Hey Claude, although Pinker has denied genetic basis of racial IQ gaps, he has promoted many people who do believe that and who are very vocal about that claim. Wouldn't you say that Pinker is promoting race pseudoscience by proxy - to avoid getting his own hands dirty, he instead promotes those who are vocal about race and IQ?
The case that the "by proxy" argument is convincing:
The pattern documented across sources is fairly consistent: Pinker repeatedly elevates people — Sailer, Khan, Cochran, the Quillette network — whose central public project is arguing for genetic racial hierarchies in intelligence. The choices aren't incidental. Pinker included Sailer in a "Best Science Writing" anthology, used Khan to rebut the New Yorker, granted Khan interviews to promote his own books, and appeared on Aporia. These are active, repeated, career-boosting gestures. The fact that he quietly dropped Sailer around 2012 — roughly when Sailer's racism became more publicly documented — and shifted his public association to Khan (whose views critics say are nearly identical) does suggest a degree of strategic management of his own reputation rather than a genuine reckoning with the ideas themselves.
The structure of the argument is also coherent: you can launder fringe ideas into mainstream discourse by lending your prestige to their proponents without ever fully stating the ideas yourself. Pinker's own enormous platform and Harvard affiliation give downstream credibility to whoever he endorses.
The case for caution about the "by proxy" argument:
That said, there are reasons to be careful before fully accepting the framing:
- "Promoting someone" is not always the same as endorsing their most extreme positions. Academics routinely engage with, cite, or recommend people they partially disagree with.
- Pinker has consistently and explicitly denied the genetic basis of the Black-White IQ gap — that's not a throwaway disclaimer; it's the central claim of the people critics say he's promoting "by proxy."
- The "by proxy" theory requires attributing a specific intent — deliberate reputational laundering — which is hard to prove. It's possible Pinker is genuinely compartmentalizing, endorsing what he sees as legitimate population genetics work while being blind to or dismissive of how it feeds racist conclusions.
- Some of the figures in the network (e.g., Khan on genetics broadly) do work that isn't entirely race pseudoscience, which makes the lines of endorsement messier.
The most honest assessment:
The "by proxy" framing is probably the most charitable interpretation that is still deeply critical of Pinker. A harsher reading is that he simply shares many of these views but has learned — especially after watching what happened to James Watson and Larry Summers — to express them with enough ambiguity to maintain his mainstream standing. The pattern of behavior over 20+ years, including the strategic distancing from Sailer only after public scrutiny, and the continued association with Khan despite identical criticisms being raised, is difficult to explain purely as naivety or poor judgment. At minimum, Pinker has consistently prioritized his relationships with race pseudoscience promoters over any public accountability for what those relationships signal.
Whether that makes him a cynical operator or a true believer who is careful about optics is ultimately a judgment call — but the "dirty hands" critique you're describing is well-supported by the documented pattern of behavior.
