jaibot comments on Using Evolution for Marriage or Sex - Less Wrong

17 Post author: diegocaleiro 06 May 2013 05:34AM

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Comment author: ChristianKl 07 May 2013 05:20:44PM 1 point [-]

Quite often proponents of evoluationary psychology give advice that doesn't make sense if you don't think that the findings of evoluationary psychology generalize to a large percentage of the human population and only say something about averages.

If you want to use information to guide your actions it's important to have a grasp on the likilhood that you can generalize from a certain evoluationary psychology claim to a situation in your daily life.

The proponent of evoluationary psychology usually thinks that you can generalize the finding of evoluationary psychology to daily life in a way that increases your understanding of those situations.

Comment author: jaibot 07 May 2013 05:57:25PM 0 points [-]

It may be possible to glean individually-useful information from evolutionary psychology, with a pile of statistical uncertainty. I'm not sure, and not aware of that much in the way of rigorous investigation in applications of applied psychology.

It becomes a problem when both speaker and audience don't have a grasp on the statistics, and it degrades into a horrible pile of confirmation bias and echo chambers and tribal fealty. I expect lesswrong to handle this better than most places, though what I've seen so far is...less than perfect.