Thank you for explaining your point of view. I agree that if you don’t know anything about a person other than that they are talking about evolutionary psychology, that is good evidence that they are a misogynist douchebag who is using it as an excuse to be a misogynist douchebag.
However, reversed stupidity is not intelligence. The fact that there are despicable people using a particular branch of science to justify their behavior is not strong evidence for or against the truth of the results in that branch of science. Lots of people have very silly ideas about quantum mechanics, but that doesn’t mean that quantum mechanics is broken.
I think I am not too far off the mark when I say that generally speaking, on LessWrong we aspire to judge ideas based on how right they are and not based on how much we dislike the people who have historically held ideas superficially similar to those ideas.
I wasn’t saying I was basing my opinions based on that, but that the context that people are coming from—being treated like shit by people on the internet who profess to be using evolutionary psychology but are really using pseudoscientific bullshit to defend the fact that they are misogynist and/or racist asswagons—often is why people have such an emotional reaction to evolutionary psychology when brought up, particularly when it’s brought up in discussions of sex, gender, race, and sexuality. It’s not something against evolutionary psychology as a whole—these people aren’t really even using good science of any kind—but a warning that using the term evolutionary psychology tends to get hackles up. I meant it as a sideline so people getting into discussions of evopsych with feminists know the connotations that evopsych and biological determinism have with a lot of people.
Thank you for explaining your point of view. I agree that if you don’t know anything about a person other than that they are talking about evolutionary psychology, that is good evidence that they are a misogynist douchebag who is using it as an excuse to be a misogynist douchebag.
However, reversed stupidity is not intelligence. The fact that there are despicable people using a particular branch of science to justify their behavior is not strong evidence for or against the truth of the results in that branch of science. Lots of people have very silly ideas about quantum mechanics, but that doesn’t mean that quantum mechanics is broken.
I think I am not too far off the mark when I say that generally speaking, on LessWrong we aspire to judge ideas based on how right they are and not based on how much we dislike the people who have historically held ideas superficially similar to those ideas.
I wasn’t saying I was basing my opinions based on that, but that the context that people are coming from—being treated like shit by people on the internet who profess to be using evolutionary psychology but are really using pseudoscientific bullshit to defend the fact that they are misogynist and/or racist asswagons—often is why people have such an emotional reaction to evolutionary psychology when brought up, particularly when it’s brought up in discussions of sex, gender, race, and sexuality. It’s not something against evolutionary psychology as a whole—these people aren’t really even using good science of any kind—but a warning that using the term evolutionary psychology tends to get hackles up. I meant it as a sideline so people getting into discussions of evopsych with feminists know the connotations that evopsych and biological determinism have with a lot of people.