If there was a scientific field (Evolutionary Sociology) that declared rationalism is harmful for humanity and the pursuit of rationality should be shunned or persecuted, I suspect that the vast majority of us would not accept these claims at face value and would look to see if their research was flawed, or their conclusions didn’t follow. And if we found such evidence, we’d probably shout it from the rooftops.
Every hunting man had a gatherer mother; every gathering woman had a hunting father.
This is the problem for the evolutionary psychology of sex differences: for each trait that you want to claim is a product of selection for a behavior that is different between sexes, you have to postulate a Plus that restricts its expression to a single sex.
So, sure, tell me that humans evolved cognitive mechanisms to aid in navigating by landmarks for better fruit and tuber searching, and I might well believe it to be reasonable; now tell me why you think it would only operate in women, and how it would be actively suppressed by genetic mechanisms in men. Then you can tell me why navigating by distance and direction is actively shut off in women. You’re the ones who like purely adaptive explanations: why would there be an advantage to individuals having each only half the suite of potential genetic navigation tools switched on?
If Evo-Psych is used by sexists the same way that Eugenics was used by totalitarians, it will suffer the same stigma and be abandoned for decades the same way. Seeing as this is a self-defense move by a traditionally oppressed group, I don’t blame them. Unless the crap is weeded out quickly the whole field will be disgraced. The victims are currently only pointing out all the crap, they didn’t allow it to get in there in the first place. The gatekeepers need to stop sleeping on the job, rather than trying to defend their prior shoddy performance.
The “It must be “Let’s all beat up Evo Psych” Day!” article seemed very convincing when I read it, but now that I had some time to think about it, it seems much less convincing. Please tell me whether I am wrong...
The article essentially says that there are no “male genes” and “female genes”, because everyone in every generation gets their genes from their father and their mother. So even when there is an evolutionary pressure only on one sex to evolve some skill, the other sex gets the skill automatically. When we find an evolutionary explanation why men have genes for some skill or trait, at the same time we found an explanation why their daughters have the same genes and the same skill or trait, too. And vice versa, when we find an explanation why women have genes for some skill or trait, we also have an explanation why their sons have the same genes and the same skill or trait, too.
A trait which would be different between sexes, would not only need genes benefiting one sex, but also some special genes to actively turn it off for the other sex. Otherwise, both sexes would have it. Even under assumption that a trait is helpful for one sex and irrelevant for the other sex, our default expectation should be to find the same genes and the same trait in both sexes. To develop otherwise, the trait would have to be actively harmful to the other sex.
For example it is useful for a man to have a penis, and it would be harmful for a woman; this is why both sexes remain different in this aspect. But we cannot use the same logic for things like color perception. Even under unrealistically generous assumptions that historically women always gathered plants, and men never did, and the color perception is useful for discerning plants, and completely useless for anything else… still, we should expect the color perception to be the same for both men and women. To expect a different result we would have to claim that color perception is actively harmful for men, which obviously is not the case.
Did I understand it correctly?
If yes, then...
Reality check: According to Wikipedia, 5-10% of men, but less than 1% of women have some form of color blindness. What?! We have just proved that this should not happen, unless men get some huge evolutionary penalty for not being colorblind, which is obviously not the case. But this information about color blindness is not some evo-psych story; it is measured data. So how is that possible?
Oh yes, there is this pesky little detail that men and women have the same chromosomes, except for the sex chromosome. Women have XX, men have XY. And the X chromosome happens to contain some data not directly related to reproduction, for example the genes for the color perception. Women get two version, men get one. It means that when something goes wrong with the color-perception genes, women have a backup copy, and men don’t. Therefore the difference.
As far as I know (but I don’t really know much about this), the Y chromosome does not contain much useful information besides specifying the male sex. So this mechanism alone could explain why men can be on average worse than women in some tasks (if the genes necessary for successfully doing the task happen to be located on the chromosome X), but not the other way around! -- By the way, which specific gene happens to be on which chromosome, that is partially a historical coincidence. There is no logical reason why the color-perception genes must be on the chromosome X. It just happened. It could have been on some other chromosome; and perhaps in some other species, it is.
