I'm very sympathetic to Aaronson's position in this review, but I think these two comments reveal the problematic aspect of his position:
* In his mind (and that of many others) the Enlightenment is about this special group of people who bestowed gifts on normals. I'm sure he'd challenge that characterisation, but I think that's what it amounts to. So instead of this idea being inclusive it becomes an us and them, in which the us is constantly expecting gratitude, while slightly missing the fact that society as a whole always has to be the enabler for what they do - even when it appears to be resisting them!
* That aggressive mistranslation explains away the other POV. I think there is mistranslation but let's ask WHY intelligent people are doing that: because they believe that Pinker (et al) have a dangerous subtext, or that their ideas trend in a specific direction. And there is something in that because consider the tension Aaronson feels: he agrees with Pinker that what happened in the past is good, but feels it is leading to disaster. So - if it was so good - why have we ended up in such a bad place? Enlightment people cannot simply say: "it's not our fault we've tried to stop this". They need to accept that maybe something in their ideas and way of approaching things is part of the problem.
"...while slightly missing the fact that society as a whole always has to be the enabler for what they do - even when it appears to be resisting them!"
Anyone care to imagine what the results of the industrial revolution would have been without the Luddites and unionized workers fighting against "progress"? It's hard to think of anything more dystopian than technocrats (or whatever your favorite term for the "special people") given the complete power to shape the future they way they would like.
I have the same kind of ambivalence to the "mistranslation" issue.
This is a direction of thought I find quite interesting. And I'd like to ask you what you think would have happened if it were the technocrats who shaped or world.
The only type of scenario that comes to my (not very well-read) mind is the one in A Brave New World, which is in my opinion one of the most benevolent possible dystopias. What is it that you have in mind? And how much worse is it, especially compared to the other forms of human suffering we're facing?
A Brave New Worldis pretty good, as an end state, but here's the question: Who are you going to tell, "We're going to engineer your children to be content, healthy slaves without the ability to perceive their own chains?" Do you tell them beforehand? Might as well pick someone you don't like, right?
STEMmies are also big supporters of the flavor of the month club. Every vein of inquiry gets hopped on as The Truth until it plays out and something new comes along.
Scientists and engineers are as political as anyone else and more than happy to put their own goals above anything else. Really, the problem of technocracy is that it is the same as any other semi-totalitarianism, except that it is coated in a veneer of "reason" that you cannot argue with.
In his mind, as I see it, the Enlightenment is about this special group, whose membership is defined by doing enlightenment things for us all.
Some of the 2m apps on Google Play are written to achieve some goal for you and not interrupt you or grab your attention. I think the people who write such apps are great, and do something very good in a small way. Now, who are these people? That set of people is defined by the good thing they do.
Saving 100m people's lives is a bigger act than writing a good smartphone app. The principle is the same: The membership of the group is attained by doing.
It's not about a special group of people. It's about a cluster of ideas whose time had come. Some attack 'the enlightenment' by attacking its luminaries. Attacking people is facile. People are hypocritical and contradictory. Critiquing the people leads nowhere. Critique the ideas instead. The main idea is reason (usually in contrast to superstition or traditions not motivated by truth). Some have attacked harmful applications of reason. Again, facile. People want to do bad things. Critique the applications and the motives for them before critiquing reason.
Why intelligent people misread things isn't a tough question. 1) They have an ideological agenda. 2) They are intelligent-clever, not intelligent-wise. Intelligent-clever people can generate an infinite stream of intelligent-sounding doubt. It's mostly noise and a waste of time to engage with.
I do not see how those two quotes imply a particular opinion of how the enlightenment happened - as far as I can tell, they merely say that the enlightenment (however it occurred) has benefitted a lot of people, yet some of beneficiaries can't stop complaining about it.
As for the hostile mistranslators, if they cannot find the presumed dangerous subtext within the work, they should honestly recognize that they cannot find it (which would not prevent them from stating their concerns, just as Aaronson stated his pessimism), rather than pretend that it is there. Ultimately, doing the latter merely reflects badly on both their critical analysis skills, and, to a degree, their ethics.
Thanks for that way of putting it. It articulates my feeling when I couldn't do it for myself.
ALSO note that what you propose is an "enlightenment compliant" way of proceeding. Unfortunately much argument (especially in the less analytical disciplines) shirks this level of responsibility -- and is allowed to shirk it by the relevant professional community.
If I were to make a mathematical argument sloppy enough to be open to hostile mistranslators and then on top of that address reviewer's psychology instead of holes she might tried to poke, text would get outright desk rejection on resubmission.
In science the odium lies on the philosopher to put forward his idea robustly. Not on the reviewers to understand it in the most favourable light and then... believe?
I'm sure that "odium" isn't too far wrong, but I believe the word you intended was "onus".
One should probably not conflate mathematical proofs and empirical evidence in this context. Mathematics allows for certain proofs, where no belief is required, but this is not true for any empirical science. I wouldn't recommend ever betting against the laws of thermodynamics, but at some point you have to take a leap of induction, if not of faith.
So you advise to scope on the reviewer hypothetical beliefs and personality next time? That is bound to succeed and show my analytical prowess? Even in uncharitable (and possibly mistranslated by me being critiqued!) case her points are baseless and manufactured?
Too much willful misinterpretation defeats the purpose of critical analysis, and where would that leave the humanities? - it would leave them wallowing in irrelevant self-referentiality, where everyone is talking past everyone else.
You are sidestepping the question, engaging in practice of irrelevance you highlight. Is debating the mistranslator a becoming reply? Moreover you said them making a case somehow casts shadow on the critic's analytical powers, where in fact starting debates around their intents bypassing the issue put forward points the exact opposite.
