radical feminists believe that the very act of gathering evidence harms their cause
That’s an awfully damning assessment. If true, it implies that radical feminists believe that their cause can be destroyed by the truth, and don’t think that it should be. I’m not convinced that this indictment, as stated here, is true of any actual radical feminist, though.
If true, it implies that radical feminists believe that their cause can be destroyed by the truth, and don’t think that it should be.
Not quite. I disagree with Eridu’s position, but it doesn’t come down to a Moore’s paradox situation. Eridu’s position is that there are truths that cause harm within certain social contexts, and that in those social contexts (but not otherwise) those truths ought to be suppressed.
This is pretty plausible if you think of some thought experiments involving vulnerable groups. Suppose that you are a rationalist/consequentialist cop in 1930′s Germany, and you are investigating a case in which a banker, who was Jewish, embezzled some money from the Society for the Protection of Cute Puppies. Although ceteris paribus, your job is to expose the truth and bring criminals to justice, in this case it might be a very good idea to keep this out of the papers at all costs, because due to anti-semitic narratives society lacks the ability to process this information sanely.
Eridu claims that because of sexist narratives, society lacks the ability to process the claims of evo-psych sanely.
I find it interesting that both you and MixedNuts have found it necessary to invoke Nazis in order to construct a marginally convincing case for your interpretations of eridu’s position. Your thought experiment boils down to an equation of “the patriarchy” as it exists in present-day Western society with Nazi Germany (which would put eridu in pretty clear violation of Godwin’s Law*), and MixedNuts’ counterexample to my proposed Generalized Anti-Creationist Principle is a variant on the classic example of when it’s not only morally acceptable but morally obligatory to lie: “when hiding Jews from the S.S. in one’s basement.”
It also seems as though the “certain social contexts” where the results of evo-psych research ought to be suppressed, according to eridu, are pretty much every social context that exists outside of Women’s Studies departments and the internal discussions of radical feminist organizations. That seems untenable to me.
I just realized that Godwin’s Law is meant to prohibit a special case of Yvain’s Worst Argument in the World: the case in which the archetypal member of the category into which one places X is Naziism.
The non-Eridu argument against evo-psych is that many such researchers are abusing/ignorant of the halo effect that leads to biased results/unjustified moral assertions about sex roles in society.
Somewhere in the archive is an article by lukeprog where he decided to break up with his girlfriend and wanted to let her down easy. In deciding how to do that, he debated with himself about telling her that his desire for a woman with larger breasts was an evolution-caused preference, not a comment on the woman specifically.
That’s nonsense, and uncritical acceptance of evo-psych runs the serious risk of exacerbating the problem.
Somewhere in the archive is an article by lukeprog where he decided to break up with his girlfriend and wanted to let her down easy. In deciding how to do that, he debated with himself about telling her that his desire for a woman with larger breasts was an evolution-caused preference, not a comment on the woman specifically.
That’s nonsense, and uncritical acceptance of evo-psych runs the serious risk of exacerbating the problem.
The problem with LukeProg’s decision to write that break up essay wasn’t evo-psych. The problem was that writing a huge essay on why you’re breaking up with someone, including detailed analysis of why there is insufficient attraction is a horrible thing to do to someone without even giving any benefit to yourself.
This doesn’t constitute an argument here against evo-psych as an accurate description of reality. It does constitute:
A solid illustration of how social awkardness can result in doing harm to others despite all the best intentions.
An extremely weak appeal to consequences—an argument that evo-psych should not be studied because bad things could happen from people understanding evolutionary psychology. I describe it as weak since there is little indication that the insult Luke gave given his awareness of evo-psych is any worse than the insult he would have given if ignorant. For example “I’m dumping you because I like big tits, it’s just the way I am” is about as insulting as “I’m dumping you because I like big tits, I just evolved that way” (details changed as necessary).
In conclusion, keep your moralizing out of my epistemic rationality! At least while posting on this site, please. You can argue that a particular subject should not be discussed here for instrumental reasons in accordance with your own preferences. However it is never appropriate (on lesswrong, I assert) to argue that a belief must be considered false because of perceived consequences of someone believing it.
The problem was that writing a huge essay on why you’re breaking up with someone, including detailed analysis of why there is insufficient attraction is a horrible thing to do to someone without even giving any benefit to yourself.
I don’t know that that’s necessarily the case. My first serious girlfriend wrote me a very long e-mail before our break-up, laying out her rational analysis of why she believed our relationship was untenable in the long term; she actually succeeded in persuading me to see it her way, which I’d been resisting for emotional reasons. That allowed us to have an amicable parting of ways, and we remain good friends to this day.
I’ll think about that—from the upvotes, it appears you’re not the only Less Wronger interested (at least, I assume an upvote to a one-liner request like that means “I’d like to see it, too”). I wouldn’t post an unedited copy, as there are some details in it that I consider very private, as, I think, would my former girlfriend. But I’ll take a look at it later and see what would need to be redacted. I would also have to ask her permission before posting any of it, of course, and I’m reluctant to bother her just now—she has a newborn daughter (as in, born last week), so I expect she’s rather preoccupied at the moment.
Heh. Even taking that into account, I still think your odds are better with a randomly chosen LWer as a recipient than a randomly chosen partner-of-a-female. But that’s admittedly a pretty low bar.
I would prefer to hear all the reasons, myself and am ten times more likely to choke on fluff like “It’s not you, it’s me.” than burst into flames because somebody criticized me. I need closure and feedback and for my life events to make sense. For those purposes, the only information I’d deem good enough is a serving of reality.
Shminux’s point, and the rest of this thread, is about predicting the behavior of typical women in order to make an accurate assessment about what breakup approach is best. Do you think that your preferences are typical for women, or even typical for women-who-LW-folks-date, many of whom are not themselves LWers?
According to Vladimir, LessWrong has somewhere in the ballpark of 600-1000 active users. According to Yvain’s 2011 survey, 92 of the 1090 respondents were female. If I alone would respond well, that increases the chances of a good response by an LW woman by over 1% (unless you want to include inactive members). Since Dave’s point is not “You’re more likely to get a good response from an LW woman than not.” and was “You’re more likely to get a good response from an LW woman than a random woman.” me saying that actually gives a potentially significant support to his point. If you calculate the chances of a random woman responding well to be under 1% (seems reasonable) and don’t consider inactive users to be an “LWer”, then I totally supported his point. If not, then all Dave needs to do to figure out whether he’s right is to count the number of LW women he is sure would respond well and compare the ratio with his estimate of how many random women would respond well. I doubt anyone here thinks the percentage of random women that would respond well is beyond the single digit percents. If that’s right, my saying so gave 10% or more of the support needed to think that he’s right. As for the behavior of the average LW woman, I have no idea. That I would respond well confirms that at least some LW women would respond well, which might help people figure out if it’s worthwhile to find out exactly how many of us there are.
Which doesn’t contradict Dave’s idea that LW women / the women that LW members date might be more likely to respond well.
Are you sure you know how you would react...
Totally sure. My last boyfriend attempted to give me fluff and I tore through it. I always want to get down to the bottom of why a relationship did not work. Even if reality is devastating, I want reality. You can tell I’m strong enough to deal with criticism because I invite it often. You can tell I’m strong enough to swallow criticism because of my elitism thread—check out the note at the top. I feel kind of dumb for not seeing these problems in advance (hindsight bias, I guess?). Now that I do see how awful my thread was—in public of all places—have I vanished, or gone crybaby or begged anybody for emotional support?
Dave’s idea that LW women / the women that LW members date
Just for clarity, I did not suggest the latter. What I suggested was that this sort of thing, initiated by the partner of an LW member, is more likely to work out well… put differently, that LW members are more likely to respond well (or at least less likely to respond poorly)… than for non-LWers.
The gender of the LW member, and the gender of the partner, is not strictly irrelevant but is largely screened off by their membership.
I make no such claims about the partners of LWers.
Since your initial (and highly promising) arrival, I must admit that I lost respect for you faster than I have for any other poster in the history of LessWrong.
Downvoted because I don’t like cheapshots. Criticisms about the community’s behavior in that thread should be confined to that thread, and should be substantive. The way you’re doing it now forces other commenters to choose between addressing your cheapshot and derailing the comment thread or allowing the cheapshot to go unchallenged.
I wouldn’t have downvoted if you’d used less strong language in your criticism or if you had supported your argument better. It’s okay for you to reference other threads as proof of things, in my book. But I don’t like that you asserted the behavior in that discussion was “completely irrational” without providing any sort of support for your argument; you just threw out an unfair label in a context where it was difficult to challenge it.
It seemed a reasonable to me; after all, shminux’s comment wasn’t random unrelated criticism, it was a germane followup to a previous comment. Posting it in the other thread eliminates the entire purpose of the comment.
I dispute the accuracy of shminux’s comment, and yet also feel reluctant to challenge the comment because it would be a digression from the topic of the above comments. That’s a problem.