But there is a more general problem with our assumption that men and women, as members of the same species sharing the same genes, must be the same in everything except reproduction (with some disadvantage for men if the genes are on the sex chromosome) -- the genes do not operate independently on each other. The results of a gene can be influenced by the internal environment, which in turn can be influenced by other genes. Different level of sexual hormones can make the same genes produce somewhat different results. Men and women do have different levels of sexual hormones, even during prenatal development. So even the same genes can work a bit differently for men and for women.
Please note that even a small difference can be noticed by people, because we observe each other a lot, for various reasons; we are a social species. You don’t need to have all men go completely blind, just to notice that there is perhaps some difference between visions of men and women. A few more percent of partially color-blind men is enough for people to eventually notice. (A possible alternative explanation, that Patriarchy spread the myth of inferior male color perception for its evil purposes, and it just randomly happened to be true, does not make a lot of sense to me.) Also, we compare humans with humans, not with other species. Even if men and women both have verbal skills tremendously superior to other species, people still notice that women have these skills somewhat better than men.
So my alternative explanation is that the same gene can produce slightly different (but still observable) results in the male and in the female body, because of a presence of sex hormones. So if there is a greater evolutionary pressure on one sex to develop some trait, as a result the whole humanity may get a gene for this trait optimized for the given sex. Both men and women will have it, and it will do the same thing; it will just do the thing a little bit better in presence of hormones of one sex than of the other sex. It could be a difference between 100% and 99% efficiency. Just a tiny difference in verbal skills, or math skills, or navigation skills, or whatever. But in the context where these skills are critical, people will notice.
Of course this does not make every evo-psych hypothesis automatically true. But neither does it make a hypothesis automatically false just because it explained a difference between sexes by greater evolutionary pressure on one of them with regard to the given trait… as the linked article seems to suggest.
So my alternative explanation is that the same gene can produce slightly different (but still observable) results in the male and in the female body, because of a presence of sex hormones.
Sex hormones are actually a huge factor in human developmental biology and the interaction with genes is interesting; the overall contribution of chromosomal differentiation to sex differentiation is pretty minor in humans (note that this is not a generalizable statement about other living things; birds might be considered to have rather more definitively-linked chromosomal sex traits, and some species don’t depend on chromosome structure directly, often using outside factors like temperature during development to influence this). Trivial example: this is why when a person assigned male at birth doses with exogenous estrogen during puberty, their breast development will tend to resemble that female-assigned relatives—testosterone vs oestrogen during the pubescent phase is the big regulator of mammary tissue growth and clustering sites for subcutaneous fat; genetics influences the potential range of that growth.
Even if men and women both have verbal skills tremendously superior to other species, people still notice that women have these skills somewhat better than men.
Yes, but why? There’s not a gene for verbal skills; there’s not even a gene for language use, nor any single smoking-gun neuroanatomical correlate of it. The ones you may have heard about—Broca’s area, FOXP2 -- are pretty broad in function and do a bunch of things, a failure of any one of which would clearly impair the ability to perform spoken language.
Is it possible that the trait we think of as verbal skill is rooted in some ultimately-genetic factor? Sure, it’s possible—but that idea isn’t particularly rigorously-supported by the available evidence, either. Meanwhile there are all these other possible contributing factors that could influence such a trait. So a well-reasoned evolutionary scenario, no matter how compelling it might sound, shouldn’t be taken as a firm foundation on which to start making overconfident, connotationally-loaded statements like that and then billing them as science.
Yes, but why? There’s not a gene for verbal skills; there’s not even a gene for language use, nor any single smoking-gun neuroanatomical correlate of it. The ones you may have heard about—Broca’s area, FOXP2 -- are pretty broad in function and do a bunch of things, a failure of any one of which would clearly impair the ability to perform spoken language.
Is it possible that the trait we think of as verbal skill is rooted in some ultimately-genetic factor? Sure, it’s possible—but that idea isn’t particularly rigorously-supported by the available evidence, either. Meanwhile there are all these other possible contributing factors that could influence such a trait.
