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Eugine_Nier comments on How to Avoid the Conflict Between Feminism and Evolutionary Psychology? - Less Wrong
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Comments (97)
Conflicts between contemporary social groups are part of reality.
The topic of this debate is "How to Avoid the Conflict Between Feminism and Evolutionary Psychology?". This debate is inherently about reasoning about conflicts between contemporary social groups.
If you want to reduce that conflict it makes sense to reason about the conflict.
Resolving conflicts is not an end in itself. The goal is to find the truth, in the process conflicts are likely to be resolved, but we shouldn't attempt to resolve conflicts by agreeing to believe a "compromise position" at the expense of seeking truth.
The goals set out in the opening post are to reduce certain bad consequences of the conflict:
Those goals are valid ends in themselves. Especially for those people who are autists or have otherwise weak social skills, communicating their truth in a way that doesn't destroy some of their friendship is very valuable.
I don't think anybody argued in this debate that one should agree to believe in a "compromise position".
I understood Eneasz in a way where he argued that proper evolutionary psychologists don't spend enough public effort on debunking incorrect and sexist evolutionary psychology.
As a sidenote, evolutionary psychology predicts that few people have the goal of finding truth. Knowing "the truth" is not very useful for a hunter gatherer. It is more important for the hunter gatherer to have a high social status in his tribe.
Humans might publically profess that finding truth is their motive but they don't act accordingly. Most people care a lot more about getting approval from other people. They care about feeling like they are in a priveliged position where they know more about the way the world works then other people.
There a good Dilbert cartoon: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2012-10-07
If people would really care about being truthful, they would be less confident that their overconfident positions are true. Holding to an overconfident position on the other hand make it easier to feel like you know the truth while other people don't.
The cartoon confuses scientific evidence with rational evidence.
In the cartoon Dilbert doesn't really provide rational evidence for his claim either.
In this case there clear rational evidence that evolution evolved human's to try to show their high status by debating. There's little rational evidence that evolution gave people the goal of finding truth.
That doesn't mean he doesn't have any.
If the only point of debating was status, people would evolve not to listen to what anyone else says. Furthermore, the results of debates and human reasoning (flawed as it is) is correlated with truth; if this wasn't the case, we'd still be on the savannah getting chased by lions.
This is a universal argument against debating any controversial topic.
In my experience, the typical feminist complaint is that the evolutionary psychologists don't debunk correct but "sexist" evolutionary psychology.
I don't think anybody argued here that one shouldn't debate whether evolutionary psychology is correct. The only thing that's argued is that this debate isn't primarily that claim.
On LessWrong I also consider it a bit strange to claim that the question of whether evolutionary psychology is correct is a controversial claim. In this venue it's a quite boring consensus claim.
"There a way that would allow evolutionary scientistis to be better at communicating their science to the public" is a controversial claim on LessWrong.
So? I don't see how that negates anything anybody argued here.