I recognize the need to draw from other sections of the site in order to talk about LessWrong as a community; I’m fine with that. But if we’re going to do that then I think we need to at least use good arguments while discussing those other threads. Otherwise it becomes too easy to just criticize things in contexts where they’re difficult to challenge.
Don’t you? Fine, I’ll bite. While the bell curve is pretty wide for both genders, an average (western?) male tends to be more analytical and reserved and less emotional than an average (western?) female. At least in my (admittedly limited) personal experience observing my family, friends and acquaintances. Certainly the cultural stereotypes bear it out, as well. Thus he would be (again, on average) more inclined to listen to reasoned arguments, as opposed to “It’s not working out between us” with some made-up excuses designed to make him feel better. Whereas she (on average) would be likely to take every logical argument as in Luke’s story, as a personal affront, insult and rejection. There are plenty of exceptions, but if you take 1000 break-ups, I’d wager that in the majority of the cases a bit of reason on the woman’s side would make it less painful for the guy, while a bit of logic on the man’s side would probably make it more painful for the girl than “it’s not you it’s me”.
I have no idea how same-sex or other less-standard breakups work out in terms of rationality.
At least in my (admittedly limited) personal experience observing my family, friends and acquaintances. Certainly the cultural stereotypes bear it out, as well.
Your perception of the people you know plus cultural stereotypes is really pretty weak evidence. I could make the following argument: In my immediate family, the men are more emotional and less analytical/reserved than the women—they tend to get angry/aggressive in response to difficult things, whereas the women seem to stay calm. Plus, cultural stereotypes bear out the idea that men are more aggressive/angry than women. Therefore, men would be more likely to take this kind of letter badly.
I’m not making that argument, but I can’t see that it would be much weaker than yours.
The problem with LukeProg’s decision to write that break up essay wasn’t evo-psych. The problem was that writing a huge essay on why you’re breaking up with someone, including detailed analysis of why there is insufficient attraction is a horrible thing to do to someone without even giving any benefit to yourself.
There’s a large difference between writing an analysis of what’s going wrong in a relationship based on information about the relationship itself and writing an evo-psych analysis which concludes that the other person has the whole weight of evolution against anyone finding them attractive.
It occurs to me that what you’ve done there is a common enough pattern, though I’m not sure it’s exactly a fallacy—seeing that something causes bad outcomes, but not being clear on what the scope of the something is.
Before long, Alice was always pushing me to spend more time with her, and I was always pushing to spend more time studying psychology. By then I knew I couldn’t give her what she wanted: marriage.
So I broke up with Alice over a long conversation that included an hour-long primer on evolutionary psychology in which I explained how natural selection had built me to be attracted to certain features that she lacked. I thought she would appreciate this because she had previously expressed admiration for detailed honesty. Now I realize that there’s hardly a more damaging way to break up with someone. She asked that I kindly never speak to her again, and I can’t blame her.
Here’s one I’ve tried to find. In the recent discussion of feminism, I remember someone (and I’m thinking it wasn’t eridu) saying that part of the purpose of the harsher attacks about racism and sexism was to make opposed people feel less sure of themselves in general.
One problem with lukeprog’s essay would be that it would muddle the evolutionary-cognitive boundary. The fact that I, in the 21st century, like big tits is logically distinct from the fact that human males, in the EEA, who slept with curvier women had more children in average, though the latter is the cause of the former.
What matter when deciding whether to use a program is what it does, not who wrote it (well, except for copyright-related reasons, but Azatoth isn’t going to sue me for infringement anyway).
I think you are misinterpreting me. I’m not saying “Never discuss evo-psych.” (That’s eridu).
I’m saying that there are strong reasons to distrust current evo-psych results. One of those reasons is that evo-psych, as used in popular culture, provides justification for writing essays like the one you and I both think was a bad idea. That is, this statement:
For example “I’m dumping you because I like big tits, it’s just the way I am” is about as insulting as “I’m dumping you because I like big tits, I just evolved that way” (details changed as necessary).
is not true. “It’s just the way I am” is usually a false deflection of responsibility—invoking evo. psych to make the statement true makes the statement actually effective at deflecting moral responsibility. If that weren’t true, lukeprog would not even have considered saying it to the woman.
On evo-psych generally:
Consider phrenology. The traits at issue were well worth studying. And as far as I know, the field used accepted practices of empiricism for its day. But the whole field went off track, to the point that essentially no phrenology results are actually useful for scientific research today. I think that the social pressures towards legitimizing our current normative practices put evo-psych (and to a less extend, all psychological research) at serious risk of wandering off into a similar wilderness.
If evo-psych manages to recover from what appear to be its current mis-steps I (but apparently not eridu) would welcome back with open arms.
invoking evo. psych to make the statement true makes the statement actually effective at deflecting moral responsibility.
No, it doesn’t. There is no moral license to be human. If action X is harmful, ascribing an evolutionary cause to X doesn’t make it not harmful — and to a consequentialist it is harm that is at the root of immorality.
If evolution built me to rape nubile young womenfolk, well, evolution can just fuck off.
That’s the second misunderstanding of what evolutionary psychology means that leads people to reject it on moral rather than factual grounds: if they’re not indulging in the naturalistic fallacy, they’re indulging in biological determinism, or think the evolutionary psychologists are. “X is a natural part of human behavior that exists because it was favored by natural selection in the past” does not mean “X is good,” nor does it mean “X is inevitable”—evo. psych. is about identifying tendencies, not certainties.
Evolution couldn’t build you “to rape nubile young womenfolk,” period, because humans are far too behaviorally plastic for that. What it could do, and, judging by the history of human behavior, probably did do to at least a large proportion of the male population, is built you to have an impulse to rape under some circumstances—when rejected by a woman with whom you’re already alone and with whom you had some expectation that you might have sex, for example, or when encountering a female member of an enemy population in war. Whether you act on that impulse or not depends on both the hereditary aspects of your personality and, probably more important, how you were socialized: these factors affect whether you feel any shame, empathy for your potential victim, fear of consequences, etc. that could outweigh the impulse to rape.
It’s also important to understand that evo. psych. is not saying that rapists are motivated by a conscious desire to reproduce: the impulse generally takes the form “I want to get my rocks off” and/or “I want to hurt this b!+(#,” not “I want to make a baby.” That’s probably true of the individuals committing the rapes even when rape is organized and officially sanctioned by military or political leaders as a way of “invading” an enemy population’s gene pool, as in Bosnia or the Sudan.
It’s also notable that evo. psych. tells us nothing about why any particular man committed rape while another man in similar circumstances did not—nor about why some men prefer large-breasted women and others don’t, for that matter. What it does offer is an explanation for why rape is part of the repertoire of human behavior at all. It’s entirely possible to imagine a mammal species in which no male ever attempts to copulate with an unwilling female, and female rejection instantly shuts off male desire. As I understand it, it’s even possible to identify such species in nature: IIRC, canines and the great cats, at least, have never been observed to engage in the kind of coercive copulation frequently seen in dolphins, chimps, orangutans, ducks, etc. That’s pretty much what evolutionary biology would predict, too: the big carnivores are so well-armed that the risk of serious injury either to the male, or to the female (preventing her from successfully bearing and rearing the male’s offspring), would most likely outweigh the reproductive advantage of copulating with more females than are receptive to the male’s advances.
I think you are misinterpreting me. I’m not saying “Never discuss evo-psych.”
No, and I’ve stated that stated that saying “never discuss evo-psych” is acceptable while muddling normative claims in with epistemic claims is not.
I’m saying that there are strong reasons to distrust current evo-psych results.
I assert that your argument centered around Luke’s essay to his girlfriend absolutely does not support this.
One of those reasons is that evo-psych, as used in popular culture, provides justification for writing essays like the one you and I both think was a bad idea.
It doesn’t provide such justification and even if it did this would not constitute evidence that evo-psych is epistemically inaccurate.
I’d like to request some constructive criticism: What would you suggest someone do when they think an empirical field has been tainted by normative claims?
I really do think that historical study of other cultures provides evidence that contradicts some psychological “findings.” But it is the nature of the endeavor that “harder” sciences like psychology carry more weight than softer sciences like history. I could point to cases like Bradwell v. Illinois for examples of tainted scientific processes, but I acknowledge that doesn’t rise to the level of proof we would expect from a true “hard science” discipline like physics.
I could point to cases like Bradwell v. Illinois for examples of tainted scientific processes,
I don’t see evidence of anything resembling a scientific process, tainted or otherwise, behind Justice Bradley’s patronizing pontification about “the proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex,” especially when the pompous old bastard specifically attributed his view of proper gender roles to “the law of the Creator.”
What would you suggest someone do when they think an empirical field has been tainted by normative claims?
Upvoted because I consider this question a far more useful one than many of the things that led up to it.
My own answer is, roughly speaking, the same for all cases where something potentially useful is being tainted by an external factor:
1) estimate how much work is involved in separating the tainted stuff from the non-tainted stuff, 2) estimate the benefit of the non-tainted stuff, and 3) if the estimated work/benefit tradeoff is high enough, do the work, otherwise throw the whole mess out.
