I find it interesting that both you and MixedNuts have found it necessary to invoke Nazis in order to construct a marginally convincing case for your interpretations of eridu’s position. Your thought experiment boils down to an equation of “the patriarchy” as it exists in present-day Western society with Nazi Germany (which would put eridu in pretty clear violation of Godwin’s Law*), and MixedNuts’ counterexample to my proposed Generalized Anti-Creationist Principle is a variant on the classic example of when it’s not only morally acceptable but morally obligatory to lie: “when hiding Jews from the S.S. in one’s basement.”
It also seems as though the “certain social contexts” where the results of evo-psych research ought to be suppressed, according to eridu, are pretty much every social context that exists outside of Women’s Studies departments and the internal discussions of radical feminist organizations. That seems untenable to me.
I just realized that Godwin’s Law is meant to prohibit a special case of Yvain’s Worst Argument in the World: the case in which the archetypal member of the category into which one places X is Naziism.
The non-Eridu argument against evo-psych is that many such researchers are abusing/ignorant of the halo effect that leads to biased results/unjustified moral assertions about sex roles in society.
Somewhere in the archive is an article by lukeprog where he decided to break up with his girlfriend and wanted to let her down easy. In deciding how to do that, he debated with himself about telling her that his desire for a woman with larger breasts was an evolution-caused preference, not a comment on the woman specifically.
That’s nonsense, and uncritical acceptance of evo-psych runs the serious risk of exacerbating the problem.
Somewhere in the archive is an article by lukeprog where he decided to break up with his girlfriend and wanted to let her down easy. In deciding how to do that, he debated with himself about telling her that his desire for a woman with larger breasts was an evolution-caused preference, not a comment on the woman specifically.
That’s nonsense, and uncritical acceptance of evo-psych runs the serious risk of exacerbating the problem.
The problem with LukeProg’s decision to write that break up essay wasn’t evo-psych. The problem was that writing a huge essay on why you’re breaking up with someone, including detailed analysis of why there is insufficient attraction is a horrible thing to do to someone without even giving any benefit to yourself.
This doesn’t constitute an argument here against evo-psych as an accurate description of reality. It does constitute:
A solid illustration of how social awkardness can result in doing harm to others despite all the best intentions.
An extremely weak appeal to consequences—an argument that evo-psych should not be studied because bad things could happen from people understanding evolutionary psychology. I describe it as weak since there is little indication that the insult Luke gave given his awareness of evo-psych is any worse than the insult he would have given if ignorant. For example “I’m dumping you because I like big tits, it’s just the way I am” is about as insulting as “I’m dumping you because I like big tits, I just evolved that way” (details changed as necessary).
In conclusion, keep your moralizing out of my epistemic rationality! At least while posting on this site, please. You can argue that a particular subject should not be discussed here for instrumental reasons in accordance with your own preferences. However it is never appropriate (on lesswrong, I assert) to argue that a belief must be considered false because of perceived consequences of someone believing it.
The problem was that writing a huge essay on why you’re breaking up with someone, including detailed analysis of why there is insufficient attraction is a horrible thing to do to someone without even giving any benefit to yourself.
I don’t know that that’s necessarily the case. My first serious girlfriend wrote me a very long e-mail before our break-up, laying out her rational analysis of why she believed our relationship was untenable in the long term; she actually succeeded in persuading me to see it her way, which I’d been resisting for emotional reasons. That allowed us to have an amicable parting of ways, and we remain good friends to this day.
I’ll think about that—from the upvotes, it appears you’re not the only Less Wronger interested (at least, I assume an upvote to a one-liner request like that means “I’d like to see it, too”). I wouldn’t post an unedited copy, as there are some details in it that I consider very private, as, I think, would my former girlfriend. But I’ll take a look at it later and see what would need to be redacted. I would also have to ask her permission before posting any of it, of course, and I’m reluctant to bother her just now—she has a newborn daughter (as in, born last week), so I expect she’s rather preoccupied at the moment.
Heh. Even taking that into account, I still think your odds are better with a randomly chosen LWer as a recipient than a randomly chosen partner-of-a-female. But that’s admittedly a pretty low bar.
I would prefer to hear all the reasons, myself and am ten times more likely to choke on fluff like “It’s not you, it’s me.” than burst into flames because somebody criticized me. I need closure and feedback and for my life events to make sense. For those purposes, the only information I’d deem good enough is a serving of reality.
Shminux’s point, and the rest of this thread, is about predicting the behavior of typical women in order to make an accurate assessment about what breakup approach is best. Do you think that your preferences are typical for women, or even typical for women-who-LW-folks-date, many of whom are not themselves LWers?
