I don’t know, correct me if I’m misreading your intent, but to me it seems like your comment is engaged in a mode of reasoning about conflicts between contemporary social groups, rather than reasoning about reality, and that in this venue of all places, we can actually do better.
“In this venue” is part of the problem. Getting down the fine details of how evolution has influenced human brains and behavior, and the signatures of that in contemporary populations, has obvious value in its own right; however, that is a tricky process, and it is carried out by biased human beings who exist in social and political contexts. Sure, a bunch of people who wanted to make an honest go at it and were good enough at filtering or sidestepping their own systemic biases could probably reach some meaningful insight into the problem, given time and the right methodology.
Doesn’t change the fact that the moment they released any of it into the wider world, it being used to further harmful and oppressive ends (including rampant spin where necessary) would be a pretty much foregone conclusion. Science, Bayescraft, what have you—they do not occur in a vacuum.
it’s just a good line of reasoning that stands on its own merits.
The problem with biology is that reason only gets you so far. The problem with discussing evolutionary psychology on LW is that biology is not particularly well-understood here; both the general contents of the field and its history, current open questions, controversies, and cutting-edge are barely even touched on, in favor of a relatively narrow slice of pop-evobio, and a bit of “Dawkins good; Gould bad!”
biology is not particularly well-understood [on Less Wrong]; both the general contents of the field and its history, current open questions, controversies, and cutting-edge are barely even touched on, in favor of a relatively narrow slice of pop-evobio, and a bit of “Dawkins good; Gould bad!”
I believe you. (Is there any way we can recruit more biologists? Or maybe there should be subject-specific “Please only comment if you’ve read at least X textbooks” threads?)
“In this venue” is part of the problem. Getting down the fine details of how evolution has influenced human brains and behavior, and the signatures of that in contemporary populations, has obvious value in its own right; however, that is a tricky process, and it is carried out by biased human beings who exist in social and political contexts. Sure, a bunch of people who wanted to make an honest go at it and were good enough at filtering or sidestepping their own systemic biases could probably reach some meaningful insight into the problem, given time and the right methodology.
Doesn’t change the fact that the moment they released any of it into the wider world, it being used to further harmful and oppressive ends (including rampant spin where necessary) would be a pretty much foregone conclusion. Science, Bayescraft, what have you—they do not occur in a vacuum.
The problem with biology is that reason only gets you so far. The problem with discussing evolutionary psychology on LW is that biology is not particularly well-understood here; both the general contents of the field and its history, current open questions, controversies, and cutting-edge are barely even touched on, in favor of a relatively narrow slice of pop-evobio, and a bit of “Dawkins good; Gould bad!”
I believe you. (Is there any way we can recruit more biologists? Or maybe there should be subject-specific “Please only comment if you’ve read at least X textbooks” threads?)
You’ve at least got one now (though one with significantly lower free-internet-time once he returns to work from vacation).
No idea how to go about doing that. Given what LW is, they’d kinda have to want to be here.