There is a sub-blogosphere focused on a particular conception of male and female psychology, centered on the blogger Roissy, which owes a lot to evolutionary psychology.
I’m a big fan of evolutionary psychology, including practical applications of it. Roissy makes a good start attempting to apply it, but he falls prey to major ideological errors, overgeneralization, and oversimplification. I see no evidence that he has read more than a few popular books on the subject. He has made the discovery that even naive applications of evolutionary psychology can be incredibly powerful in the practical world, then falls into the naive realist pit and assumes that his theories are true just because they work better than the conventional alternatives. Furthermore, he fails at ethics really, really badly. I’m being kinda vague, but I’ll go into further detail upon request.
Evolutionary psychology is great. Applied evolutionary psychology is great. Roissy just isn’t doing it right.
Given the emerging influence of ‘game’ bloggers such as roissy and their often disappointing interaction with so-called “men’s rights” activism, (see e.g. [1] and resulting comments, [2]) I think it would be useful if you did take the time to write an extended critique of them. Are you still affiliated with feministcritics.org?
It’s hard to discuss the subject with the debate becoming emotional, but let me just say that Roissy’s goals are to be an entertaining writer, to succeed at picking up women, and to debunk false commonsense notions of dating, through real-life experience.
He’s not trying to submit a peer-reviewed paper on evo psych to a rationality audience. To judge him on that basis is to kind of miss the point.
(Ethics is a whole separate question. But then, Stalin was a atheist too, wasn’t he?)
I’m a big fan of evolutionary psychology, including practical applications of it. Roissy makes a good start attempting to apply it, but he falls prey to major ideological errors, overgeneralization, and oversimplification. I see no evidence that he has read more than a few popular books on the subject. He has made the discovery that even naive applications of evolutionary psychology can be incredibly powerful in the practical world, then falls into the naive realist pit and assumes that his theories are true just because they work better than the conventional alternatives. Furthermore, he fails at ethics really, really badly. I’m being kinda vague, but I’ll go into further detail upon request.
Evolutionary psychology is great. Applied evolutionary psychology is great. Roissy just isn’t doing it right.
Given the emerging influence of ‘game’ bloggers such as roissy and their often disappointing interaction with so-called “men’s rights” activism, (see e.g. [1] and resulting comments, [2]) I think it would be useful if you did take the time to write an extended critique of them. Are you still affiliated with feministcritics.org?
I am indeed planning such an extended critique. I’m just deciding whether it would make sense to post it here, or FC.org, or somewhere else entirely.
And yes, I’m still one of the bloggers there, though I am sort of on hiatus.
Upvoted for this. Now to get it down to 140 characters …
Edit: Posted. Suggestions for how to cut it down enough to add credit welcomed.
It’s hard to discuss the subject with the debate becoming emotional, but let me just say that Roissy’s goals are to be an entertaining writer, to succeed at picking up women, and to debunk false commonsense notions of dating, through real-life experience.
He’s not trying to submit a peer-reviewed paper on evo psych to a rationality audience. To judge him on that basis is to kind of miss the point.
(Ethics is a whole separate question. But then, Stalin was a atheist too, wasn’t he?)