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Alejandro1 comments on The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world? - Less Wrong
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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.
They also fail to check on whether a behavior is as universal as they think it is.
Male and female are not important explanatory categories
Yeah, you definitely have to beware of WEIRD psychological samples, too.
For example, there's a culture in which people don't experience the Müller-Lyer illusion - which has even been observed in people who have been blind from birth.
Which culture?
Here is one possibility:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/656735
According to the PDF about the WEIRD psychological samples, the San foragers of the Kalahari desert.
Another "interesting" bit of trivia: the ability to look at something very far away and understand that it only looks small is a learned skill, not an innate one.
Original source
Taboo "learned/innate skill". Is everything except what feral children do a learned skill? If not what do you mean?
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.
I strongly recommend not punishing people for saying that it's taken them time to learn something.
That's... probably a good idea.
xkcd
It is not as if we have no half-baked evopsych theorizing here; and there's Hanson, who is particularly guilty. Who can read some of his wilder posts and not regard it was a wee bit discrediting of evopsych?
No it bloody doesn't except on the Internet. Read "The Psychological Foundations of Culture" and quote me a paragraph that pattern-matches anything like that. And then perhaps you'll give me back your respect point, because in a flash of enlightenment you'll suddenly understand why I was puzzled by people having issues with EP.
Oh boy, this is going to be one of those "reference class tennis" arguments, isn't it?
"The Psychological Foundations of Culture" does not discuss gender issues in detail.
More specifically: Sexual Strategies Theory tends to agree with modern cultural stereotypes of men and women, much as "scientific racism" tended to confirm cultural stereotypes of people of different races.
(I do acknowledge that "Sexual Strategies Theory" is far from settled science and has been heavily criticized - but it's a large part of what comes to mind when people think of ev-psych.)
Evolutionary psychology is not primarily about gender issues. This may be much of why so many folks have such a problem with it ....
Perhaps it is merely that reputable evolutionary psychology is not about gender issues, while disreputable evo-psych is almost entirely focused on them.
I've had the luck of understanding both why people were puzzled and why they were wrong to be puzzled, since I only really learned any real ev-psych after I came to LessWrong.
What Crono says is pattern-matching is, well, yes mostly on the internet. However, it's also somewhat present out there, but it's not the Ev-Psych itself that pattern-matches - it's the behaviors and arguments of idiots who use Ev-Psych as ammunition.
What I've seen personally is mostly cases where "Evolutionary Psychology" could be substituted for "Magical Scientific Explanation" and no meaning would be lost, or cases where you could reasonably assert that a magical giant goat head yelling "facts" at people could have been the arguer's only source of information - i.e. the "fact" they pulled from ev-psych was technically true in the exact sense that "light is waves" is true, but they had no understanding of it whatsoever and their derivations from that were completely alien to the science.
In fairness, that's about culture. Not gender.
The paper could've been called "The Biological Foundations of Culture" and it would've been more accurate. Read it before saying that.
I've been rumbled :(
We're talking about this, right? If I really have misunderstood it, I guess this is a good time to get around to reading it.
Nope. You're looking for the paper by Tooby and Cosmides.
Part of the issue is that as far as I know said "scientific racism" was never scientifically discredited (the underlying facts may even be true). It was simply socially discredited in a "this leads to genocide and other horrible things" kind of way and a memetic immune system was set up to fight these memes. However, as mentioned in the linked article said immune system is no match for rational thought.
When it appears that an intellectual edifice has been constructed to portray as necessary a particular status-quo — in the case of scientific racism, that of slavery and subjugation by race — we may reasonably suspect that the overturning of those social conditions is all the disproof that is needed to overthrow the entire edifice of rationalization, too.
Imagine that there exists a complicated, deeply explained theory to explain why no green-eyed, black-haired person has ever been, or ever will be, elected president. And then one is. The theory is not merely socially discredited; it is empirically disproven.
Scientific racism was concocted to explain curious observations such as that black people liked to run away from slavery and sometimes did not work as hard as they could for a slave-master. These curiosities are better explained by modern evolutionary psychology, with its notion of the psychological unity of mankind, than by the convoluted rationalizations created to justify past systems of social relations.
I feel I should point out that these two examples are pretty lame examples: they were proposed by the same guy, before Francis Galton (generally considered the father or grandfather of any genuinely scientific racism), have never been used by any except anti-racists, and indeed, were widely mocked at the time.
To claim that they are an example of a motivating problem in scientific racism is roughly like someone in 2170 saying TimeCube was a motivating problem in the development of a since-discredited stringy theory.
I think the Time Cube example is almost certainly an exaggeration, although I admit you probably know more on the subject than me. Do you have a more ... typical ... example?
I don't think it's much of an exaggeration.
Speaking from my 2170th perspective, I must point out that Time Cube was perfectly standard 20th century physics: it was distributed on their premier form of scholarly communication the Internet, was carefully documented in the very first versions of Wikipedia (indicating the regard it was held in by contemporaries), it dealt with standard topics of 20th century American discourse, conspiracy theories (which thankfully we have moved beyond), it was widely cited and discussed as recent citation analyses have proven, and finally, the author lectured and taught at the only surviving center of American learning, MIT.
The historical case is simply open and shut! This isn't a random layman myth like Nixon mentoring Obama and running dirty tricks in his first election (as every informed historian knows, Nixon was of the Greens while Obama bin Laden, of course, was a Blue).
Except Time Cube is incomprehensible gibberish, not just wrong. But I'm not saying that it was actually mainstream, you understand.
Also, that's a really good "2170th perspective". I can't argue with that. Unless, of course, you're saying our understanding of recent history is quite as bad as the closing paragraph there.
I'm not sure we could say anything better of Isaac Newton's alchemy.
Popular understanding can be pretty bad. The more I read in history, the more I realized I didn't understand the past anywhere near as well as I thought I did; revelations ranging from spherical earths to gay presidents to the Founding Fathers being conspiracy theorists etc. I don't put much stock on understanding well the context of the racist who was originally being discussed, although enough information survives that I can point out discrediting parts.
Indeed. Do you take 21st century scientific racism seriously? Or do you dismiss it because it pattern matches to what some idiots have said?
Reversed stupidity is not intelligence, despite our natural pattern-matching inclinations to treat it as such.
The technical term is "karma". But I must admit, I am surprised he didn't already know.
While you mention it, do you know of something like "The Psychological Foundations of Culture" but for macroeconomics instead?
This is an economics textbook I liked:
http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Economics-N-Gregory-Mankiw/dp/0030259517
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.
It could almost pass as an article on the Onion.
I suspect that it was intended to be ironic on some level. Whether it's the irony of those crazy liberal's theory "proving" they should vote conservative, the irony that conservatives, who are often attacked as anti-womans-rights, should "logically" be getting the votes of women, or something else, I couldn't tell you. It could even be an attempt to show women information that "should" persuade them to vote for his preferred candidate, but somehow I doubt it. The tone just seems too jokey. Regardless, of course, it's definitely offensive, so it was a stupid thing to write; I may be overestimating the author.
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.