Reddit mentions of The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

His book The Better Angels of Our Nature changed my life, and my entire outlook on the world. I've given away 4-5 copies since then, and I encourage everyone to read it. I also loved The Blank Slate. About to start his new book, Enlightenment Now.

So the first thing to debunk is your title. This does not attempt to show "overall female inferiority". It is explicitly dealing with the role of women in combat. It is trivial to debunk your claim, harder to debunk theirs. No cherry-picked list of statistics remotely proves "overall inferiority."

Ok, now as for their claims: I will agree with one core observation they make: They are right that "gender equality"-- in a purely biological sense-- is a myth. There are very clear and obvious differences between men and women. The physical differences are obvious, and the mental and emotional differences should be clear also. But note: "unequal" does not mean "inferior." Until you cite a specific task, you cannot make broad claims about inferiority.

That said, their conclusion-- "Females are clearly unsuitable for combat"-- completely wrong.

The differences between the genders are statistical, not absolute. To use the first item in their list as an example, sure, the average woman has 35% less muscle mass-- yet there are a shitload of women who can kick the average guys ass. So on any given stat, some women will actually rate higher than some men. Some women are clearly unsuitable for combat, but so are some men.

If this is a topic that interests you, check out Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate for an excellent examination of the role biolgical differences have on human behavior. It goes into the topic in detail and shows how both the political right and the political left are almost completely wrong on the topic (which is pretty much to be expected when people try to determine reality by only choosing facts that match up with their ideology).

Edit: "Until you cite a specific task, you cannot make broad claims about inferiority" sounds a bit like I am endorsing the view that one gender is inferior. That is absolutely not the case. It is certainly true that in specific contexts one gender may be better than the other on average, but beyond those specific contexts any claims of superiority are absurd.

> I would argue that our value structures aren’t hard wired in to us, they are learned.

There are certainly value structures embedded into our biology by evolution.

The idea you are expressing is called "The blank slate" or "la tabula rasa", and it's a completely untenable position to hold taking evolution, biology, neuroscience, and psychology into account. The idea that the human mind is a mere "blank slate" and that, subsequently, all our behaviours, and more generally, our plagues, come from our environment, ie, family, "society" or "culture" is nonsense.

Steven Pinker rips this idea to shreds from too may angles to count in his book "the blank slate - The modern denial of human nature". It's worth a read.

I'm currently reading The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker. I wish I had not bought it on audible, as I often have to re-listen to sections to fully understand them. I will pick this up next.

> But this is something that can instilled at an early age through education and emphasizes certain basic, fundamental ideas of how people should view one another.

This is an incorrect and baseless assumption.

>In Finland they teach people starting at a very young age about the importance of sharing and not being self-centered. These are powerful ideas when injected into people's minds starting at a young age.

Do you have any evidence that these ideas translate into any significant change in the future behavior of Fins, or are you just assuming it does? Why do you cast aside the possibility that native Fins have a genetic tendency, on a macro scale, towards less selfishness?

In fact, while you're at it, can you find me a single study, controlling for heredity, which found that you could make a child more caring and less self centered by teaching, in the long run? Because I've got a professor at Harvard who took the time to review the vast scientific literature on the subject and has found that it cannot be done.

>I guess you could say that I'm an example of successful social engineering away from my natural way of thinking,

At least, you're honest enough to say "I guess". Because that's all it is, there is no reason why a natural, genetic, tendency to resist conservative thinking could not coexist with a vulnerability to it (and triumph in the end). So no, saying that you are a success case is a big, huge, guess.

I highly recommend picking up Steven Pinker's book "The Blank Slate"

He goes deeply into the history and effects of this type of thinking and how it is used to subvert our understanding of ourselves.

He has a TED talk on the subject. And a couple of lengthy talks at various institutions that are similar to this one The national academies

He also has a great, if tangential, talk on his other book "the language instinct" over at Google authors, and a very well done one for "the floating universty" over at bigthink.

This is a great example of how liberal PC culture has stifled science.

The Left’s most rigid taboos involve the biology of race and gender, as the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker chronicles in The Blank Slate. The book takes its title from Pinker’s term for the dogma that “any differences we see among races, ethnic groups, sexes, and individuals come not from differences in their innate constitution but from differences in their experiences.” The dogma constricts researchers’ perspective—“No biology, please, we’re social scientists”—and discourages debate, in and out of academia. Early researchers in sociobiology faced vitriolic attacks from prominent scientists like Stephen Jay Gould, who accused them of racism and sexism for studying genetic influences on behavior.

Studying IQ has been a risky career move since the 1970s, when researchers like Arthur Jensen and Richard Herrnstein had to cancel lectures (and sometimes hire bodyguards) because of angry protesters accusing them of racism. Government funding dried up, forcing researchers in IQ and behavioral genetics to rely on private donors, who in the 1980s financed the renowned Minnesota study of twins reared apart. Leftists tried to cut off that funding in the 1990s, when the University of Delaware halted the IQ research of Linda Gottfredson and Jan Blits for two years by refusing to let them accept a foundation’s grant; the research proceeded only after an arbitrator ruled that their academic freedom had been violated.

The Blank Slate dogma has perpetuated a liberal version of creationism: the belief that there has been no evolution in modern humans since they left their ancestral homeland in Africa some 50,000 years ago. Except for a few genetic changes in skin color and other superficial qualities, humans everywhere are supposedly alike because there hasn’t been enough time for significant differences to evolve in their brains and innate behavior. This belief was plausible when biologists assumed that evolution was a slow process, but the decoding of the human genome has disproved it, as Nicholas Wade (a former colleague of mine at the New York Times) reported in his 2015 book, A Troublesome Inheritance.

https://www.amazon.com/Troublesome-Inheritance-Genes-Human-History/dp/1594204462/ref=mt_hardcover?_encoding=UTF8&me=

http://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2009academicfreedom.pdf

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000QCTNIM/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1