You seem to have done that, at least in a BOTE kind of way, and concluded that the tradeoff doesn’t justify the work. Which is cool.
It’s not clear to me whether anyone is actually disagreeing with you about that conclusion, or (if they are) whether they think your estimate of the work is too high, your estimate of the benefit too low, or your threshold tradeoff too low.
I upvoted both your post as well as the parent, for putting the issue much more clearly than anyone else:
1) estimate how much work is involved in separating the tainted stuff from the non-tainted stuff, 2) estimate the benefit of the non-tainted stuff, and 3) if the estimated work/benefit tradeoff is high enough, do the work, otherwise throw the whole mess out.
That said, I disagree with TimS because I believe his estimated benefit is too low.
His estimate of the work involved might be too high as well, but I don’t know enough about the field to make anything other than a guess.
As for my reasons for believing that his estimate of the benefits is too low, I discussed it on other threads, but the gist of it is as follows:
1). If we are going to commit a large amount of resources to sweeping social changes, we need to know as much as possible before we pull the trigger, especially if the trigger is connected to the firing pin on the “ban sexual intercourse” cannon (that metaphor was, perhaps, not my finest achievement).
2). Speaking more generally, I believe that the benefits of any kind of scientific knowledge far outweigh the drawbacks in most situations (though of course there are limits), due to the compounding effects. For example, the first application of modern physics was the nuclear bomb: a device is literally capable of ending the world. However, our world would be a very different, and IMO much worse place, had quantum physics never been discovered.
I just want to clarify that I don’t advocate banning heterosexual intercourse. Even if I agree slightly more with eridu than you about how coercive ordinary sexual encounters are experienced.
I’m pretty sure that I disagree on both 1 (people are terrible at separating normative and empirical claims) and 2 (there’s probably not much evo. psych that will be very useful in social engineering). But I’m honestly not certain which disagreement is larger.
I’m curious which of my estimates differs further from the LW average—but I’m not sure if actually discovering that would advance the particular goal of optimizing our stance towards evo. psych research.
people are terrible at separating normative and empirical claims
That’s a much broader problem than the misunderstanding and misuse of evo. psych. I think one of the major aims of humanism/transhumanism should be getting more people to understand the difference between descriptive and prescriptive statements—between is and ought. And, given how pervasive that confusion is across human cultures, the roots of it might be a fruitful area of investigation for evo. psych., along with other branches of cognitive science.
I can’t help but notice that at least some radical feminists’ aversion to evo. psych. and related fields in biology stems from their failure to distinguish normative from empirical claims. A lot of the firestorm surrounding Thornhill and Palmer’s A Natural History of Rape came down to the critics indulging in the naturalistic fallacy (which is a pity, because there are plenty of legitimate criticisms to be made of Thornhill and Palmer’s conclusions). Another example that springs to mind is this article by Andrea Dworkin, in which she detracts from an otherwise good argument by inserting a gratuitous slur on Edward O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis that demonstrates a breathtaking failure of reading comprehension on her part.
I’m saying that there are strong reasons to distrust current evo-psych results. One of those reasons is that evo-psych, as used in popular culture, provides justification for writing essays like the one you and I both think was a bad idea.
I think there are reasons to distrust a lot of evolutionary psychology results, and I think Luke’s breakup letter was just as bad an idea as he’s presented it as, but I don’t think the latter provides much evidence for the former. The rules of social interaction are only tangentially related to empirical reality, and even severe violations of social etiquette don’t establish empirical falsehood. In fact, it’s generally considered polite to deemphasize a number of empirical truths which our culture considers awkward, such as differences in skill.
As to invoking evopsych to dodge responsibility for your sexual preferences, it seems to me that that’s only dishonest if the results it invokes are untrue in the first place. It’s impolite regardless, though; our culture smiles on only a fairly narrow set of mechanistic excuses for behavior, and that’s not one of them.
Well, maybe not just any feminist, but eridu specifically did claim that, since the findings of evolutionary psychology are frequently misused to advance the patriarchy, no one should study evolutionary psychology. As far as I can tell, he feels that way about all research that deals with sex and/or gender, not just evolutionary psychology specifically.
There were anti-Semitic pamphlets that quoted studies of Jewish populations where blood type B was most frequent and Aryan populations where blood type A was, kept quiet about studies showing the reverse, and used that as proof that Aryans and Jews were different races that shouldn’t mingle and should be ranked relative to each other. If someone thought that publishing counterpoints (the rest of the data, or pointing out that blood type distribution doesn’t imply any of the conclusions) would be ineffective and had instead advocated banning statistics on blood type, it’d be rather uncharitable to say “They believe gathering evidence hurts their cause”.
If someone thought that publishing counterpoints (the rest of the data, or pointing out that blood type distribution doesn’t imply any of the conclusions) would be ineffective and had instead advocated banning statistics on blood type, it’d be rather uncharitable to say “They believe gathering evidence hurts their cause”.
I don’t see what the difference is, in practice. In both cases, the person in question wants to ban research into blood types. One person wants to do it because he fears his position could be destroyed by the truth; the other one wants to do it because the research would give his opponents too much power. In both cases, though, the research is banned, and neither person knows whether his beliefs are true or not.
Are you still in the analogy here? There’s very little that blood type research can actually tell us for or against antisemitism—we don’t have to fear a result that would support it. The problem is that some possible results (all possible results, really), while not evidence for “Aryans rule, Jews drool”, will be used to support this assertion. We expect that the costs of people being persuaded to hold false antisemitic beliefs outweigh the benefits of better responses to epidemics or whatever we’re hoping to get out of the research. Likewise, eridu believes that ev-psych can’t say much about what gender roles should be (I agree), but is misused to support some harmful gender roles (I agree). He also believes that it’s not really possible to mitigate the misuse, and so the costs of people being persuaded to hold false sexist beliefs outweigh… figuring out how parental grief works or something.
What you appear to describe is… to stretch the analogy past its snapping point, someone who thinks injecting type A blood into everyone will solve antisemitism, and is scared that blood type research would prove their intervention ineffective or harmful. While also being scared of the consequences of misuse.
For better or worse, you seem to have steel-manned eridu’s position. Eridu appears to believe that it is irrelevant whether ev psych (or any other empirical project) has anything to say about appropriate gender relations.
There’s very little that blood type research can actually tell us for or against antisemitism...
How do you know this, if not by looking at the result of blood type research (or, more likely, research on heredity in general) ? Similarly, how does eridu know that “ev-psych can’t say much about what gender roles should be” ? If by “should be” you mean something like the naturalistic fallacy, then I’d agree; however, it’s still possible that ev-psych can tell us something valuable about why our current gender roles are the way they are.
To use another analogy, optics and genetics tell me why my eyesight is bad, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to throw up my hands and say, “oh well, guess I’m almost blind then”. Instead, I’m going to use this knowledge to acquire some corrective lenses.
someone who thinks injecting type A blood into everyone will solve antisemitism, and is scared that blood type research would prove their intervention ineffective or harmful.
Why does that someone believe that the intervention will actually be effective ?
How do you know this, if not by looking at the result of blood type research (or, more likely, research on heredity in general)?
I know people of various ancestries, including near-pure Jews and near-pure Aryans. The Jews are not less creative, weaker, sneakier, greedier, less heroic, or more bent on world domination than the Aryans. Looking at history, Jews are more likely than Aryans to create great work of art and make great discoveries, and it takes about equal digging to find an Aryan ancestor to any creative Jew than the reverse. In general, if I try to rank people from best to worst, I don’t find many ancestry-related clusters, which shows that ranking races from best to worst is not useful. Heredity research can tell me that intermarriage is not bad, but I can also observe that countries and cities with higher rates of intermarriage aren’t doing worse, haven’t lost their cultural identities, and, New York notwithstanding, promote equality rather than Jewish superiority.
Similarly, differences between genders that are relevant to gender roles ought to be salient enough that regular psychology can expose them (and so what if it’s culture-dependent, we’re working from currently existing culture) with no need for the subtler, bare-bones models ev-psych gives us.
Similarly again, figuring out that your eyes converge too strongly and you need divergent lenses is useful, in a way that screens off the usefulness of genetics of nearsightedness.
Why does that someone believe that the intervention will actually be effective?
Because it’s a stupid analogy. Maybe they believe that antisemitism is caused by people being in bad moods due to anemia, and they have a huge stash of blood that happens to be type A.
I know people of various ancestries, including near-pure Jews and near-pure Aryans. The Jews are not less creative, weaker, sneakier, greedier, less heroic, or more bent on world domination than the Aryans...
Ok, so what this sounds like to me is, “I’d go out and do a bunch of research, in order to work around my biases by using ironclad evidence”. As far as I understand, eridu claims that people would just use the evidence selectively to justify their biases, instead. For example, they might notice that the crime rate in NY is higher than in other cities, and exclaim, “Aha ! It’s all those evil Jews ! That proves it !”. Thus, you should avoid collecting any evidence at all, for fear of giving them too much ammunition. Yes, eridu singles out evo-psych specifically, but his reasons for doing so are not unique to evo-psych, AFAICT.
