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Comment by SketchySeaBeast | Hacker News Reader

You don't think that you're being reductive?

Actually, narrative explanations like the vampire book are exponentially the most reductive. Cause/effect, story. On the other hand, evolution is billions of hours of trial end error making footsteps of niche evasion.

Gotta think big, stories are puny both in terms of explanation load and their total existence in evolutionary time. They are fun over the dinner table but that’s about as definitive as they get.

No, I meant your approach to the subject, having found an argument you find compelling and dismissing any others out of hand.

I’m trained as a media anthropologist who now studies neurobiology as a vector into next-gen AAA game dev (using horror tropes in dystopian sci fi).

And out of the entire gamut of literature and competing theories you found a single chapter in a pop sci book to be the most compelling? OK, fair enough.

Actually to be fair, all of narrative theory and much of anthropology are untestable and unfalsifiable. Which makes them little more than hypotheses. So these tales are little more than the campfire tales that begin our slide into storytelling. Genetics and evolution are testable and falsifiable, giving them scientific, correlational validity. That book is not pop sci at all, it’s written by the leading endocrinologist of our time and has over 2K citations of deep scientific study. Pop sci it is not.

> all of narrative theory and much of anthropology are untestable and unfalsifiable

Isn't that also true for "Sapolsky’s Behave and linger" and what you're currently believing? Why does it work different for other stories than the one you happen to believe in?

Sapolsky isn’t storytelling. What I’m restating isn’t storytelling. It works differently as it’s different- it’s scientific.

If you're already into neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, I recommend looking one step up the emergence chain into Ethology too (biology's answer to psychology, across all living organisms) . There's still a lot you can do by treating the organism as a black box and treating behavior empirically; in an evolutionary framework.

I’m more a neo behaviorist, neo Darwinian leading into ecological psych and coordination dynamics. The 4E approaches make little sense to me. The black box is revealed by affordances etc.

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