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pjeby comments on Forager Anthropology - Less Wrong
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Whatever WrongBot’s failings as a poster may or may not be, I haven’t seen anything in his posts to suggest that the problem is arguments engaging his emotions. You’ve expressed the opinion that WrongBot can’t reason, and perhaps this comment is evidence for that (although I think I understand the point he is trying to make), but I don’t perceive the connection to emotions. It is, of course, possible that I’ve missed something demonstrating that his emotions are at the root of any failures he has exhibited.
At any rate, it seems to me that there are any number of posters on LW who’ve exhibited reasoning failures at one time or another, and I don’t understand why you’ve focused on WrongBot to the extent of asking him to stop posting on LW until he can reason better. If anything, as a more or less independent observer, I feel like it is your focus on WrongBot that could be interpreted as some sort of an emotional response, although from my knowledge of you, I don’t think that’s actually the case.
I disagree that posts from WrongBot, or others with similar failings in reasoning (although I think you and I also disagree about how serious WrongBot’s failings are), pose a serious risk to LessWrong as a community, although I also see how reasonable minds might differ on that. From my perspective, I don't think we’ve reached the point where LW is so crowded with posts that good ideas and posts are being crowded out by bad ones. More fundamentally, I don’t see any real problem with posts like WrongBot’s, even if they exhibit imperfect reasoning. Even poorly reasoned posts can lead to interesting discussions, as I think WrongBot’s posts have.
Indeed. I upvoted this post and the other on this topic because they contained interesting information that was new to me, and since I "like and want more of that", they deserve upvoting on that basis.
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. It's almost like a sacred cow is being threatened, or that WrongBot has previously been identified as an enemy outsider due to having supported polyamory.
(IOW, I see some of the reaction to WrongBot as greater evidence of emotional involvement by people other than WrongBot.)
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.
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.
For what it's worth, all that talk about (and emphasis on) the standard narrative comes from Sex at Dawn. I don't think it's representative of all (or even most) current thought in evolutionary psychology, though there are some discussions on LW that have been framed in its terms.
In any case, point taken. I'll shut up about it in my remaining posts in the sequence.
For example, people's emotional involvement with Malthus's assertion that human populations increase at an exponential rate absent limits on resources :) ?
ADDED. I retract this comment since (I now realize) PJ wrote some of the reaction, and obviously I cannot refute what PJ wrote by listing instances in which the reaction was justified on rational grounds.
Er, you did see the word some in there, right?
Upvoted, and grandparent retracted.