According to Vladimir, LessWrong has somewhere in the ballpark of 600-1000 active users. According to Yvain’s 2011 survey, 92 of the 1090 respondents were female. If I alone would respond well, that increases the chances of a good response by an LW woman by over 1% (unless you want to include inactive members). Since Dave’s point is not “You’re more likely to get a good response from an LW woman than not.” and was “You’re more likely to get a good response from an LW woman than a random woman.” me saying that actually gives a potentially significant support to his point. If you calculate the chances of a random woman responding well to be under 1% (seems reasonable) and don’t consider inactive users to be an “LWer”, then I totally supported his point. If not, then all Dave needs to do to figure out whether he’s right is to count the number of LW women he is sure would respond well and compare the ratio with his estimate of how many random women would respond well. I doubt anyone here thinks the percentage of random women that would respond well is beyond the single digit percents. If that’s right, my saying so gave 10% or more of the support needed to think that he’s right. As for the behavior of the average LW woman, I have no idea. That I would respond well confirms that at least some LW women would respond well, which might help people figure out if it’s worthwhile to find out exactly how many of us there are.
Which doesn’t contradict Dave’s idea that LW women / the women that LW members date might be more likely to respond well.
Are you sure you know how you would react...
Totally sure. My last boyfriend attempted to give me fluff and I tore through it. I always want to get down to the bottom of why a relationship did not work. Even if reality is devastating, I want reality. You can tell I’m strong enough to deal with criticism because I invite it often. You can tell I’m strong enough to swallow criticism because of my elitism thread—check out the note at the top. I feel kind of dumb for not seeing these problems in advance (hindsight bias, I guess?). Now that I do see how awful my thread was—in public of all places—have I vanished, or gone crybaby or begged anybody for emotional support?
Dave’s idea that LW women / the women that LW members date
Just for clarity, I did not suggest the latter. What I suggested was that this sort of thing, initiated by the partner of an LW member, is more likely to work out well… put differently, that LW members are more likely to respond well (or at least less likely to respond poorly)… than for non-LWers.
The gender of the LW member, and the gender of the partner, is not strictly irrelevant but is largely screened off by their membership.
I make no such claims about the partners of LWers.
Since your initial (and highly promising) arrival, I must admit that I lost respect for you faster than I have for any other poster in the history of LessWrong.
Downvoted because I don’t like cheapshots. Criticisms about the community’s behavior in that thread should be confined to that thread, and should be substantive. The way you’re doing it now forces other commenters to choose between addressing your cheapshot and derailing the comment thread or allowing the cheapshot to go unchallenged.
I wouldn’t have downvoted if you’d used less strong language in your criticism or if you had supported your argument better. It’s okay for you to reference other threads as proof of things, in my book. But I don’t like that you asserted the behavior in that discussion was “completely irrational” without providing any sort of support for your argument; you just threw out an unfair label in a context where it was difficult to challenge it.
It seemed a reasonable to me; after all, shminux’s comment wasn’t random unrelated criticism, it was a germane followup to a previous comment. Posting it in the other thread eliminates the entire purpose of the comment.
I dispute the accuracy of shminux’s comment, and yet also feel reluctant to challenge the comment because it would be a digression from the topic of the above comments. That’s a problem.
I recognize the need to draw from other sections of the site in order to talk about LessWrong as a community; I’m fine with that. But if we’re going to do that then I think we need to at least use good arguments while discussing those other threads. Otherwise it becomes too easy to just criticize things in contexts where they’re difficult to challenge.
Don’t you? Fine, I’ll bite. While the bell curve is pretty wide for both genders, an average (western?) male tends to be more analytical and reserved and less emotional than an average (western?) female. At least in my (admittedly limited) personal experience observing my family, friends and acquaintances. Certainly the cultural stereotypes bear it out, as well. Thus he would be (again, on average) more inclined to listen to reasoned arguments, as opposed to “It’s not working out between us” with some made-up excuses designed to make him feel better. Whereas she (on average) would be likely to take every logical argument as in Luke’s story, as a personal affront, insult and rejection. There are plenty of exceptions, but if you take 1000 break-ups, I’d wager that in the majority of the cases a bit of reason on the woman’s side would make it less painful for the guy, while a bit of logic on the man’s side would probably make it more painful for the girl than “it’s not you it’s me”.
I have no idea how same-sex or other less-standard breakups work out in terms of rationality.
At least in my (admittedly limited) personal experience observing my family, friends and acquaintances. Certainly the cultural stereotypes bear it out, as well.
Your perception of the people you know plus cultural stereotypes is really pretty weak evidence. I could make the following argument: In my immediate family, the men are more emotional and less analytical/reserved than the women—they tend to get angry/aggressive in response to difficult things, whereas the women seem to stay calm. Plus, cultural stereotypes bear out the idea that men are more aggressive/angry than women. Therefore, men would be more likely to take this kind of letter badly.
I’m not making that argument, but I can’t see that it would be much weaker than yours.
The problem with LukeProg’s decision to write that break up essay wasn’t evo-psych. The problem was that writing a huge essay on why you’re breaking up with someone, including detailed analysis of why there is insufficient attraction is a horrible thing to do to someone without even giving any benefit to yourself.
There’s a large difference between writing an analysis of what’s going wrong in a relationship based on information about the relationship itself and writing an evo-psych analysis which concludes that the other person has the whole weight of evolution against anyone finding them attractive.
It occurs to me that what you’ve done there is a common enough pattern, though I’m not sure it’s exactly a fallacy—seeing that something causes bad outcomes, but not being clear on what the scope of the something is.
