Stephen Pinker (again) and the Decline of Art

More on Stephen Pinker.

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Education

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[PianoIsTheRemedy]

1. Couldn't it be the case that SOME behaviors are "innate", some are caused by experience, and some are a mixture of both? Why is it one or the other?

2. I see glaring evidence against Pinker's broad polemic. One particular point that I feel compelling relates to orphans who are devoid of human contact and nurturing at birth. They develop profound learning disabilities and social problems. Indeed there may be innate "machinery" FOR behavior, but it requires nurturing to develop.

[CousinoMacul]

What you call dumb I call stuck in a frame. ;-P

[randyhelzerman]

Well thanks for giving me the benefit of the doubt by assuming that I was too dumb to understand your position then :-)

[CousinoMacul]

Let me just remind you of the arguments I had with Jeff (az) a while back, but my definition of straw man does not require intentionality but simply arguing against a position that your opponent does not hold. I didn't think that you were intentionally misrepresenting my position. :-)

[randyhelzerman]

I always argue in good faith Javier. I may very well have misunderstood your point, but I've never strawmanned anybody in my life.

[randyhelzerman]

I couldn't have understood conferencereport's characterization of Pinker's take on art correctly---art is declining because we aren't writing poems that rhyme, and rhyming poems are built into our DNA? That couldn't be it. Surely Pinker's read "Leaves of grass?"

[CousinoMacul]

OK Randy, now you're just straw manning me and getting away from my original criticism. I never argued that all human behavior (or even that most) is genetically determined. In fact I even said as much (check my original comment). I just criticized your information bijection example.

As to your question, I don't have a method.

[randyhelzerman]

(cont, to CousinoMacul) w.r.t. complex animal behaviors, what do you think is the most complex nonhuman animal behavior, and how would you go about counting how much information it would take to specify it?

[randyhelzerman]

Hi CousinoMacul, so I gave an example: if you even videotape 6 hours of my life (my behaviors) and compress it with the best compression methods we know about, you've already used up more information than what is in our genome. What's more to argue for here? We couldn't specify the grammar of English in less than a gigabyte of information, let alone a lexicon of any size--how is it not blindingly obvious that human culture is not genetically transmitted? (cont)

[CousinoMacul]

Of course I'm familiar with KC, but if you know nothing about the program which generated the M set, and charged with finding the amount of information it contained, you would probably drastically overestimate it. Which is the exact mistake that I think that you're making now by estimating the information coded in human behavior, then trying to draw a bijection between that and the information in the genome. Which brings me back to the animals with complex inherited behaviors. :-)