Poignant short story about truth-seeking that I just found. Quote:
"No," interjected an internal voice. "You need to prove that your dad will appear by a direct argument from the length of your nails, one that does not invoke your subsisting in a dream state as an intermediate step."
"Nonsense," retorted another voice. "That we find ourselves in a dream state was never assumed; rather, it follows so straightforwardly from the long-nail counterfactual that the derivation could be done, I think, even in an extremely weak system of inference."
The full thing reads like a flash tour of OB/LW, except it was written in 2001.
My response is to the Roissy quote specifically, which says, "direct result of actions taken that further your genes' goals" NOT "would have furthered your genes' goals in the ancestral environment." Thus, in the case of forced reproduction, if you were locked in a small room and given just enough food to survive, but then given the opportunity to reproduce with a fertile partner every single time that you were capable of causing conception, you would (I'd hope) not be happy, even though you would produce many, many more times the surviving offspring (if you're male, literally thousands of times the surviving offspring). It seems almost trivially obvious that objectively maximizing inclusive genetic fitness will not make you happy.
The amendment "tend to maximize... in the ancestral environment" changes the equation completely. First, it's very prone to "just-so" stories; one can invent a decent explanation as to why practically any action increases genetic fitness (i.e. celibacy is for aunt/unclehood). Second, because the cause is tremendously indirect, it isn't realistic to say that the cause of someone's increased happiness is the fact that they are (or would be in the AE) more genetically fit, as outlined in the EY post I linked. There's a great deal of truth to it, but it's both indirect and tremendously imprecise. And, more generally, if someone asks "How can I be happier?" the answer is seldom, "Well, think about what would maximize your inclusive genetic fitness in the ancestral environment, and then do that."
On a related note, my problem with a lot of Roissy's reasoning is that he views people in terms of rather binary "objective" Platonic ideals of "male" and "female" and does not account for either innate or learned differences, instead dismissing such as trivial, which is quite problematic, because a great diversity of preferences actually exist.
Edit: Also, wikipedia's phrasing of the sexy son hypothesis contradicts what I've read elsewhere. The idea is that if females generally prefer trait X, then females should choose males with trait X, even if trait X is completely superficial, because then their sons will be more successful with future females. That doesn't make non-superficial trait Y irrelevant, and there is no basis in reason nor a citation claiming it should. The hypothesis is simply an explanation of how an expensive superficial trait can become dominant; it has nothing (explicitly) to do with cuckoldry or anything like that.