FWIW, for I think the first time I see LW as going more or less mad in perceiving value in a blog post linked to in the discussion section.
For what it is worth I hadn’t followed the thread and my impression when reading it after your priming was “just kinda ok”. The reasoning wasn’t absurd or anything but there isn’t any easy way to see how much influence that particular dynamic has had relative to other factors. My impression is that the effect is relatively minor.
I tentatively think any story humans tell about natural selection that obeys certain Darwinian and logical rules is true in that it must have an effect. However this effect may be too small to make any predictions from. This thought is under suspicion for committing the no true Scotsman fallacy.
An example is group selection. If humans can tell a non-flawed story about why it would be in a region of foxes’ benefit to individually restrain their breeding, this does not mean one can predict foxes can be seen to do this. It does mean that the effect itself is real subject to caveats about the rate of migration for foxes from one region to another, etc., such that under artificual enough conditions the real effect could be important. The problem is that there are a million other real effects that don’t come to mind as nice stories, and all have different vectors of effect.
This is why evolutionary psychology and the like is so bewitching and misleading. Pretty much all the effects postulated are true—though most are insignificant. People are entranced by their logical truth.
For what it is worth I hadn’t followed the thread and my impression when reading it after your priming was “just kinda ok”. The reasoning wasn’t absurd or anything but there isn’t any easy way to see how much influence that particular dynamic has had relative to other factors. My impression is that the effect is relatively minor.
I tentatively think any story humans tell about natural selection that obeys certain Darwinian and logical rules is true in that it must have an effect. However this effect may be too small to make any predictions from. This thought is under suspicion for committing the no true Scotsman fallacy.
An example is group selection. If humans can tell a non-flawed story about why it would be in a region of foxes’ benefit to individually restrain their breeding, this does not mean one can predict foxes can be seen to do this. It does mean that the effect itself is real subject to caveats about the rate of migration for foxes from one region to another, etc., such that under artificual enough conditions the real effect could be important. The problem is that there are a million other real effects that don’t come to mind as nice stories, and all have different vectors of effect.
This is why evolutionary psychology and the like is so bewitching and misleading. Pretty much all the effects postulated are true—though most are insignificant. People are entranced by their logical truth.
I think I agree with all of that (with the caveat that I don’t know exactly which Evolutionary Psychology claims you would dismiss as insignificant.)