I’m not sure what position you think you’re arguing against. The ev-psych position is that the presence of a Y chromosome ultimately causes the difference in verbal skills (along with a lot of other things) between men and women. (Most of this influence probably passes through the SRY gene and the presence of sex hormones, but that’s less certain than the effect itself.)
Your counter-argument appears to be that there isn’t a single node in the causal diagram that corresponds to just the the effect on verbal skills. I agree that there probably doesn’t exist such a node but fail to see why we should expect it to exist if ev-psych explanation is correct.
I agree denotationally but object connotationally. So, yes, it’s true that people seeking to justify social practices that we-socially-liberal-people strongly disapprove of often make poorly-reasoned appeals to evolutionary psychology, and that this is not only bad because it’s bad reasoning, but it also damages the credibility of evopsych as field, but …
I don’t know, correct me if I’m misreading your intent, but to me it seems like your comment is engaged in a mode of reasoning about conflicts between contemporary social groups, rather than reasoning about reality, and that in this venue of all places, we can actually do better. The mindset which dubs an entire area of inquiry “disgraced” because many of the thinkers working in that area are systematically biased in identifiable ways is a common one, but it’s a mistake. There’s absolutely nothing contradictory about simultaneously believing that many scholars whose work is labeled as “evolutionary psychology” have important insights about human nature, and also that many of their critics also have important insights, for the same reason that very different-looking maps can both usefully model different aspects of the same territory. Of course, this is not to say that “everyone is equally right”; rather, I’m saying we can talk about the actual observations and inferences under dispute, rather than getting distracted with irrelevant side issues like whether Satoshi Kanazawa is a bad person.
I think that there’s so little rationality in the world today, that on the current margin it’s more important for those of us who know better to explicitly say things like what I’m saying now (Social Reality Is a Strict Subset of Actual Reality; the Facts Really Aren’t on Anyone’s Side), rather than trying to apply social pressure in favor of our preferred ideology. I say this not because it’s wrong to have ideologically-derived values (I don’t like gender roles, either), but because lots of other people are already working on politics, and not very many people are working on epistemology, so that almost anyone in a position to notice this choice should take the latter. You write that “[t]he victims are currently only pointing out all the crap[;] [t]he gatekeepers need to stop sleeping on the job,” but without necessarily denying that the victims are in fact victims and that the crap is in fact crap, this really seems like a distraction from the real issues.
You quote P. Z. Myers arguing that in order for a sex difference to be evolutionarily favored, there needs to be some reason why the trait in question would be adaptive in one sex but actually maladaptive in the other. To someone in the mindset of “discrediting evolutionary psychology”, this might seem like a crushing objection, but to someone in the mindset of trying to understand human evolution, there’s no reason to be thinking of objecting to anything; it’s just a good line of reasoning that stands on its own merits. And, in fact, competent evolutionary psychologists already know it; Eliezer makes the same point (which I would imagine is standard and familiar to people who really know the literature) in his post “The Psychological Unity of Humankind”:
Note, however, that in the absence of actually opposed selection pressures, the species as a whole will get dragged along even by selection pressure on a single sex. This is why males have nipples; it’s not a selective disadvantage.
So I think a lot of the apparent disagreement between Myers et al. and (well-done) evolutionary psychology is illusory, as should not be surprising because Bayesian reasoners cannot agree to disagree; reality just doesn’t care about our culture wars.
I don’t know, correct me if I’m misreading your intent, but to me it seems like your comment is engaged in a mode of reasoning about conflicts between contemporary social groups, rather than reasoning about reality, and that in this venue of all places, we can actually do better.
“In this venue” is part of the problem. Getting down the fine details of how evolution has influenced human brains and behavior, and the signatures of that in contemporary populations, has obvious value in its own right; however, that is a tricky process, and it is carried out by biased human beings who exist in social and political contexts. Sure, a bunch of people who wanted to make an honest go at it and were good enough at filtering or sidestepping their own systemic biases could probably reach some meaningful insight into the problem, given time and the right methodology.
Doesn’t change the fact that the moment they released any of it into the wider world, it being used to further harmful and oppressive ends (including rampant spin where necessary) would be a pretty much foregone conclusion. Science, Bayescraft, what have you—they do not occur in a vacuum.
it’s just a good line of reasoning that stands on its own merits.
