A recent Time cover story swallows evolutionary psychology wholesale: Losing our faculties over a matter like sex ought not to make much sense for a species like ours that relies on its wits. A savanna full of predators, after all, was not a place to get distracted. But the lure of losing our faculties is one of the things that makes sex thrilling–and one of the very things that keeps the species going. As far as your genes are concerned, your principal job while you’re alive is to conceive offspring, bring them to adulthood and then obligingly die so you don’t consume resources better spent on the young. Anything that encourages you to breed now and breed plenty gets that job done.
In my experience, a statement encountered at random in an article or on the internet about evo psych is more likely to be false than a statement encountered at random about quantum physics.
This comment is a response to TGGP's assertion that quantum physics is "harder, psychologically, to get your head round than evo psych" (whatever that means).
It seems like a perfectly sensible way of describing things. One can have false motives and true motives, and we usually use "real" to mean the true motives. Would you prefer they talked about one's true motives as opposed to their false motives?
Silas:
I wasn't endorsing Hanson's view, just explaining it. I agree with you.
Scott_Scheule and Robin_Hanson: my biggest objection to explaining love, dance, architecture, etc. through signaling is that, well, those seem to be *extremely* roundabout ways of spreading one's seed. It's like someone should have tapped Michaelangelo on the shoulder and said, "you know, there's a simpler way..."
I'm not sure the adjective "real" in the phrase "real motive" is really helping anyone. Propositional beliefs are real. So are emotions. So are evolutionary histories. Whatever is, is real.
I believe for example that my neighbor's real motive in lobbying for environmentalist and progressive causes is to appear nonexploitative or valuable in some other way to prospective friends even though it is not part of her conscious planning about her lobbying.
More plausibly, your neighbour sees environmental advocacy and progressivism as being consistent with their morality (possibly involving some amount of hypocracy, akrasia and etc.). That's where the buck stops as far as "real motives" are concerned. Social network phenomena are clearly relevant as an empirical matter, but very few people would claim that e.g. extreme religiousness is only really motivated by social concerns even though the same dynamics are applicable.
You think we live in a just worldWhen you assume too much you make an ass of you and you. I don't believe in the concept of "just" at all.
looking into the matter accordinglyLooking into what?
I'm just asking you to recognise that some beliefs might be harder, psychologically, to get your head round than evo psych.Quantum mechanics, for sure. Did you have something else in mind?
The debate here is between Robin and allies, who find the idea that materialism could fail worth a "geez," and the journalist and his ilk, who are skeptical of the idea it could succeed. Alternatively, the journalist et al do think materialism true, but doubt science will ever be able to explain it. Alternatively, Robin and allies think materialism false, but true about such cultural issues as joy, love, dance, et al. Or, more unlikely, think reductionist explanation will work here, even if there are immaterial truths that it ends up reducing to.
All of these positions are defensible. I read a recent paper on the topic--the context is the dualist/monist debate, but many of the arguments are applicable, just replace "consciousness" with "love" or "dance" etc.
Please don't say 'dinner-party or otherwise'. It's wilfully missing my point, which is that there are different belief-systems which, although genealogically classifiable under a single banner, don't correspond to one another in terms of effects, coherence, believer-base and so forth. I'm doing this partly to be kind to evo psych, which I know I'm not encountering in its strongest form most of the time.You think we live in a just world. I don't. I suspect it's going to take a long time to argue each other out of that one. I'd suggest that you recognise, however, your strong interest in rejecting all the arguments I or another person might make, and looking into the matter accordingly. Please note that I'm *not* trying to claim some Super Rationality Prize for believing something that in many ways puts me in a tight spot - I'm just asking you to recognise that some beliefs might be harder, psychologically, to get your head round than evo psych.
Eliezer doesn't seem content with "no inherent logical progression". That's why he's had a long string of posts on Aristotelian categories and the definitions of words. Marxism, dinner-party or otherwise, killed tons of people by "encouraging, or rather reinforcing" hate and authoritarianism. Here in the land of "every man for himself" ethics the main cause of death is being old and having had too much to eat.
In what area do you think there is higher than average quality research? How do you determine quality?
Dinner-party Marxism has killed almost nobody. You're talking about a different bowdlerisation. I'd argue that dinner-party evolutionary psychology may be killing people right now by encouraging, or rather reinforcing, an 'every man for himself' ethics and a resistence to societal change and personal self-examination, particularly among those doing rather well out of the status quo. I'd agree with Eliezer that there is no inherent logical progression from one to the other, although I suspect he wouldn't agree with me altogether in my belief that the cultural/ideological need for scientific narratives that can be easily used in such a way is currently skewing funding and publication decisions - I suspect the predominance of poorer-than-average-quality research in this area is a sign of this.
I know it's usual to discuss love as though it's a single emotion, but it seems to me that it's actually a cocktail of several emotions, such as protectiveness, loyalty, fascination, comfort, trust, vanity, physical attraction, tenderness, security - and all the others I haven't thought of off-hand.