Before long, Alice was always pushing me to spend more time with her, and I was always pushing to spend more time studying psychology. By then I knew I couldn’t give her what she wanted: marriage.
So I broke up with Alice over a long conversation that included an hour-long primer on evolutionary psychology in which I explained how natural selection had built me to be attracted to certain features that she lacked. I thought she would appreciate this because she had previously expressed admiration for detailed honesty. Now I realize that there’s hardly a more damaging way to break up with someone. She asked that I kindly never speak to her again, and I can’t blame her.
Here’s one I’ve tried to find. In the recent discussion of feminism, I remember someone (and I’m thinking it wasn’t eridu) saying that part of the purpose of the harsher attacks about racism and sexism was to make opposed people feel less sure of themselves in general.
One problem with lukeprog’s essay would be that it would muddle the evolutionary-cognitive boundary. The fact that I, in the 21st century, like big tits is logically distinct from the fact that human males, in the EEA, who slept with curvier women had more children in average, though the latter is the cause of the former.
What matter when deciding whether to use a program is what it does, not who wrote it (well, except for copyright-related reasons, but Azatoth isn’t going to sue me for infringement anyway).
I think you are misinterpreting me. I’m not saying “Never discuss evo-psych.” (That’s eridu).
I’m saying that there are strong reasons to distrust current evo-psych results. One of those reasons is that evo-psych, as used in popular culture, provides justification for writing essays like the one you and I both think was a bad idea. That is, this statement:
For example “I’m dumping you because I like big tits, it’s just the way I am” is about as insulting as “I’m dumping you because I like big tits, I just evolved that way” (details changed as necessary).
is not true. “It’s just the way I am” is usually a false deflection of responsibility—invoking evo. psych to make the statement true makes the statement actually effective at deflecting moral responsibility. If that weren’t true, lukeprog would not even have considered saying it to the woman.
On evo-psych generally:
Consider phrenology. The traits at issue were well worth studying. And as far as I know, the field used accepted practices of empiricism for its day. But the whole field went off track, to the point that essentially no phrenology results are actually useful for scientific research today. I think that the social pressures towards legitimizing our current normative practices put evo-psych (and to a less extend, all psychological research) at serious risk of wandering off into a similar wilderness.
If evo-psych manages to recover from what appear to be its current mis-steps I (but apparently not eridu) would welcome back with open arms.
invoking evo. psych to make the statement true makes the statement actually effective at deflecting moral responsibility.
No, it doesn’t. There is no moral license to be human. If action X is harmful, ascribing an evolutionary cause to X doesn’t make it not harmful — and to a consequentialist it is harm that is at the root of immorality.
If evolution built me to rape nubile young womenfolk, well, evolution can just fuck off.
That’s the second misunderstanding of what evolutionary psychology means that leads people to reject it on moral rather than factual grounds: if they’re not indulging in the naturalistic fallacy, they’re indulging in biological determinism, or think the evolutionary psychologists are. “X is a natural part of human behavior that exists because it was favored by natural selection in the past” does not mean “X is good,” nor does it mean “X is inevitable”—evo. psych. is about identifying tendencies, not certainties.
Evolution couldn’t build you “to rape nubile young womenfolk,” period, because humans are far too behaviorally plastic for that. What it could do, and, judging by the history of human behavior, probably did do to at least a large proportion of the male population, is built you to have an impulse to rape under some circumstances—when rejected by a woman with whom you’re already alone and with whom you had some expectation that you might have sex, for example, or when encountering a female member of an enemy population in war. Whether you act on that impulse or not depends on both the hereditary aspects of your personality and, probably more important, how you were socialized: these factors affect whether you feel any shame, empathy for your potential victim, fear of consequences, etc. that could outweigh the impulse to rape.
It’s also important to understand that evo. psych. is not saying that rapists are motivated by a conscious desire to reproduce: the impulse generally takes the form “I want to get my rocks off” and/or “I want to hurt this b!+(#,” not “I want to make a baby.” That’s probably true of the individuals committing the rapes even when rape is organized and officially sanctioned by military or political leaders as a way of “invading” an enemy population’s gene pool, as in Bosnia or the Sudan.
It’s also notable that evo. psych. tells us nothing about why any particular man committed rape while another man in similar circumstances did not—nor about why some men prefer large-breasted women and others don’t, for that matter. What it does offer is an explanation for why rape is part of the repertoire of human behavior at all. It’s entirely possible to imagine a mammal species in which no male ever attempts to copulate with an unwilling female, and female rejection instantly shuts off male desire. As I understand it, it’s even possible to identify such species in nature: IIRC, canines and the great cats, at least, have never been observed to engage in the kind of coercive copulation frequently seen in dolphins, chimps, orangutans, ducks, etc. That’s pretty much what evolutionary biology would predict, too: the big carnivores are so well-armed that the risk of serious injury either to the male, or to the female (preventing her from successfully bearing and rearing the male’s offspring), would most likely outweigh the reproductive advantage of copulating with more females than are receptive to the male’s advances.
