wedrifid comments on Rationality Lessons Learned from Irrational Adventures in Romance - LessWrong

54 Post author: lukeprog 04 October 2011 02:45AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (609)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: wedrifid 07 October 2011 01:04:41AM 4 points [-]

It's worth noting that not every piece of social interaction has a non-trivial influence from evolutionary psychology. Sometimes an insult is just an insult...

Of all the forms of communication over which to trivialize evolutionary psychology you chose insults? Knowing how, when and who to insult is one of the most critical instincts evolutionary psychology provided us!

Comment author: [deleted] 07 October 2011 02:41:16AM 1 point [-]

And the exact specific insults chosen is pretty darn culture-bound. "Stupid melon" is only a serious insult in Chinese.

(To clarify: I am talking about the semantics of the words chosen as insults, not the behavior of socially insulting another for whatever reason. I do not think the specific words common in current English parlance as insults by a specific social group can be meaningfully applied to humanity as a whole)