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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world? - Less Wrong
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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.
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.