I’ve just listened to a semi-interesting radio interview with cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker about his new book The Blank Slate. That is to say, some of Pinker’s part was intersting — the callers alternated between totally brain dead, and pathetically desparate to appear erudite by name-dropping ancient philosophers with no real connection to the discussion. (A surprising number seem to think that the banal observation that “it’s not nature or nurture, it’s a combination of the two” is profound or interesting… as though anyone thought otherwise.) Pinker’s assigned foil was more skilled at the name dropping, but not really any quicker on the draw than the callers. For example, he observes (correctly enough) that arguments from human nature have often been misused to justify hierarchy, or a status quo. (Of course, arguments which falsely assumed an overly plastic human nature have lead down some bloody roads as well.) But what example does he pick to illustrate this? Well, the fact that increasingly, welfare policy seems to be focusing on incentives to work, rather than merely aiding the downtrodden. Err… what? If anything, isn’t the opposite true? If you thought certain people were just naturally incapable of taking care of themselves, then the only thing to do would be sustain them on a dole of some kind. It’s when you suppose that at least most people are capable of freely adjusting their effort and output that it makes sense to think about incentives. This, also, is not remotely a profound point… so it’s a little disturbing that the best wag they could find to go head-to-head with someone of Pinker’s caliber wasn’t able to recognize it.

Anyway, I recall Pinker having coverered a good bit of this ground already, but my interets is piqued enough that I’ll probably pick up The Blank Slate in short order. I’m also curious, since the host observes that Pinker quotes both F.A. Hayek and Thomas Sowell in the book. I recall emailing Pinker as a freshman at NYU, because it struck me that for someone so heavily influenced by Noam Chomsky, what I could divine of his politics sounded distinctly non-Chomskian. He confirmed that sense, but didn’t go into much detail. Still… he sounds rather like (dare I say it?)_ a libertarian, an impression I had throughout this interview in Reason, also worth checking out.