Steven Pinker's new book, "Rationality", was just released. My impression, 1/4 through, is that it could use a strong dose of "meta-/post-rat" (whatever that means)!
e.g. how do we deal with the nebulosity of "vegetable"? neural nets and weights! sure, in some sense, but…
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Pleased to see that the book includes quite a concise but clear explainer of causal networks.
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I guess it gets worse.
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Black person: gets mortgage denied
Pinker: well, was it really racism? or was it simply because the US government, banks, real estate agents and millions of Americans engaged in a multi-decade project of segregation and disinvestment?
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Honestly, that section of the book was quite sensitively handled. The whole point of it was to underscore how challenging it is to use data without introducing unexpected problems. I don't think the Times's characterization is just.
Rather, I don't think the second sentence in the excerpt is just. The first sentence ("blinkered") is perhaps not unreasonable: it's a bit odd to discuss these tensions in the abstract, without at any point referencing the concrete historical instances of redlining.
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