There’s a tradition of examining that frame here that’s probably inherited from Overcoming Bias; it’s related to a model of human cognitive evolution as driven primarily by political selection pressures, which seems fairly plausible to me. I should probably mention, though, that I don’t think it’s a complete model; it’s fairly hard to come up with an unambiguous counterexample to it, but it shares with a lot of evo-psych the problem of having much more explanatory than predictive power.
I think it’s best viewed as one of several complementary models of behavior rather than as a totalizing model, hence the “frame” descriptor.
I described it as a frame because I think it’s best viewed as one of several complementary models of behavior rather than as a totalizing model.
I have a suspicion that we’ll only be able to produce any totalizing model that’s much good after we crack human intelligence in general. I mean, look at all this entangled mess.
Well, “that’s much good” is the tough part. It’s not at all hard to make a totalizing model, and only a little harder to make one that’s hard to disprove in hindsight (there are dozens in the social sciences) but all the existing ones I know of tend to be pretty bad at prediction. The status-seeking model is one of the better ones—people in general seem more prone to avoiding embarrassment than to maximizing expected money or sexual success, to name two competing models—but it’s far from perfect.
There’s a tradition of examining that frame here that’s probably inherited from Overcoming Bias; it’s related to a model of human cognitive evolution as driven primarily by political selection pressures, which seems fairly plausible to me. I should probably mention, though, that I don’t think it’s a complete model; it’s fairly hard to come up with an unambiguous counterexample to it, but it shares with a lot of evo-psych the problem of having much more explanatory than predictive power.
I think it’s best viewed as one of several complementary models of behavior rather than as a totalizing model, hence the “frame” descriptor.
I have a suspicion that we’ll only be able to produce any totalizing model that’s much good after we crack human intelligence in general. I mean, look at all this entangled mess.
Well, “that’s much good” is the tough part. It’s not at all hard to make a totalizing model, and only a little harder to make one that’s hard to disprove in hindsight (there are dozens in the social sciences) but all the existing ones I know of tend to be pretty bad at prediction. The status-seeking model is one of the better ones—people in general seem more prone to avoiding embarrassment than to maximizing expected money or sexual success, to name two competing models—but it’s far from perfect.
Yup. My point exactly.