POSTED November 17, 2009

gladwell.com: Pinker on “What the Dog Saw.”

More Gladwell being a tool.  It’s pretty funny that he blithely side steps the main argument and instead defines a small point using ad hominem attacks.  (And of course, Steve Sailer joins in on the comments.)

The main argument, that Gladwell doesn’t even have a college-level understand of basic math concepts as witnessed by his incorrect explanation of basic concepts and that he’s misunderstood and misspelled Eigenvalue as “Igon Value”, is backhandedly dismissed as a “spelling error”.  These personal responses, saccharine-coated in the veneer of fake over-politeness, are one of the worse things about blogs.  People should just let criticism stand on its own, or keep their correspondence private, rather than looking like fools on their own website.

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"I wondered about the basis of Pinker’s conclusion, so I e-mailed him, asking if he could tell me where to find the scientific data that would set me straight. He very graciously wrote me back. He had three sources, he said. The first was Steve Sailer. Sailer, for the uninitiated, is a California blogger with a marketing background who is best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people."