Comment on Forager Anthropology

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 20:58:33 GMT

I mostly agree with PJ. I found the book discussion in WrongBot's posts interesting. His claims about evolutionary psychology and its "standard narrative" were half-baked, but I attribute that to him not having done enough homework on these subjects. There is a lot of bad information on evolutionary psychology out there which seems to have biased WrongBot, and combined with his values, makes him vulnerable to claims that evolutionary psychology "does not acknowledge the mutability of human preference" (see this book review for more debunking).

I'm quite confident that WrongBot is a good enough rationalist that he will update when exposed to more evidence.The kinds of errors he is making are the typical errors that intelligent human rationalists can make when they are first approaching subjects that they don't know much about, when they have been exposed to biased information and hold values in those areas. I think he has been misled and is under-informed on the topic of evolutionary psychology, rather than being fundamentally biased by his emotions. I recommend that he read more on the subject, and not just popular books. While I will urge him to do more research before making his own speculations on these subjects in ways that go beyond summarizing, I don't think his posts are in any way a threat to LessWrong, and I would be interested in continued posting from him in the future. The assessments of MichaelVassar and rhollerith's friend seem overly harsh.

I do think that both posts contain a bit too much whaling on the strawman of "the standard narrative" and could do without it altogether, but at the same time I don't see why people are so focused on arguing with that.

The reason is that there is a long history of people being wrong in criticizing evolutionary psychology, and rationalists should be able to do better. I'm interested in real scrutiny of the field, not recycled criticisms that have already been answered by evolutionary psychologists over a decade ago (see the link to that book review for an example), or the resurrection of debunked positions that most mainstream evolutionary psychologists don't hold anymore.

Discuss