Quintin (and also Alex) - first, let me say, thank you for the friendly, collegial, and constructive comments and replies you’ve offered. Many folks get reactive and defensive when they’re hit with a 6,000-word critique of their theory, but you’re remained constructive and intellectually engaged. So, thanks for that.
On the general point about Shard Theory being a relatively ‘Blank Slate’ account, it might help to think about two different meanings of ‘Blank Slate’—mechanistic versus functional.
A mechanistic Blank Slate approach (which I take Shard Theory to be, somewhat, but not entirely, since it does talk about some reinforcement systems being ‘innate’), emphasizes the details of how we get from genome to brain development to adult psychology and behavior. Lots of discussion about Shard Theory has centered around whether the genome can ‘encode’ or ‘hardwire’ or ‘hard-code’ certain bits of human psychology.
A functional Blank Slate approach (which I think Shard Theory pursues even more strongly, to be honest), doesn’t make any positive, theoretically informative use of any evolutionary-functional analysis to characterize animal or human adaptations. Rather, functional Blank Slate approaches tend to emphasize social learning, cross-cultural differences, shared family environments, etc as sources of psychology.
To highlight the distinction: evolutionary psychology doesn’t start by asking ‘what can the genome hard-wire?’ Rather, it starts with the same key questions that animal behavior researchers ask about any behavior in any species: ‘What selection pressures shaped this behavior? What adaptive problems does this behavior solve? How do the design details of this adaptation solve the functional problem that it evolved to cope with?’
In terms of Tinbergen’s Four Questions, a lot of the discussion around Shard Theory seems to focus on proximate ontogeny, whereas my field of evolutionary psychology focuses more on ultimate/evolutionary functions and phylogeny.
I’m aware that many folks on LessWrong take the view that the success of deep learning in neural networks, and neuro-theoretical arguments about random initialization of neocortex (which are basically arguments about proximate ontogeny), mean that it’s useless to do any evolutionary functional or phylogenetic analysis of human behavior when thinking about AI alignment (basically, on the grounds that things like kin detection systems, cheater detection systems, mate preferences, or death-avoidance systems couldn’t possible evolve fulfil those functions in any meaningful sense.)
However, I think there’s substantial evidence, in the 163 years since Darwin’s seminal work, that evolutionary-functional analysis of animal adaptations, preferences, and values has been extremely informative about animal behavior—just as it has about human behavior. So, it’s hard to accept any theoretical argument that the genome couldn’t possible encode any of the behaviors that animal behavior researchers and evolutionary psychologists have been studying for so many decades. It wouldn’t just mean throwing out human evolutionary psychology. It would mean throwing out virtually all scientifically informed research on behavior in all other species, including classic ethology, neuroethology, behavioral ecology, primatology, and evolutionary anthropology.
Quintin (and also Alex) - first, let me say, thank you for the friendly, collegial, and constructive comments and replies you’ve offered. Many folks get reactive and defensive when they’re hit with a 6,000-word critique of their theory, but you’re remained constructive and intellectually engaged. So, thanks for that.
On the general point about Shard Theory being a relatively ‘Blank Slate’ account, it might help to think about two different meanings of ‘Blank Slate’—mechanistic versus functional.
A mechanistic Blank Slate approach (which I take Shard Theory to be, somewhat, but not entirely, since it does talk about some reinforcement systems being ‘innate’), emphasizes the details of how we get from genome to brain development to adult psychology and behavior. Lots of discussion about Shard Theory has centered around whether the genome can ‘encode’ or ‘hardwire’ or ‘hard-code’ certain bits of human psychology.
A functional Blank Slate approach (which I think Shard Theory pursues even more strongly, to be honest), doesn’t make any positive, theoretically informative use of any evolutionary-functional analysis to characterize animal or human adaptations. Rather, functional Blank Slate approaches tend to emphasize social learning, cross-cultural differences, shared family environments, etc as sources of psychology.
To highlight the distinction: evolutionary psychology doesn’t start by asking ‘what can the genome hard-wire?’ Rather, it starts with the same key questions that animal behavior researchers ask about any behavior in any species: ‘What selection pressures shaped this behavior? What adaptive problems does this behavior solve? How do the design details of this adaptation solve the functional problem that it evolved to cope with?’
In terms of Tinbergen’s Four Questions, a lot of the discussion around Shard Theory seems to focus on proximate ontogeny, whereas my field of evolutionary psychology focuses more on ultimate/evolutionary functions and phylogeny.
I’m aware that many folks on LessWrong take the view that the success of deep learning in neural networks, and neuro-theoretical arguments about random initialization of neocortex (which are basically arguments about proximate ontogeny), mean that it’s useless to do any evolutionary functional or phylogenetic analysis of human behavior when thinking about AI alignment (basically, on the grounds that things like kin detection systems, cheater detection systems, mate preferences, or death-avoidance systems couldn’t possible evolve fulfil those functions in any meaningful sense.)
However, I think there’s substantial evidence, in the 163 years since Darwin’s seminal work, that evolutionary-functional analysis of animal adaptations, preferences, and values has been extremely informative about animal behavior—just as it has about human behavior. So, it’s hard to accept any theoretical argument that the genome couldn’t possible encode any of the behaviors that animal behavior researchers and evolutionary psychologists have been studying for so many decades. It wouldn’t just mean throwing out human evolutionary psychology. It would mean throwing out virtually all scientifically informed research on behavior in all other species, including classic ethology, neuroethology, behavioral ecology, primatology, and evolutionary anthropology.