"Bad idea"

I finished reading Pinker's Stuff of Thought (scroll down for various links!) sometime last week, but there's one more quote I wanted to share--not because it's deep or particularly funny, but just because it makes me wonder if Steve reads my blog:
"When you combine these two aptitudes--metaphor and compositionality--the language of thought can be pressed into service to conceive and express a ceaseless geyser of ideas... Of course these abilities can also feed a ceaseless geyser of bad ideas." (page 437, for those of you following along at home.)

Now I'm reading--and enjoying--Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational, but he isn't as quotable as Pinker. Which I find odd, because in general his style is much more accessible and chatty: all the fellow researchers are his friends, he talks about his wife and children frequently, and is generally a compelling and appealing author. Maybe that's the problem: he reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell, whose book Blink I recently read (and also enjoyed very much).

So what's the problem with that? It goes too fast, like a very long magazine article. Both Ariely and Gladwell generalize quite a bit, teasing out suggestive avenues (but not exactly building arguments). There's genuine insight, but I prefer Pinker's slow, dense chapters on microclasses of verbs and his careful dissection of theories of meaning. (Admittedly, I'm more familiar with some of the background material that Pinker deals with--here, I'm thinking specifically of Jerry Fodor's theory of meaning--than I am the details of economics. Then again, Ariely doesn't ever slowly dissect those theories in a way that might make me want to read them anyway, in the way that I get excited about reading Chomsky.)

Of course, I'll want to watch Ariely if he ever gets to the Colbert Report. Malcolm Gladwell wasn't nearly as funny as Pinker (admittedly, that's a pretty high standard!), but his hair is wild enough that Colbert didn't make a joke about it (which is the kind of meta-level humor that I like).