Blueberry comments on Against the standard narrative of human sexual evolution - Less Wrong
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Comments (153)
I think it's pretty obvious that monogamy isn't built into human nature, but I object to the post pretty vehemently. Do you have any examples of vehement objections by people who insist that polyamory is 'bad' as opposed to by people who think that bad reasoning is 'bad'?
I even said I planned to read the book some day, as it sounded interesting but badly reasoned. However, a short summary of an interesting but badly reasoned book, when the summary itself doesn't comment on the bad reasoning but instead endorses said reasoning, on a rationality blog, seems to indicate to me that the author of the summary needs more practice before they can talk rationally about the subject.
So you haven't read the book, but you know it's badly reasoned, and anyone who endorses it must not be good at rationality?
I'm also surprised and confused by Michael Vassar's reaction to this post.
Strong disagreements with Pinker are strong evidence for poor reasoning, but much weaker evidence for being wrong.
The blog post itself and its comments are pretty compelling evidence for poor rationality skills under stress, most notably the Malthus bit, as people other than myself have mentioned.
I endorse lots of books with fairly bad reasoning.