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

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

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Comment author: wnoise 22 February 2010 05:44:58PM 0 points [-]

Oh, it's absolutely possible -- this I why couched the phrasing in terms of "typically" and "tend to".

And, well, votes are noisy.

If I had to ascribe a reason, it would be definitional -- superstimulus could be used to just mean "trigger the adaptation more than what the adaptation was for", which need not imply any significant harm, or it could be used to mean "will trigger the adaptation to such a strong extent, that it does cause harm, either by inappropriate behavior to the stimulus, or disrupting appropriate behavior to the stimulus it was adapted for."

I think the latter definition is more useful, though I admit that the examples I've tried to find for excluding based on it (finding patterns in randomness, finding faces in car grills) also didn't trigger more than the usual stimulus, so would have been excluded from the first definition as well.