David

My take on Steven Pinker’s latest tweet
 In my essay “The Next Evolution in Human Logic” I warned that institutions create coherent internal models, RCTs, citations, metrics , that feel like truth while losing contact with integrated reality at the seams. Pinker is textbook institutional hallucination. He calls the campaign against ultra-processed food “mindless,” mocks the very concept (“the more things you do to food, the less healthy it is?”), insists new RCTs prove it’s just calories and fiber, and diagnoses critics with class bias against poor people’s affordable food. Classic compartmentalised expertise: stay inside the approved silo, reduce everything to measurable variables, dismiss the boundary-crossers as quacks or snobs. Reality doesn’t respect academic boundaries. The United States derives roughly 60-70% of calories from ultra-processed products. Italy’s traditional Mediterranean pattern, olive oil, vegetables, legumes, fish, fresh staples, remains far less engineered. Obesity (BMI ≥30): •US: 40.3% (2021-2023) •Italy: 10.4% (2023-2024) nearly four times lower. Cardiovascular mortality tells the same story. Age-standardised CVD death rates in the US sit consistently higher than in Italy (roughly 20-30% worse on key GBD/AHA metrics), with American trends showing stagnation while Italy benefits from the whole-food . These are population-level outcomes in real humans living real lives. The RCTs Pinker cites control calories in artificial settings; they cannot falsify the coupled system—food matrix, satiety engineering, lifelong exposure, microbiome, cultural norms—that shows dramatically better results where ultra-processing is low. Pinker never owns the seam. He simply declares the institutional map correct and the territory biased and he’s one Americas brightest ( supposedly ) This is exactly the closed-system thinking I describe in the essay : elevate confirming signals, discount disconfirming ones, taboo boundary questions, then psychologise dissent. No one “owns” the interaction between processing, reward pathways, availability and lifelong health, therefore the seam stays invisible. The next evolution in human logic is boundary intelligence: name the missing variables, specify mechanisms and lags, weigh all signals symmetrically, separate precautionary action from p-value proof. Pinker’s confident reductionism is not evidence-based wisdom; it is the hallucination itself. Notice how he denounces the alternative view as an issue of moral character . Folks who think highly processed foods are bad for you don’t like poor people - it’s a class thing ? - yet there are a lot of poor people in Italy not being obese and not suffering from heart disease. If we keep trusting institutional coherence over reality’s integrated signals, we’ll keep wondering why populations eating more “natural” food keep posting better numbers. Read the full essay here:
ctindale.substack.com/p/the-…