Apr 16
The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker Viciously Nitpicked by Me. Part Three.
The Blank Slate should be read by everyone.
I’m nitpicking it as a way to get more out of reading it for the third time. I also am disappointed at the lack of online discussion of this amazing book, so I thought I’d add to it.
I want to find out to what extent I really am right and Steven Pinker wrong in these nitpicks of mine. If anyone can nitpick any my nitpicks, please do so in the comments.
I also want to make sure that Pinker knows that some people are reading the Blank Slate closely.
Let’s get to it.
On page 258, it says:
“[…]foragers[…]” doesn’t seem to be the right word. Shouldn’t that be “hunters”? Meat doesn’t grow on trees, and Pinker even says “Hunters generally have no easy way of keeping their catch from others[…]” later in the same paragraph. It’s distracting at the very least.
The phrase “[…]who pool the risks of hunting large game[…] seems inapt. Surely it’s not the *risks* that are pooled, but rather the *meat*?
The word “windfalls” is the wrong one, surely? A windfall drops into one’s lap. A large animal hunted down is not a windfall.
The word “catch” refers to fish, surely? You catch fish, but you don’t catch a woolly mammoth. The word “kill” would be better.
“[…]punished by gossip and ostracism[…] seems unlikely to be true. Surely the “punishment” would be a spear in the chest? Wouldn’t the men be hunting as group, and acting as a group to share, or not, the kill?
The quote from The Perfect Storm has nothing to do with the text that immediately precedes it. It should be placed before the the bit starting “A possible exception[…]”, or that bit should be in a footnote instead.
I’d rephrase (if I were Junger) the last line of the Perfect Storm quote as, “Each captain knows that one day, he may be the one with a frozen injector or leaking hydraulics.”
