In any case, the style of the review is pretty much par for the course in academia.
A bit off topic, but that's terribly damning of academia! It's not often you get a concrete example of the "educated elite talking down to the proles" stereotype, but that review is it, in the flesh.
It's off-putting. Viscerally so. I've read bad restaurant reviews by professional critics that are less venomous.
That's weird. I don't get that impression from the review at all. Pinker is a Harvard Professor, and hardly a prole from anyone's point of view. You have to bear in mind that Pinker has put out a series of publications in the past 5-10 years that are extremely patronizing to scholars in the humanities. If you're going to tell entire disciplines that they're doing it all wrong, and that you know how to do it right, then you can't really expect a friendly response. One can imagine the reaction if, for example, historians wrote articles telling physicists how to conduct their research.
Comments
A bit off topic, but that's terribly damning of academia! It's not often you get a concrete example of the "educated elite talking down to the proles" stereotype, but that review is it, in the flesh.
It's off-putting. Viscerally so. I've read bad restaurant reviews by professional critics that are less venomous.
That's weird. I don't get that impression from the review at all. Pinker is a Harvard Professor, and hardly a prole from anyone's point of view. You have to bear in mind that Pinker has put out a series of publications in the past 5-10 years that are extremely patronizing to scholars in the humanities. If you're going to tell entire disciplines that they're doing it all wrong, and that you know how to do it right, then you can't really expect a friendly response. One can imagine the reaction if, for example, historians wrote articles telling physicists how to conduct their research.
So is the review directed at the author, or the potential reader?