Pinker. Dissolving Hype Falsities
“So men are not from Mars, nor are women from Venus. Men and women are from Africa, the cradle of our evolution, where they evolved together as a single species. Men and women have all the same genes except for a handful on the Y chromosome, and their brains are so similar that it takes an eagle-eyed neuroanatomist to find the small differences between them. Their average levels of general intelligence are the same, according to the best psychometric estimates,24 and they use language and think about the physical and living world in the same general way.”
== Steven Pinker, MIT & Harvard prfoessor and cognitive scientist.
YES Finally, something that dissolves the pop-new-age ludicrous falsities claiming men and women are biologically different . They are not. They are very very similar and almost 100% identical, genetically.
This isn’t so much an interest in masculine/feminine studies, but rather a dissolution of fallacious belief, hyped by superficial media and pseudo-science.
Hearing Pinker’s wise words is not only comforting and alleviating from the intoxicatingly vile untruths I heard uttered to me by so many pop media feminists or people interesting in pointing out the “inherent superiority of one gender over the other”, but Pinker’s words move forward with dissolving untruths that clog, obfuscate, and blur our scope of reality.
I think the most concise and most lucid article that encapsulates this entire pseudo-truth-unraveling behavior is Dawkins’ article “Hall of Mirrors”, where he enunciates the validity of scientific truth.
Pinker’s dissolution of and illustrative evidence provision of the noble savage, blank slate, and ghost in the machine fallacious paradigms of human nature is brilliant.
Of course, while others put forth similar ideas, it was pop-hype author John Grey who further propounded this disillusioned idea that men and women are so inherently different. So John Grey is obviously the nemesis of the subject of this article. But it’s wise and prudent to if one recognizes a nemesis, to not speak frequently of him. So we won’t waste time unraveling Grey’s fragile arguments and absurd “wave-welling”, “elastic-rubberbanding” feminine and masculine analogies. Instead, let’s focus on how toxic said authors are on our collective conscience.
If one wants to have an intelligent conversation with another human about, say, human nature, or gender roles, or cognitive evolution, I think the best course of action is to completely evade the possibility of entertaining such a conversation with a status quo, average, pop-hype-book-reading human because of the eventual inevitable collisions with these hype media falsities.
These hype media falsities that sell simply because of emotional reaction flurry, permanently scar the perceptions some people make. I am not proposing that they should be banned, but rather, that some kind of warning be put on said books indicating it as completely unproven, completely unscientific. The Bible, John Grey’s “Men are From Mars, Men are from Venus”, most all non-scientific works, would all be pooled under pure 100% fictional works, for that they are. I think it’s vitally important to clarify that certainty. And to then of course distinguish those books (the majority of which make up most bookstores unfortunately) from the proven, cut & dry, scientific books that are actually true, that have the potential for containing material that is genuinely true!
Many of the “non-fiction” books in bookstores are grossly miscategorized and the social and cognitive consequences of this are drastic. Abolishing fiction would be absurd, dangerous, bleak, and depressing, but when I read fiction, I want to read of Tolkien’s lore, or of Verne’s punctual characters, or of any of the other much more rich and inviting works of true fiction. Instead of these pseudo-non-fiction works that are like weeds amongst the truthful scientific books and the pure, original fiction books, or the scientifically-proven and tested books, I think appropriately labelling all the pseudo-non-fiction (unproven) books as what they are, fiction, will cause people to drift to the healthy extremes: pure fiction or pure scientifically proven books and these pseudo-non-fiction hype media works will simply drift off and plummet in sales simply because of appropriate labelling!
The pseudo-science books written by non-scientific, usually very uneducated authors that claim to be true are, frankly, deleteriously cognitively malnourishing. This analogy to food is interesting. I think an appropriate set of parallel extensions would be fiction is oh some kind of stirfry, scientific books as some kind of healthy natural produce or fish, and then these hype media false non-fiction boks as something similar to the cigarrette: addictive, intoxicating, wrought with flair and hype, and massively destructive.
If you extrapolate this idea out, yes, it would mean finally appropriately labelling all “religious tomes” as merely (in my opinion horribly written and very bland) fictional stories. These pseudo non-fiction books are toxic books 1)they are unscientific untruths, 2)claiming to be truthful! Pure fiction of Tolkien or Verne or Doyle is not the slightest bit toxic because the readership of those epic works know that the respective Frodo, Fogg, and Holmesian heroes are fictional. Increidbly descriptive, brilliantly crafted? yes, but indubitably fictional. Religions and similar books preachign fiction as non-fiction is a direct cognitive dissension into insanity.
Books by scientific authors containing scientifically-proven data should be the only books acceptablly labeled as “idea-sharing” books. Fiction books should serve the purpose of image-sharing (some of which can have ideas) pieces of literature. New Age, pop culture self-help books have become the new religion for the “semi-educated” average intelligence (typically american). This newest incarnation of this vile, toxic, dangerous entity (religion) is even more surrepticious and dangerous because it’s packaged as this “life improvement” device, but it’s really toxic and fallacious repackaged religion.
The religious folk’s clever malign doesn’t really have much downtime. It’s always crafting new ways to infect peoples’ minds. Religion discourages critical thinking and that is one of the greatest causes of its toxic and viral-like perpetuation. The example of this is the biblical quote of saying “Don’t argue with the devil, he’s had thousands of years to practice”. That’s religion discouraging critical thinking and encouraging blind submission. Religion is how people devolve into drones hiding behind sanctity, eager to kill on command. Domesticated house pets have more cunning than humans under the dangerous, deluding, and deleterious spell of religion. So obviously greatest perpetuation of this mind virus, religious books, should ulitmiately simply be eliminated. This is very brash, but the proposition of any religious books to be labelled simply as what they are: fiction, will lead to the natural extinction of religious texts simply because no one wants to read extremely insipid and poorly written fiction when there’s extremely well-written and colorful and adventurous genuine bona fide fiction authors on the next shelf, or genuine bona fide scholars, academics discussing scientific truths!
Indeed, Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit as well as the entirety of his book, The Demon-Haunted World, is an indispensible survival item for cognitive clarity.
Books that have not undergone rigorous scientific scrutiny and claim to be non-fiction truly pollute any attempt for clear thinking. There’s so much astonishment and shock and “Wow” in scientifically laboratory-proven evidence that there’s absolutely no need for this pseudo-non-fiction rubbish. There’s a need for fiction, for escape, and a need for scientific articles and books for truth. There exists no need of the desire “to be deluded into a hype media falsity belief to prove or disprove some opinion one currently holds”. I’ve been a victim of believing so many of these pseudo-non-fiction books and therefore found authentic, genuine scientific and true books by the authors of Pinker and Dawkins for example so remarkably mind-shatteringly good that the need for any other kind of “non-fiction” book or a book that hedges the fence of fiction and non-fiction seems pointless.
On a side note, one of the most indubitably unique, often quite humorous, and unquestionably impressive characteristics of Pinker is his ability to list a smorgasbord of highly diverse, seemingly random, and all entirely relevant examples that illustratively delineate and provide meaning, color, and texture to what theorem or point he is making.
After having a mind clogged with all these pop fiction media hype authors such as Anthony Robbins, John Grey, most any of the non-scientific-authored books you’ll find a book shelf that claims to be fiction, the works of Dawkins, Pinker, Hitchens, and many others is like having a full feast from all the food groups after cognitively starving off of an obscure, meager, and deprived diet of say only beets. The non-scientific books that claim to be non-fiction are mind pollutants, and their fallacious points offer at best meager (and at worst, outright toxic and poisonous) sustenance for an already ravenous cognitive conscience. People are starving for truth and they’re being fed preservatives.
Personally, I would like all the pop hype media books not written by a scientific author and lacking in scientific data, removed or banned in someway unless they’re explicitly labeled as fiction. Meaning that bookstores would contain scientifically proven books and fictional literature. I don’t think such a change will happen any time soon nor ever at all, but the fact remains that these pseudo-science hype media falsity “non-fiction” books that are wrought with fiction, do scar the clear thinking of the status quo.
So conclusively, the best solution for an intelligent conversation regarding any of the aforementioned topics is to circumvent the status quo American (actually, bypass all but the most educated americans) and find an academic savvy in the fields of cognitive science, neuroscience, or any of the natural science fields, or simply a noble lad whose a solid bloke from the UK or Europe. haha.
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