I think you are misinterpreting me. I’m not saying “Never discuss evo-psych.”
No, and I’ve stated that stated that saying “never discuss evo-psych” is acceptable while muddling normative claims in with epistemic claims is not.
I’m saying that there are strong reasons to distrust current evo-psych results.
I assert that your argument centered around Luke’s essay to his girlfriend absolutely does not support this.
One of those reasons is that evo-psych, as used in popular culture, provides justification for writing essays like the one you and I both think was a bad idea.
It doesn’t provide such justification and even if it did this would not constitute evidence that evo-psych is epistemically inaccurate.
I’d like to request some constructive criticism: What would you suggest someone do when they think an empirical field has been tainted by normative claims?
I really do think that historical study of other cultures provides evidence that contradicts some psychological “findings.” But it is the nature of the endeavor that “harder” sciences like psychology carry more weight than softer sciences like history. I could point to cases like Bradwell v. Illinois for examples of tainted scientific processes, but I acknowledge that doesn’t rise to the level of proof we would expect from a true “hard science” discipline like physics.
I could point to cases like Bradwell v. Illinois for examples of tainted scientific processes,
I don’t see evidence of anything resembling a scientific process, tainted or otherwise, behind Justice Bradley’s patronizing pontification about “the proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex,” especially when the pompous old bastard specifically attributed his view of proper gender roles to “the law of the Creator.”
What would you suggest someone do when they think an empirical field has been tainted by normative claims?
Upvoted because I consider this question a far more useful one than many of the things that led up to it.
My own answer is, roughly speaking, the same for all cases where something potentially useful is being tainted by an external factor:
1) estimate how much work is involved in separating the tainted stuff from the non-tainted stuff, 2) estimate the benefit of the non-tainted stuff, and 3) if the estimated work/benefit tradeoff is high enough, do the work, otherwise throw the whole mess out.
You seem to have done that, at least in a BOTE kind of way, and concluded that the tradeoff doesn’t justify the work. Which is cool.
It’s not clear to me whether anyone is actually disagreeing with you about that conclusion, or (if they are) whether they think your estimate of the work is too high, your estimate of the benefit too low, or your threshold tradeoff too low.
I upvoted both your post as well as the parent, for putting the issue much more clearly than anyone else:
1) estimate how much work is involved in separating the tainted stuff from the non-tainted stuff, 2) estimate the benefit of the non-tainted stuff, and 3) if the estimated work/benefit tradeoff is high enough, do the work, otherwise throw the whole mess out.
That said, I disagree with TimS because I believe his estimated benefit is too low.
His estimate of the work involved might be too high as well, but I don’t know enough about the field to make anything other than a guess.
As for my reasons for believing that his estimate of the benefits is too low, I discussed it on other threads, but the gist of it is as follows:
1). If we are going to commit a large amount of resources to sweeping social changes, we need to know as much as possible before we pull the trigger, especially if the trigger is connected to the firing pin on the “ban sexual intercourse” cannon (that metaphor was, perhaps, not my finest achievement).
2). Speaking more generally, I believe that the benefits of any kind of scientific knowledge far outweigh the drawbacks in most situations (though of course there are limits), due to the compounding effects. For example, the first application of modern physics was the nuclear bomb: a device is literally capable of ending the world. However, our world would be a very different, and IMO much worse place, had quantum physics never been discovered.
I just want to clarify that I don’t advocate banning heterosexual intercourse. Even if I agree slightly more with eridu than you about how coercive ordinary sexual encounters are experienced.
I’m pretty sure that I disagree on both 1 (people are terrible at separating normative and empirical claims) and 2 (there’s probably not much evo. psych that will be very useful in social engineering). But I’m honestly not certain which disagreement is larger.
I’m curious which of my estimates differs further from the LW average—but I’m not sure if actually discovering that would advance the particular goal of optimizing our stance towards evo. psych research.
people are terrible at separating normative and empirical claims
That’s a much broader problem than the misunderstanding and misuse of evo. psych. I think one of the major aims of humanism/transhumanism should be getting more people to understand the difference between descriptive and prescriptive statements—between is and ought. And, given how pervasive that confusion is across human cultures, the roots of it might be a fruitful area of investigation for evo. psych., along with other branches of cognitive science.
I can’t help but notice that at least some radical feminists’ aversion to evo. psych. and related fields in biology stems from their failure to distinguish normative from empirical claims. A lot of the firestorm surrounding Thornhill and Palmer’s A Natural History of Rape came down to the critics indulging in the naturalistic fallacy (which is a pity, because there are plenty of legitimate criticisms to be made of Thornhill and Palmer’s conclusions). Another example that springs to mind is this article by Andrea Dworkin, in which she detracts from an otherwise good argument by inserting a gratuitous slur on Edward O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis that demonstrates a breathtaking failure of reading comprehension on her part.
I’m saying that there are strong reasons to distrust current evo-psych results. One of those reasons is that evo-psych, as used in popular culture, provides justification for writing essays like the one you and I both think was a bad idea.
