Z._M._Davis comments on The Gift We Give To Tomorrow - Less Wrong

44 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 17 July 2008 06:07AM

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Comment author: Z._M._Davis 18 July 2008 03:52:10AM 9 points [-]

Vladimir: "These are easy." Ben: "None of them are tough to explain. Some Vlad's nailed [...]" Elliot: "Humans [...] prepared for the hunt by looking at their cave paintings of animals they would soon kill [...]" Elliot again: "hunting music [...] How's that?"

In case anyone was wondering where evolutionary psychology gets its bad reputation for being a bunch of "just-so" stories, see above.

To be clear, I'm not saying that there aren't any adaptive explanations for aesthetic appreciation of music, rainbows, &c. Rather, it's that we're unlikely to uncover the true explanations in the process of speculating on a blog comment thread. To do this properly, and therefore actually have half a chance of getting the right answer, you'd want to be deeply familiar with the literature on human evolution and modern-day hunter-gatherers. You'd want to review or conduct cross-cultural studies. You'd want to devise some extremely clever experiments to run in the psychology lab, &c.

By all means, generate hypotheses! Guess!--but know when you're just guessing.