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Comment by tgv | Hacker News Reader

Is this serious? Or is this a "I don't like evolutionary psychology, so I'm going to throw the problems of the entire field at it"?

The matching critique doesn't make any sense to me, because it's a fundamental assumption behind evolutionary psychology, from which it derives hypotheses.

But this quote:

"Now, one of my major charges with evolutionary psychologists is that they go to the ordinary folks, college students, and they ask them questions about such intimate things like their sexual behavior. We know that people are wanting to not be honest about such matters, and, of course, evolutionary psychologists are aware of this. The second issue is that the answers given to these sorts of questions are then generalized to humanity in general."

also disqualifies clinical, educational and social psychology.

For a much more thorough critique of social sciences, see Tal Yarkoni's upcoming paper "The generalizability crisis" (in BBS, I believe).

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She's explaining why she doesn't think the "fundamental assumption behind evolutionary psychology" is valid - that is a wholly legitimate critique. After all, "shape of a person's skull informs his mental and emotional characteristics" is a fundamental assumption of phrenology, but we certain argue against it.

But we only can argue against it, because we can verify it isn't true. Hypotheses generated by the phrenological assumptions simply don't hold. Heck, even astrology can be tested.

She's free to attack shoddy papers, of course: the harder, the better, I say. But that doesn't disprove anything.

> Is this serious? Or is this a "I don't like evolutionary psychology, so I'm going to throw the problems of the entire field at it"?

Came to say the same. From different angles...

from the article:

"""The idea is that, in the modern world, we have sort of modern skulls, but the wiring—the cognitive structure of the brain itself—is not being modified, because enough evolutionary time hasn’t passed. This goes for evolutionary functions like mate selection, parental care, predator avoidance—that our brains were pretty much in the same state as our ancestors’ brains."""

But, nobody is saying our brains are in the same state. Rather that our brain's state is impacted in the same way as our ancestors, because we have inherited the genes that produced the structures that influence the brain states which are possible/likely.

edits: readability

> also disqualifies clinical, educational and social psychology.

Yes.

We've been seeing the reproducibility crisis in these fields unfold for several years now.

To answer your first question, her perspective seems to be "I like evolutionary psychology, so I want it to be better and actually founded on science."

This is certainly a valid perspective, and I feel the same way about many fields and I might also feel that way about this field if I were better acquainted. If that's her position, it wasn't presented very clearly--I certainly thought she was talking about addressing a fundamental issue with the theory/framework, both because of her own words ("I wanted to carefully try to articulate what seems to be a fatal problem with the framework and to put it out there.") and because of Gizmodo's editorializing. If your interpretation were correct, it would have been far more clear if the article would have stated up front that the philosopher believes there are remediable issues of methodology and rigor in the field as evidenced by X, Y, and Z; here's why you should care, and here's what can be done. Instead, it seems too try to conflate (not even well-supported) claims of lacking rigor with fundamental problems, or at least that's my perception.

Yes, the article is trying to pitch this as a "Gotcha" piece and taking sides with the interviewee, as opposed to what's actually going on: a philosopher doing her job.

>The matching critique doesn't make any sense to me, because it's a fundamental assumption behind evolutionary psychology, from which it derives hypotheses.

This sounds circular. She has offered a warrant to this argument clearly in the article.

It is amusing to me that you think that psychology is such a solid science. After all, the entire field is based on a remarkable and unfalsifiable assumption: We assume that people have inner experiences above and beyond observable mental states, and further we assume that those inner experiences are independent of culture and language. This is obviously bogus; humans are meatbag computers.

First, I think psychology is a terribly bad science, and 95% of the papers is simply wrong.

> This is obviously bogus

Only if computers cannot have inner experiences. But psychology doesn't study experiences directly, it primarily studies behavior. And it does not assume they are independent of culture and language per se, even though it is the default assumption in many studies.

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