= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Will_Sawin comments on The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (1742)
Off the top of my head:
Economic inequality is an unequal distribution of resources. The most salient example of this is an unequal distribution of resources that all have equal claim to, like a pie a parent bakes for their children. But [various convincing arguments in favor of at least some economic inequality.]
War is killing, which is bad because murder is bad. (Or eating meat, or capital punishment.)
Gay marriage is good because it's a right, and the most salient rights are good.
Welfare is good because it's a form of helping people, and helping people in ways that don't produce bad incentive effects and without taking from anyone else is good.
Processed food is bad because putting the most salient synthetic chemicals in food would be a really bad idea.
Note that "genetic engineering to cure diseases is eugenics" and "evolutionary psychology is sexist" are probably left-wing viewpoints, though not ones Yvain agrees with.
ISTM that categorizing many of those as "Left-wing viewpoints" or "Right-wing viewpoints" is a strong category error, one that we should attempt to reduce rather than redraw or blue boundaries. "Evolutionary psychology is sexist" is, afaict, a word error. It is not a position, but an implicit claim: "Because evolutionary psychology is sexist, it is bad, and thus evolutionary psychology is wrong!" - this is usually combined (in my experience) with an argument that the world is inherently good and that all humans are inherently equal and so on, which means that theories that posit "unfair" or "bad" circumstances are wrong; the world must be "good" and "fair". Stereotypicalism would call for a reference to religion here.
It may be a word error - I don't think it is, "Evolutionary psychology is riddled with false claims produced by sexist male scientists and rationalized by the scientists even though the claims are not at all well-supported compared to nonsexist alternatives" is a coherent and meaningful description of a way the universe could be but isn't, and is therefore false, not a word error - but if so, it's a word-error made by stereotypically left-wing people like Lewontin and Gould who were explicitly political in their criticism, not a word-error made by any right-wing scientists I can think of offhand.
In general, we should be careful about dismissing claims as meaningless or incoherent, when often only a very reasonable and realistic amount of charity is required to reinterpret the claim as meaningful and false - most people are trying to be meaningful most of the time, even when they're rationalizing a wrong position. Only people who've gotten in a lot more trouble than that are actively trying to avoid letting their arguments be meaningful. And meaningless claims can be dismissed immediately, without bringing forth evidence or counterobservations; meaningful false claims require more demonstration to show they're false. So when somebody brings a false claim, and you dismiss it as meaningless, you're actually being significantly logically rude to them - putting in less effort than they're investing - it takes more effort to bring forth a meaningful false claim than to call something 'meaningless'.
I dislike accusations of sexism as much as the next guy, but in the last year or two I have started to think that ev-psych is way overconfident. The coarse grained explanation is that ev-psych seems to be "softer" than regular psychology, which itself is "softer" than medicine, and we all know what percentage of medical findings are wrong. I'd be curious to learn what other LWers think about this, especially you, because your writings got me interested in ev-psych in the first place.
As in about the likelihood of certain kinds of explanations?
Can't think anything without a concrete example.
I am going to rehearse saying this in a robotic voice, while spinning round and round flailing my arms in a mechanical fashion.
Can you put it up on Youtube when you're done?
Off the top of my head:
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/retrieve/pii/S096098220701559X
So far as I know, the association of pink with girls and blue with boys is a western custom which only goes back a century or so.
Precisely.
This seems like a qualitative argument, when a quantitative argument would be more interesting. Who is the John Ioannidis of evolutionary psychology? Or, what research has been published that has later turned out to be false?
(Also, why do you dislike accusations of sexism? Shouldn't you only dislike false accusations of sexism?)
I dislike accusations of sexism for the same reason I dislike accusations of any other negative behavior. Those accusations signal either sexism or false accusations of sexism, both of which are net negatives to me.
See the OP.
Because you and I no doubt hang out in completely different circles, my view of the prototypical case of sexism is probably different from yours. Also, I consider most non-prototypical cases of sexism to be wrong, so there aren't really any connotations being smuggled in.
I may or may not agree depending on which definition of "sexism" you are using.
Well, in any debate you'd still have to explain why that particular example of sexism is wrong.
Not if (a) you're in a situation where everyone already agrees on that or (b) you consider fairness to be an important value.
And assuming you also don't want to even consider the possibility that you might be wrong. In any case, as you may have noticed, that's not true here.
More like you consider a particular interpretation of fairness to be such an important value that it trumps all others.
This is a worthy steel-manning when trying to reach an accurate conclusion about ev-psych, but I think you give the typical person who claims "ev-psych is sexist" too much credit here.
Natasha Walter makes the argument that Eliezer refers to in Living Dolls (not really about ev-psych, but about the idea of innate differences between genders in abilities), and I'm sure there are other examples (I haven't actually read all that much feminist writing). However, I have also encountered people who won't even discuss the issue with anyone who is pro-ev psych because they think that they're so morally appalling. Not sure how typical the people I'm encountered are though - I suspect they may be more extreme than most, and the most extreme people are the loudest.
