Ah, shoot. Finally a meet up at a time I could ordinarily attend, and it happens to be the night I have dinner reservations at SCC Culinary Arts Department dining room. They’re not so easy to get, so it’s not something I could easily reschedule.
mantis
Karma: 101
I work Monday through Friday, and am generally off between 5:30 and 6:00 PM. I work up in North Scottsdale, so it tends to take half an hour or so to get down to Tempe during rush hour. There are other social events I attend after work most Wednesdays and every other Thursday, but I’m usually free on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday evenings.
Does your group ever meet later in the evening? I’d be interested in attending a Less Wrong meetup here in the valley, but I work full-time, so Friday afternoon is no good for me. Would I be right in inferring from the location and time that most of your members are ASU students?
Let’s leave “intelligent” aside and focus on the “rational” necessary condition for being “intelligent and rational.” Also, let’s dig down past the label “conservative Christian” (or “conservative Catholic,” as Chris actually said) to some of the beliefs that constitute conservative Christianity and conservative Catholicism. For example, in the American context, a conservative Christian who isn’t Catholic is probably some variety of creationist, and quite likely a young-earth creationist. Finding out that a person is a YEC would reduce my probability estimate that that person is rational to effectively zero, regardless of what else they had said up to that point; in my experience, it is not possible for a person to know enough about rationality to practice it, and simultaneously be ignorant enough of the natural sciences to believe that the Earth was created in essentially its present form with its present biota less than 10,000 years ago.
Being a conservative Catholic, as I understand that phrase, necessarily entails believing that homosexuality and contraception are morally wrong according to “natural law” which can supposedly be derived without recourse to divine revelation, and also believing that the College of Cardinals, a group of men who conspired to conceal the sexual abuse of children on a massive scale and thus enable it to continue for decades, are the best possible arbiters of morality for the rest of us. (If you don’t believe those two things, you may still be a liberal Catholic, but you are not a conservative one.) Those beliefs are likewise not ones that someone can both hold and be a rational person. They do not, however, preclude intelligence; I would note Justice Antonin Scalia as an excellent example of a highly intelligent, deeply irrational conservative Catholic who uses his intelligence in the service of his irrational beliefs and goals.
I think that’s probably more practical than trying to make it continuous, considering that our nervous systems are incapable of perceiving infinitesimal changes.
Thanks! I’ll have to get hold of the first book and see how I like it—unless there’s a better place to begin reading the series? Does the publication order match the internal chronology?
I have not yet read any of the novels in that series, but I did see Peter Weir’s film of The Far Side of the World during its theatrical run. If you’ve seen it, would you say it was a good adaptation of the novel?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.”
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.
No, but all that requires is adding the qualifier “academic” to the noun “subject” in my principle, so it can’t get misapplied to very unusual and extreme situations where knowledge of the specific situation could be more dangerous than the lack of that knowledge.
If true, that does seem like a very good reason not to trust eridu or take anything he has to say seriously. As an evolutionary biologist, most familiar with this kind of anti-thought from the creationist quarter, I might state it as a Generalized Anti-Creationist Principle: “Any person who advocates ignorance or false beliefs about a subject as morally superior to true and accurate knowledge of that subject is not to be trusted or taken seriously on any subject.” (See here for a good example of a creationist who goes every last angstrom of the way to this reductio ad absurdum of his position.)
This recalls Steven Pinker’s critique of many aspects of twentieth century radical left-wing thought, including some radical feminist ideas, in The Blank Slate. Radical scholars in the social sciences clung (and, in at least some cases, are still clinging) to the increasingly untenable notion of the human mind as a tabula rasa for fear of what they perceive as disastrous moral consequences of it not being true, and decried every scientific advance that filled in some portion of the slate. Neither side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on pretending things are true because they think the world be better if they were, and there are an awful lot of people who could benefit from reciting the Litanies of Tarsky and Gendlin until they take them to heart.
As an aside, I have to wonder if the upvotes on my previous comment reflect a sober assessment of its quality, or simply the fact that “that which can be destroyed by the truth should be” is a huge, multi-colored, strobing applause light around these here parts. ;-)
radical feminists believe that the very act of gathering evidence harms their cause
That’s an awfully damning assessment. If true, it implies that radical feminists believe that their cause can be destroyed by the truth, and don’t think that it should be. I’m not convinced that this indictment, as stated here, is true of any actual radical feminist, though.
I think it’s pretty obvious that evand mean “abortion opponents,” not “abortion proponents.” Make that correction and the rest of the comment is accurate.
I might have to bring it up to a minute or two before I’d give you that—I perceive the exponential growth in disutility for extreme pain over time during the first few minutes/hours/days as very, very steep. Now, if we posit that the people involved are immortal, that would change the equation quite a bit, because fifty years isn’t proportionally that much more than fifty seconds in a life that lasts for billions of years; but assuming the present human lifespan, fifty years is the bulk of a person’s life. What duration of torture qualifies as a literal fate worse than (immediate) death, for a human with a life expectancy of eighty years? I’ll posit that it’s more than five years and less than fifty, but beyond that I wouldn’t care to try to choose.
Let’s step away from outright torture and look at something different: solitary confinement. How long does a person have to be locked in a room against his or her will before it rises to a level that would have a non-zero disutility you could multiply by 3^^^3 to get a higher disutility than that of a single person (with a typical, present-day human lifespan) locked up that way for fifty years? I’m thinking, off the top of my head, that non-zero disutility on that scale would arise somewhere between 12 and 24 hours.
Nope, that doesn’t follow; multiplication isn’t the only possible operation that can be applied to this scale.
In case you’re still looking, I think you might find Chris Brecheen’s “Social Justice Bard” blog edifying, though he doesn’t connect social justice ideas to Christianity that I’ve seen. For that, some of the blogs on the Progressive Christian Channel at Patheos.com might help (Slacktivist is particularly social-justice-oriented), as well as some of the ones on the Atheist Channel whose authors are ex-Christians and still draw inspiration from what they see as Christianity’s good points (e.g. Love Joy Feminism, Roll to Disbelieve and An Atheist in Dixie).