ClaimsSteven Pinker

“Social and Political Bias: Newest lecture in Gen Ed 1066, Rationality.”

Steven Pinker, Harvard professor, on X 12 March 2020 Post by @sapinker on X, 2020-03-12 (X)

Factual Their own work or organisation

The newest lecture in Gen Ed 1066, Rationality, is titled Social and Political Bias.

Resolved true The record shows it happened or was so.

Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?

The second judge would not resolve this claim; the verdict shown is the first judge's.

What would count as true or false

Judged as of 2020-03-12. True: a lecture titled 'Social and Political Bias' was posted or delivered as the newest lecture in Harvard's Gen Ed 1066 'Rationality' course on or just before that date. Mostly true: the lecture exists in that course with a slightly different title, or was released a few days off that date. Mixed: the lecture exists but was not the newest at that time. Mostly false: a lecture with that title exists but belongs to a different course or course number. False: no such lecture or course existed.

Set before the research began.

Evidence (3)

  1. E1 [PDF] Rationality - olli-dc.org OLLI-DC (course syllabus by Ray Squitieri) · February 2021

    “Pinker, “Rationality,” lecture 9, “Heuristics, Biases, and Cognitive Illusions”; lecture 13, “Social and Political Bias.””

  2. E2 Rationality Spring 2020, Tues & Thurs 1:30-2:45 Harvard ... Steven Pinker (Harvard course syllabus, General Education 1066) Own record

    “Thurs, Mar. 12: Political and social bias. Motivated reasoning. Biased evaluation.”

  3. E3 Rationality Spring 2020, Tues & Thurs 1:30-2:45 Harvard ... Steven Pinker (Harvard course syllabus, General Education 1066) Own record

    “Lectures: You must attend all the lectures; as a rule, recordings of the lectures will not be available.”

Reasoning

E2, the official Spring 2020 Gen Ed 1066 Rationality syllabus, schedules the lecture "Political and social bias" for Thursday, March 12, the date of the claim. E1, an independent syllabus from 2021, cites lecture 13 of Pinker's "Rationality" course under the exact title "Social and Political Bias". Taken together, the sources show that a lecture titled "Social and Political Bias" belonged to Pinker's Rationality lectures [E1] and that a session on political and social bias was scheduled for March 12, 2020 in the course [E2], which is consistent with it being the newest lecture when the claim was made.

Cite this claim

Steven Pinker, “The newest lecture in Gen Ed 1066, Rationality, is titled Social and Political Bias.” (said 12 March 2020). Verdict: resolved true. Reliability API, claim c_280319ab87bc, method 0.1.0+28da144b, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_280319ab87bc

This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.

Reply to this claim

For Steven Pinker, or someone speaking for them: a correction or counter-evidence. Replies are read before anything is shown; an approved reply shows your name, role, date, statement and link. Your email address is never shown and is deleted 30 days after the decision (privacy).

More factual claims by Steven Pinker

  1. Resolved true Factual 26 September 2026
    “To be sure, my arguments were laid out five years before the release of LLM chatbots, and I would update some of them today.”

    Pinker's arguments on AI risk were laid out five years before the release of LLM chatbots.

  2. Mostly true Factual 2023
    “I’ve got to say that I’m one of the ones who said that’s just not how language works.”

    Pinker was among those who argued that predicting the next word is not how language works.

  3. Resolved true Factual 24 December 2022
    “discovered and edited by me & Harvey Silverglate”

    The lost Carl Sagan lecture 'Science and Civil Liberties' was discovered and edited by Steven Pinker and Harvey Silverglate and appeared in Quillette's 2022 Editors' Choice.

  4. Resolved true Factual 27 December 2019
    “Perhaps recklessly, I took on this assignment from the Financial Times for their end-of-year issue.”

    Pinker took on an assignment from the Financial Times to write about what to expect from the 2020s for its end-of-year issue.

  5. Resolved true Factual 23 December 2019
    “NIPS vs. NeurIPS: guest post by Steven Pinker”

    Steven Pinker wrote a guest post titled 'NIPS vs. NeurIPS' on Scott Aaronson's blog Shtetl-Optimized.

All of them

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