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wedrifid comments on Polyhacking - Less Wrong
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Let me translate in to overt. The following statement-reply pair:
Is overwhelmingly strong evidence that your beliefs on this subject are not optimally correlated with reality.
Sure it is quite possible (and likely) that a lot of people are wrong about what sexual strategies are used. But not that there are sexual strategies and not that it should be startling to find that the sexual strategies turn out to be symmetric. It should be difficult for Konkvistador to think of reasons for that to occur, because it would be a miraculous coincidence.
Why? From what I know of Sex at Dawn, the book's claims would lead us to expect sexual strategies for both men and women that involve many partners.
You're making claims and ignoring sources without giving a shred of evidence yourself.
I think the burden of proof is on one who claims that different things are equal. "Involve many partners" is extremely vague, it's not so fine-grained a similarity that for it to be a common strategy for both men and women would be miraculous, it's not a strategy at all any more than "theism" or "atheism" are philosophies.
If someone were to claim that Mercury has exactly as much mass as a moon of Jupiter plus or minus one kilogram, I wouldn't feel the slightest discomfort at not having a source to back up my expectation they'd be different, and I would not be convinced without a mountain of evidence.
Things don't magically align like that in nature. I could find out tomorrow that every study ever showing differences between men and women was too contaminated by culture to be useful, I'd still not believe that no significant differences exist. So long as I'm not claiming to know exactly what those differences are, I don't have the burden of proof.
This discussion started with:
mention of "hypergamy", the usual definition of which simply treats marriage (by implication, either monogamous or polygamous) as the default
stats purporting to show that women seek fewer partners.
followed by Julian pointing out that the stats come from a particular culture (and later pointing to research that looks at many cultures).
Mind you, the evidence I mentioned over here does seem consistent with a broader definition of "hypergamy". But again, this comes from the same culture.
It moved on from there a long time ago and started being about the things literally represented by the characters contained in the comments instead of what side they affiliate with.
Edit: This gave Hairy an excuse to get confused. I should have, instead, written "The parent is almost entirely irrelevant to the point the grandparent is making".
Ah. So you're being needlessly pedantic.
Even on this level your objection fails, because K said s/he thought the two strategies "differ from each other on this" while Julian claimed to provide 'antidotes to this kind of "sexual strategies" thinking' (emphasis added). You can't leave out some of the symbols and claim this makes for a more literal interpretation.
No. Just no.
Here's the sub-thread I refer to. You come into it strawmanning JulianMorrison and accusing him of political bias. Now you seem to say that you 'moved the discussion' in this way because you (falsely) believed he made a technically incorrect statement in the comment that I just quoted correctly.
Had he in fact done so, and had I wanted to correct it for some reason, I would have started my response with "Technically..." rather than going straight to sarcasm.
Odds are neither wedrifid nor hairyfigment is learning anything from this discussion any more. But if you want to continue, consider tabooing "sexual strategies." It's possible you're just using that phrase to mean different things.