The problem with biology is that reason only gets you so far. The problem with discussing evolutionary psychology on LW is that biology is not particularly well-understood here; both the general contents of the field and its history, current open questions, controversies, and cutting-edge are barely even touched on, in favor of a relatively narrow slice of pop-evobio, and a bit of “Dawkins good; Gould bad!”
biology is not particularly well-understood [on Less Wrong]; both the general contents of the field and its history, current open questions, controversies, and cutting-edge are barely even touched on, in favor of a relatively narrow slice of pop-evobio, and a bit of “Dawkins good; Gould bad!”
I believe you. (Is there any way we can recruit more biologists? Or maybe there should be subject-specific “Please only comment if you’ve read at least X textbooks” threads?)
I don’t know, correct me if I’m misreading your intent, but to me it seems like your comment is engaged in a mode of reasoning about conflicts between contemporary social groups, rather than reasoning about reality, and that in this venue of all places, we can actually do better.
Conflicts between contemporary social groups are part of reality.
The topic of this debate is “How to Avoid the Conflict Between Feminism and Evolutionary Psychology?”. This debate is inherently about reasoning about conflicts between contemporary social groups.
If you want to reduce that conflict it makes sense to reason about the conflict.
Resolving conflicts is not an end in itself. The goal is to find the truth, in the process conflicts are likely to be resolved, but we shouldn’t attempt to resolve conflicts by agreeing to believe a “compromise position” at the expense of seeking truth.
The goals set out in the opening post are to reduce certain bad consequences of the conflict:
But the fact is, the conflict arose. It has only bad consequences as far as I could see, such as people fighting over each other, breaking friendships, and prejudice of great intensity on both sides.
Those goals are valid ends in themselves. Especially for those people who are autists or have otherwise weak social skills, communicating their truth in a way that doesn’t destroy some of their friendship is very valuable.
we shouldn’t attempt to resolve conflicts by agreeing to believe a “compromise position” at the expense of seeking truth.
I don’t think anybody argued in this debate that one should agree to believe in a “compromise position”.
I understood Eneasz in a way where he argued that proper evolutionary psychologists don’t spend enough public effort on debunking incorrect and sexist evolutionary psychology.
As a sidenote, evolutionary psychology predicts that few people have the goal of finding truth. Knowing “the truth” is not very useful for a hunter gatherer. It is more important for the hunter gatherer to have a high social status in his tribe.
Humans might publically profess that finding truth is their motive but they don’t act accordingly. Most people care a lot more about getting approval from other people. They care about feeling like they are in a priveliged position where they know more about the way the world works then other people.
If people would really care about being truthful, they would be less confident that their overconfident positions are true. Holding to an overconfident position on the other hand make it easier to feel like you know the truth while other people don’t.
In the cartoon Dilbert doesn’t really provide rational evidence for his claim either.
In this case there clear rational evidence that evolution evolved human’s to try to show their high status by debating. There’s little rational evidence that evolution gave people the goal of finding truth.
In the cartoon Dilbert doesn’t really provide rational evidence for his claim either.
That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have any.
In this case there clear rational evidence that evolution evolved human’s to try to show their high status by debating. There’s little rational evidence that evolution gave people the goal of finding truth.
If the only point of debating was status, people would evolve not to listen to what anyone else says. Furthermore, the results of debates and human reasoning (flawed as it is) is correlated with truth; if this wasn’t the case, we’d still be on the savannah getting chased by lions.
But the fact is, the conflict arose. It has only bad consequences as far as I could see, such as people fighting over each other, breaking friendships, and prejudice of great intensity on both sides.
This is a universal argument against debating any controversial topic.
I understood Eneasz in a way where he argued that proper evolutionary psychologists don’t spend enough public effort on debunking incorrect and sexist evolutionary psychology.
In my experience, the typical feminist complaint is that the evolutionary psychologists don’t debunk correct but “sexist” evolutionary psychology.
This is a universal argument against debating any controversial topic.
I don’t think anybody argued here that one shouldn’t debate whether evolutionary psychology is correct. The only thing that’s argued is that this debate isn’t primarily that claim.
