I am currently improving my courtship skills and am reading Mate by Geoffrey Miller. The book relies heavily on evolutionary psychology, which I was previously critical of.
My earlier perspective was that because we know little about the human evolutionary environment, evo psych is full of “fully general arguments”. I can assert lots of attributes to the evo environ to support any position, so I can support no position.
But I do not have a good source of priors for what women find sexy. Evo psych is offering priors and most of them so far match observational data. Was my previous view of Evo psych wrong, and if so how?
There are two things in favor of evolutionary psychology. On the one hand it provides a good source of priors. On the other hand, it produces a community which doesn’t want political correctness interfer with their observations.
Given the methods of antropologists you might expect them to say useful things about courtship but unfortunately, they operate in the sphere of social science while evolutionary psychologists operate in the department of psychology. In social science you would get attacked by feminists for many factual accurate statement that a person like Geoffrey Miller make and thus the topic is shunned by the researchers who care about truth and left to those who care about activism.
In the academic field of evolutionary psychology you have people running studies about what people actually do in our times that are useful.
Thanks for the informative comment. My observations also support this claim.
Evopshych is not useless, just a tool that’s really, really easy to shoot yourself in the foot with. Buyer beware, I guess. It can be done right—for a beautiful example, read or skim Homicide by wilson and daly.
In the context of mating things are complicated by the fact that evopsych itself says that female tastes are very plastic, designed to adapt to whatever is “fit” in each time and society. They’re set around puberty, and are much more varied than male tastes. Which I guess is actionable info—there are women that like almost anything, but not much point in trying to conquer every woman. Or even to conquer one particular woman.
Hmmm, I have a few thoughts about that
1. If true, all of my reading should be useless. Depressing, but possible!
2. That contradicts some of my data. I have dated <anonymized other culture> women and American women and a few mediteranean catholic women. Some aspects of their tastes were maybe different, like for monogamy vs. polyamory. American women were more likely to leave the relationship after having sex than both catholic med and <anonymized>. Other than that, they both prefered high status men. The <anonymized> women seemed to like guys with lots of money much more than the mediteranean and American women. But overall they both respond to hard-to-get tactics, seek high status in early stages. In late-game they want trustworthy and caring partners who are emotionally mature and good communicators (and also the first stage things). So mostly the same with a few significant differences. Just my experience
3. We know that psych differences between women and men are not described objectively by psychologists. Julia Galef’s podcast episode. Basically, because most people think women and men have different intelligence and they actually do not, psych researchers overcorrect by arguing against difference even in entirely unrelated cases. A bit of a blue vs. green thinking. So the evidence from psychologist consensus is a bit weaker bc they might hold that view contrary to evidence. It’s still okay evience tho.
Can you tell me what areas of female tastes are considered plastic, and perhaps areas which are not?
I’ll just add: You can use evopsych to predict present behaviors based on what we actually know of the evolutionary environment (which is what you’re doing). AND you can use evopsych to infer the evolutionary environment based on what we know of present behaviors. But you can’t do both with the same set of facts. That’s what Yud would call “double counting the evidence”
True. Interesting point.
I have no time to wade into evopsych debates, so I am just reading Geoffery Miller’s “Mate”