Mechanisms—good point. I have another way of putting it.
In TV police shows, detectives try to establish a suspect’s means, motive, and opportunity for committing a crime.Sloppy detectives (and jurors!) tend to focus just on motive and its lurid details. In evolutionary bio/psych, we try to establish genetic variation, selective advantage, and heritability. Sloppy evolutionary hypotheses tend to focus just on the selective advantage and ignore the other two.
People are drawn to stories. We give evidence extra weight if it comes in the form of a good narrative. (Is there a name for that bias?)
I thank the Ravenclaw Harry Potter for bringing me here. I’ve been lurking for a couple of weeks. My first clue that I’d feel at home here was learning that Eliezer taught himself physics by reading the Feynman lectures.
I’m an evolutionary ecologist by training, and a self-taught Python programmer and GIS analyst. I currently work at a community college, where I do a lot of one-on-one biology-teaching. I spend a lot of time thinking about where students go wrong when they’re thinking about science, and how to help them think more about their own thinking. (In my department we call it metacognition.) I’m also the father of a four-year-old, and so I also spend a good part of my home-life confronting and responding to some pretty fascinating cognitive and philosophical puzzles. (Her latest interest: the origins and arbitrariness of names.)
I’ve been developing as a rationalist (without the label) since who-knows-when during childhood, but I trace my more careful, articulated thinking about my own thinking to my early grad-school days, when I spent a lot of time fretting over how scientists should think about nature and problem-solving.
I’m looking forward to learning some new cognitive habits (my current thing is to think of—and teach—many cognitive skills as habits) and reinforcing some that I already have.