Reminder of one of my most Edible Temperature Take: Both Steven Pinker and Peter Singer bear large amounts of direct responsibility for the worst turns in contemporary western culture— especially concerning the popular understanding of ethics and society— and should be ostracized from the canon and public intellectualism as a whole 👍🏾
Pinker's beliefs as regards the lived experience of power, oppression, and the social construction of both criminality and suffering excuse the powerful and blame the oppressed. He's largely responsible for the prejudicial stereotype of autistic people as "robotic." He did a large amount of work to rehabilitate Charles Murray in the public view. And he aided Jeffery Epstein's legal defense.
Peter Singer has straight-up advocated for eugenics and the understanding of disabled life as one of inherent suffering and thus less valuable as recently as this year.
Do not heed them. Do not center them. Remove them from your work as much as possible.
If you are in the mood for it, there is a superbly written intellectual takedown of most of Pinker's pseudo-evolutionary work by Allen H. Orr - one of the most competent and articulate evolutionary biologists I know - from 2003: