Palestinian miracle on the Mediterranean is within reach if Gaza rejects Islamism, Jihadism, Hamas and stale nationalist notions, all of which have left it devastated. Will those in the West who express support for Palestinians finally abandon their sloganeering about “resistance”? Effective pro-Palestinian advocacy can speak out against Israeli actions without the futile pursuit of Israel’s destruction." https://t.co/JZOWkFi6Vq

  1.4K240071104K viewsView on X
• Sep 20, 202612x their median

  How therapy culture made us neurotic and quarrelsome. (Three insights on human nature from the late Robert Trivers are germane: Even the most intimate of human relationships have deep conflicts of interest (resolving them once and for all is impossible); people are self-deceived (so inevitably perceive themselves as selfless and others as selfish); men and women are not interchangeable. https://t.co/UoXlJ8UIg9

  1.3K251119105K viewsView on X

Ranked by total interactions across everything we have tracked for this account, which is a longer history than the 30-day window the rates above use. The multiple compares each post to this account's own median.

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