Similarly, differences between genders that are relevant to gender roles ought to be salient enough that regular psychology can expose them
Right, but it’d be good to know which differences (if any) are the results of biology. To use my earlier analogy (hopefully without straining it to the breaking point), there are lots of illiterate people around; but some are illiterate because they’d never been taught to read, whereas others are illiterate because their eyes cannot focus on the page. It is really helpful to know which are which.
Maybe they believe that antisemitism is caused by people being in bad moods due to anemia, and they have a huge stash of blood that happens to be type A.
My point is that, in order to have some sort of a justified belief in their remedy, they must have first studied various blood types, and blood disorders in general. Otherwise, they’d just be randomly transfusing blood into people for no good reason, thus (assuming they at least do so safely) wasting a bunch of resources and gaining little (though, admittedly, more than nothing) in return.
Ok, so what this sounds like to me is, “I’d go out and do a bunch of research, in order to work around my biases by using ironclad evidence”.
Hmm, what I think I’m saying is more like:
Do research in sociology, not biology. If you uncover differences it may be a good idea to look at their origins, but don’t go digging for possible sources of differences that don’t reveal themselves.
Use the interocular trauma significance test. Any difference large and widespread enough to make group-level rather than individual-level policy should hit you between the eyes.
If you uncover differences it may be a good idea to look at their origins...
I think it’s pretty obvious that there are many differences between genders. Even eridu would agree to this, IMO, since his stated objective is to eliminate gender in order to eliminate the differences.
Any difference large and widespread enough to make group-level rather than individual-level policy should hit you between the eyes.
That’s just a recipe for indulging your own biases, IMO. That said, I doubt that differences between gender currently justify group-level policy (other than in specialized cases such as medical treatment, etc.). We’re not arguing over whether gender bias exists (I believe that it does) or whether we should adopt patriarchal policies (I believe that we should not).
Rather, the argument is over whether the very act of studying specific aspects of human biology and/or psychology constitutes an extremely harmful act and should immediately be stopped. I believe that it does not.
I think it’s pretty obvious that there are many differences between genders. Even eridu would agree to this, IMO, since his stated objective is to eliminate gender in order to eliminate the differences.
This is why I think the distinction between gender and sex is so helpful. It is not obvious to me that there are gender differences, even though I agree with you that there are obvious sex differences. Eridu appears to want to eliminate sex differences, while I merely want to abolish gender differences.
Consider the taboo in modern society against female chest nudity. It’s obvious to any subscriber to National Geographic that this norm is not an inherent part of human society. So I think the norm is a gender-norm, not a sex-norm.
Properly speaking, evo. psych has nothing to say about gender and gender-norms. Only sex and sex-norms. But society as a whole resists the distinct, and scientists rely on the halo effect to support that blurring of what should be relatively distinct concepts.
Someone more radical than I would like point out that the distinction is much fuzzier than I suggest. (Consider social pressure to perform surgery to “fix” intersex infants). (shrug). There’s a lot of low hanging fruit in social engineering before a precise resolution of that issue is really necessary.
It is not obvious to me that there are gender differences, even though I agree with you that there are obvious sex differences. … Eridu appears to want to eliminate sex differences, while I merely want to abolish gender differences.
I don’t think I get what you mean by “sex differences” vs. “gender differences”; eridu claims he wants to eliminate gender, not sex. Can you explain your definitions ? You bring up the example below:
It’s obvious to any subscriber to National Geographic that this norm is not an inherent part of human society. So I think the norm is a gender-norm, not a sex-norm.
I agree with you there, and this is a gender difference, but I’m not sure how your view on this contrasts with eridu’s. Surely eridu doesn’t want to eliminate secondary sexual characteristics… does he ?
I think eridu wants secondary sex characteristics to stop being morally relevant (i.e. never treat women different than men). I think that’s impossible—but society is not careful about what really is a secondary sex characteristic.
I think eridu wants secondary sex characteristics to stop being morally relevant (i.e. never treat women different than men). I think that’s impossible...
As far as I can tell, so does he, which is why he wants to destroy gender altogether. Once he’s done, we won’t have “men” and “women” at all; we’d just have “people with sexual organs A” and “people with sexual organs B” (plus a small number of others with C, D, etc.). By analogy, today we (mostly) don’t have separate identities for different hair or eye colors; it’s just a meaningless biological quirk (again, mostly).
One problem with this goal is that if gender truly is dependent on sex to any meaningful extent, then the goal cannot be achieved through purely social means. This is one of the reasons why I believe that evo-psych specifically, and evolutionary biology in general, should not be banned, despite its possible negative consequences.
I should also mention that I am sympathetic to the goal; it’s not a bad idea. However, it would be an immense undertaking, and you don’t want to commit an immense amount of resources to a goal unless you can be reasonably sure it’s achievable at least in principle.
(On a sidenote, eridu did claim that “treating women different than men” is impossible, because the patriarchy is pervasive and omnipresent. Even when you think you’re treating women the same as men, you aren’t—which is why he’s against liberal feminism.)
(On a sidenote, eridu did claim that “treating women different than men” is impossible, because the patriarchy is pervasive and omnipresent. Even when you think you’re treating women the same as men, you aren’t—which is why he’s against liberal feminism.)
A very small piece of evidence that eridu might have a point: A while ago, I was faced with a person who I didn’t know at the time was a transexual in transition. I felt like I didn’t know what to do or say to them. (I’m reasonably sure I just looked blank at the time, or at least we’re on decent terms since then. I haven’t mentioned that reaction to the person, and they’ve since tranisitioned to a standard gender.)
It did feel to me as though I had separate behavior sets for dealing with men and with women, and was at a loss when I didn’t know which set to apply. I haven’t explored how the sets might be different, but maybe I should.
It did feel to me as though I had separate behavior sets for dealing with men and with women
Me too, but 1) the sets do overlap by a substantial amount, and 2) I think it’s more a case of potential sexual partners vs everyone else than of women vs men—with women I’m not sexually attracted to at all, I behave pretty much the same as if they were male (except for different cultural norms such as—in Italy—kissing them on the cheek instead of shaking hands, which I don’t consider any more relevant that the use of different pronouns). (Edited to replace ″romantic″ with ″sexual″ -- I’ve introspected myself and ISTM that the set of people with whom I’d use the first set of behaviours almost exactly coincide with the set of people with whom I’d want to have protected sex if they offered, and promised not to tell anybody and to try not to let that affect our future interactions in any way—which is a somewhat broader criterion than me being willing to have a monogamous romantic relationship with them.)
FWIW, I doubt I treat men I’m attracted to and women I’m attracted to the same way. Though introspection is a decidedly unreliable source of information about this sort of thing.
There’s much less commonality in how I treat people I’m not attracted to. Or at least less salient commonality. I really don’t know what to say about it. I mean, sure, there are women I’m not attracted to whom I treat differently than men I’m not attracted to… but there are also men I’m not attracted to whom I treat differently than men I’m not attracted to. Introspection fails to provide even unreliable hints on that question.
Also, the fact that there exist both men and women I’m not attracted to doesn’t make me particularly unique; I expect that’s true of everybody. So I wouldn’t have felt especially motivated to share that data point, even were it crisper. You had started out drawing the distinction between “potential sexual partner vs everyone else” and “women vs men,” though, so I thought the perspective of someone for whom “potential sexual partner” included both women and men (well, in principle, anyway; after 20 years of monogamy it’s somewhat theoretical) might be relevant.
Your comment was also immediately voted down. I brought it back to neutral karma. I haven’t been following this conversation, but it doesn’t seem worthy of immediate downvotes...
I guess you missed the part where people (not me personally, it was just made pretty clear) are downvoting everything in this thread in the hope that everyone would stop talking?
I’d considered the possibility, but the fact that the parents were significantly net-upvoted made it seem churlish to attribute downvotes simply to the thread it’s in. It seems more plausible now that you (and at least one other person) have endorsed it.
“Gender should be removed from society” is not a particularly rare opinion—unfortunately it is also not a particularly feasible one, at least not in the short term.
I should clarify that it seems not only infeasible in the short term but lacks anything resembling a clear path to get there. And while an uncharitable person might say the same about CEV, SIAI working on CEV doesn’t involve forcing everyone else to change their patterns of social interaction in service of goals that are not clearly defined.
The path from here to there is wildly unclear. But history shows social changes as large as the one I advocate for have actually happened. So there’s that.
If true, that does seem like a very good reason not to trust eridu or take anything he has to say seriously. As an evolutionary biologist, most familiar with this kind of anti-thought from the creationist quarter, I might state it as a Generalized Anti-Creationist Principle: “Any person who advocates ignorance or false beliefs about a subject as morally superior to true and accurate knowledge of that subject is not to be trusted or taken seriously on any subject.” (See here for a good example of a creationist who goes every last angstrom of the way to this reductio ad absurdum of his position.)