On LessWrong I also consider it a bit strange to claim that the question of whether evolutionary psychology is correct is a controversial claim. In this venue it’s a quite boring consensus claim.
“There a way that would allow evolutionary scientistis to be better at communicating their science to the public” is a controversial claim on LessWrong.
In my experience, the typical feminist complaint is that the evolutionary psychologists don’t debunk correct but “sexist” evolutionary psychology.
So? I don’t see how that negates anything anybody argued here.
Sure. But “reducing the conflict” can also mean taking steps to reduce the significance of the undesired social dynamic / cognitive bias known as the halo effect.
First, we could recognize the limitations of attempting to apply cutting edge Ev. psych to daily life. In terms of practical effect, ev. psych is behind nutrition science in terms of relevance to individual decision-making.
Second, more hostility to what Eliezer might call blogosphere ev. psych would clearly improve the quality of discourse.
I read the first of those two articles posted awhile and took issue with it for making statements like this:
Here’s an easy indicator. If it’s a paper that presumes to tell you the evolutionary basis of differences between the sexes or races, it’s bullshit.
But I didn’t read any of his other stuff and the second article has good arguments that I had not heard before. And quippy articles are okay, sometimes, if there they are backed up.
Who are the people that are using evolutionary psychology to cast aspersions on women? Heartiste doesn’t seem like a representative pick-up artist, he is the most misogynistic and “bad” to my knowledge.
If there was a scientific field (Evolutionary Sociology) that declared rationalism is harmful for humanity and the pursuit of rationality should be shunned or persecuted, I suspect that the vast majority of us would not accept these claims at face value and would look to see if their research was flawed, or their conclusions didn’t follow. And if we found such evidence, we’d probably shout it from the rooftops.
(PZ links below, as I read him daily)
Evo-Psych is, not infrequently, used as a weapon against women.
The case made for these claims is often very bad.
If Evo-Psych is used by sexists the same way that Eugenics was used by totalitarians, it will suffer the same stigma and be abandoned for decades the same way. Seeing as this is a self-defense move by a traditionally oppressed group, I don’t blame them. Unless the crap is weeded out quickly the whole field will be disgraced. The victims are currently only pointing out all the crap, they didn’t allow it to get in there in the first place. The gatekeepers need to stop sleeping on the job, rather than trying to defend their prior shoddy performance.
The “It must be “Let’s all beat up Evo Psych” Day!” article seemed very convincing when I read it, but now that I had some time to think about it, it seems much less convincing. Please tell me whether I am wrong...
The article essentially says that there are no “male genes” and “female genes”, because everyone in every generation gets their genes from their father and their mother. So even when there is an evolutionary pressure only on one sex to evolve some skill, the other sex gets the skill automatically. When we find an evolutionary explanation why men have genes for some skill or trait, at the same time we found an explanation why their daughters have the same genes and the same skill or trait, too. And vice versa, when we find an explanation why women have genes for some skill or trait, we also have an explanation why their sons have the same genes and the same skill or trait, too.
A trait which would be different between sexes, would not only need genes benefiting one sex, but also some special genes to actively turn it off for the other sex. Otherwise, both sexes would have it. Even under assumption that a trait is helpful for one sex and irrelevant for the other sex, our default expectation should be to find the same genes and the same trait in both sexes. To develop otherwise, the trait would have to be actively harmful to the other sex.
For example it is useful for a man to have a penis, and it would be harmful for a woman; this is why both sexes remain different in this aspect. But we cannot use the same logic for things like color perception. Even under unrealistically generous assumptions that historically women always gathered plants, and men never did, and the color perception is useful for discerning plants, and completely useless for anything else… still, we should expect the color perception to be the same for both men and women. To expect a different result we would have to claim that color perception is actively harmful for men, which obviously is not the case.
Did I understand it correctly?
If yes, then...
Reality check: According to Wikipedia, 5-10% of men, but less than 1% of women have some form of color blindness. What?! We have just proved that this should not happen, unless men get some huge evolutionary penalty for not being colorblind, which is obviously not the case. But this information about color blindness is not some evo-psych story; it is measured data. So how is that possible?
