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Tag Archives: Steven Pinker

Sam Harris Responds

Thursday, January 14, 2016

Probably you find yourself as am I, baffled by the recent spat of Twitter hate emanating from NNT towards @SamHarris, @sapinker and many others. The Steven Pinker spat goes back to a 2009 NYT book review by Pinker of Malcolm Gladwell’s “What the Dog Saw”, where Pinker beats up on Gladwell (see also). Taleb, featured […]

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Statistics of Violence as Special Case of Fat Tails

Saturday, July 11, 2015

A lecture summarizing the paper on violence with Cirillo to MIT and NECSI data scientists, mostly explaining to data scientists how to work with fat tails and only indirectly addressing Pinker by responding to those fooled by the illusion of drop in violence:     Uploaded on Jul 10, 2015 A lunch discussion at MIT […]

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This is a one-page answer as the journalist-passing-for-scientist Pinker…

Monday, June 22, 2015

This is a one-page answer as the journalist-passing-for-scientist Pinker has been working the press to show that violence has “dropped” since 1945, citing political science bloggers innocent of fat tails, who seem clueless about the difference between data and information. How to separate anecdote from evidence, sampling error from truth, journalism from science? Well there […]

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E.O. Wilson, Nowak et al. wrote a paper on altruism…

Thursday, April 2, 2015

E.O. Wilson, Nowak et al. wrote a paper on altruism that triggered a huge angry reaction (particularly by science journalists Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins). The paper (linked) contained words with a mathematical backup. More than 100 biologists signed a petition asking for retraction. And the math was not remotely addressed. Yet if the paper […]

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I have to give credit where credit is due…

Friday, August 23, 2013

I have to give credit where credit is due. I was at dinner with two people who said that Steve Pinker stood by them at a difficult moment, when it was very unpopular to do so, when other academics abandoned them. And he went out of his way to do so. Very honorable. So one […]

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