She makes the very good point early on that "angry ancestors have more kids" is not saying "being angry makes you want to reproduce", or anything of that sort. But then goes on to explicitly make the screwup mentioned above. And reports the "people having sex because of X Y & Z" story at the end without any kind of criticism or "this is a possibility" caveat. She does say that evolutionary psychology demands a great deal of separating of assorted not-necessarily-connected facts, but doesn't seem to actually be *applying* this.
Also, in that 12 virtues of rationality piece:
"It is especially important to eat math and science which impinges upon rationality: Evolutionary psychology, heuristics and biases, social psychology, probability theory, decision theory. But these cannot be the only fields you study. "
Now, even if psychology is a "science" at all (which I would at least contest), evolutionary psychology sure as hell isn't. And certainly not in the same league as heuristics/biases, probability theory, and decision theory.
Some of that - biases in particular - are a psychological issue, and *can* be studied in classic scientific manner, but you run into a lot of problems studying anything psychological in that fashion - hell of a lot of confounding variables, and the more you take out, the further you get from an actual-real-life situation. Observer/experimenter effect is a very real problem! (Not that this is always acknowledged, either.) But evolutionary psychology you really can't study like that *at all*.
If you're looking at psychological issues, there are a lot of problems with using quantitative scientific methods. Which isn't to say that they don't have their place; but one needs to be very cautious about drawing conclusions from that alone, and very aware of one's own biases and the biases implicit in the questions being asked. There's a *lot* of people doing research who aren't.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2007-12-06 11:53 am (UTC)Also, in that 12 virtues of rationality piece:
"It is especially important to eat math and science which impinges upon rationality: Evolutionary psychology, heuristics and biases, social psychology, probability theory, decision theory. But these cannot be the only fields you study. "
Now, even if psychology is a "science" at all (which I would at least contest), evolutionary psychology sure as hell isn't. And certainly not in the same league as heuristics/biases, probability theory, and decision theory.
Some of that - biases in particular - are a psychological issue, and *can* be studied in classic scientific manner, but you run into a lot of problems studying anything psychological in that fashion - hell of a lot of confounding variables, and the more you take out, the further you get from an actual-real-life situation. Observer/experimenter effect is a very real problem! (Not that this is always acknowledged, either.) But evolutionary psychology you really can't study like that *at all*.
If you're looking at psychological issues, there are a lot of problems with using quantitative scientific methods. Which isn't to say that they don't have their place; but one needs to be very cautious about drawing conclusions from that alone, and very aware of one's own biases and the biases implicit in the questions being asked. There's a *lot* of people doing research who aren't.