I think there are reasons to distrust a lot of evolutionary psychology results, and I think Luke’s breakup letter was just as bad an idea as he’s presented it as, but I don’t think the latter provides much evidence for the former. The rules of social interaction are only tangentially related to empirical reality, and even severe violations of social etiquette don’t establish empirical falsehood. In fact, it’s generally considered polite to deemphasize a number of empirical truths which our culture considers awkward, such as differences in skill.
As to invoking evopsych to dodge responsibility for your sexual preferences, it seems to me that that’s only dishonest if the results it invokes are untrue in the first place. It’s impolite regardless, though; our culture smiles on only a fairly narrow set of mechanistic excuses for behavior, and that’s not one of them.
I find it interesting that both you and MixedNuts have found it necessary to invoke Nazis in order to construct a marginally convincing case for your interpretations of eridu’s position. Your thought experiment boils down to an equation of “the patriarchy” as it exists in present-day Western society with Nazi Germany (which would put eridu in pretty clear violation of Godwin’s Law*), and MixedNuts’ counterexample to my proposed Generalized Anti-Creationist Principle is a variant on the classic example of when it’s not only morally acceptable but morally obligatory to lie: “when hiding Jews from the S.S. in one’s basement.”
It also seems as though the “certain social contexts” where the results of evo-psych research ought to be suppressed, according to eridu, are pretty much every social context that exists outside of Women’s Studies departments and the internal discussions of radical feminist organizations. That seems untenable to me.
I just realized that Godwin’s Law is meant to prohibit a special case of Yvain’s Worst Argument in the World: the case in which the archetypal member of the category into which one places X is Naziism.
The non-Eridu argument against evo-psych is that many such researchers are abusing/ignorant of the halo effect that leads to biased results/unjustified moral assertions about sex roles in society.
Somewhere in the archive is an article by lukeprog where he decided to break up with his girlfriend and wanted to let her down easy. In deciding how to do that, he debated with himself about telling her that his desire for a woman with larger breasts was an evolution-caused preference, not a comment on the woman specifically.
That’s nonsense, and uncritical acceptance of evo-psych runs the serious risk of exacerbating the problem.
The problem with LukeProg’s decision to write that break up essay wasn’t evo-psych. The problem was that writing a huge essay on why you’re breaking up with someone, including detailed analysis of why there is insufficient attraction is a horrible thing to do to someone without even giving any benefit to yourself.
This doesn’t constitute an argument here against evo-psych as an accurate description of reality. It does constitute:
A solid illustration of how social awkardness can result in doing harm to others despite all the best intentions.
An extremely weak appeal to consequences—an argument that evo-psych should not be studied because bad things could happen from people understanding evolutionary psychology. I describe it as weak since there is little indication that the insult Luke gave given his awareness of evo-psych is any worse than the insult he would have given if ignorant. For example “I’m dumping you because I like big tits, it’s just the way I am” is about as insulting as “I’m dumping you because I like big tits, I just evolved that way” (details changed as necessary).
In conclusion, keep your moralizing out of my epistemic rationality! At least while posting on this site, please. You can argue that a particular subject should not be discussed here for instrumental reasons in accordance with your own preferences. However it is never appropriate (on lesswrong, I assert) to argue that a belief must be considered false because of perceived consequences of someone believing it.
I don’t know that that’s necessarily the case. My first serious girlfriend wrote me a very long e-mail before our break-up, laying out her rational analysis of why she believed our relationship was untenable in the long term; she actually succeeded in persuading me to see it her way, which I’d been resisting for emotional reasons. That allowed us to have an amicable parting of ways, and we remain good friends to this day.
That’s amazing. Can we see a copy of the email?
I’ll think about that—from the upvotes, it appears you’re not the only Less Wronger interested (at least, I assume an upvote to a one-liner request like that means “I’d like to see it, too”). I wouldn’t post an unedited copy, as there are some details in it that I consider very private, as, I think, would my former girlfriend. But I’ll take a look at it later and see what would need to be redacted. I would also have to ask her permission before posting any of it, of course, and I’m reluctant to bother her just now—she has a newborn daughter (as in, born last week), so I expect she’s rather preoccupied at the moment.
I’m guessing that this is more likely to work out when it’s the female who decides to be rational about it.
I’m guessing it’s more likely to work out when it’s the partner of a LessWronger who initiates it, than when it’s the partner of a nonLessWronger.
I would have agreed with you if not for the recent completely irrational feminism and creepiness discussion.
Heh. Even taking that into account, I still think your odds are better with a randomly chosen LWer as a recipient than a randomly chosen partner-of-a-female. But that’s admittedly a pretty low bar.
I would prefer to hear all the reasons, myself and am ten times more likely to choke on fluff like “It’s not you, it’s me.” than burst into flames because somebody criticized me. I need closure and feedback and for my life events to make sense. For those purposes, the only information I’d deem good enough is a serving of reality.
Shminux’s point, and the rest of this thread, is about predicting the behavior of typical women in order to make an accurate assessment about what breakup approach is best. Do you think that your preferences are typical for women, or even typical for women-who-LW-folks-date, many of whom are not themselves LWers?
