Views from Crestmont Drive

• Steven Pinker on education, and how it might prioritize overcoming base intuitions that don’t apply in the modern world;
• The naturalistic fallacy and DeSantis’ and Fetterman’s objections to lab-grown meat.

This month I’m working my way through the last ‘big’ Steven Pinker book I’ve never read all the way through — The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, published in 2002. It concerns the existence of an evolutionarily-derived human nature, as opposed to the naive idea, long-held, that the mind is ‘blank’ upon birth and only shaped by experience and education. Just this afternoon I read Chapter 13, “Out of Our Depths,” which deals with the perils of the “intuitive” thinking built into that human nature, which formed to prioritize survival in an environment humans haven’t lived in for millennia. This passage, on pp 235-6, echoes the appeals to education I’ve noted in a couple recent posts. (As well as the distinction between the intuitive and the thoughtful, both in morality and in decision-making, that runs through several recent books.)

The obvious cure for the tragic shortcomings of human intuition in a high-tech world is education. Continue reading →