lessdazed comments on The time has come to talk of whether pigs have wings - Less Wrong

-2 Post author: lessdazed 27 October 2011 12:55AM

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Comment author: lessdazed 27 October 2011 04:42:32AM 0 points [-]

This means that for example people don't appreciate that highly deleterious alleles can stay in a population when they are recessive because evolution has a lot more trouble acting on them when their frequence becomes very low.

I have no background in science and I understood this when I was ten (?) and my mother told me about Christopher Nance and answered my followup questions. I suspect people here largely do understand this.

Can you please explain more difficult things? I made this thread to try and pinpoint my confusion and ignorance.

Comment author: prase 27 October 2011 11:32:29AM 2 points [-]

Who is Christopher Nance?

Comment author: JoshuaZ 27 October 2011 04:45:57AM 1 point [-]

Does this thread cause you to update at all on the level here for understanding these sorts of issues?

Comment author: lessdazed 27 October 2011 05:13:59AM *  2 points [-]

That's not a real thread, it's a test to see whether people think critically about what they read on LW in general and about biology in particular.

Possibly.

In any case, it was the inspiration for this post as I said about that thread:

I think it is basically storytelling with truth constrained according to rules of Aristotelian inference...Nothing useful about biology can be learned from this sort of thing...conjoins mundane observations to each other according to an entertaining narrative until a logically true and subjectively interesting influence in biology is discovered - regardless of the fact that the method used to reach the random-vectored conclusion, minus the constraint of having to be entertaining, would endorse countless other truths of similar magnitude and random vector...

Privileging the hypothesis, reversed stupidity is not intelligence, cultish countercultishness, the tragedy of group selectionism...

I'm not sure what it is that is (or is not) being explained. Phlogiston had fire, for example. There needs to be an unexplained phenomenon, or one has a fake fake explanation...

The blog post is a random story crafted to appeal to humans and not be logically false. It can be defended by saying that all that is meant is logical truth of its stories being factors, but by Gricean implication, if one writes a blog post about an effect being real, one is claiming that this could be used to make a prediction and has more of an effect than the influence of Pluto's gravity on mating patterns of the Buffy-Tufted Marmoset...

The OP seems to me like a fixation on a very small thing, a story of why a factor should have an effect, totally ignoring most other factors on the effect and most other effects of the factor...

So. I was downvoted for saying such things there, and so I made this thread to cure my misunderstanding of biology, since that post was so well received. I gave my best shot at explaining evolution in a handful of sentences, and wait for it to be corrected by a better short explanation or added to.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 27 October 2011 05:16:26AM 2 points [-]

I would suggest that in this context the problem is not that you need more correction but that other people in the thread or the people downvoting you need such correction.

Comment author: jsalvatier 27 October 2011 05:20:33PM 1 point [-]

I for one do not understand these issues and would be interested in hearing more. Though it doesn't strike me as obviously important (counterevidence appreciated).

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