According to Vladimir, LessWrong has somewhere in the ballpark of 600-1000 active users. According to Yvain’s 2011 survey, 92 of the 1090 respondents were female. If I alone would respond well, that increases the chances of a good response by an LW woman by over 1% (unless you want to include inactive members). Since Dave’s point is not “You’re more likely to get a good response from an LW woman than not.” and was “You’re more likely to get a good response from an LW woman than a random woman.” me saying that actually gives a potentially significant support to his point. If you calculate the chances of a random woman responding well to be under 1% (seems reasonable) and don’t consider inactive users to be an “LWer”, then I totally supported his point. If not, then all Dave needs to do to figure out whether he’s right is to count the number of LW women he is sure would respond well and compare the ratio with his estimate of how many random women would respond well. I doubt anyone here thinks the percentage of random women that would respond well is beyond the single digit percents. If that’s right, my saying so gave 10% or more of the support needed to think that he’s right. As for the behavior of the average LW woman, I have no idea. That I would respond well confirms that at least some LW women would respond well, which might help people figure out if it’s worthwhile to find out exactly how many of us there are.
Two comments:
First, you clearly are not an average female.
Are you sure you know how you would react in both cases? People are notoriously bad at predicting their own behavior.
Which doesn’t contradict Dave’s idea that LW women / the women that LW members date might be more likely to respond well.
Totally sure. My last boyfriend attempted to give me fluff and I tore through it. I always want to get down to the bottom of why a relationship did not work. Even if reality is devastating, I want reality. You can tell I’m strong enough to deal with criticism because I invite it often. You can tell I’m strong enough to swallow criticism because of my elitism thread—check out the note at the top. I feel kind of dumb for not seeing these problems in advance (hindsight bias, I guess?). Now that I do see how awful my thread was—in public of all places—have I vanished, or gone crybaby or begged anybody for emotional support?
No.
I am stronger than that.
Just for clarity, I did not suggest the latter. What I suggested was that this sort of thing, initiated by the partner of an LW member, is more likely to work out well… put differently, that LW members are more likely to respond well (or at least less likely to respond poorly)… than for non-LWers.
The gender of the LW member, and the gender of the partner, is not strictly irrelevant but is largely screened off by their membership.
I make no such claims about the partners of LWers.
Since your initial (and highly promising) arrival, I must admit that I lost respect for you faster than I have for any other poster in the history of LessWrong.
But posts like this one give me hope.
Downvoted because I don’t like cheapshots. Criticisms about the community’s behavior in that thread should be confined to that thread, and should be substantive. The way you’re doing it now forces other commenters to choose between addressing your cheapshot and derailing the comment thread or allowing the cheapshot to go unchallenged.
I wouldn’t have downvoted if you’d used less strong language in your criticism or if you had supported your argument better. It’s okay for you to reference other threads as proof of things, in my book. But I don’t like that you asserted the behavior in that discussion was “completely irrational” without providing any sort of support for your argument; you just threw out an unfair label in a context where it was difficult to challenge it.
It seemed a reasonable to me; after all, shminux’s comment wasn’t random unrelated criticism, it was a germane followup to a previous comment. Posting it in the other thread eliminates the entire purpose of the comment.
I dispute the accuracy of shminux’s comment, and yet also feel reluctant to challenge the comment because it would be a digression from the topic of the above comments. That’s a problem.
I recognize the need to draw from other sections of the site in order to talk about LessWrong as a community; I’m fine with that. But if we’re going to do that then I think we need to at least use good arguments while discussing those other threads. Otherwise it becomes too easy to just criticize things in contexts where they’re difficult to challenge.
I’d like to hear other possible solutions though.
Why do you think so?
Why do you think a man would think so?
I don’t know! That was why I asked.
Don’t you? Fine, I’ll bite. While the bell curve is pretty wide for both genders, an average (western?) male tends to be more analytical and reserved and less emotional than an average (western?) female. At least in my (admittedly limited) personal experience observing my family, friends and acquaintances. Certainly the cultural stereotypes bear it out, as well. Thus he would be (again, on average) more inclined to listen to reasoned arguments, as opposed to “It’s not working out between us” with some made-up excuses designed to make him feel better. Whereas she (on average) would be likely to take every logical argument as in Luke’s story, as a personal affront, insult and rejection. There are plenty of exceptions, but if you take 1000 break-ups, I’d wager that in the majority of the cases a bit of reason on the woman’s side would make it less painful for the guy, while a bit of logic on the man’s side would probably make it more painful for the girl than “it’s not you it’s me”.
I have no idea how same-sex or other less-standard breakups work out in terms of rationality.
At least in my (admittedly limited) personal experience observing my family, friends and acquaintances. Certainly the cultural stereotypes bear it out, as well.
Your perception of the people you know plus cultural stereotypes is really pretty weak evidence. I could make the following argument: In my immediate family, the men are more emotional and less analytical/reserved than the women—they tend to get angry/aggressive in response to difficult things, whereas the women seem to stay calm. Plus, cultural stereotypes bear out the idea that men are more aggressive/angry than women. Therefore, men would be more likely to take this kind of letter badly.
