MichaelVassar comments on Against the standard narrative of human sexual evolution - Less Wrong

7 Post author: WrongBot 23 July 2010 05:28AM

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Comment author: MichaelVassar 23 July 2010 02:32:54PM 11 points [-]

Agreed regarding the standard content of science-grade evolutionary psychology. That's what people who actually make and test predictions say.

It seems to be the case though that most supposed evolutionary psychology is speculation based on fairly long logical chains with fairly high probabilities associated with each step and a lack of awareness of conjunction fallacies. This method can work, but it isn't science, and when combined with motivated reasoning it's not one of the methods of rationality either.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 24 July 2010 03:15:39AM 5 points [-]

If it produces successful advance predictions - if you do new experiments to test the idea and they seem to come out pretty much the right way - then it's probably working well enough.

Comment author: MichaelVassar 24 July 2010 03:51:16PM 0 points [-]

Agreed. But that's mostly not what goes by the name.
Also, massive modularity isn't necessarily due to genetic biases. T&C Evo Psych consists of a number of logically distinct hypotheses, some of which are true but obvious, some true and non-obvious, some false. Most Evo Psych is basically what I just described.