This recalls Steven Pinker’s critique of many aspects of twentieth century radical left-wing thought, including some radical feminist ideas, in The Blank Slate. Radical scholars in the social sciences clung (and, in at least some cases, are still clinging) to the increasingly untenable notion of the human mind as a tabula rasa for fear of what they perceive as disastrous moral consequences of it not being true, and decried every scientific advance that filled in some portion of the slate. Neither side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on pretending things are true because they think the world be better if they were, and there are an awful lot of people who could benefit from reciting the Litanies of Tarsky and Gendlin until they take them to heart.
As an aside, I have to wonder if the upvotes on my previous comment reflect a sober assessment of its quality, or simply the fact that “that which can be destroyed by the truth should be” is a huge, multi-colored, strobing applause light around these here parts. ;-)
It follows directly that you stop trusting people who tell you “Don’t tell me if you hide any Jews, I don’t want to let anything slip in front of the SS”. Is that actually a conclusion you wish to endorse?
No, but all that requires is adding the qualifier “academic” to the noun “subject” in my principle, so it can’t get misapplied to very unusual and extreme situations where knowledge of the specific situation could be more dangerous than the lack of that knowledge.
That’s one of the things that aggravates me about eridu. I’m far more sympathetic to second-wave than third-wave feminism. But I don’t think that being second-wave requires rejecting empiricism. (I suspect >90% of ev. psych results are wrong because of cultural bias, but that’s a separate assertion.)
That’s an awfully damning assessment. If true, it implies that radical feminists believe that their cause can be destroyed by the truth, and don’t think that it should be. I’m not convinced that this indictment, as stated here, is true of any actual radical feminist, though.
Not quite. I disagree with Eridu’s position, but it doesn’t come down to a Moore’s paradox situation. Eridu’s position is that there are truths that cause harm within certain social contexts, and that in those social contexts (but not otherwise) those truths ought to be suppressed.
This is pretty plausible if you think of some thought experiments involving vulnerable groups. Suppose that you are a rationalist/consequentialist cop in 1930′s Germany, and you are investigating a case in which a banker, who was Jewish, embezzled some money from the Society for the Protection of Cute Puppies. Although ceteris paribus, your job is to expose the truth and bring criminals to justice, in this case it might be a very good idea to keep this out of the papers at all costs, because due to anti-semitic narratives society lacks the ability to process this information sanely.
Eridu claims that because of sexist narratives, society lacks the ability to process the claims of evo-psych sanely.
I find it interesting that both you and MixedNuts have found it necessary to invoke Nazis in order to construct a marginally convincing case for your interpretations of eridu’s position. Your thought experiment boils down to an equation of “the patriarchy” as it exists in present-day Western society with Nazi Germany (which would put eridu in pretty clear violation of Godwin’s Law*), and MixedNuts’ counterexample to my proposed Generalized Anti-Creationist Principle is a variant on the classic example of when it’s not only morally acceptable but morally obligatory to lie: “when hiding Jews from the S.S. in one’s basement.”
It also seems as though the “certain social contexts” where the results of evo-psych research ought to be suppressed, according to eridu, are pretty much every social context that exists outside of Women’s Studies departments and the internal discussions of radical feminist organizations. That seems untenable to me.
I just realized that Godwin’s Law is meant to prohibit a special case of Yvain’s Worst Argument in the World: the case in which the archetypal member of the category into which one places X is Naziism.
The non-Eridu argument against evo-psych is that many such researchers are abusing/ignorant of the halo effect that leads to biased results/unjustified moral assertions about sex roles in society.
Somewhere in the archive is an article by lukeprog where he decided to break up with his girlfriend and wanted to let her down easy. In deciding how to do that, he debated with himself about telling her that his desire for a woman with larger breasts was an evolution-caused preference, not a comment on the woman specifically.
That’s nonsense, and uncritical acceptance of evo-psych runs the serious risk of exacerbating the problem.
The problem with LukeProg’s decision to write that break up essay wasn’t evo-psych. The problem was that writing a huge essay on why you’re breaking up with someone, including detailed analysis of why there is insufficient attraction is a horrible thing to do to someone without even giving any benefit to yourself.
This doesn’t constitute an argument here against evo-psych as an accurate description of reality. It does constitute:
A solid illustration of how social awkardness can result in doing harm to others despite all the best intentions.
An extremely weak appeal to consequences—an argument that evo-psych should not be studied because bad things could happen from people understanding evolutionary psychology. I describe it as weak since there is little indication that the insult Luke gave given his awareness of evo-psych is any worse than the insult he would have given if ignorant. For example “I’m dumping you because I like big tits, it’s just the way I am” is about as insulting as “I’m dumping you because I like big tits, I just evolved that way” (details changed as necessary).
In conclusion, keep your moralizing out of my epistemic rationality! At least while posting on this site, please. You can argue that a particular subject should not be discussed here for instrumental reasons in accordance with your own preferences. However it is never appropriate (on lesswrong, I assert) to argue that a belief must be considered false because of perceived consequences of someone believing it.
I don’t know that that’s necessarily the case. My first serious girlfriend wrote me a very long e-mail before our break-up, laying out her rational analysis of why she believed our relationship was untenable in the long term; she actually succeeded in persuading me to see it her way, which I’d been resisting for emotional reasons. That allowed us to have an amicable parting of ways, and we remain good friends to this day.
That’s amazing. Can we see a copy of the email?
I’ll think about that—from the upvotes, it appears you’re not the only Less Wronger interested (at least, I assume an upvote to a one-liner request like that means “I’d like to see it, too”). I wouldn’t post an unedited copy, as there are some details in it that I consider very private, as, I think, would my former girlfriend. But I’ll take a look at it later and see what would need to be redacted. I would also have to ask her permission before posting any of it, of course, and I’m reluctant to bother her just now—she has a newborn daughter (as in, born last week), so I expect she’s rather preoccupied at the moment.
I’m guessing that this is more likely to work out when it’s the female who decides to be rational about it.
I’m guessing it’s more likely to work out when it’s the partner of a LessWronger who initiates it, than when it’s the partner of a nonLessWronger.
I would have agreed with you if not for the recent completely irrational feminism and creepiness discussion.
Heh. Even taking that into account, I still think your odds are better with a randomly chosen LWer as a recipient than a randomly chosen partner-of-a-female. But that’s admittedly a pretty low bar.
I would prefer to hear all the reasons, myself and am ten times more likely to choke on fluff like “It’s not you, it’s me.” than burst into flames because somebody criticized me. I need closure and feedback and for my life events to make sense. For those purposes, the only information I’d deem good enough is a serving of reality.
Shminux’s point, and the rest of this thread, is about predicting the behavior of typical women in order to make an accurate assessment about what breakup approach is best. Do you think that your preferences are typical for women, or even typical for women-who-LW-folks-date, many of whom are not themselves LWers?
According to Vladimir, LessWrong has somewhere in the ballpark of 600-1000 active users. According to Yvain’s 2011 survey, 92 of the 1090 respondents were female. If I alone would respond well, that increases the chances of a good response by an LW woman by over 1% (unless you want to include inactive members). Since Dave’s point is not “You’re more likely to get a good response from an LW woman than not.” and was “You’re more likely to get a good response from an LW woman than a random woman.” me saying that actually gives a potentially significant support to his point. If you calculate the chances of a random woman responding well to be under 1% (seems reasonable) and don’t consider inactive users to be an “LWer”, then I totally supported his point. If not, then all Dave needs to do to figure out whether he’s right is to count the number of LW women he is sure would respond well and compare the ratio with his estimate of how many random women would respond well. I doubt anyone here thinks the percentage of random women that would respond well is beyond the single digit percents. If that’s right, my saying so gave 10% or more of the support needed to think that he’s right. As for the behavior of the average LW woman, I have no idea. That I would respond well confirms that at least some LW women would respond well, which might help people figure out if it’s worthwhile to find out exactly how many of us there are.
Two comments:
First, you clearly are not an average female.
Are you sure you know how you would react in both cases? People are notoriously bad at predicting their own behavior.
Which doesn’t contradict Dave’s idea that LW women / the women that LW members date might be more likely to respond well.
Totally sure. My last boyfriend attempted to give me fluff and I tore through it. I always want to get down to the bottom of why a relationship did not work. Even if reality is devastating, I want reality. You can tell I’m strong enough to deal with criticism because I invite it often. You can tell I’m strong enough to swallow criticism because of my elitism thread—check out the note at the top. I feel kind of dumb for not seeing these problems in advance (hindsight bias, I guess?). Now that I do see how awful my thread was—in public of all places—have I vanished, or gone crybaby or begged anybody for emotional support?
No.
I am stronger than that.
Just for clarity, I did not suggest the latter. What I suggested was that this sort of thing, initiated by the partner of an LW member, is more likely to work out well… put differently, that LW members are more likely to respond well (or at least less likely to respond poorly)… than for non-LWers.