There's definitely a temptation to identify a belief we agree with with its best advocates, and a belief we disagree with with its typical advocates. I definitely see this when people talk about how stupid eg "the left/right" is. I may be encouraging that error...
The sexism associated with evolutionary biology is typically the result of the perceived (or actual) claim that because sexual differentiation has a historical and evolutionary basis, it is morally correct to reinforce those differences today.
You can point out that that type of claim is not commonly made my evolutionary psychologists, but when lay people perceive that that claim is true and use it to justify sexist actions that they would not have taken in the absence of their perception of such a claim, then it is the case that evolutionary psychology contributes to behavior which unfairly discriminates on the basis of sex.
One of the key points is that "Evolutionary psychology is sexist" and "evolutionary psychology contributes to behavior which unfairly discriminates on the basis of sex" are very nearly the same statement, while "Evolutionary psychology is riddled with false claims produced by sexist male scientists" is a radically different statement.
Well, sure. But so do a million other things. After all, it would be much harder to discriminate unfairly on the basis of sex if we didn't have sensory organs capable of distinguishing an individual's sex, so the existence of such organs contributes to behavior which unfairly discriminates on the basis of sex. Unarguable.
Also uninteresting.
Surely a more important question is whether the study of evolutionary psychology differentially contributes to such discrimination? Which perhaps it does, but this takes more effort to demonstrate than simply pointing out that there exist lay people who use it to justify sexist actions.
Okay- I assert that there are almost zero people who seriously assert that 'Having sensory organs which can distinguish sex' justifies sexist actions, and that there are more than one hundred thousand Americans who demonstrably either claim, or allow the claim to stand, that EP justifies sexist actions that they themselves take.
I'm prepared to defend the second assertion if needed, which is why I choose a conservative number. The first assertion is trivial to falsify if you can find a significant number of people who believe that.
To be more logically complete, my unstated assumption: Lay people typically don't take actions which they believe to be unjustified.
I'd be interested in seeing this. Largely because I'm curious to see specific examples of what you consider unjustified sexism.
The most godawful example I've seen of EP being used as a cover for blatant sexism and misogyny is this NRO article, which basically says that as a rich boss with many male sons, Mitt Romney exudes alpha male power, and all women should fall in trance and vote for him.
Suddenly I am enlightened!
In particular, I have just now realized that whereas I encountered evolutionary psychology in the context of my quest to unravel the mysteries of human cognition and so I read a bunch of science books and papers on it, many other people may be encountering evolutionary psychology primarily in the context of Someone Is Wrong On The Internet, attempted invocations of ev-psych which are so terrible as to be propagated through the blogosphere as horrors for everyone to marvel at.
This explains a lot about the oddly bad opinion that so many online-folk seem to have about evolutionary psychology. This has had me making puzzled expressions for years, not sure what was going on. But you would probably get a pretty different first-impression (and first impressions are very controlling) if your first exposure was reading that NRO article instead of "The Psychological Foundations of Culture". Even if somebody tried to expose you to the real science afterward, you'd probably go in with some degree of motivated skepticism.
Having thus generalized the problem - is this likely to be happening to me somewhere, or you? Besides ev-psych and economics, which other sciences will Reddit expose to you primarily in the form of exhibiting Someone Is Wrong On The Internet misuses?
That's surely playing a role, but another thing is that gender dynamics is often a mind-killer, in pretty much all contexts it shows up in. I don't have a full explanation for that, but I think that has to do with the sexual frustration of unattractive¹ people being repeatedly turned down by attractive people and the resentment of attractive people being repeatedly harassed by unattractive people. I tend to be overly cautious about this and hence to avoid mentioning gender even when it's relevant (e.g., if in the previous sentence “unattractive people” was replaced with “lots of men” and “attractive people” with “lots of women”, it would be just as accurate and perhaps even more precise).
In my experience, when people invoke evolutionary psychology, they tend to neglect the mechanisms by which genes could have the postulated effect. Often, absurdly specific evolved traits are claimed that can also be understood as simple reinforcement or the like. Or they claim something so information-laden that it defies belief that it could be encoded in an evolved mechanism except through general learning.
This isn't a science, and perhaps not even terribly important, but I think Aristotle is subject to this effect. Almost every Aristotelian I've encountered on the internet is a Thomist, leading to the impression (in my estimation) that Aristotle is some kind of a proto-apologist. And of course, there's a list of Aristotle-fails, like the women's-teeth thing or the thing about air rushing in behind a thrown ball to maintain its motion that are either false or misleading.
On the other hand, there aren't good reasons for most people to study actual Aristotle. Nevertheless he does show up as a foil in odd places.
Evolutionary biology in general.
Well, Will Newsome would say theology.
It took you this long to understand why people have issues with evolutionary psychology? -1 respect points, Eliezer.
Note that, on gender issues at least, it also pattern-matches very strongly to the "scientific racism" of the 19th and early 20th century.
While you mention it, do you know of something like "The Psychological Foundations of Culture" but for macroeconomics instead?