Oh yes, there is this pesky little detail that men and women have the same chromosomes, except for the sex chromosome. Women have XX, men have XY. And the X chromosome happens to contain some data not directly related to reproduction, for example the genes for the color perception. Women get two version, men get one. It means that when something goes wrong with the color-perception genes, women have a backup copy, and men don’t. Therefore the difference.
As far as I know (but I don’t really know much about this), the Y chromosome does not contain much useful information besides specifying the male sex. So this mechanism alone could explain why men can be on average worse than women in some tasks (if the genes necessary for successfully doing the task happen to be located on the chromosome X), but not the other way around! -- By the way, which specific gene happens to be on which chromosome, that is partially a historical coincidence. There is no logical reason why the color-perception genes must be on the chromosome X. It just happened. It could have been on some other chromosome; and perhaps in some other species, it is.
But there is a more general problem with our assumption that men and women, as members of the same species sharing the same genes, must be the same in everything except reproduction (with some disadvantage for men if the genes are on the sex chromosome) -- the genes do not operate independently on each other. The results of a gene can be influenced by the internal environment, which in turn can be influenced by other genes. Different level of sexual hormones can make the same genes produce somewhat different results. Men and women do have different levels of sexual hormones, even during prenatal development. So even the same genes can work a bit differently for men and for women.
Please note that even a small difference can be noticed by people, because we observe each other a lot, for various reasons; we are a social species. You don’t need to have all men go completely blind, just to notice that there is perhaps some difference between visions of men and women. A few more percent of partially color-blind men is enough for people to eventually notice. (A possible alternative explanation, that Patriarchy spread the myth of inferior male color perception for its evil purposes, and it just randomly happened to be true, does not make a lot of sense to me.) Also, we compare humans with humans, not with other species. Even if men and women both have verbal skills tremendously superior to other species, people still notice that women have these skills somewhat better than men.
So my alternative explanation is that the same gene can produce slightly different (but still observable) results in the male and in the female body, because of a presence of sex hormones. So if there is a greater evolutionary pressure on one sex to develop some trait, as a result the whole humanity may get a gene for this trait optimized for the given sex. Both men and women will have it, and it will do the same thing; it will just do the thing a little bit better in presence of hormones of one sex than of the other sex. It could be a difference between 100% and 99% efficiency. Just a tiny difference in verbal skills, or math skills, or navigation skills, or whatever. But in the context where these skills are critical, people will notice.
Of course this does not make every evo-psych hypothesis automatically true. But neither does it make a hypothesis automatically false just because it explained a difference between sexes by greater evolutionary pressure on one of them with regard to the given trait… as the linked article seems to suggest.
Sex hormones are actually a huge factor in human developmental biology and the interaction with genes is interesting; the overall contribution of chromosomal differentiation to sex differentiation is pretty minor in humans (note that this is not a generalizable statement about other living things; birds might be considered to have rather more definitively-linked chromosomal sex traits, and some species don’t depend on chromosome structure directly, often using outside factors like temperature during development to influence this). Trivial example: this is why when a person assigned male at birth doses with exogenous estrogen during puberty, their breast development will tend to resemble that female-assigned relatives—testosterone vs oestrogen during the pubescent phase is the big regulator of mammary tissue growth and clustering sites for subcutaneous fat; genetics influences the potential range of that growth.
Yes, but why? There’s not a gene for verbal skills; there’s not even a gene for language use, nor any single smoking-gun neuroanatomical correlate of it. The ones you may have heard about—Broca’s area, FOXP2 -- are pretty broad in function and do a bunch of things, a failure of any one of which would clearly impair the ability to perform spoken language.
Is it possible that the trait we think of as verbal skill is rooted in some ultimately-genetic factor? Sure, it’s possible—but that idea isn’t particularly rigorously-supported by the available evidence, either. Meanwhile there are all these other possible contributing factors that could influence such a trait. So a well-reasoned evolutionary scenario, no matter how compelling it might sound, shouldn’t be taken as a firm foundation on which to start making overconfident, connotationally-loaded statements like that and then billing them as science.
