Many "progressive" social science types are committed to the belief that it's possible to "fix" inequality of outcome. Pinker's rejection of "blank slatism" threatens that belief. That's a big reason he's disliked.
-
This Tweet is unavailable
-
This Tweet is unavailable
-
This Tweet is unavailable
-
Er.. it doesn't! Some people reason as follows: 1) We should fix social problems 2) But, if blank slatism is *false* then social problems relating are unfixable 3) Therefore blank slatism is true. However that's wrong, it isn't even deductively valid.
It does *threaten* it, because equality of the opportunity, plus equal starting positions, won't (necessarily) mean (more or less) equality of outcome if blank slatism is false.
-
-
But that's irrelevant, since: a) Even if blank slatism is *true* & there was equality of opportunity, equality of outcome would not be guaranteed - chaos theory shows that even unmeasurably small differences in intial conditions would result in divergence.
-
Hence the words "more or less" - plus chaos theory - which you really, really don't need to invoke in this context - wouldn't result in systemic, structural inequality - just individual differences.
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.