Quite often proponents of evoluationary psychology give advice that doesn’t make sense if you don’t think that the findings of evoluationary psychology generalize to a large percentage of the human population and only say something about averages.
If you want to use information to guide your actions it’s important to have a grasp on the likilhood that you can generalize from a certain evoluationary psychology claim to a situation in your daily life.
The proponent of evoluationary psychology usually thinks that you can generalize the finding of evoluationary psychology to daily life in a way that increases your understanding of those situations.
It may be possible to glean individually-useful information from evolutionary psychology, with a pile of statistical uncertainty. I’m not sure, and not aware of that much in the way of rigorous investigation in applications of applied psychology.
It becomes a problem when both speaker and audience don’t have a grasp on the statistics, and it degrades into a horrible pile of confirmation bias and echo chambers and tribal fealty. I expect lesswrong to handle this better than most places, though what I’ve seen so far is...less than perfect.
Quite often proponents of evoluationary psychology give advice that doesn’t make sense if you don’t think that the findings of evoluationary psychology generalize to a large percentage of the human population and only say something about averages.
If you want to use information to guide your actions it’s important to have a grasp on the likilhood that you can generalize from a certain evoluationary psychology claim to a situation in your daily life.
The proponent of evoluationary psychology usually thinks that you can generalize the finding of evoluationary psychology to daily life in a way that increases your understanding of those situations.
It may be possible to glean individually-useful information from evolutionary psychology, with a pile of statistical uncertainty. I’m not sure, and not aware of that much in the way of rigorous investigation in applications of applied psychology.
It becomes a problem when both speaker and audience don’t have a grasp on the statistics, and it degrades into a horrible pile of confirmation bias and echo chambers and tribal fealty. I expect lesswrong to handle this better than most places, though what I’ve seen so far is...less than perfect.