On the contrary, you are sidestepping the issue. There is a difference between, on the one hand, discussing what troubles you about a work, and on the other, attributing that which troubles you to that work (and its author), without justification.
On the subject of sidestepping the question, you have still not explained why responders are absolved from the burden of precision that you have put on the creators of original works.
I didn't notice you posing this problem. Frankly I don't understand the difference you announced you'd be trying to make. 1) Discussing a critique, 2) attributing critique to a work being criticized and its author without justification? What was your point?
About the equal standards. You would be shaken to discover reviewers are not held to the them by the journals and this is by design. Because, as I first said, the burden of making the argument robust is on the original work, not on the critics to robustly scrutinize beyond all doubt. I think you ignored what I started with, and then mistranslated me sidestepping anything.
There's an amusing irony here - you are claiming that I have mistranslated you, but by the claim you made in your first post in this thread, that would be because you have been too sloppy in your statement of your position. In this one case, I might agree with you.
That's only because I choose to be illustrative with that last sentence. Without me making parallel with that sloppy logic of mistranslation, you'd be just convoluted and shown wrong by the previous ones, and I might as well rest my case on that.
I'd like to see evidence that Pinker thinks it is about "this special group of people". What I have read in the book doesn't support this. He of course gives examples of the most remarkable people but goes on to say they depended on an immensely larger group of collaborators. For example the process of eliminating smallpox depended on hundreds of thousands of people including health workers, government functionaries and the patients themselves.
Regarding the motivations of the mistranslators: I think those commentators are frustrated romantics who actually reject the enlightenment view that people can understand and improve their world. Look at John Gray's books on Amazon; he argues that progress isn't possible -- he's quite passionate about that!
I have had discussions with people who take this position -- typically very intelligent academics. They rely on "anecdata" -- a blizzard of examples of bad stuff. Something like Pinker's blizzard of data and charts would naturally make them very very angry -- as much because of the reliance on statistical thinking as because of the subject.
As to why these people are so passionately devoted to romantic (anti-enlightenment) values: I'm not at all sure. I think they have a visceral dislike for analytical treatments of human issues, but I don't have a deeper sense of why that is.
I think it's because the fruit of the Enlightenment proved to be dehumanizing (despite the humanism in the Enlightenment itself).
We got the clockwork universe - the universe as a machine. That was all right. But out of it we got machines (computers) that changed everything, including society. Some of the ways that society changed made it less personal - less real human contact. For some people, that's a real loss. They miss the past form of society. One could call that a romantic longing.
Then we started putting humans into the "machine" category. That's also a loss of a romantic (or romanticized) past, but now the loss is intellectual or philosophical.
> "while slightly missing the fact that society as a whole always has to be the enabler for what they do - even when it appears to be resisting them!"
Even when society was drowning and burning them to death for heresy? There are a multitude of examples of this, if you care to read histories of the Inquisition. I will give you a starting point—Google "Giordano Bruno"
> "They need to accept that maybe something in their (enlightenment) ideas and way of approaching things is part of the problem."
:/
> "but let's ask WHY intelligent people are doing that: because they believe that Pinker (et al) have a dangerous subtext, or that their ideas trend in a specific direction."
The reasonable answer is because they're highly ideologically motivated, not nearly as intelligent and certainly not as ethical as Pinker.
Do you have any examples of actual burning? Of someone who was going around enlightening and got burned for science.
Only example I know, Giordano Bruno was as much a scientist as today's theologians and Templeton-sponsored cosmologists; got on the hook for spreading pantheism. Galileo and Copernicus besides not being burnt were also wrong. Church decided to shun them not because of their philosophy (unlike Bruno they were doing surprisingly little theology for the ire that met them), but calculations rightly evaluated to be wrong. In case of Galileo also obnoxious activism asking for persecution. The heresy part came in because of dogma that proper science is god-inspired and thus should be at least somewhat reasonable, which this stuff wasn't at the time (recall, Newton was an alchemist first, the first scientist a second). I can perfectly imagine stuff like this going on in today's groupthink grant system, between suicides of tenured faculty and Prasher turned taxi driver despite Nobel-grade work.
ideologically motivated
Do you realize that this is tautological? Where do you think ideologies come from if not from reason? Do you, in your arbitrary intelligence, realize that every presumption came to be for a reason? Phenomenon of tradition illustrates that pretty well, even if original reasoning was lost.
There is a difference between empiricism, as in testing ideas, and ideologically motivated behavior that involves only seeking only information that can buttress one's current beliefs.
> Only example I know, Giordano Bruno...
You know this example because I just pointed it out to you. There are many others, but I'm done doing your homework for you.
* In his mind (and that of many others) the Enlightenment is about this special group of people who bestowed gifts on normals. I'm sure he'd challenge that characterisation, but I think that's what it amounts to. So instead of this idea being inclusive it becomes an us and them, in which the us is constantly expecting gratitude, while slightly missing the fact that society as a whole always has to be the enabler for what they do - even when it appears to be resisting them!
* That aggressive mistranslation explains away the other POV. I think there is mistranslation but let's ask WHY intelligent people are doing that: because they believe that Pinker (et al) have a dangerous subtext, or that their ideas trend in a specific direction. And there is something in that because consider the tension Aaronson feels: he agrees with Pinker that what happened in the past is good, but feels it is leading to disaster. So - if it was so good - why have we ended up in such a bad place? Enlightment people cannot simply say: "it's not our fault we've tried to stop this". They need to accept that maybe something in their ideas and way of approaching things is part of the problem.