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 09 May 2011 03:37:28PM 5 points [-]

Here are some additional predictions from evoutionary psychologists.

Comment author: Marius 09 May 2011 04:14:05PM 2 points [-]

The first two are excellent examples. Thanks!