Steven Pinker: still undefeated as the "World's Most Annoying Man"

Pinker's June 2025 appearance on Aporia
podcast owned by neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard

Everything I've heard about Steven Pinker's latest book "When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows...” has lead me to believe it is an arid exercise in mental masturbation, coupled with Pinker settling scores against his "woke" adversaries.

The review that has most convinced me I am correct is the Washington Post's review "To Steven Pinker, human knowledge is just a game" by Becca Rothfeld.

Back in 2019, Nathan J. Robinson wrote a piece for Current Affairs entitled "The World's Most Annoying Man" about Pinker. All you need do to find it is to Google "world's most annoying man."

Both this article and the Rothfeld review agree on Pinker's incuriosity. Robinson wrote:

Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker is that guy. He thinks many people are very unreasonable, and makes sweeping claims about their irrationality and moral imbecility, but often doesn’t bother to listen to what they actually say. While insisting for page upon page on the necessity of rationality, he irrationally caricatures and mocks ideas he hasn’t tried to understand. Then, when the people who believe those ideas become upset, he sees this as further proof of their emotion-driven thinking, and becomes even more convinced that he is right. It is a pattern displayed by many of those who are critics of “social justice” and the political left. (For an entire book about this, see The Current Affairs Rules For Life: On Social Justice and Its Critics.) Pinker, however, takes it to an extreme: Nobody has ever tried to look more Reasonable while being so ignorant and condescending.

Rothfeld says:

Yet Pinker is so confident in his mode of inquiry, so incurious about anything that spills beyond its tidy bounds, that he tries to enfold even unwieldy and sprawling truths into his cramped formal apparatus. Facial expressions are nothing but “coordination signals”; determining whether you are laughing with a friend or laughing at an enemy is “a signaling problem”; and — you can’t make this up! — “social relationships are coordination games.”

Rothfeld and Robinson agrees about the condescending part too. 

Rothfeld:

This is the kind of public intellectualism that makes the public hate intellectuals. Instead of showing what ideas have to teach us about life, Pinker holds a gun to life’s head and demands it conform to his thought experiments. And he does it with the patronizing tone of someone telling his readers what to think from on high. In one passage, prompting us to imagine increasingly higher-order levels of knowledge about knowledge, he virtually pats us on the head. “Now let’s try four layers,” he writes. After we’ve tackled four, he asks, encouragingly, “Think you can handle a fifth layer?”

So you can add "incurious" and "condescending" to the list of adjectives about Pinker that critics have agreed on, along with "likes to have it both ways" - we could shorten that to "incoherent" - and "blithe." I documented those critical responses on RationalWiki back in the time before it became the Gimp in Maynard and Zed's dungeon. 

From my perspective, the concept of "everyone knows that everyone knows" is a frustrating one, because neither Robinson nor Rothfeld know the role that Pinker has played in promoting race pseudoscience, an ethical and intellectual failure that I consider far worse than his annoying, tiresome, condescending literary personality and the books he produces. Or worse, they know Pinker's view on race pseudoscience but don't think it matters.

And far more people know that Pinker hung out with Jeffrey Epstein than about his promotion of race pseudoscience. So how does Pinker explain someone like me, who knows something that most people don't know? Why do I spend time trying to tell people things they don't know, and possibly don't want to know?

My guess: Pinker has no curiosity about something he can't explain with his simple game theory philosophy.