After reading that article, I seriously can't tell whether he means should epistemically (‘women are likely to vote for him’), ethically (‘women had better vote for him’), or he's (deliberately or accidentally) equivocating the two. His arguments only makes sense if he means it epistemically, but his tone only makes sense if he means it ethically.
My guess is that the article is a propaganda piece, designed above all things to elevate Romney's status and make him look better. I don't think the author, if pressed on the point, would either commit to a prediction that Romney will receive an overwhelming amount of the female vote, nor to a normative claim that women, ethically, should vote for him(1). In other words, I guess he was just bullshiting. But bullshit can still be sexist.
(1) He probably does think that women (and men) ought ethically to vote for Romney, but on grounds unrelated to the topic of the article.
This article isn't a joke?
That is an excellent question.
Is your objection that the descriptive statement is false, or than it's sexist to say it even if its true?
Yes, how one's candidate appeals to voters' biases is not exactly something to brag about, but it's unfortunately a common occurrence in our political process.
First, it is false. Polls put Obama over Romney among female voters by 8, 10, or 16 points, according to the first three results I found in Google News. Moreover, in 2008 Obama won the female and tied the male vote, while now he seems to be winning the female vote by a somewhat smaller amount, but losing substantially the male vote. So looking at the female/male ratio (to control for the state of the economy and other general features) it looks as of now that Romney does worse with women than McCain did.
Of course, not every false statement about women is sexist. But I would say that an analysis attributing (in a false and unsubstantiated way) women's voting choices to irrational, subconscious factors as opposed to conscious ideological preference or self-interest, while not making a similar analysis for men's voting choices, is sexist.
Also, in my opinion it edges into outright misogyny because the paragraph
is not merely an objective analysis that in the author's opinion women will see Obama as weak/emasculated//whatever for having daughters instead of sons: it actively mocks Obama and expresses contempt for him on that basis, thus reinforcing the idea that women are less valuable than men.
It's not clear to me that it's supposed to be a descriptive statement. Downvoted for misquotation (even if explicitly shown by square brackets) hiding that.
They must have been terribly disappointed that his alpha pheromones only worked on married women.
Wait, are you asserting that sexism is ever justified? If so, we have a definition mismatch.
For a start, we have Forbes Magazine drawing a link from EP to why most women will never be CEOs (Never mind that most people will never be CEOs). I haven't yet demonstrated how many readers of Forbes allowed the claim that EP justifies the sexist treatment of executives, and also take sexist actions regarding executives; will you accept that 5% of board members of publicly traded companies make sexist decisions about executives, and that 80% of those people read Forbes and didn't object to that (4% of board members overall)? (again, I'm using numbers that I think are conservative, because direct measurements are hard.)
Since I specified unjustified sexism, you'll have to provide an argument for why said justification is incorrect.
I agree that many Americans assert that EP justifies sexist actions.
I agree that effectively nobody asserts that having sensory organs which can distinguish sex justify sexist actions. Nor did I claim anyone did.
My assertion was, and is, that the presence of those organs, much like the presence of those justifications, contributes to sexist actions that would not occur in their absence.
I assumed your objection was to the sexist actions, and the justifications were objectionable merely because they enabled those actions. In which case it seems that anything else that equally enabled those actions would be equally objectionable.
But, sure, if you're concerned specifically with asserted justifications rather than with the actions themselves, then I'm entirely beside your point.
Unrelatedly: lacking a justification for X != believing X to be unjustified.
The ability to notice a difference irrelevant to a decision is not in the same category as the belief that a difference which is irrelevant to a decision is, in fact, relevant.
True.
And the existence of a field of study that can be used to justify such a belief is in yet a third category.
I'm not sure what you mean by "reinforce", but it seems reasonable to take these differences into account when making decisions.
For example, suppose that evolutionary science has determined that is was pro-survival in the past for females to refrain from occupations which had high fatality rates.
Reinforcing that would be claiming that females should refrain from or be prohibited/discouraged from those occupations in the present and near future.
Also sexist is the line of thought "Females are statistically more/less likely to be X, therefore I require that it be a male/female who performs task Y.", when variation within each sex is great enough that there are a very large number of one sex who outperform a typical member of the other; a specific example would be "Females are less likely than males to complete a degree in mathematics; therefore it makes sense to award this scholarship to the equally qualified male instead of the female".
That's not the relevant comparison. In practice the comparison is between an above average members of each sex.
In your example, than depends on whether the first clause is still true after controlling for whatever qualifications are used in the second.
You don't always have the luxury of choosing from among a sample that includes above-median performers.
The second case is a textbook example of sexist thought; I thought it was clear that the first clause was not controlling for anything, while the second was making a specific measurement of expected performance.
In that case comparing average members of one sex with the above average members of the other is still not the right comparison to make.
Even this statement is ambiguous. Does the specific measure of expected performance actually screen of gender?
You never need to compare the average, because you only ever need to compare a small number of individuals.
Performance in the production environment correlates with the measured expectation equally well for males and females.