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Time Review of Geoffrey Miller's Spent: Skim
- whacked_new 17y agoWhile not wrong, this research leads to foolish decisions: people will read them, and use it to justify their actions: "this is how it is, so this is how I am." But no. This is projecting how people are meant to behave in their natural state to the complexity of modern civilization. It depends on the assumption that the human mind is a crystallized, unchanging bundle of desires. This is where most of us humans fall short. We have the ability of metacognition. Hence, we have the ability to self-evolve. A better way to go about publicizing this kind of research is "sex sells, by default, and is optimal for [these set of conditions -- i.e. if your goals are all sex-centric. Maybe they are, good for you]. For [another kind of condition], this is the optimal strategy, which leads to [these kinds of interesting interactions]."
- jseliger 17y agoThe problem is that this article isn't very good. You'd be better served to read the piece I wrote: http://jseliger.com/2009/05/20/spent-sex-evolution-and-consumer-behavior-—-geoffrey-miller http://jseliger.com/2009/05/20/spent-sex-evolution-and-consu... and Robin Hanson's work at Overcoming Bias: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/05/spents-main-argument.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/05/spents-main-argument.h... http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/05/engaging-spent.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/05/engaging-spent.html I believe I submitted the first link to HN, but it didn't get voted up. That Time's facile article did instead is somewhat disappointing.
- cubedice 17y agoNot to say that this is a good reason, but the Time headline is extremely catchy. BTW, I did find your review to be actually a review (unlike the Time piece) EDIT: I see the anti-catchy police have changed the HN title ;)