The gender of the LW member, and the gender of the partner, is not strictly irrelevant but is largely screened off by their membership.
I make no such claims about the partners of LWers.
Since your initial (and highly promising) arrival, I must admit that I lost respect for you faster than I have for any other poster in the history of LessWrong.
But posts like this one give me hope.
Downvoted because I don’t like cheapshots. Criticisms about the community’s behavior in that thread should be confined to that thread, and should be substantive. The way you’re doing it now forces other commenters to choose between addressing your cheapshot and derailing the comment thread or allowing the cheapshot to go unchallenged.
I wouldn’t have downvoted if you’d used less strong language in your criticism or if you had supported your argument better. It’s okay for you to reference other threads as proof of things, in my book. But I don’t like that you asserted the behavior in that discussion was “completely irrational” without providing any sort of support for your argument; you just threw out an unfair label in a context where it was difficult to challenge it.
It seemed a reasonable to me; after all, shminux’s comment wasn’t random unrelated criticism, it was a germane followup to a previous comment. Posting it in the other thread eliminates the entire purpose of the comment.
I dispute the accuracy of shminux’s comment, and yet also feel reluctant to challenge the comment because it would be a digression from the topic of the above comments. That’s a problem.
I recognize the need to draw from other sections of the site in order to talk about LessWrong as a community; I’m fine with that. But if we’re going to do that then I think we need to at least use good arguments while discussing those other threads. Otherwise it becomes too easy to just criticize things in contexts where they’re difficult to challenge.
I’d like to hear other possible solutions though.
Why do you think so?
Why do you think a man would think so?
I don’t know! That was why I asked.
Don’t you? Fine, I’ll bite. While the bell curve is pretty wide for both genders, an average (western?) male tends to be more analytical and reserved and less emotional than an average (western?) female. At least in my (admittedly limited) personal experience observing my family, friends and acquaintances. Certainly the cultural stereotypes bear it out, as well. Thus he would be (again, on average) more inclined to listen to reasoned arguments, as opposed to “It’s not working out between us” with some made-up excuses designed to make him feel better. Whereas she (on average) would be likely to take every logical argument as in Luke’s story, as a personal affront, insult and rejection. There are plenty of exceptions, but if you take 1000 break-ups, I’d wager that in the majority of the cases a bit of reason on the woman’s side would make it less painful for the guy, while a bit of logic on the man’s side would probably make it more painful for the girl than “it’s not you it’s me”.
I have no idea how same-sex or other less-standard breakups work out in terms of rationality.
At least in my (admittedly limited) personal experience observing my family, friends and acquaintances. Certainly the cultural stereotypes bear it out, as well.
Your perception of the people you know plus cultural stereotypes is really pretty weak evidence. I could make the following argument: In my immediate family, the men are more emotional and less analytical/reserved than the women—they tend to get angry/aggressive in response to difficult things, whereas the women seem to stay calm. Plus, cultural stereotypes bear out the idea that men are more aggressive/angry than women. Therefore, men would be more likely to take this kind of letter badly.
I’m not making that argument, but I can’t see that it would be much weaker than yours.
There’s a large difference between writing an analysis of what’s going wrong in a relationship based on information about the relationship itself and writing an evo-psych analysis which concludes that the other person has the whole weight of evolution against anyone finding them attractive.
It occurs to me that what you’ve done there is a common enough pattern, though I’m not sure it’s exactly a fallacy—seeing that something causes bad outcomes, but not being clear on what the scope of the something is.
Here’s the quote:
Thanks for finding the post. It felt very awkward discussing an example when I couldn’t produce the example for examination.
You’re welcome.
Here’s one I’ve tried to find. In the recent discussion of feminism, I remember someone (and I’m thinking it wasn’t eridu) saying that part of the purpose of the harsher attacks about racism and sexism was to make opposed people feel less sure of themselves in general.
One problem with lukeprog’s essay would be that it would muddle the evolutionary-cognitive boundary. The fact that I, in the 21st century, like big tits is logically distinct from the fact that human males, in the EEA, who slept with curvier women had more children in average, though the latter is the cause of the former.
What matter when deciding whether to use a program is what it does, not who wrote it (well, except for copyright-related reasons, but Azatoth isn’t going to sue me for infringement anyway).
I think you are misinterpreting me. I’m not saying “Never discuss evo-psych.” (That’s eridu).
I’m saying that there are strong reasons to distrust current evo-psych results. One of those reasons is that evo-psych, as used in popular culture, provides justification for writing essays like the one you and I both think was a bad idea. That is, this statement:
is not true. “It’s just the way I am” is usually a false deflection of responsibility—invoking evo. psych to make the statement true makes the statement actually effective at deflecting moral responsibility. If that weren’t true, lukeprog would not even have considered saying it to the woman.
On evo-psych generally:
Consider phrenology. The traits at issue were well worth studying. And as far as I know, the field used accepted practices of empiricism for its day. But the whole field went off track, to the point that essentially no phrenology results are actually useful for scientific research today. I think that the social pressures towards legitimizing our current normative practices put evo-psych (and to a less extend, all psychological research) at serious risk of wandering off into a similar wilderness.
If evo-psych manages to recover from what appear to be its current mis-steps I (but apparently not eridu) would welcome back with open arms.
No, it doesn’t. There is no moral license to be human. If action X is harmful, ascribing an evolutionary cause to X doesn’t make it not harmful — and to a consequentialist it is harm that is at the root of immorality.
If evolution built me to rape nubile young womenfolk, well, evolution can just fuck off.
That’s the second misunderstanding of what evolutionary psychology means that leads people to reject it on moral rather than factual grounds: if they’re not indulging in the naturalistic fallacy, they’re indulging in biological determinism, or think the evolutionary psychologists are. “X is a natural part of human behavior that exists because it was favored by natural selection in the past” does not mean “X is good,” nor does it mean “X is inevitable”—evo. psych. is about identifying tendencies, not certainties.
Evolution couldn’t build you “to rape nubile young womenfolk,” period, because humans are far too behaviorally plastic for that. What it could do, and, judging by the history of human behavior, probably did do to at least a large proportion of the male population, is built you to have an impulse to rape under some circumstances—when rejected by a woman with whom you’re already alone and with whom you had some expectation that you might have sex, for example, or when encountering a female member of an enemy population in war. Whether you act on that impulse or not depends on both the hereditary aspects of your personality and, probably more important, how you were socialized: these factors affect whether you feel any shame, empathy for your potential victim, fear of consequences, etc. that could outweigh the impulse to rape.
It’s also important to understand that evo. psych. is not saying that rapists are motivated by a conscious desire to reproduce: the impulse generally takes the form “I want to get my rocks off” and/or “I want to hurt this b!+(#,” not “I want to make a baby.” That’s probably true of the individuals committing the rapes even when rape is organized and officially sanctioned by military or political leaders as a way of “invading” an enemy population’s gene pool, as in Bosnia or the Sudan.
It’s also notable that evo. psych. tells us nothing about why any particular man committed rape while another man in similar circumstances did not—nor about why some men prefer large-breasted women and others don’t, for that matter. What it does offer is an explanation for why rape is part of the repertoire of human behavior at all. It’s entirely possible to imagine a mammal species in which no male ever attempts to copulate with an unwilling female, and female rejection instantly shuts off male desire. As I understand it, it’s even possible to identify such species in nature: IIRC, canines and the great cats, at least, have never been observed to engage in the kind of coercive copulation frequently seen in dolphins, chimps, orangutans, ducks, etc. That’s pretty much what evolutionary biology would predict, too: the big carnivores are so well-armed that the risk of serious injury either to the male, or to the female (preventing her from successfully bearing and rearing the male’s offspring), would most likely outweigh the reproductive advantage of copulating with more females than are receptive to the male’s advances.
Evidently it didn’t.
Why did I interpret that as “evidently it didn’t fuck off” (rather than “evidently it didn’t build you that way”) on the first reading?
I interpreted it thus on not only my first, but all reading up until you posted this.
Thanks!
...
No, and I’ve stated that stated that saying “never discuss evo-psych” is acceptable while muddling normative claims in with epistemic claims is not.
I assert that your argument centered around Luke’s essay to his girlfriend absolutely does not support this.
It doesn’t provide such justification and even if it did this would not constitute evidence that evo-psych is epistemically inaccurate.
Fair enough.
I’d like to request some constructive criticism: What would you suggest someone do when they think an empirical field has been tainted by normative claims?
I really do think that historical study of other cultures provides evidence that contradicts some psychological “findings.” But it is the nature of the endeavor that “harder” sciences like psychology carry more weight than softer sciences like history. I could point to cases like Bradwell v. Illinois for examples of tainted scientific processes, but I acknowledge that doesn’t rise to the level of proof we would expect from a true “hard science” discipline like physics.
I don’t see evidence of anything resembling a scientific process, tainted or otherwise, behind Justice Bradley’s patronizing pontification about “the proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex,” especially when the pompous old bastard specifically attributed his view of proper gender roles to “the law of the Creator.”