Everyone makes their own cocktail from the bar; a different mix for each potential partnership - and the mix usually changes over time, too; adding new ingredients, letting others go stale.
Sometimes evolutionary psychology can explain everything that's in the cocktail, sometimes it can't. I'd say there's often "something else". I don't mean something(s) that can't be explained scientifically; I just think it doesn't work to force a single explanation onto a complex mix.
It would be useful to talk in terms of proximate and ultimate causes. "Proximate causation: Explanation of an animal's behavior based on trigger stimuli and internal mechanisms. Ultimate causation: Explanation of an animal's behavior based on evolution - why this specific trait was favored by natural selection."
Evolutionary psychology seeks ultimate causes. The TIME journalist is talking about proximate causes. And really, you could see it as another variation on the problem of qualia. Granted that certain physical behaviors have certain adaptive outcomes, why does it feel like that to engage in them? Ev-psych might explain why it's adaptive to feel a certain emotion at a certain time. But it will not, in itself, explain the existence of emotions.
I like Geoffrey Miller's take on love. In his view, just as we need to sign a contract in order to convince a landlord to rent to us, we need a guarantee to each other in order to initiate deeply altruistic partnerships. And so love, defined as the credible guarantee that we'd suffer massive disutility if we were to lose our partner, is the guarantee that cements pair-bonding.
Seen in this light, wasteful sacrifices are seen as "romantic" because they illustrate that material concerns pale in comparison to this "doomsday device" that is the threatened disutility of love lost. And so diamonds are romantic, vacuum cleaners are not.
I know I've seen people feel that ev psych is an insufficient - or perhaps merely unsatisfying explanation for romantic feelings. But I don't, and never have, understood what's so unsatisfying about the explanation. I can still as thoroughly enjoy the consequences of my genetic heritage even if I think I understand a little more about how it works.
Anyone who thinks romantic feelings are somehow beyond technoscience has probably never done MDMA.
Since anonymous cites me to support his position, I will voice my disagreement with his It's counterintuitive to define "real motives" to mean something other than the goals and values of concious planning.
I believe for example that my neighbor's real motive in lobbying for environmentalist and progressive causes is to appear nonexploitative or valuable in some other way to prospective friends even though it is not part of her conscious planning about her lobbying. (That is consistent with my previous comment because the people I refer to in my previous comment have much more intelligence about their own psychology and motives than my neighbor has.)
I'll stop commenting now because my name now appears 3 times in the sidebar!
In my experience, a statement encountered at random in an article or on the internet about evo psych is more likely to be false than a statement encountered at random about quantum physics.
This comment is a response to TGGP's assertion that quantum physics is "harder, psychologically, to get your head round than evo psych" (whatever that means).
Eliezer:
It seems like a perfectly sensible way of describing things. One can have false motives and true motives, and we usually use "real" to mean the true motives. Would you prefer they talked about one's true motives as opposed to their false motives?
Silas:
I wasn't endorsing Hanson's view, just explaining it. I agree with you.
Scott_Scheule and Robin_Hanson: my biggest objection to explaining love, dance, architecture, etc. through signaling is that, well, those seem to be *extremely* roundabout ways of spreading one's seed. It's like someone should have tapped Michaelangelo on the shoulder and said, "you know, there's a simpler way..."
But I freely admit I may be missing something.
I'm not sure the adjective "real" in the phrase "real motive" is really helping anyone. Propositional beliefs are real. So are emotions. So are evolutionary histories. Whatever is, is real.
I believe for example that my neighbor's real motive in lobbying for environmentalist and progressive causes is to appear nonexploitative or valuable in some other way to prospective friends even though it is not part of her conscious planning about her lobbying.
More plausibly, your neighbour sees environmental advocacy and progressivism as being consistent with their morality (possibly involving some amount of hypocracy, akrasia and etc.). That's where the buck stops as far as "real motives" are concerned. Social network phenomena are clearly relevant as an empirical matter, but very few people would claim that e.g. extreme religiousness is only really motivated by social concerns even though the same dynamics are applicable.
You think we live in a just worldWhen you assume too much you make an ass of you and you. I don't believe in the concept of "just" at all.
looking into the matter accordinglyLooking into what?
I'm just asking you to recognise that some beliefs might be harder, psychologically, to get your head round than evo psych.Quantum mechanics, for sure. Did you have something else in mind?
The debate here is between Robin and allies, who find the idea that materialism could fail worth a "geez," and the journalist and his ilk, who are skeptical of the idea it could succeed. Alternatively, the journalist et al do think materialism true, but doubt science will ever be able to explain it. Alternatively, Robin and allies think materialism false, but true about such cultural issues as joy, love, dance, et al. Or, more unlikely, think reductionist explanation will work here, even if there are immaterial truths that it ends up reducing to.
