"Coursework which is routine at MIT is considered onerous at Harvard," says Steven Pinker.

An interesting tidbit from the interview referenced earlier.

There's also an interesting tidbit here, which reminds me of the Bill Joy argument:

Pinker: Thanks to tenure, the people who can't tolerate biological insight into human affairs are still around in the universities.

Pinker: I've found that by and large today's generation of students are far less phobic of biology, and are baffled that anyone could find empirical hypotheses to be too dangerous to study.

Interviewer: I want to go back to "empirical hypotheses ... too dangerous to study." This was the topic of the Edge Annual Question. Your own offering was the possibility that the kind of research that we have just discussed may uncover a genetic and evolutionary basis for population differences in mental abilities, personality, and other psychological traits. What are your projections for the trajectory of this idea?

This question couples into the WSJ op-eds on education.

The major problem in psychology is its lack of focus on explanation as opposed to description.

That problem is not confined to psychology.

How Steven Pinker Works