I’m not making that argument, but I can’t see that it would be much weaker than yours.
There’s a large difference between writing an analysis of what’s going wrong in a relationship based on information about the relationship itself and writing an evo-psych analysis which concludes that the other person has the whole weight of evolution against anyone finding them attractive.
It occurs to me that what you’ve done there is a common enough pattern, though I’m not sure it’s exactly a fallacy—seeing that something causes bad outcomes, but not being clear on what the scope of the something is.
Here’s the quote:
Thanks for finding the post. It felt very awkward discussing an example when I couldn’t produce the example for examination.
You’re welcome.
Here’s one I’ve tried to find. In the recent discussion of feminism, I remember someone (and I’m thinking it wasn’t eridu) saying that part of the purpose of the harsher attacks about racism and sexism was to make opposed people feel less sure of themselves in general.
One problem with lukeprog’s essay would be that it would muddle the evolutionary-cognitive boundary. The fact that I, in the 21st century, like big tits is logically distinct from the fact that human males, in the EEA, who slept with curvier women had more children in average, though the latter is the cause of the former.
What matter when deciding whether to use a program is what it does, not who wrote it (well, except for copyright-related reasons, but Azatoth isn’t going to sue me for infringement anyway).
I think you are misinterpreting me. I’m not saying “Never discuss evo-psych.” (That’s eridu).
I’m saying that there are strong reasons to distrust current evo-psych results. One of those reasons is that evo-psych, as used in popular culture, provides justification for writing essays like the one you and I both think was a bad idea. That is, this statement:
is not true. “It’s just the way I am” is usually a false deflection of responsibility—invoking evo. psych to make the statement true makes the statement actually effective at deflecting moral responsibility. If that weren’t true, lukeprog would not even have considered saying it to the woman.
On evo-psych generally:
Consider phrenology. The traits at issue were well worth studying. And as far as I know, the field used accepted practices of empiricism for its day. But the whole field went off track, to the point that essentially no phrenology results are actually useful for scientific research today. I think that the social pressures towards legitimizing our current normative practices put evo-psych (and to a less extend, all psychological research) at serious risk of wandering off into a similar wilderness.
If evo-psych manages to recover from what appear to be its current mis-steps I (but apparently not eridu) would welcome back with open arms.
No, it doesn’t. There is no moral license to be human. If action X is harmful, ascribing an evolutionary cause to X doesn’t make it not harmful — and to a consequentialist it is harm that is at the root of immorality.
If evolution built me to rape nubile young womenfolk, well, evolution can just fuck off.
That’s the second misunderstanding of what evolutionary psychology means that leads people to reject it on moral rather than factual grounds: if they’re not indulging in the naturalistic fallacy, they’re indulging in biological determinism, or think the evolutionary psychologists are. “X is a natural part of human behavior that exists because it was favored by natural selection in the past” does not mean “X is good,” nor does it mean “X is inevitable”—evo. psych. is about identifying tendencies, not certainties.
Evolution couldn’t build you “to rape nubile young womenfolk,” period, because humans are far too behaviorally plastic for that. What it could do, and, judging by the history of human behavior, probably did do to at least a large proportion of the male population, is built you to have an impulse to rape under some circumstances—when rejected by a woman with whom you’re already alone and with whom you had some expectation that you might have sex, for example, or when encountering a female member of an enemy population in war. Whether you act on that impulse or not depends on both the hereditary aspects of your personality and, probably more important, how you were socialized: these factors affect whether you feel any shame, empathy for your potential victim, fear of consequences, etc. that could outweigh the impulse to rape.
It’s also important to understand that evo. psych. is not saying that rapists are motivated by a conscious desire to reproduce: the impulse generally takes the form “I want to get my rocks off” and/or “I want to hurt this b!+(#,” not “I want to make a baby.” That’s probably true of the individuals committing the rapes even when rape is organized and officially sanctioned by military or political leaders as a way of “invading” an enemy population’s gene pool, as in Bosnia or the Sudan.
It’s also notable that evo. psych. tells us nothing about why any particular man committed rape while another man in similar circumstances did not—nor about why some men prefer large-breasted women and others don’t, for that matter. What it does offer is an explanation for why rape is part of the repertoire of human behavior at all. It’s entirely possible to imagine a mammal species in which no male ever attempts to copulate with an unwilling female, and female rejection instantly shuts off male desire. As I understand it, it’s even possible to identify such species in nature: IIRC, canines and the great cats, at least, have never been observed to engage in the kind of coercive copulation frequently seen in dolphins, chimps, orangutans, ducks, etc. That’s pretty much what evolutionary biology would predict, too: the big carnivores are so well-armed that the risk of serious injury either to the male, or to the female (preventing her from successfully bearing and rearing the male’s offspring), would most likely outweigh the reproductive advantage of copulating with more females than are receptive to the male’s advances.
Evidently it didn’t.
Why did I interpret that as “evidently it didn’t fuck off” (rather than “evidently it didn’t build you that way”) on the first reading?