All of these positions are defensible. I read a recent paper on the topic--the context is the dualist/monist debate, but many of the arguments are applicable, just replace "consciousness" with "love" or "dance" etc.
http://www.unc.edu/~ujanel/...
Please don't say 'dinner-party or otherwise'. It's wilfully missing my point, which is that there are different belief-systems which, although genealogically classifiable under a single banner, don't correspond to one another in terms of effects, coherence, believer-base and so forth. I'm doing this partly to be kind to evo psych, which I know I'm not encountering in its strongest form most of the time.You think we live in a just world. I don't. I suspect it's going to take a long time to argue each other out of that one. I'd suggest that you recognise, however, your strong interest in rejecting all the arguments I or another person might make, and looking into the matter accordingly. Please note that I'm *not* trying to claim some Super Rationality Prize for believing something that in many ways puts me in a tight spot - I'm just asking you to recognise that some beliefs might be harder, psychologically, to get your head round than evo psych.
Eliezer doesn't seem content with "no inherent logical progression". That's why he's had a long string of posts on Aristotelian categories and the definitions of words. Marxism, dinner-party or otherwise, killed tons of people by "encouraging, or rather reinforcing" hate and authoritarianism. Here in the land of "every man for himself" ethics the main cause of death is being old and having had too much to eat.
In what area do you think there is higher than average quality research? How do you determine quality?
Dinner-party Marxism has killed almost nobody. You're talking about a different bowdlerisation. I'd argue that dinner-party evolutionary psychology may be killing people right now by encouraging, or rather reinforcing, an 'every man for himself' ethics and a resistence to societal change and personal self-examination, particularly among those doing rather well out of the status quo. I'd agree with Eliezer that there is no inherent logical progression from one to the other, although I suspect he wouldn't agree with me altogether in my belief that the cultural/ideological need for scientific narratives that can be easily used in such a way is currently skewing funding and publication decisions - I suspect the predominance of poorer-than-average-quality research in this area is a sign of this.
Acheman, how many people has Marxism killed? How many people has evolutionary psychology killed? Read "The Blank Slate".
Robert Lindsay claims altruism does not exist. I discuss that here.
Many people don't, but I find humans horrifying.
I know it's usual to discuss love as though it's a single emotion, but it seems to me that it's actually a cocktail of several emotions, such as protectiveness, loyalty, fascination, comfort, trust, vanity, physical attraction, tenderness, security - and all the others I haven't thought of off-hand.
Everyone makes their own cocktail from the bar; a different mix for each potential partnership - and the mix usually changes over time, too; adding new ingredients, letting others go stale.
Sometimes evolutionary psychology can explain everything that's in the cocktail, sometimes it can't. I'd say there's often "something else". I don't mean something(s) that can't be explained scientifically; I just think it doesn't work to force a single explanation onto a complex mix.
It would be useful to talk in terms of proximate and ultimate causes. "Proximate causation: Explanation of an animal's behavior based on trigger stimuli and internal mechanisms. Ultimate causation: Explanation of an animal's behavior based on evolution - why this specific trait was favored by natural selection."
Evolutionary psychology seeks ultimate causes. The TIME journalist is talking about proximate causes. And really, you could see it as another variation on the problem of qualia. Granted that certain physical behaviors have certain adaptive outcomes, why does it feel like that to engage in them? Ev-psych might explain why it's adaptive to feel a certain emotion at a certain time. But it will not, in itself, explain the existence of emotions.
I like Geoffrey Miller's take on love. In his view, just as we need to sign a contract in order to convince a landlord to rent to us, we need a guarantee to each other in order to initiate deeply altruistic partnerships. And so love, defined as the credible guarantee that we'd suffer massive disutility if we were to lose our partner, is the guarantee that cements pair-bonding.
Seen in this light, wasteful sacrifices are seen as "romantic" because they illustrate that material concerns pale in comparison to this "doomsday device" that is the threatened disutility of love lost. And so diamonds are romantic, vacuum cleaners are not.
I know I've seen people feel that ev psych is an insufficient - or perhaps merely unsatisfying explanation for romantic feelings. But I don't, and never have, understood what's so unsatisfying about the explanation. I can still as thoroughly enjoy the consequences of my genetic heritage even if I think I understand a little more about how it works.
Anyone who thinks romantic feelings are somehow beyond technoscience has probably never done MDMA.
Since anonymous cites me to support his position, I will voice my disagreement with his It's counterintuitive to define "real motives" to mean something other than the goals and values of concious planning.
I believe for example that my neighbor's real motive in lobbying for environmentalist and progressive causes is to appear nonexploitative or valuable in some other way to prospective friends even though it is not part of her conscious planning about her lobbying. (That is consistent with my previous comment because the people I refer to in my previous comment have much more intelligence about their own psychology and motives than my neighbor has.)
I'll stop commenting now because my name now appears 3 times in the sidebar!