I’m not sure what position you think you’re arguing against. The ev-psych position is that the presence of a Y chromosome ultimately causes the difference in verbal skills (along with a lot of other things) between men and women. (Most of this influence probably passes through the SRY gene and the presence of sex hormones, but that’s less certain than the effect itself.)
Your counter-argument appears to be that there isn’t a single node in the causal diagram that corresponds to just the the effect on verbal skills. I agree that there probably doesn’t exist such a node but fail to see why we should expect it to exist if ev-psych explanation is correct.
I agree denotationally but object connotationally. So, yes, it’s true that people seeking to justify social practices that we-socially-liberal-people strongly disapprove of often make poorly-reasoned appeals to evolutionary psychology, and that this is not only bad because it’s bad reasoning, but it also damages the credibility of evopsych as field, but …
I don’t know, correct me if I’m misreading your intent, but to me it seems like your comment is engaged in a mode of reasoning about conflicts between contemporary social groups, rather than reasoning about reality, and that in this venue of all places, we can actually do better. The mindset which dubs an entire area of inquiry “disgraced” because many of the thinkers working in that area are systematically biased in identifiable ways is a common one, but it’s a mistake. There’s absolutely nothing contradictory about simultaneously believing that many scholars whose work is labeled as “evolutionary psychology” have important insights about human nature, and also that many of their critics also have important insights, for the same reason that very different-looking maps can both usefully model different aspects of the same territory. Of course, this is not to say that “everyone is equally right”; rather, I’m saying we can talk about the actual observations and inferences under dispute, rather than getting distracted with irrelevant side issues like whether Satoshi Kanazawa is a bad person.
I think that there’s so little rationality in the world today, that on the current margin it’s more important for those of us who know better to explicitly say things like what I’m saying now (Social Reality Is a Strict Subset of Actual Reality; the Facts Really Aren’t on Anyone’s Side), rather than trying to apply social pressure in favor of our preferred ideology. I say this not because it’s wrong to have ideologically-derived values (I don’t like gender roles, either), but because lots of other people are already working on politics, and not very many people are working on epistemology, so that almost anyone in a position to notice this choice should take the latter. You write that “[t]he victims are currently only pointing out all the crap[;] [t]he gatekeepers need to stop sleeping on the job,” but without necessarily denying that the victims are in fact victims and that the crap is in fact crap, this really seems like a distraction from the real issues.
You quote P. Z. Myers arguing that in order for a sex difference to be evolutionarily favored, there needs to be some reason why the trait in question would be adaptive in one sex but actually maladaptive in the other. To someone in the mindset of “discrediting evolutionary psychology”, this might seem like a crushing objection, but to someone in the mindset of trying to understand human evolution, there’s no reason to be thinking of objecting to anything; it’s just a good line of reasoning that stands on its own merits. And, in fact, competent evolutionary psychologists already know it; Eliezer makes the same point (which I would imagine is standard and familiar to people who really know the literature) in his post “The Psychological Unity of Humankind”:
So I think a lot of the apparent disagreement between Myers et al. and (well-done) evolutionary psychology is illusory, as should not be surprising because Bayesian reasoners cannot agree to disagree; reality just doesn’t care about our culture wars.
“In this venue” is part of the problem. Getting down the fine details of how evolution has influenced human brains and behavior, and the signatures of that in contemporary populations, has obvious value in its own right; however, that is a tricky process, and it is carried out by biased human beings who exist in social and political contexts. Sure, a bunch of people who wanted to make an honest go at it and were good enough at filtering or sidestepping their own systemic biases could probably reach some meaningful insight into the problem, given time and the right methodology.
Doesn’t change the fact that the moment they released any of it into the wider world, it being used to further harmful and oppressive ends (including rampant spin where necessary) would be a pretty much foregone conclusion. Science, Bayescraft, what have you—they do not occur in a vacuum.
The problem with biology is that reason only gets you so far. The problem with discussing evolutionary psychology on LW is that biology is not particularly well-understood here; both the general contents of the field and its history, current open questions, controversies, and cutting-edge are barely even touched on, in favor of a relatively narrow slice of pop-evobio, and a bit of “Dawkins good; Gould bad!”