Upvoted because I consider this question a far more useful one than many of the things that led up to it.
My own answer is, roughly speaking, the same for all cases where something potentially useful is being tainted by an external factor: 1) estimate how much work is involved in separating the tainted stuff from the non-tainted stuff,
2) estimate the benefit of the non-tainted stuff, and
3) if the estimated work/benefit tradeoff is high enough, do the work, otherwise throw the whole mess out.
You seem to have done that, at least in a BOTE kind of way, and concluded that the tradeoff doesn’t justify the work. Which is cool.
It’s not clear to me whether anyone is actually disagreeing with you about that conclusion, or (if they are) whether they think your estimate of the work is too high, your estimate of the benefit too low, or your threshold tradeoff too low.
I upvoted both your post as well as the parent, for putting the issue much more clearly than anyone else:
That said, I disagree with TimS because I believe his estimated benefit is too low.
I am curious as to your reasons for believing that, as opposed to believing that his estimate of the work involved is too high.
His estimate of the work involved might be too high as well, but I don’t know enough about the field to make anything other than a guess.
As for my reasons for believing that his estimate of the benefits is too low, I discussed it on other threads, but the gist of it is as follows:
1). If we are going to commit a large amount of resources to sweeping social changes, we need to know as much as possible before we pull the trigger, especially if the trigger is connected to the firing pin on the “ban sexual intercourse” cannon (that metaphor was, perhaps, not my finest achievement).
2). Speaking more generally, I believe that the benefits of any kind of scientific knowledge far outweigh the drawbacks in most situations (though of course there are limits), due to the compounding effects. For example, the first application of modern physics was the nuclear bomb: a device is literally capable of ending the world. However, our world would be a very different, and IMO much worse place, had quantum physics never been discovered.
I just want to clarify that I don’t advocate banning heterosexual intercourse. Even if I agree slightly more with eridu than you about how coercive ordinary sexual encounters are experienced.
Yes, my bad, I did not want to imply that you advocated anything of the sort.
I’m pretty sure that I disagree on both 1 (people are terrible at separating normative and empirical claims) and 2 (there’s probably not much evo. psych that will be very useful in social engineering). But I’m honestly not certain which disagreement is larger.
I’m curious which of my estimates differs further from the LW average—but I’m not sure if actually discovering that would advance the particular goal of optimizing our stance towards evo. psych research.
That’s a much broader problem than the misunderstanding and misuse of evo. psych. I think one of the major aims of humanism/transhumanism should be getting more people to understand the difference between descriptive and prescriptive statements—between is and ought. And, given how pervasive that confusion is across human cultures, the roots of it might be a fruitful area of investigation for evo. psych., along with other branches of cognitive science.
I can’t help but notice that at least some radical feminists’ aversion to evo. psych. and related fields in biology stems from their failure to distinguish normative from empirical claims. A lot of the firestorm surrounding Thornhill and Palmer’s A Natural History of Rape came down to the critics indulging in the naturalistic fallacy (which is a pity, because there are plenty of legitimate criticisms to be made of Thornhill and Palmer’s conclusions). Another example that springs to mind is this article by Andrea Dworkin, in which she detracts from an otherwise good argument by inserting a gratuitous slur on Edward O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis that demonstrates a breathtaking failure of reading comprehension on her part.
I think there are reasons to distrust a lot of evolutionary psychology results, and I think Luke’s breakup letter was just as bad an idea as he’s presented it as, but I don’t think the latter provides much evidence for the former. The rules of social interaction are only tangentially related to empirical reality, and even severe violations of social etiquette don’t establish empirical falsehood. In fact, it’s generally considered polite to deemphasize a number of empirical truths which our culture considers awkward, such as differences in skill.
As to invoking evopsych to dodge responsibility for your sexual preferences, it seems to me that that’s only dishonest if the results it invokes are untrue in the first place. It’s impolite regardless, though; our culture smiles on only a fairly narrow set of mechanistic excuses for behavior, and that’s not one of them.
Well, maybe not just any feminist, but eridu specifically did claim that, since the findings of evolutionary psychology are frequently misused to advance the patriarchy, no one should study evolutionary psychology. As far as I can tell, he feels that way about all research that deals with sex and/or gender, not just evolutionary psychology specifically.
There were anti-Semitic pamphlets that quoted studies of Jewish populations where blood type B was most frequent and Aryan populations where blood type A was, kept quiet about studies showing the reverse, and used that as proof that Aryans and Jews were different races that shouldn’t mingle and should be ranked relative to each other. If someone thought that publishing counterpoints (the rest of the data, or pointing out that blood type distribution doesn’t imply any of the conclusions) would be ineffective and had instead advocated banning statistics on blood type, it’d be rather uncharitable to say “They believe gathering evidence hurts their cause”.
I don’t see what the difference is, in practice. In both cases, the person in question wants to ban research into blood types. One person wants to do it because he fears his position could be destroyed by the truth; the other one wants to do it because the research would give his opponents too much power. In both cases, though, the research is banned, and neither person knows whether his beliefs are true or not.
Are you still in the analogy here? There’s very little that blood type research can actually tell us for or against antisemitism—we don’t have to fear a result that would support it. The problem is that some possible results (all possible results, really), while not evidence for “Aryans rule, Jews drool”, will be used to support this assertion. We expect that the costs of people being persuaded to hold false antisemitic beliefs outweigh the benefits of better responses to epidemics or whatever we’re hoping to get out of the research. Likewise, eridu believes that ev-psych can’t say much about what gender roles should be (I agree), but is misused to support some harmful gender roles (I agree). He also believes that it’s not really possible to mitigate the misuse, and so the costs of people being persuaded to hold false sexist beliefs outweigh… figuring out how parental grief works or something.
What you appear to describe is… to stretch the analogy past its snapping point, someone who thinks injecting type A blood into everyone will solve antisemitism, and is scared that blood type research would prove their intervention ineffective or harmful. While also being scared of the consequences of misuse.
For better or worse, you seem to have steel-manned eridu’s position. Eridu appears to believe that it is irrelevant whether ev psych (or any other empirical project) has anything to say about appropriate gender relations.
How do you know this, if not by looking at the result of blood type research (or, more likely, research on heredity in general) ? Similarly, how does eridu know that “ev-psych can’t say much about what gender roles should be” ? If by “should be” you mean something like the naturalistic fallacy, then I’d agree; however, it’s still possible that ev-psych can tell us something valuable about why our current gender roles are the way they are.
To use another analogy, optics and genetics tell me why my eyesight is bad, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to throw up my hands and say, “oh well, guess I’m almost blind then”. Instead, I’m going to use this knowledge to acquire some corrective lenses.
Why does that someone believe that the intervention will actually be effective ?
I know people of various ancestries, including near-pure Jews and near-pure Aryans. The Jews are not less creative, weaker, sneakier, greedier, less heroic, or more bent on world domination than the Aryans. Looking at history, Jews are more likely than Aryans to create great work of art and make great discoveries, and it takes about equal digging to find an Aryan ancestor to any creative Jew than the reverse. In general, if I try to rank people from best to worst, I don’t find many ancestry-related clusters, which shows that ranking races from best to worst is not useful. Heredity research can tell me that intermarriage is not bad, but I can also observe that countries and cities with higher rates of intermarriage aren’t doing worse, haven’t lost their cultural identities, and, New York notwithstanding, promote equality rather than Jewish superiority.
Similarly, differences between genders that are relevant to gender roles ought to be salient enough that regular psychology can expose them (and so what if it’s culture-dependent, we’re working from currently existing culture) with no need for the subtler, bare-bones models ev-psych gives us.
Similarly again, figuring out that your eyes converge too strongly and you need divergent lenses is useful, in a way that screens off the usefulness of genetics of nearsightedness.
Because it’s a stupid analogy. Maybe they believe that antisemitism is caused by people being in bad moods due to anemia, and they have a huge stash of blood that happens to be type A.
Ok, so what this sounds like to me is, “I’d go out and do a bunch of research, in order to work around my biases by using ironclad evidence”. As far as I understand, eridu claims that people would just use the evidence selectively to justify their biases, instead. For example, they might notice that the crime rate in NY is higher than in other cities, and exclaim, “Aha ! It’s all those evil Jews ! That proves it !”. Thus, you should avoid collecting any evidence at all, for fear of giving them too much ammunition. Yes, eridu singles out evo-psych specifically, but his reasons for doing so are not unique to evo-psych, AFAICT.
Right, but it’d be good to know which differences (if any) are the results of biology. To use my earlier analogy (hopefully without straining it to the breaking point), there are lots of illiterate people around; but some are illiterate because they’d never been taught to read, whereas others are illiterate because their eyes cannot focus on the page. It is really helpful to know which are which.
My point is that, in order to have some sort of a justified belief in their remedy, they must have first studied various blood types, and blood disorders in general. Otherwise, they’d just be randomly transfusing blood into people for no good reason, thus (assuming they at least do so safely) wasting a bunch of resources and gaining little (though, admittedly, more than nothing) in return.
