“On March 14th at 7pm ET, thought leader and Harvard professor Steven Pinker will release digital collectibles of his famous idea that ‘Free speech is fundamental.'”

A commenter points us to this juicy story:

John Glenn, huh? I had no idea. I guess it makes sense, though: after the whole astronaut thing ended, dude basically spend the last few decades of his life hanging out with rich people.

Following the link:

Two tiers will be available: the gold collectible, which is unique and grants the buyer the right to co-host the calls with Pinker, will be priced at $50,000; the standard collectibles, which are limited to 30 items and grant the buyers the right to access those video calls and ask questions to Pinker at the end, will be priced at 0.2 Ethereum (~$300).

Here’s the thing. Pinker’s selling collectibles of his idea, “Free speech is fundamental.” But we know from some very solid research that scientific citations are worth $100,000 each.

So does that mean that Pinker’s famous idea that “Free speech is fundamental” is only worth, at best, 0.5 citations? That doesn’t seem fair at all. Pinker’s being seriously ripped off here.

On the other hand, he could also sell collectibles for some of his other ideas, such as, “Did the crime rate go down in the 1990s because two decades earlier poor women aborted children who would have been prone to violence?”, “Are suicide terrorists well-educated, mentally healthy and morally driven?”, “Do African-American men have higher levels of testosterone, on average, than white men?”, or, my personal favorite, “Do parents have any effect on the character or intelligence of their children?” 50 thousand here, 50 thousand there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money.

All joking aside, I don’t see anything wrong with Pinker doing this. The NFT is a silly gimmick, sure, but what he’s really doing is coming up with a clever way to raise money for his research projects. If I had a way to get $50,000 donations, I’d do it too. It’s hard to believe that anyone buying the “NFT” is thinking that they’re getting their hands on a valuable, appreciating asset. It’s just a way for them to support Pinker’s professional work. One reason this topic interests me is that we’re always on the lookout for new sources of research funds. (We’ve talked about putting ads on the blog, but it seems like the amount of $ we’d end up getting for it would be not worth all the hassle involved in having ads.) As is often the case with humor, we laugh because we care.

And why is particular story this so funny? Maybe because it seems so time-bound, kind of as if someone were selling custom disco balls in the 1970s, or something like that. And he’s doing it with such a straight face (“* * * NOW LIVE . . . My first digital collectible . . .”)! If you’re gonna do it at all, you go all in, I guess.

P.S. Following the links on the above twitter feed led me to this website of McGill University’s Office for Science and Society, whose slogan is, “Separating Sense from Nonsense.” How cool is that?

What a great idea! I wonder how they fund it. They should have similar offices at Ohio State, Cornell, Harvard (also here), the University of California, Columbia, etc etc etc.