SilasBarta comments on Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych - Less Wrong

52 Post author: Alicorn 22 February 2010 01:53AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (823)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Alicorn 22 February 2010 05:56:29AM *  0 points [-]

You have my word that the baby was the cutest baby in the first several pages of results for "cute baby" on a Google image search by my own lights, and the bunny was just the cutest bunny I happened to have on my hard drive.

Edit: Actually, I did reject one cuter baby because the picture was watermarked.

Comment author: Jack 22 February 2010 06:07:40AM *  0 points [-]

How long have you been collecting pictures of cute bunnies on your hard drive? :-)

Scratch that. The same picture is also first in google hits for "cute bunny"

Still, perhaps a larger data set makes sense.

Comment author: Alicorn 22 February 2010 07:56:01AM 1 point [-]

I don't know how long I've been doing it, but my "Lagomorpha" folder contains 14 images.

Comment author: Psy-Kosh 22 February 2010 06:00:20AM 0 points [-]

Hrm... that at least brings up a possibility... Any chance that there's much higher variance in the appearance of baby bunnies than in baby humans? In that case "find the cutest" rather than "find average" might go rather farther with bunnies than humans.

Comment author: wnoise 22 February 2010 07:07:45AM *  2 points [-]

Well, there was a supposed ~10000 humans bottleneck, not too far ago, evolutionarily speaking, so humans really do have less variance than many species.

Comment author: Alicorn 22 February 2010 06:38:35AM 0 points [-]

Probably not variance that's easily detectable to humans.