Steven Pinker’s valiant battle against political correctness

We need some sort of corollary to the Dunning-Kruger effect (the general psychological phenomenon of stupid people being too stupid to realize they’re stupid).

This related syndrome involves people who are genuine experts in something coming to believe that their expertise makes them experts on everything, with the result that they end up sounding quite Dunning-Krugerish when they opine on subjects outside their area of expertise, which ends up being practically every subject imaginable.

I suggest the Pinker-Gelernter Continuum.

The responses are good.  My favorite is “Assassination attempts on former presidents or a Brown sophomore yelling at Sam Harris – what’s more newsworthy?” (Let’s ask Bari Weiss!)

Once again the press gets gamed, giving saturation coverage and agonized commentary to a minor event. It's not major news that a country of 325m has a few malicious jerks who (correctly) anticipate 15 minutes of notoriety with a vindictive stunt. https://t.co/zXnBJXCqdB

— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) October 25, 2018