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In my earlier response, note that I didn't say that hate doesn't exist or that it isn't real. Neither did I say that it was the same as fear. I said it is an em

by placebo 11y ago

In my earlier response, note that I didn't say that hate doesn't exist or that it isn't real. Neither did I say that it was the same as fear. I said it is an emotion that is derived from fear. Usually the connection is easy to see. Other times it is more subtle and concealed - but I argue it's always there. I don't believe in irrational behaviours. People behave the way they do for a reason. When you hate someone, it's always because they represent something that you can't remain at peace with. Usually because of something that you are threatened by in one way or another (either physically or psychologically). Of course, I might be wrong, but I think that in the same way there's no smoke without a fire, there's no hate without fear. This is a theory though, and one counterexample is all it takes to bring it down.

lsc 11y ago
>I don't believe in irrational behaviours. People behave the way they do for a reason. I'm assuming you are speaking of evolutionary psychology; personally, I think that most evolutionary psychology explanations are post-hoc rationalizations; it's usually difficult to actually test. That doesn't mean that it's valueless or uninteresting, just that evolutionary psychology should be treated more the way we treat history and less the way we treat experimental psychology or neurology or what have you[1]. Yes, we can come up for reasons why the crusade happened, and we can come up with historical evidence for and against it, and that can be really interesting, but we're still building a narrative from the bits of history that remain, and have a bunch of obvious biases (in history, the biggest is that the surviving written evidence is usually, well, written by someone with their own narrow biases.) I thought I gave a pretty good example of hate without fear (or hate where the fear is pretty secondary to the hate) from my life, which you seemed to ignore? I'm not going to come up with another example, because I work pretty hard to remove my own irrational hates, and speculating about other people's irrational hate is, well, it's much less likely to produce reasonable results. [1] neurology and experimental psychology have their own, very different problems, of course, but it's a different sort of thing from history.

by placebo 11y ago

lsc 11y ago

>I don't believe in irrational behaviours. People behave the way they do for a reason. I'm assuming you are speaking of evolutionary psychology; personally, I think that most evolutionary psychology explanations are post-hoc rationalizations; it's usually difficult to actually test. That doesn't mean that it's valueless or uninteresting, just that evolutionary psychology should be treated more the way we treat history and less the way we treat experimental psychology or neurology or what have you[1]. Yes, we can come up for reasons why the crusade happened, and we can come up with historical evidence for and against it, and that can be really interesting, but we're still building a narrative from the bits of history that remain, and have a bunch of obvious biases (in history, the biggest is that the surviving written evidence is usually, well, written by someone with their own narrow biases.) I thought I gave a pretty good example of hate without fear (or hate where the fear is pretty secondary to the hate) from my life, which you seemed to ignore? I'm not going to come up with another example, because I work pretty hard to remove my own irrational hates, and speculating about other people's irrational hate is, well, it's much less likely to produce reasonable results. [1] neurology and experimental psychology have their own, very different problems, of course, but it's a different sort of thing from history.