Given what I know about Gould I suspect he likes group selection for the same reason he dislikes sociobiology. Namely, because group selection is moral.
As for your main point while I agree that it’s dangerous to get into affective death spirals around your heroes and anti-affective death spirals about your villains, it is also true that the fact that someone doesn’t care about the truth of a theory because he finds it immoral is Bayesian evidence that his other statements aren’t necessarily reliable. After all he might only be making them because he finds them moral.
the fact that someone doesn’t care about the truth of a theory because he finds it immoral is Bayesian evidence that his other statements aren’t necessarily reliable.
True. I don’t want to go overboard and say that we shouldn’t accumulate evidence about what people have done in the past. But I was not being a rational Bayesian. I wanted to be a Good Guy and feel righteous.
Given what I know about Gould I suspect he likes group selection for the same reason he dislikes sociobiology. Namely, because group selection is moral.
As for your main point while I agree that it’s dangerous to get into affective death spirals around your heroes and anti-affective death spirals about your villains, it is also true that the fact that someone doesn’t care about the truth of a theory because he finds it immoral is Bayesian evidence that his other statements aren’t necessarily reliable. After all he might only be making them because he finds them moral.
True. I don’t want to go overboard and say that we shouldn’t accumulate evidence about what people have done in the past. But I was not being a rational Bayesian. I wanted to be a Good Guy and feel righteous.