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gwern comments on On the Openness personality trait & 'rationality' - Less Wrong
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The title had me captivated. However:
This post could use some more exposition in between the quotes. When "parasite load" was mentioned, my immediate assumption was that this was a metaphorical usage referring to "parasitic" ideas or memes, and was quite confused when I encountered a discussion of skin infections and whatnot, suggesting that somehow the literal sense of biological parasites was intended. This was confusing because I wasn't expecting any connection between psychological personality traits such as openness on the one hand and susceptibility to infectious disease on the other. Maybe such a connection is well-known in some circles, but I was totally unprepared for it and it came across to me as a bizarrely privileged hypothesis. Some more emphatic exposition, saying in effect "yes reader, I really do intend to relate the personality trait of openness to the medical phenomenon of infectious diseases" would have been helpful.
Parasites and infections are really important in evolution; this is maybe not what is most popularly discussed in articles or news, but I'm pretty sure that it is covered in longer works on evolutionary biology like The Selfish Gene. For example, one of the major justifications for the invention of sex (!) is parasite resistance; see Wikipedia on the Red Queen Hypothesis or http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-07/uocp-pmh070609.php
That I know perfectly well. That wasn't the problem. What I needed more preparation for was the notion that they are important in the evolution of psychological traits -- which (for me at least) does not follow at all immediately from the premise of their being important in the evolution of "physical" characteristics (such as those shared by organisms that don't even have brains, e.g. sex).
Why would you expect them to not be? What makes psychology exempt from evolution? (First two words of the article: 'Evolutionary psychologist...')
Nothing; in fact the grandparent specifically assumes it isn't, since I referred to
The point was that I expect psychological traits to have different kinds of evolutionary explanations than "physical" traits. I expect evolutionary-psychological explanations to take place on a different level of abstraction, involving environments with other psychological agents. In particular, I don't expect them to directly involve phenomena that also apply to organisms that don't even have a psychology.
Keep in mind that I'm talking about my expectations going in. I'm not complaining about how the universe works (if it turns out to work in a certain way); this is simply a matter of exposition: the post felt jarring. This could have been alleviated quite simply by an acknowledgement that something counterintuitive was being claimed.