David Pinsof

@MrNRowcliffe Fair, there is definitely that risk for sure, but if there's anyone who's open to credible but taboo ideas it's me.

@DavidPinsof Thanks for engaging. Well, coming from you that’s worth a lot. Not surprising that a theory that purports to explain so much is over-reach. Still, I also see an opposite risk that it could be rejected by many as taboo rather than for intellectual weakness.

Paging @davidpinsof. Please invite @drdanis onto your Evolutionary Psychology pod. If substantiated, her theory of reproductive suppression as a feature of female intrasexual competition feels incredibly impactful, and deserving of detailed discussion and scrutiny. 1/2

@MrNRowcliffe FWIW, I find her theory very implausible for many different reasons. I’m not aware of any scholars who have tried to back it up (or are even aware of it), and I’m honestly not sure how it could be backed up. It seems to have the flavor of a conspiracy theory.

I have questions! Has any other research backed up the theory? Can this mechanism really be a key driver both of feminism and fertility decline in all their many guises? How (the hell) do we even begin to reconcile the theory with modernity? Thank you. 2/2

@mboudry Isn't this just a restatement of his view that beliefs are distorted in a socially self-serving way rather than a happiness-inducing way? Obviously it is socially self-serving to paint ourselves in the best possible light, insofar as we can get away with it.

Do people just believe whatever they wish to be true? Like the Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (which turn dark at the first sign of danger), pure wishful thinking would be extremely maladaptive. So I largely agree with @danwilliamsphil that "wishful thinking" is a myth, but I think he overstates his case. People are often overly pessimistic about the world (for a host of other cognitive reasons), yet optimistically—and wishfully—biased about themselves. The reality is more subtle: we do distort ego-relevant beliefs in the direction of what we desire, but only within limits. We remain constrained by evidence, preserving an illusion of objectivity. I’ll probably write a longer post on this!

@dsznycer My hunch is that such architectural coordination underlies our intuitions about moral realism and objectivity. We intuit moral truths that humans are likely to architecturally coordinate on, assuming access to the same relevant info, among those who are disinterested or unbiased.

We have common knowledge about a million basic facts, not just about where to meet if we lose track of each other cep.ucsb.edu/wp-content/upl…

A brilliant thinker—one of my biggest role models. RIP.

"Trivers writes simply, but the arguments are often so deep -- so close to the complexities of truly understanding human mentality -- that the effort to grasp it (all and completely) is almost frightening." -RD Alexander

@StefanFSchubert Though in my view due to insufficiently strong incentives for political rationality at the individual level.

Yes, and interestingly not due to tribalism/partisanship, which gets the vast majority of attention in public discourse on political irrationality

Excellent 👇 A really interesting and valuable conversation exploring the relationship (and possible conflicts) between cultural evolution/dual inheritance theory and Tooby and Cosmides-style evolutionary psychology.

@bsgallagher @acerbialberto There’s recent scholarly exchange between Nicolas Baumard / Jean Baptiste Andre and others in Evolution & Human Behavior on this. They argue that culture can be fully understood as a kind of ecology and should not be considered a distinct evolutionarily process. I’m sympathetic.

@DavidPinsof @acerbialberto OK, but are they really effectively synonymous forces or contexts? Intuitively I would think culture is an aspect or a subset of ecology. How do you understand their relationship?

"...it remains unclear how exactly culture ‘shapes’ cognition. The study outlines four pathways: culture can privilege one cognitive process over another, prune out disfavored processes, produce new processes, or have no effect on cognition." cell.com/trends/cogniti…

@koenfucius @mboudry I think it likely explains why we are biased toward self-serving explanations in general, and I think the big misunderstanding idea is one of them.

@DavidPinsof @mboudry …which might well include biases too, perhaps. Could evolution explain the reluctance of so many to consider evolution as a most parsimonious explanation for mysterious behaviour?

Responding to challenges from readers to his categorical argument that “Fallacies Don’t Exist”, @mboudry clarifies that most alleged fallacies—like biases—are evolutionary adaptations, and often called out in a partisan fashion. Makes good sense to me: buff.ly/PQFdYsN

@PaulaGhete @robinhanson I'm sure there's a lot of innate variation, which we are quite sensitive to as hyper-judgy humans, just as I'm sure there's a lot of variation in cheetah running speed. But aside from that innate variation, yes, I think the main bottleneck is incentives.

@DavidPinsof @robinhanson I would be curious to compare the average person’s performance against reality (how often they prove accurate mind reading and critical thinking). Do you believe it’s mostly or only a matter of incentives that could be a bottleneck? (I know this definitely matters)

"if you think signaling explains anything less than 60% of the human condition, then I’m afraid you are the crazy one. … 1) Humans are extremely judgy. 2) Humans care deeply about how others judge them. 3) Humans are extremely good at getting inside each other’s heads." Yup.

@PaulaGhete @robinhanson I think most humans are unfathomably good at mind reading (relative to a mind-blind benchmark) when they are sufficiently incentivized to be, and they are unfathomably good at critical thinking (relative to an unreasoning benchmark) when they are sufficiently incentivized to be.

@DavidPinsof @robinhanson True but I would say most humans are bad at mind reading and few are truly good. I would say the same about critical thinking, for example.

@PaulaGhete @robinhanson I think we evaluate each other's theory of mind abilities relative to a human benchmark, but this is like cheetahs evaluating each other's running speed relative to a cheetah benchmark. It's easy to forget that cheetahs are really fast and humans are really good at mind reading.

@robinhanson I am skeptical of the 3rd claim. It seems to me that most people have poor theory of mind.

@CostelloWilliam I think your paper was responding in good faith to a criticism that is almost always made in bad faith. It’s good to correct it and good to presume good faith, but it’s not surprising that the bad faith remains.

Some reactions to our new paper seem to be: “Congrats on your field meeting the bare minimum.” It’s a strange Kafka trap. If we correct the longstanding (and incorrect) claim that evolutionary psychology is unfalsifiable, we’re mocked. If we don’t, the misconception persists.

In my latest post, I defend @robinhanson’s seemingly crazy view that 90% of human behavior is signaling. Or at least, that it’s not as crazy as it sounds. Link below.