YouTuber Tom Nicholas misrepresented Steven Pinker's statements on academic writing
Tom Nicholas’s YouTube video “Why is Academic Writing so Boring?” is wildly wrong and misleading in how it portrays Steven Pinker. Nicholas falsely accuses Pinker of making arguments that he very clearly does not make, and ignores almost everything Pinker actually says.
Several years ago, I read Pinker’s book The Sense of Style—a pretty great book about how to improve writing, especially academic writing. When I saw Nicholas’s video, which only focuses on Pinker’s much shorter essay “Why Academics Stink at Writing,” I noticed the view he attributes to Pinker bears little resemblance to the view Pinker develops in the book. But I wondered if maybe Pinker’s essay was indeed a lot dumber than the book, since authors often do a very bad job of compressing their ideas into short formats. So I read the essay—and found Nicholas’s portrayal was not a remotely reasonable interpretation.
For one thing, Nicholas speaks as if Pinker is opposed to academic jargon, which is not true. Pinker thinks some jargon is essential and useful, and that some jargon is gratuitous. Some version of this position is blatantly correct. Nicholas spends a LOT of his video defending the very idea of academic jargon—a view Pinker already agrees with! Nicholas and Pinker may well turn out to disagree on the specifics of what kinds of jargon are justified, but Nicholas can’t explore this idea since he’s misrepresenting Pinker as being opposed to all jargon.
In fact, Pinker mostly focuses on issues other than jargon—and Nicholas completely ignores all of this, despite its obvious relevance to the video topic.
On two occasions in the video, Nicholas presents a quote from Pinker (from page 1) out of context—making it sound as if Pinker is saying academics in the “softer sciences” generally write badly on purpose, “to hide the fact that they have nothing to say.” But the truth is, Pinker doesn’t express this theory himself. He says it is the most popular theory among non-academics! Then in the very next paragraph, he says: “Though no doubt the bamboozlement theory applies to some academics some of the time, in my experience it does not ring true. I know many scholars who have nothing to hide and no need to impress. They do groundbreaking work on important subjects, reason well about clear ideas, and are honest, down-to-earth people. Still, their writing stinks.” This is never mentioned in the video.
Nicholas very briefly mentions that Pinker gives several reasons why most academic writing is bad, but he gives the impression that the bamboozlement theory is an argument Pinker himself is putting forward. Nicholas completely omits the fact that Pinker says the theory “does not ring true.” And Nicholas completely leaves out any mention of the reasons that Pinker spends the entire rest of the essay discussing. Pinker rejects the notion that most bad academic writing is intentionally obscure. Instead, he gives a nuanced and charitable analysis appealing to several factors, many of them fairly innocent. A large portion of his analysis is the “curse of knowledge”—roughly, the tendency for an expert on X to fail to grasp what it’s like to not know much about X, and thus to fail to write in a manner that is comprehensible to someone who doesn’t already know the same stuff.
There is a popular notion that academic writing is generally bad on purpose, and that it is generally bad due to jargon. Some parts of Nicholas’s video are a half-decent rebuttal to this view. But he depicts Steven Pinker as the avatar of this view—a view Pinker explicitly rejects.
Nicholas occasionally mentions that he agrees a lot of academic writing is bad, but he never clarifies how. Meanwhile, Pinker has actually written a lot on diagnosing the problems and giving advice on how to improve it.
Nicholas speaks as if Pinker singles out the “soft” sciences (twice misrepresenting Pinker’s quote, as I mentioned). Pinker does later claim that the humanities have some distinctive writing problems (which may or may not be true, and may be worth exploring at length-- but Nicholas doesn’t even cite this part), but in the essay under discussion he simply does not dwell long on this. Pinker criticizes the writing style of “hard” science research studies numerous times. He also says some writing problems are especially severe in linguistics, his own field.
Finally, Nicholas essentially accuses Pinker of opposing jargon out of a desire to defend status quo capitalism and make it harder to engage in high-level critique of status quo capitalism. Pinker is a capitalist, and some of his political views are probably bad. The only Pinker book I’ve read is The Sense of Style, which barely discusses politics (except in the section where Pinker defends the singular ‘they’), so I can’t comment on that. All I know is that Nicholas blatantly and severely misrepresents the Pinker essay in the video, and none of Pinker’s political positions will change this fact or make it okay.