Hmm, what I think I’m saying is more like:
Do research in sociology, not biology. If you uncover differences it may be a good idea to look at their origins, but don’t go digging for possible sources of differences that don’t reveal themselves.
Use the interocular trauma significance test. Any difference large and widespread enough to make group-level rather than individual-level policy should hit you between the eyes.
I think it’s pretty obvious that there are many differences between genders. Even eridu would agree to this, IMO, since his stated objective is to eliminate gender in order to eliminate the differences.
That’s just a recipe for indulging your own biases, IMO. That said, I doubt that differences between gender currently justify group-level policy (other than in specialized cases such as medical treatment, etc.). We’re not arguing over whether gender bias exists (I believe that it does) or whether we should adopt patriarchal policies (I believe that we should not).
Rather, the argument is over whether the very act of studying specific aspects of human biology and/or psychology constitutes an extremely harmful act and should immediately be stopped. I believe that it does not.
This is why I think the distinction between gender and sex is so helpful. It is not obvious to me that there are gender differences, even though I agree with you that there are obvious sex differences. Eridu appears to want to eliminate sex differences, while I merely want to abolish gender differences.
Consider the taboo in modern society against female chest nudity. It’s obvious to any subscriber to National Geographic that this norm is not an inherent part of human society. So I think the norm is a gender-norm, not a sex-norm.
Properly speaking, evo. psych has nothing to say about gender and gender-norms. Only sex and sex-norms. But society as a whole resists the distinct, and scientists rely on the halo effect to support that blurring of what should be relatively distinct concepts.
Someone more radical than I would like point out that the distinction is much fuzzier than I suggest. (Consider social pressure to perform surgery to “fix” intersex infants). (shrug). There’s a lot of low hanging fruit in social engineering before a precise resolution of that issue is really necessary.
I don’t think I get what you mean by “sex differences” vs. “gender differences”; eridu claims he wants to eliminate gender, not sex. Can you explain your definitions ? You bring up the example below:
I agree with you there, and this is a gender difference, but I’m not sure how your view on this contrasts with eridu’s. Surely eridu doesn’t want to eliminate secondary sexual characteristics… does he ?
I think eridu wants secondary sex characteristics to stop being morally relevant (i.e. never treat women different than men). I think that’s impossible—but society is not careful about what really is a secondary sex characteristic.
As far as I can tell, so does he, which is why he wants to destroy gender altogether. Once he’s done, we won’t have “men” and “women” at all; we’d just have “people with sexual organs A” and “people with sexual organs B” (plus a small number of others with C, D, etc.). By analogy, today we (mostly) don’t have separate identities for different hair or eye colors; it’s just a meaningless biological quirk (again, mostly).
One problem with this goal is that if gender truly is dependent on sex to any meaningful extent, then the goal cannot be achieved through purely social means. This is one of the reasons why I believe that evo-psych specifically, and evolutionary biology in general, should not be banned, despite its possible negative consequences.
I should also mention that I am sympathetic to the goal; it’s not a bad idea. However, it would be an immense undertaking, and you don’t want to commit an immense amount of resources to a goal unless you can be reasonably sure it’s achievable at least in principle.
(On a sidenote, eridu did claim that “treating women different than men” is impossible, because the patriarchy is pervasive and omnipresent. Even when you think you’re treating women the same as men, you aren’t—which is why he’s against liberal feminism.)
A very small piece of evidence that eridu might have a point: A while ago, I was faced with a person who I didn’t know at the time was a transexual in transition. I felt like I didn’t know what to do or say to them. (I’m reasonably sure I just looked blank at the time, or at least we’re on decent terms since then. I haven’t mentioned that reaction to the person, and they’ve since tranisitioned to a standard gender.)
It did feel to me as though I had separate behavior sets for dealing with men and with women, and was at a loss when I didn’t know which set to apply. I haven’t explored how the sets might be different, but maybe I should.
Me too, but 1) the sets do overlap by a substantial amount, and 2) I think it’s more a case of potential sexual partners vs everyone else than of women vs men—with women I’m not sexually attracted to at all, I behave pretty much the same as if they were male (except for different cultural norms such as—in Italy—kissing them on the cheek instead of shaking hands, which I don’t consider any more relevant that the use of different pronouns). (Edited to replace ″romantic″ with ″sexual″ -- I’ve introspected myself and ISTM that the set of people with whom I’d use the first set of behaviours almost exactly coincide with the set of people with whom I’d want to have protected sex if they offered, and promised not to tell anybody and to try not to let that affect our future interactions in any way—which is a somewhat broader criterion than me being willing to have a monogamous romantic relationship with them.)
FWIW, I doubt I treat men I’m attracted to and women I’m attracted to the same way. Though introspection is a decidedly unreliable source of information about this sort of thing.
What about men you’re not attracted to and women you’re not attracted to?
There’s much less commonality in how I treat people I’m not attracted to. Or at least less salient commonality. I really don’t know what to say about it. I mean, sure, there are women I’m not attracted to whom I treat differently than men I’m not attracted to… but there are also men I’m not attracted to whom I treat differently than men I’m not attracted to. Introspection fails to provide even unreliable hints on that question.
Also, the fact that there exist both men and women I’m not attracted to doesn’t make me particularly unique; I expect that’s true of everybody. So I wouldn’t have felt especially motivated to share that data point, even were it crisper. You had started out drawing the distinction between “potential sexual partner vs everyone else” and “women vs men,” though, so I thought the perspective of someone for whom “potential sexual partner” included both women and men (well, in principle, anyway; after 20 years of monogamy it’s somewhat theoretical) might be relevant.
Did this comment go from +2 to −1 in, like, five minutes? Why? (Upvoted back to zero—I don’t think it deserves being negative.)
Your comment was also immediately voted down. I brought it back to neutral karma. I haven’t been following this conversation, but it doesn’t seem worthy of immediate downvotes...
Apparently? Not sure why.
I guess you missed the part where people (not me personally, it was just made pretty clear) are downvoting everything in this thread in the hope that everyone would stop talking?
I’d considered the possibility, but the fact that the parents were significantly net-upvoted made it seem churlish to attribute downvotes simply to the thread it’s in. It seems more plausible now that you (and at least one other person) have endorsed it.
“Gender should be removed from society” is not a particularly rare opinion—unfortunately it is also not a particularly feasible one, at least not in the short term.
Agreed, but the short-term infeasibility alone should not disqualify the goal completely; if that was the case, the SIAI wouldn’t exist.
(to be fair, I personally don’t endorse donating money to SIAI, but I have additional reasons)
I should clarify that it seems not only infeasible in the short term but lacks anything resembling a clear path to get there. And while an uncharitable person might say the same about CEV, SIAI working on CEV doesn’t involve forcing everyone else to change their patterns of social interaction in service of goals that are not clearly defined.
The path from here to there is wildly unclear. But history shows social changes as large as the one I advocate for have actually happened. So there’s that.
Shouldn’t we draw up a better map of the road from here to there before beginning our journey?
Agreed.
Edited to add: I am just such an uncharitable person :-/
If true, that does seem like a very good reason not to trust eridu or take anything he has to say seriously. As an evolutionary biologist, most familiar with this kind of anti-thought from the creationist quarter, I might state it as a Generalized Anti-Creationist Principle: “Any person who advocates ignorance or false beliefs about a subject as morally superior to true and accurate knowledge of that subject is not to be trusted or taken seriously on any subject.” (See here for a good example of a creationist who goes every last angstrom of the way to this reductio ad absurdum of his position.)
This recalls Steven Pinker’s critique of many aspects of twentieth century radical left-wing thought, including some radical feminist ideas, in The Blank Slate. Radical scholars in the social sciences clung (and, in at least some cases, are still clinging) to the increasingly untenable notion of the human mind as a tabula rasa for fear of what they perceive as disastrous moral consequences of it not being true, and decried every scientific advance that filled in some portion of the slate. Neither side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on pretending things are true because they think the world be better if they were, and there are an awful lot of people who could benefit from reciting the Litanies of Tarsky and Gendlin until they take them to heart.
As an aside, I have to wonder if the upvotes on my previous comment reflect a sober assessment of its quality, or simply the fact that “that which can be destroyed by the truth should be” is a huge, multi-colored, strobing applause light around these here parts. ;-)
It follows directly that you stop trusting people who tell you “Don’t tell me if you hide any Jews, I don’t want to let anything slip in front of the SS”. Is that actually a conclusion you wish to endorse?
Edit: mantis is correct, see eir reply below.
No, but all that requires is adding the qualifier “academic” to the noun “subject” in my principle, so it can’t get misapplied to very unusual and extreme situations where knowledge of the specific situation could be more dangerous than the lack of that knowledge.
That’s one of the things that aggravates me about eridu. I’m far more sympathetic to second-wave than third-wave feminism. But I don’t think that being second-wave requires rejecting empiricism. (I suspect >90% of ev. psych results are wrong because of cultural bias, but that’s a separate assertion.)