I believe you. (Is there any way we can recruit more biologists? Or maybe there should be subject-specific “Please only comment if you’ve read at least X textbooks” threads?)
You’ve at least got one now (though one with significantly lower free-internet-time once he returns to work from vacation).
No idea how to go about doing that. Given what LW is, they’d kinda have to want to be here.
Conflicts between contemporary social groups are part of reality.
The topic of this debate is “How to Avoid the Conflict Between Feminism and Evolutionary Psychology?”. This debate is inherently about reasoning about conflicts between contemporary social groups.
If you want to reduce that conflict it makes sense to reason about the conflict.
Resolving conflicts is not an end in itself. The goal is to find the truth, in the process conflicts are likely to be resolved, but we shouldn’t attempt to resolve conflicts by agreeing to believe a “compromise position” at the expense of seeking truth.
The goals set out in the opening post are to reduce certain bad consequences of the conflict:
Those goals are valid ends in themselves. Especially for those people who are autists or have otherwise weak social skills, communicating their truth in a way that doesn’t destroy some of their friendship is very valuable.
I don’t think anybody argued in this debate that one should agree to believe in a “compromise position”.
I understood Eneasz in a way where he argued that proper evolutionary psychologists don’t spend enough public effort on debunking incorrect and sexist evolutionary psychology.
As a sidenote, evolutionary psychology predicts that few people have the goal of finding truth. Knowing “the truth” is not very useful for a hunter gatherer. It is more important for the hunter gatherer to have a high social status in his tribe.
Humans might publically profess that finding truth is their motive but they don’t act accordingly. Most people care a lot more about getting approval from other people. They care about feeling like they are in a priveliged position where they know more about the way the world works then other people.
There a good Dilbert cartoon: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2012-10-07
If people would really care about being truthful, they would be less confident that their overconfident positions are true. Holding to an overconfident position on the other hand make it easier to feel like you know the truth while other people don’t.
The cartoon confuses scientific evidence with rational evidence.
In the cartoon Dilbert doesn’t really provide rational evidence for his claim either.
In this case there clear rational evidence that evolution evolved human’s to try to show their high status by debating. There’s little rational evidence that evolution gave people the goal of finding truth.
That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have any.
If the only point of debating was status, people would evolve not to listen to what anyone else says. Furthermore, the results of debates and human reasoning (flawed as it is) is correlated with truth; if this wasn’t the case, we’d still be on the savannah getting chased by lions.
This is a universal argument against debating any controversial topic.
In my experience, the typical feminist complaint is that the evolutionary psychologists don’t debunk correct but “sexist” evolutionary psychology.
I don’t think anybody argued here that one shouldn’t debate whether evolutionary psychology is correct. The only thing that’s argued is that this debate isn’t primarily that claim.
On LessWrong I also consider it a bit strange to claim that the question of whether evolutionary psychology is correct is a controversial claim. In this venue it’s a quite boring consensus claim.
“There a way that would allow evolutionary scientistis to be better at communicating their science to the public” is a controversial claim on LessWrong.
So? I don’t see how that negates anything anybody argued here.
Sure. But “reducing the conflict” can also mean taking steps to reduce the significance of the undesired social dynamic / cognitive bias known as the halo effect.
Could you elaborate about how exactly you think the halo effect could be reduced in this case?
First, we could recognize the limitations of attempting to apply cutting edge Ev. psych to daily life. In terms of practical effect, ev. psych is behind nutrition science in terms of relevance to individual decision-making.
Second, more hostility to what Eliezer might call blogosphere ev. psych would clearly improve the quality of discourse.
I read the first of those two articles posted awhile and took issue with it for making statements like this:
But I didn’t read any of his other stuff and the second article has good arguments that I had not heard before. And quippy articles are okay, sometimes, if there they are backed up.
Who are the people that are using evolutionary psychology to cast aspersions on women? Heartiste doesn’t seem like a representative pick-up artist, he is the most misogynistic and “bad” to my knowledge.
He’s a jaded cynic. He’s also the most insightful and intelligent PUA writing in the blogosphere. But don’t forget how cynical he is.