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I'm out of the loop, can you tell me why evolutionary psychology isn't a consistent concept?

ogogmad 4y ago
How would you test it? There's lots of factors influencing someone's psychology; how would you pick them apart to prove causes? The field's dumb.
- jevgeni 4y ago
  There are a lot of fields of study that we accept despite these flaws. Economics and social sciences are prime examples. But for some reason it’s evolutionary psychology that revs people up so much. The idea is even not that controversial: “The need to survive might have affected human psychology - especially the learned part”.
  - ogogmad 4y ago
    > There are a lot of fields of study that we accept despite these flaws. Economics and social sciences are prime examples. Who's we? I'm sick and tired of people saying this. It sounds like this: "This is a map of Middle Earth, not Stalingrad." "But at least we have a map! What's your alternative, you complainer?" "But it's not a map of a real place!" "We'll use this map - flawed as it is - to plan our invasion of Stalingrad." I want my science rigorous. Or else it isn't science.
    - jevgeni 4y ago
      The collective “we”, which is largely independent of your individual opinion. The problem is not that we have a faulty map. It’s that you pretend it’s irreversibly faulty. We’ve successfully navigated quite a bit of trouble and chances are that we’ll be able to do so in the future. What you are suggesting sounds a lot like: let’s do nothing.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - bmacho 4y ago
      Economics would be parallel to psychology, not evolutionary psychology. I believe that descriptive psychology is a science. E.g. eventually they will be able to determine the result of the Milgram experiment, and it will become a fact, a building block in our view of the world, and it will affect our decisions mostly positively. They just need to make enough experiments.
      - jevgeni 4y ago
        Evolutionary psychology is descriptive psychology with the assumption that closely related evolutionary paths can be used for comparative study.
- jl6 4y ago
  Maybe you can come up with a particularly stringent conceptualization of what is or isn’t science, and maybe some fields of inquiry won’t meet that bar (like cosmology?), but that doesn’t make them “dumb”. Even without testability you can still reason about the likelihood of things.

How would you test it? There's lots of factors influencing someone's psychology; how would you pick them apart to prove causes? The field's dumb.

jevgeni 4y ago
There are a lot of fields of study that we accept despite these flaws. Economics and social sciences are prime examples. But for some reason it’s evolutionary psychology that revs people up so much. The idea is even not that controversial: “The need to survive might have affected human psychology - especially the learned part”.
- ogogmad 4y ago
  > There are a lot of fields of study that we accept despite these flaws. Economics and social sciences are prime examples. Who's we? I'm sick and tired of people saying this. It sounds like this: "This is a map of Middle Earth, not Stalingrad." "But at least we have a map! What's your alternative, you complainer?" "But it's not a map of a real place!" "We'll use this map - flawed as it is - to plan our invasion of Stalingrad." I want my science rigorous. Or else it isn't science.
  - jevgeni 4y ago
    The collective “we”, which is largely independent of your individual opinion. The problem is not that we have a faulty map. It’s that you pretend it’s irreversibly faulty. We’ve successfully navigated quite a bit of trouble and chances are that we’ll be able to do so in the future. What you are suggesting sounds a lot like: let’s do nothing.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - bmacho 4y ago
    Economics would be parallel to psychology, not evolutionary psychology. I believe that descriptive psychology is a science. E.g. eventually they will be able to determine the result of the Milgram experiment, and it will become a fact, a building block in our view of the world, and it will affect our decisions mostly positively. They just need to make enough experiments.
    - jevgeni 4y ago
      Evolutionary psychology is descriptive psychology with the assumption that closely related evolutionary paths can be used for comparative study.
jl6 4y ago
Maybe you can come up with a particularly stringent conceptualization of what is or isn’t science, and maybe some fields of inquiry won’t meet that bar (like cosmology?), but that doesn’t make them “dumb”. Even without testability you can still reason about the likelihood of things.