biology does not seem to be a common field of expertise or even interest here
Evolution, evolutionary psychology, cognitive science (i.e. neurology), and diet seem to be significant interests. That is, I agree with you that it’s quite relevant and that we don’t seem to have much expertise here, but I think we have the interest.
nods True enough where those are concerned—I may be expressing this unclearly.
What I mean to indicate is that there’s some obvious interest in the bits of biology that bump up against rationality philosophy and this community’s aggregate, extrapolated desireable “FOOM” scenarios, but it comes across as very topical interest. Like focusing on the pretty flower, considering pretty flowers relevant to their interests, but ignoring the branch, and only dimly interested in the tree as the thing-that-holds-flowers.
Biology as its own field isn’t going to be of interest to everybody, of course, but it’s troubling to see that a lot of the discussion about biology that goes on around here seems, well, incomplete and backward. Relying heavily on pop-science and “celebrity” biologists to speak for the entire field (much of Eliezer’s writing about the topic), reasoning from first principles about stuff that’s too embedded in context for the resulting, logically-valid ideas to apply soundly to real biology, and a tendency to oversimplify the subject matter or just ignore relevant bits, either because of a lack of knowledge or a very limited one—and a tendency to reason forward from there, leading to what seem like GIGO issues in the resulting model.
(This is a long-winded way of agreeing with your statement that there’s interest but no expertise; I just think the distinction’s important enough to make between superficial interest in obvious, surface-level attractors and a deeper focus on the body of knowledge giving rise to them. It doesn’t fly here to talk like this about economics, logic, or philosophy—if your knowledge is that limited, you’ll be directed to the sequences.)
Evolution, evolutionary psychology, cognitive science (i.e. neurology), and diet seem to be significant interests. That is, I agree with you that it’s quite relevant and that we don’t seem to have much expertise here, but I think we have the interest.
nods True enough where those are concerned—I may be expressing this unclearly.
What I mean to indicate is that there’s some obvious interest in the bits of biology that bump up against rationality philosophy and this community’s aggregate, extrapolated desireable “FOOM” scenarios, but it comes across as very topical interest. Like focusing on the pretty flower, considering pretty flowers relevant to their interests, but ignoring the branch, and only dimly interested in the tree as the thing-that-holds-flowers.
Biology as its own field isn’t going to be of interest to everybody, of course, but it’s troubling to see that a lot of the discussion about biology that goes on around here seems, well, incomplete and backward. Relying heavily on pop-science and “celebrity” biologists to speak for the entire field (much of Eliezer’s writing about the topic), reasoning from first principles about stuff that’s too embedded in context for the resulting, logically-valid ideas to apply soundly to real biology, and a tendency to oversimplify the subject matter or just ignore relevant bits, either because of a lack of knowledge or a very limited one—and a tendency to reason forward from there, leading to what seem like GIGO issues in the resulting model.
(This is a long-winded way of agreeing with your statement that there’s interest but no expertise; I just think the distinction’s important enough to make between superficial interest in obvious, surface-level attractors and a deeper focus on the body of knowledge giving rise to them. It doesn’t fly here to talk like this about economics, logic, or philosophy—if your knowledge is that limited, you’ll be directed to the sequences.)