lukeprog comments on Your Evolved Intuitions - Less Wrong

15 Post author: lukeprog 05 May 2011 04:21PM

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Comment author: lukeprog 05 May 2011 06:00:13PM 8 points [-]

A huge amount of science operates on postdictions. That's not 'cheating', it's just not as impressive as Einstein predicting gravitational lensing. Just as in other sciences, including evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology uses multiple converging lines of evidence to weigh the probabilities of hypotheses (see, e.g., Buss, The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, pp. 457-465: PDF).

And in fact, evolutionary psychologists often do make novel predictions and then go out and make the observations that either confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis.

I suspect that those who say evolutionary psychology is nothing but 'just so' stories are not actually keeping up with the science but instead are operating under cached thoughts.

Comment author: Marius 05 May 2011 06:14:31PM 5 points [-]

Ok, update my cache: you listed 7 bold postdictions; please list some bold predictions.

Its true that not all science is prospective, but you need to at least avoid looking at the data when making hypotheses you will then test against that data. Often we divide a data set to do this. Its much easier to do this with quantitative hypotheses than qualitative ones.

Comment author: lukeprog 05 May 2011 07:28:24PM *  4 points [-]

knb provides one example here, though I can come back add others later.

Highly relevant is this post from Yudkowsky.

Comment author: Marius 05 May 2011 09:23:16PM 2 points [-]

If Buller is to be believed that's another postdiction. The sort of studies I want to see would compare two groups who aren't known to be distinct. An example: Group A and B evolved in different environments and should display some difference in behavior. They have different rates of intron fragments G and H Now look at apparently-homogenous group X, who do not believe they have A or B ancestry. Compare X with intron G to X with intron H and find the predicted behavior difference.
Do we have studies at that level?