Prestige | Pinker Just Proved Sowell Right

I read a Steven Pinker tweet yesterday.

Pinker is interesting because he's praised Thomas Sowell for years. He's cited Sowell's work in his own books, including The Blank Slate. I read Better Angels of Our Nature in my younger years and was impressed. Parts of it are excellent, and are worth wrestling with if you're a serious thinker. (The climate chapter is one of the most unscientific things I've ever read, but that's another article.)

Then, yesterday, he made the exact rhetorical move Sowell named in 2001.

He called the conservative critique of empathy "contemptible." He used the phrases "toxic empathy" and "suicidal empathy," concepts Gad Saad has spent years developing, without engaging what either actually means... then pivoted to calling the Trump administration cruel and callous. How original! We're getting Rachel Maddow levels of insight from one of Harvard's most prestigious intellectuals.

The tweet got over 380,000 views... Matthew Yglesias rolled in with a soft endorsement about cultivating kindness over cruelty. What a nice guy! The credentialed progressive approval came as expected.

But the substantive engagement also came in, from the people Pinker was implicitly smearing... Gad Saad, a tenured Concordia professor with a Cornell PhD who has spent decades applying evolutionary psychology to behavioral science (Pinker's own field, by the way), replied with the actual definition of "suicidal empathy," a maladaptive misfiring of empathy that's hyperactive, activated in the wrong situations, directed at the wrong targets. He pointed out Pinker hadn't engaged with the concept at all... Christopher Rufo, a Manhattan Institute fellow, deployed Saad's framework and called it "a very useful way to explain what is happening in liberal America."

Pinker didn't engage them... he pretends they don't exist. The Ivory Tower lets you ignore whoever you want... that's Power.

The mechanism is clockwork. Pinker tweeted from a Harvard chair... Yglesias amplified with a corporate-liberal nod. The credentialed approval rolled in on schedule... and the actual argument happened in a completely different room. Twitter QTs, Substacks, podcasts. The argument is happening... It just isn't happening where Pinker is.

Here's the question. Does our argument matter? Is it just our echo chamber? Who's having more influence on the real world right now, Pinker or us?

Sit with that...

...here's the part that should bother you... Sowell named this exact move 25 years ago. "It is amazing how many people think they can answer an argument by attributing bad motives to those who disagree with them." Pinker has read this. Pinker has praised this writer. He's friends with him. And yesterday Pinker did exactly the thing he was warned against, in the exact form Sowell predicted...

If a Harvard psychologist who genuinely admires Sowell can't catch himself doing the move Sowell diagnosed, what hope is there for the credentialed class to ever engage seriously with the ideas they dismiss?

The answer is they don't have to. They have the megaphone. They can dismiss without engagement and the prestige machinery does the rest. You are irrelevant to them. You don't exist.

Watching Pinker do this, I realized something I've been avoiding for months.

The Atlantic of 1955 took its subjects seriously. Did the research. Cited the sources. Treated readers as capable adults. It was prestigious because it was good.

They don't take subjects on the right seriously anymore.

When was the last Atlantic profile of a serious Trump-aligned figure that took its subject seriously? When was the last Times piece that covered a Democratic scandal with the same urgency as a Republican one? When was the last Washington Post fact-check that applied the same methodology to both sides?

It's not never, but it's rare enough that you noticed.

The mechanism is straightforward. The universities were captured. The HR pipeline was captured. The publishing economy was captured. The right responded by retreating to talk radio. The result is that the work the prestige outlets used to do, when it concerns us, doesn't get done.

So somebody has to do it.

I'm not pretending to be the one... I don't have Harvard. I don't have a Pulitzer alumni network. I don't have a hundred years of inertia. I'm a guy with an email list, a website, and a backlog of ideas I want to lay out properly.

But I can do the work... Citations. Primary sources. Pictures. Real research. Treating subjects with the seriousness they deserve, even when the seriousness is an indictment.

Here's how I know this matters. I published an article last week called "The Losertarian Problem." It's been converting libertarians into Trump supporters in real time. I'm not making this up. I have the emails. One reader threatened to unfollow my page when he saw the title. I told him to read the piece and tell me what he thought. He came back and said it changed his mind. Not "made me think." ... Changed his mind.

When was the last time you read something that changed your mind?

