I know that working from the viewpoint in which all of gendered behavior is culturally constructed will have me wrong sometimes, but the trend of history makes me think I'll be less wrong by keeping that viewpoint as opposed to the contrary one.

I'm not sure how stable this strategy is. Right now, personal genomics and big data informatics might be making biology smarter at a surprising rate, while sociology has no similar tool ratchet to boost it up. I mean, you're not up against some caricature from the 19th century spouting about God-ordained moral order, but people who are intent on actually looking into the one billion moving parts that make a human come together and make sense of them.

Also, you probably mean sex, not gender-- gender is between the ears, sex is between the legs. (It's more complicated than that, obviously, but that's the pneumonic that's been useful for me.)

Well, you do decide how to behave with what's between your ears, not what's between your legs.

Thank you for explaining your point of view. I agree that if you don't know anything about a person other than that they are talking about evolutionary psychology, that is good evidence that they are a misogynist douchebag who is using it as an excuse to be a misogynist douchebag.

However, reversed stupidity is not intelligence. The fact that there are despicable people using a particular branch of science to justify their behavior is not strong evidence for or against the truth of the results in that branch of science. Lots of people have very silly ideas about quantum mechanics, but that doesn't mean that quantum mechanics is broken.

I think I am not too far off the mark when I say that generally speaking, on LessWrong we aspire to judge ideas based on how right they are and not based on how much we dislike the people who have historically held ideas superficially similar to those ideas.

I wonder if "evopsych" and "the patriarchy" are some sort of mirror image words that make people from the other side stop listening whenever they get brought into the argument.

If humans having any behavior differences by gender that are not culturally constructed is a suspect viewpoint, what do you make of humans having evolved from animals that don't have culture to construct things but do have behavior differences by gender?

That would have been terrible writing. I know that language is imprecise, but that doesn't mean that facts don't exist, it just means that it can be hard to express them.

There's a second point to the fable, which is that "Blue" and "Green" have had extra connotations snuck in by history:

Society is still divided along Blue and Green lines, and there is a "Blue" and a "Green" position on almost every contemporary issue of political or cultural importance. The Blues advocate taxes on individual incomes, the Greens advocate taxes on merchant sales; the Blues advocate stricter marriage laws, while the Greens wish to make it easier to obtain divorces; the Blues take their support from the heart of city areas, while the more distant farmers and watersellers tend to be Green; the Blues believe that the Earth is a huge spherical rock at the center of the universe, the Greens that it is a huge flat rock circling some other object called a Sun. Not every Blue or every Green citizen takes the "Blue" or "Green" position on every issue, but it would be rare to find a city merchant who believed the sky was blue, and yet advocated an individual tax and freer marriage laws.

Part of the point of the fable is that these positions have nothing to do with each other and also nothing to do with the color of the sky, and when you go around teaching people that the Green and Blue points of view are equally valid, you're also teaching them not to try to settle any of these other questions (while reinforcing the implicit premise that any of the "Blue" positions above have anything to do with the sky being blue and dually for green).

Anyway, the fable isn't actually about color. Feel free to substitute something you feel is more objective if it helps you understand the fable better (e.g. whether the air on the surface is safe to breathe).

No. No, no, no, no. Blue light is light that has a wavelength of approximately 450-495 mm and green light is light that has a wavelength of approximately 520-570 mm. If I had a device that measured the wavelength of light, the wavelength of the light coming from the sky is an empirical fact. It may not be constant, and if the wavelength is in between those ranges then it may look more bluish-green or greenish-blue depending on various factors, but I cannot socially construct the wavelength of light emitted by a given source.

What do you think this is a metaphor for?

I'm a feminist. I started reading this blog because I like Methods of Rationality and the overlap between rationalists and nootropics nerds intrigued me. I studied sociology, gender studies and cultural studies in college, so that's where my background is.

In discussions I've been a part of, evolutionary psychology ends up being sort of a pariah viewpoint because it's constantly used to reinforce social norms that are tied up in patriarchy. We also tend to, for various reasons, believe more in nurture over nature. Here's my reasons why I do that, and why I am dismissive of evolutionary psychology by default.