I interpreted it thus on not only my first, but all reading up until you posted this.
Thanks!
...
No, and I’ve stated that stated that saying “never discuss evo-psych” is acceptable while muddling normative claims in with epistemic claims is not.
I assert that your argument centered around Luke’s essay to his girlfriend absolutely does not support this.
It doesn’t provide such justification and even if it did this would not constitute evidence that evo-psych is epistemically inaccurate.
Fair enough.
I’d like to request some constructive criticism: What would you suggest someone do when they think an empirical field has been tainted by normative claims?
I really do think that historical study of other cultures provides evidence that contradicts some psychological “findings.” But it is the nature of the endeavor that “harder” sciences like psychology carry more weight than softer sciences like history. I could point to cases like Bradwell v. Illinois for examples of tainted scientific processes, but I acknowledge that doesn’t rise to the level of proof we would expect from a true “hard science” discipline like physics.
I don’t see evidence of anything resembling a scientific process, tainted or otherwise, behind Justice Bradley’s patronizing pontification about “the proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex,” especially when the pompous old bastard specifically attributed his view of proper gender roles to “the law of the Creator.”
Upvoted because I consider this question a far more useful one than many of the things that led up to it.
My own answer is, roughly speaking, the same for all cases where something potentially useful is being tainted by an external factor: 1) estimate how much work is involved in separating the tainted stuff from the non-tainted stuff,
2) estimate the benefit of the non-tainted stuff, and
3) if the estimated work/benefit tradeoff is high enough, do the work, otherwise throw the whole mess out.
You seem to have done that, at least in a BOTE kind of way, and concluded that the tradeoff doesn’t justify the work. Which is cool.
It’s not clear to me whether anyone is actually disagreeing with you about that conclusion, or (if they are) whether they think your estimate of the work is too high, your estimate of the benefit too low, or your threshold tradeoff too low.
I upvoted both your post as well as the parent, for putting the issue much more clearly than anyone else:
That said, I disagree with TimS because I believe his estimated benefit is too low.
I am curious as to your reasons for believing that, as opposed to believing that his estimate of the work involved is too high.
His estimate of the work involved might be too high as well, but I don’t know enough about the field to make anything other than a guess.
As for my reasons for believing that his estimate of the benefits is too low, I discussed it on other threads, but the gist of it is as follows:
1). If we are going to commit a large amount of resources to sweeping social changes, we need to know as much as possible before we pull the trigger, especially if the trigger is connected to the firing pin on the “ban sexual intercourse” cannon (that metaphor was, perhaps, not my finest achievement).
2). Speaking more generally, I believe that the benefits of any kind of scientific knowledge far outweigh the drawbacks in most situations (though of course there are limits), due to the compounding effects. For example, the first application of modern physics was the nuclear bomb: a device is literally capable of ending the world. However, our world would be a very different, and IMO much worse place, had quantum physics never been discovered.
I just want to clarify that I don’t advocate banning heterosexual intercourse. Even if I agree slightly more with eridu than you about how coercive ordinary sexual encounters are experienced.
Yes, my bad, I did not want to imply that you advocated anything of the sort.
I’m pretty sure that I disagree on both 1 (people are terrible at separating normative and empirical claims) and 2 (there’s probably not much evo. psych that will be very useful in social engineering). But I’m honestly not certain which disagreement is larger.
I’m curious which of my estimates differs further from the LW average—but I’m not sure if actually discovering that would advance the particular goal of optimizing our stance towards evo. psych research.
That’s a much broader problem than the misunderstanding and misuse of evo. psych. I think one of the major aims of humanism/transhumanism should be getting more people to understand the difference between descriptive and prescriptive statements—between is and ought. And, given how pervasive that confusion is across human cultures, the roots of it might be a fruitful area of investigation for evo. psych., along with other branches of cognitive science.
I can’t help but notice that at least some radical feminists’ aversion to evo. psych. and related fields in biology stems from their failure to distinguish normative from empirical claims. A lot of the firestorm surrounding Thornhill and Palmer’s A Natural History of Rape came down to the critics indulging in the naturalistic fallacy (which is a pity, because there are plenty of legitimate criticisms to be made of Thornhill and Palmer’s conclusions). Another example that springs to mind is this article by Andrea Dworkin, in which she detracts from an otherwise good argument by inserting a gratuitous slur on Edward O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis that demonstrates a breathtaking failure of reading comprehension on her part.
I think there are reasons to distrust a lot of evolutionary psychology results, and I think Luke’s breakup letter was just as bad an idea as he’s presented it as, but I don’t think the latter provides much evidence for the former. The rules of social interaction are only tangentially related to empirical reality, and even severe violations of social etiquette don’t establish empirical falsehood. In fact, it’s generally considered polite to deemphasize a number of empirical truths which our culture considers awkward, such as differences in skill.
As to invoking evopsych to dodge responsibility for your sexual preferences, it seems to me that that’s only dishonest if the results it invokes are untrue in the first place. It’s impolite regardless, though; our culture smiles on only a fairly narrow set of mechanistic excuses for behavior, and that’s not one of them.