That was a 46-minute essay (or podcast) doing measurable conversion work. It's doing the work while you're reading this right now. Go share it with some libertarians you know, let it work for you. It's a tool to be used.

Now imagine a 5,000-word researched profile of Mark Carney, the new supreme ruler of Canada. One of Trump's greatest adversaries, straight out of the City of London. Direct quotes from his book Value(s). Critical quotes from his lectures laid out section by section... citations to primary sources. The City of London framing applied like a scalpel... Pictures from his time at Goldman, the Bank of England, the World Economic Forum... The Davos crew... The receipts laid down like exhibits in a deposition.

What does that do to a Canadian who's starting to see the cartoon break? What kind of ammo does that give the Trump loyalists in their battle with the Davos crew running Canada?

What does twelve of those a year do to the discourse? We're going to find out...

Words still work... real arguments, made well, still convert. They were lying when they said the right cannot out-write its enemies... the right can. We're better at this than they are. We can model their minds. They can't model ours. We just have to actually do the work.

So that's what I'm building.

I'm not pretending I'm ready for this... I've been writing publicly for less than two months. The work I've shipped is good... none of it is yet at the standard I'm chasing. The Carney profile is going to be better than anything I've published so far... the next one will be better than that.

I left software engineering to do this... the pay cut is real. I'm not making a living off this work yet, that's the truth.

The operating costs alone run over $1,000 a month. Email service to reach the list. Server fees. Subscriptions to writers I read for research. Dev tools to build the site... that's all before I've earned a dollar from the writing itself.

I make mistakes publicly. You watch me make them. You watch me adjust. The standard goes up from here.

Here's what I'm building... some of it is months in the making. Some of it I came up with this morning... the whole thing keeps sharpening as I write it. I'm building this in front of you, not at you.

Character profiles, first. Real research, real citations, real primary sources. Public, free, on the site. The first one is coming soon. The subject is Mark Carney, the man from the City of London... one profile a month... forever.

Field notes for members. Real arguments diagnosed in real time. Facebook comments, Twitter threads, reader emails. Each one a case study in how the moves get used and how to refuse them. The training material.

The Arena... Live engagements as they unfold. When a public figure comes at me, when a thread heats up, members are in the room while it happens. They weigh in... They help shape the response. Real-time training, not just retrospective.

The members' room is where this gets serious. The only people who can comment on the site are paying members. Not because I'm gatekeeping... Because the price filters spam, communists, and tourists. What's left is signal. You are the signal. But it's more than comments: members will see drafts as I'm building them. The Carney profile is the first one they'll watch take shape. The pull quotes I'm considering. The sections I'm cutting. The threads I'm chasing. Spot an error, tell me, I'll credit you. That's how the work gets sharper. That's how we build assets.

And someday I'll recruit some of you to write your own pieces under this banner. I'll recruit others to start training operators. Not yet. I have to prove the format first. Proof of work. But that's where this goes. I have a long term vision.

Here's what membership does for you... the public articles teach you to see the moves. The training teaches you to deploy them. Field notes break down real arguments line by line so you can practice with real reference material. Watching the profiles get built lets you absorb editorial discipline by example... the room is where you stop arguing alone. You see the moves coming. You name them out loud. You hold the frame. By month three you've become the person progressives don't want to argue with.

This is the work. Slowly. One piece at a time... with you in the room.

I'm aiming to open the membership next week. The first 100 founding members lock in at $8 per month for life and get a founding member badge that shows next to their name in every comment thread. After 100, the founding pricing closes forever.

Standard pricing is $13 per month. If you want to pay more to support the work, you can. Anything above the minimum is your call.

I'm going to write my way out. They have the megaphone. We're going to have the work... they can't unwrite what we publish. Some of you are going to help me build it.

If you want to be one of the first 100 founders, hit reply and tell me.

~ Clay

@stopbeingprey on X

P.S. Tip jar is still open if today landed for you: stopbeingprey.com/tip. The real answer is membership and that opens next week.

P.P.S. The people who have donated already, I can't tell you how much that has meant. Tips can't take us where we need to go (too sporadic, can't plan around them), but every single donation has mattered... I'll tell you the truth: when a donation lands while I'm writing, it lifts my spirits in a way I can barely describe. Five bucks can make my whole day. Not a sales pitch. The truth. If you want to make my day better: stopbeingprey.com/tip