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MichaelVassar comments on The scourge of perverse-mindedness - Less Wrong
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I tend to think that the hazard of perverse response to materialism has been fairly adequately dealt with in this community. OTOH, the perverse response to psychology has not. The fact that something is grounded in "status seeking", "conditioning", or "evolutionary motives" generally no more deprives the higher or more naive levels of validity or reality than does materialism, hence my quip that "I believe exactly what Robin Hanson believes, except that I'm not cynical"
If anyone's addressed the interaction between status-seeking, conditioning, and/or evolved drives and the fact that people manage to do useful and sometimes wonderful things anyway, I haven't seen it.
I'm just confused. Those terms are short-hand for a model that exists to predict the world. If that model doesn't help you to predict the world, throw the model out, just don't bemoan the world fitting the model if and when it does fit. The world is still the world, as well as being a thing described by a model that is typically phrased cynically.
I was very tempted to include evo-psych in my list, but decided it probably warrants more than a cursory treatment.