Well I wasn’t going to dignify this with a response, but since you’re getting up-votes for some reason...
You’re right gwern, you caught me. My enthusiasm for supporting this girl’s cause has nothing to do with life and death issues and my ability to wisely judge the context and available evidence, but rather is better explained by the hypothesis that this is all a bunch of motivated cognition on my part deriving from my secret fetish for cancer girls...
There’s a fetish for everything. You laugh, but Neon Genesis Evangelion was so successful in part because of bandaged Rei, and we recently saw an entire fan-made English visual novel (_Katawa Shoujo_/”Cripple Girls”) on this sort of thing. Fight Club also comes to mind.
Of course, you don’t need a fetish to want to help out a girl. As I commented yesterday on The Last Psychiatrist - ‘organisms are adaptation-executers, not fitness-maximizers’.
I do hope you cited the aphorism rather than taking credit for it as original. But seeing it repeated once again forced me for once to pay attention to its meaning: to find it vacuous. The point should be stated Don’t confuse functional and mechanistic explanations. Organisms don’t “execute” their adaptations, this being just another confusion of kinds of explanation, at least if taken literally. And organisms can be said to be fitness maximizers, once it is realized that functional generalizations are always riddled with exceptions.
Well I wasn’t going to dignify this with a response, but since you’re getting up-votes for some reason...
You’re right gwern, you caught me. My enthusiasm for supporting this girl’s cause has nothing to do with life and death issues and my ability to wisely judge the context and available evidence, but rather is better explained by the hypothesis that this is all a bunch of motivated cognition on my part deriving from my secret fetish for cancer girls...
There’s a fetish for everything. You laugh, but Neon Genesis Evangelion was so successful in part because of bandaged Rei, and we recently saw an entire fan-made English visual novel (_Katawa Shoujo_/”Cripple Girls”) on this sort of thing. Fight Club also comes to mind.
Of course, you don’t need a fetish to want to help out a girl. As I commented yesterday on The Last Psychiatrist - ‘organisms are adaptation-executers, not fitness-maximizers’.
I do hope you cited the aphorism rather than taking credit for it as original. But seeing it repeated once again forced me for once to pay attention to its meaning: to find it vacuous. The point should be stated Don’t confuse functional and mechanistic explanations. Organisms don’t “execute” their adaptations, this being just another confusion of kinds of explanation, at least if taken literally. And organisms can be said to be fitness maximizers, once it is realized that functional generalizations are always riddled with exceptions.
I presented it as a quote, and it’s very easily googleable, so I didn’t provide a full cite or anything, no.
One of the exceptions is exactly the point of the quote.