Bombshell: Oliver Sacks (a humane man & a fine essayist) made up...
Steven Pinker@sapinker
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Dec 12, 2025
~2 min read
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Bombshell: Oliver Sacks (a humane man & a fine essayist) made up many of the details in his famous case studies, deluding neuroscientists, psychologists, & general readers for decades. The man who mistook his wife for a hat? The autistic twins who generated multi-digit prime numbers? The institutionalized, paralyzed man who tapped out allusions to Rilke? Made up to embellish the stories. Probably also: the aphasic patients who detected lies better than neurologically intact people, including Ronald Reagan's insincerity. newyorker.com/magazine/2025/…
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"In his journal, Sacks wrote that 'a sense of hideous criminality remains (psychologically) attached' to his work: he had given his patients 'powers (starting with powers of speech) which they do not have.' Some details, he recognized, were 'pure fabrications.'
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Why did The New Yorker, which perpetuates the myth that they employ an army of meticulous fact-checkers, pollute our understanding of mind and brain by publishing these fabrications for decades?
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Because their primary commitment is to a belletristic, literarist, romantic promotion of elite cultural sensibilities over the tough-minded analyses of philistine scientists and technologists, their rival elite (carrying on C. P. Snow's war of prestige between "the two cultures). A common denominator behind Sacks's fabrications was that ineffable, refined intuition can surmount cerebral analysis, which is limited and cramped. It's a theme that runs through some of their other blunders, such as ...
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A fatuous diatribe against a dictionary based on a modern understanding of language, by their dance critic Joan Acocella, an ignoramus on this topic, mirroring a similar polemic by the critic Dwight MacDonald in the magazine 50 years before: slate.com/culture/2012/0…
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A thoroughly muddled essay called "The Truth Wears Off" by the (since-disgraced) writer Jonah Lehrer, misunderstanding regression to the mean and Tversky's Law of Small Numbers to argue for a mystical “decline effect,” which supposedly cast doubt on the scientific method. (I discuss this in Rationality.)
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The many articles by Malcolm Gladwell (like Sacks, a fine essayist) which mixed good reporting with dubious statistical reasoning and misleading claims (e.g., that only practice, not talent, is necessary for achievement, or that IQ above 120 doesn't matter) nytimes.com/2009/11/15/boo…
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Kudos to Rachel Aviv (and to the New Yorker, for publishing it), though they never acknowledge their own role in disseminating these tall tales, designed to sow doubt on hard-headed rationality and empiricism.
