Though I know more about the former than the latter, I begin to suspect that different styles of cynicism prevail in evolutionary psychology than in microeconomics.
Evolutionary psychologists are absolutely and uniformly cynical about the real reason why humans are universally wired with a chunk of complex purposeful functional circuitry X (e.g. an emotion) – we have X because it increased inclusive genetic fitness in the ancestral environment, full stop.
Evolutionary psychologists are mildly cynical about the environmental circumstances that activate and maintain an emotion. For example, if you fall in love with the body, mind, and soul of some beautiful mate, an evolutionary psychologist would like to check up on you in ten years to see whether the degree to which you think your mate's mind is still beautiful, correlates with independent judges' ratings of how physically attractive that mate still is.
But it wouldn't be conventionally ev-psych cynicism to suppose that you don't really love your mate, and that you were actually just attracted to their body all along, but that instead you told yourself a self-deceiving story about virtuously loving them for their mind, in order to falsely signal commitment.
Robin, on the other hand, often seems to think that this general type of cynicism is the default explanation and that anything else bears a burden of proof – why suppose an explanation that invokes a genuine virtue, when a selfish desire will do?
Of course my experience with having deep discussions with economists mostly consists of talking to Robin, but I suspect that this is at least partially reflective of a difference between the ev-psych and economic notions of parsimony.
Ev-psychers are trying to be parsimonious with how complex of an adaptation they postulate, and how cleverly complicated they are supposing natural selection to have been.
Economists… well, it's not my field, but maybe they're trying be parsimonious by having just a few simple motives that play out in complex ways via consequentialist calculations?
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"So here I am having been raised in the Christian faith and trying not to freak out over the past few weeks because I’ve finally begun to wonder whether I believe things just because I was raised with them. Our family is surrounded by genuinely wonderful people who have poured their talents into us since we were teenagers, and our social structure and business rests on the tenets of what we believe. I’ve been trying to work out how I can ‘clear the decks’ and then rebuild with whatever is worth keeping, yet it’s so foundational that it will affect my marriage (to a pretty special man) and my daughters who, of course, have also been raised to walk the Christian path.
Is there anyone who’s been in this position – really, really invested in a faith and then walked away?"