The idea that evolution has driven men to be a certain way and women to be otherwise is generally really hard to prove because it's pretty much impossible to find people who are outside of the social structures that exist. However, historically ideas of how men and women evolve are tied up in ideas of hunter-gatherer cultures, many of which are being regularly proven wrong (the recent evidence found on the proportion of gathered food vs. hunted food eaten by hunter-gatherer societies, for example). These assumptions are based on how we view gender as a society and how we perceive "primitive" (scarequotes used because of the social baggage around the word "primitive", which is both judgmental and inaccurate) cultures.

Historically, the sort of people who use arguments based in biological determinism are creating arguments for the status quo. You see this in the history of the relationship between race, biology and evolution and in the history of how women have been perceived by "science" (scarequotes used both in self-awareness that science is hardly a monolithic entity and because a lot of this was bullshit spouted by people in labcoats more than actual science). As this stuff is proven to not only be wrong, but to be extremely harmful, I've looked at the arc of history and decided that when an argument is made for something that reinforces the current social order (particularly patriarchy, but other social structures too) and it uses biological determinism as it's basis, I usually take it with a grain of salt the size of a glacier, because historically those arguments have tended to be wrong, and the context in which I've seen them used is almost always one in which people with privilege are circling the wagons in an attempt to defend their privilege as biologically just. It's also something I see used by people who are determined that their relationship with the opposite gender is because of some biological reason and that default to biology as the reason for that when it's really easy to find extremely blatant examples of how social conditioning controls how people think and behave and/or their issues come from treating any group of people as a monolithic entity.

Also, I've seen a lot more sociological studies and research from that perspective than most people doing the evopsych side of the argument, and when given the science behind evopsych as I've seen it and weighing it against the sociological stuff that I know fairly well, the sociological evidence tends to be more compelling and obvious. Sociologists, of course, are likely to have the same issues as scientists do with their biases influencing their data, but because it's the sociologist's main job to understand culture, I give them more of the benefit of the doubt than most "hard" scientists for the same reason I would give a linguist more credit in understanding, say, connotation and denotation-- it's easier to break out of society's box, even when you were raised in said box, if you have more knowledge of what the box is and where it's edges are.

TL;DR: Evolutionary psychology tends to lead to biologically deterministic arguments and biological determinism has historically not only been wrong but has been actively harmful to marginalized groups. I generally choose to take any argument involving evolutionary psychology or biological determinism with a grain of salt, particularly when that argument supports the social status quo, because historically biologically deterministic arguments about marginalized groups (the big ones being women, racial minorities and sexual minorities) have turned out to be wrong. Because it's impossible to separate scientists from the society that they work within, I assume that biases are reflected in data, and I also know that the way that evolutionary psychology studies are reported in the media tends to exaggerate findings, so I particularly have to take reports of evopsych findings with a grain of salt unless I or someone I trust has run the data. Even if I can trust the data; I can't always trust the interpretation of the data because the person doing the interpretation is from a culture with a vested interest in preserving the status quo.

I hope that gives you guys some insight on the whole thing. The other thing you might want to know is that the majority of people on the internet arguing for evolutionary psychology are gigantic assholes, so you have to get over the initial bias against you that's brought on by, you know, reddit comment threads you can play evolutionary psychology bingo in. In the same way that "state's rights" can be a codeword for racism, "evopsych" can be a codeword for "I am a misogynist douchebag, and also probably a pick-up-artist, who is into harassing feminists on the internet as, you know, a hobby".

I've been consistently bothered thinking about this story and I think the biggest issue I have with it is the idea that there is a right answer at all. I know this just puts me in the same category as the people at the college who teach everyone that Green and Blue are equally valid viewpoints, but it seems to me that the truth of the matter is that perception is so subjective and societally constructed. The other people in this thread have discussed this as a matter of the Greens rationalizing, hypothetically "seeing" the wrong color because they want to, but I think that argument is fundamentally wrong because the way we view color has changed so dramatically over history and is different among cultures. It's like the base system for numbers, or even language, to an extent-- once you learn it, it's really hard to snap out of it and think in a different way. I feel like the entire story, and the idea of the rightness of the Blues being confirmed, is just privileging a particular point of view as "right". Maybe this is just me arguing for a less objective reality, but even though I read this a few days ago it's been tickling the edge of my mind, bothering me.