Eliezer_Yudkowsky 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: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 February 2010 10:04:50PM 3 points [-]

Thank you for the references, upvoted. But it's not clear to me that "finding babies uncute" has actually been linked to psychopathy per se, albeit it might be something interesting to investigate because of a couple of chained correlations. In fact the term "fairly strong evidence" in the original comment does seem misplaced, unless you know of a specific experiment indicating that.

(Also, would "fairly strong evidence" in this context mean say "a likelihood factor of ten for finding babies uncute, even though the base frequency of psychopaths is low" or "a substantial fraction of people who find babies uncute are in fact psychopaths"?)

Comment author: Jack 22 February 2010 10:06:30PM 0 points [-]

Yes. This was why I qualified the initial claim with "fairly". Perhaps it should have been qualified further.

Comment author: RobinZ 22 February 2010 10:15:09PM *  1 point [-]

The way you characterized the evidence I would have said, "This comment reminded me: there's an interesting correlation between psychopathy and finding babies uncute - it comes down to the relation to the fear expression and infantile expressions."

But I would want more evidence (particularly regarding alternative mechanisms for baby-distaste) before I claimed a likelihood factor as large as ten.

Comment author: Jack 22 February 2010 10:26:35PM 0 points [-]

Alright, this + the sensitivity of the subject lead men to edit the original comment. Th