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Is this psychologist racist and should he be sacked?
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For instance, if black women were sending out more first messages than other women, or if they were sending out messages clearly not intended to be romantic in nature (say, a message to another straight woman saying "hey, I saw that you work at Google, too, wanna carpool?"), then it would throw off those numbers.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
You are quite right in that evolution can't account for generational changes but no one in their right mind is claiming that. What evolutionary psychology does claim is that some behaviour is biologically caused in that it was adaptive in the long term of our evolutionary history. Anything other than claiming that biology has no role in behaviour is admitting that evolution has played at least some role in psychology. At the very best you're just describing instances of bad science which evolution psych is admittedly all too prone to, and at worst you're outright strawmanning.
I'm also curious as to your response to the last link.
Of course, admitting that evolution has played some role in psychology doesn't make you an "evolutionary psychologist."
Most of the time, it just makes you a psychologist.
The one on birth rotation? Personally, I'm not entirely sure what the relevance is.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
wut
I quite agree. My point is that if you admit that biology plays a role in psychology then there's some merit to examining it from that perspective which, as I mentioned earlier, should be done for every psychological theory anyway.
At the beginning it mentioned the effects of increased cranial size on the size and shape of the pelvis. Page 6 of this (if you can access it) describes in much more detail the difficulties in birth given larger craniums without a sufficiently large pelvis.
No. Nor could there be.
On some views, it wouldn't matter if everyone in the world found a particular woman beautiful--that still would not make her beauty objective. Consider the parallel with ethics, where many people argue that there can be no objective ethical truths, regardless of whether people do or do not disagree.
This, of course, adds an extra dimension of hilarity to the initial blog post. What scientific content does "objective" add in that context? What scientific result has licensed him to add it? The answer, of course, is none and none.
The idea that there are actually 'races' as most people think of them is pretty questionable, but setting that aside, it's always worth examining our opinions to see if they are rooted in racism. "I have a thing for blonde hair" isn't inherently racist and isn't necessarily rooted in racism, but what about "I have a thing for black guys because they're such animals in bed"? That's an attraction rooted in an ugly racial stereotype, not just a thing you happen to have.
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I figure you just mean someone applying that to every black man ever, though.
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Well, yes, because I assume that people try to say what they mean. Especially because this person is likely not saying "I have slept with a statistically large sample of black guys and white guys, and thus have an objective perception of relative sexual enthusiasm."
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On a related note, I seem to recall reading somewhere that there is a fair amount of porn "for black people" that works on the racial stereotype of black women being more feral.. or something.
Can't remember where I heard of it but I'm fairly sure it was on these forums.
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And early Israeli porn was all about Nazi dominatrices. People are weird.
The speed for which this happened pretty much directly correlated with how often I interracted with people of the race in question. So, I'm not sure about the idea of clinical attractiveness - but I'm sure psychological things are at play, such as stereotyping, how accustomed you are, how you "view" people of certain races.
I'm a bit similar with Indian women, except I haven't acclimated to them yet. Something about them often seems reminiscent of an unhealthy black woman with a pallor and (occasionally) thinning hair.
Again, just what you're used to. Interesting you mention the skin, Some Indian women have amazing skin (which isn't something I took much notice of previously). I've swung so far in that direction now, and it's what I'm used to that I often look at ex girlfriends that are white and think they seem pasty and blotchy by comparrison. I'm sure my tastes are completely at the whim of my social interractions.
The original purpose of the Devil's Advocate was to test an argument for weaknesses, not to stir shit up to be contrary. I dunno when that changed over.
Porn, like every other cultural media, is going to reflect the values of the culture it's in.
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Edit: And I'm not trying to push you or anything.
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I don't know about other people, but I would probably enjoy the thread more if it avoided turning into a string of personal anecdotes about racial sexual taste.
Also,
Sure. The dominant school of thought in psychology right now is called the "bio-social-cognitive model," which definitely takes biology (and evolution) into account, but also recognizes that some phenomena take place at a level of abstraction above biology (for instance, social interactions of people in groups). There's no sort of cartesian or supernatural dualism here; it still recognizes that biology affects these interactions, but merely recognizes that biological reductionism lacks explanatory power for some things (to use a rough analogy, much in the same way it's often easier to describe the behavior of computers in terms of network protocols instead of the movement of electrons in a semiconductor.)
Sure. I was actually trying to get there, gently, by pointing out how attraction is largely based around social status cues. There are, of course, those gross conscious stereotypes ("black men are better in bed") that are easily identified given a little bit of introspection. (Granted, a lot of people seem to lack that introspection.) Even if you don't hold any gross conscious stereotypes, you may unconsciously perceive social status markers things like facial structure, body weight and fat distribution, mannerisms, etc. and these may affect your notions of attractiveness.
I'm not arguing that people have a moral responsibility to stamp out such perceptions - I don't know if it's even possible - or that you're a bad person if you don't like black women or whatever. I certainly have racial preferences of my own; while I certainly could try to spend introspective time & energy trying to reshape my racial preferences, right now when it comes to mental self-improvement I have more important things on my agenda (like exercising more and eating less meat). I'm just putting these ideas out there for people to do what they will with them.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Definitely. I was referring more to the necessity of ruling out alternative genetic explanations when trying to test psychological theories. Steven Pinker has said that any psychological experiment performed on birth children instead of adopted children is useless due to biological confounds and, while I'm not sure the case is quite as strong as he makes it, there is certainly not that kind of necessity to rule out sociological effects when studying biological psychology.
I think we're mostly on the same page here.
I do think that it's easy to underestimate the effects that culture & experience can have on biology. I think popular media certainly does, and some academics do too. Experiences, especially long-term & repeated experiences, can have unexpected effects on the chemistry and the structure of the brain.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Basically this.
Define your own critical p-value. There is no reason to use 5%. It was only chosen because it was easier to use what the first guy used than recalculate a complicated integral to another value before the days of tables and computers.
Isn't 10-5% considered to be "marginally significant?"
It depends on what your critical value is. If you chose a 1% critical value because you are dealing with a huge set of data and you can feel that you would rather spend your precision on type 1 error than type 2 error 10-5% could be massively insignificant. On the other hand, if you decided that you didn't care as much about type 1 error and could accept a large value then 10% might be entirely significant.
It all depends on what your critical values are and that depends on the question you're asking and the consequences of your test.
Or, to be short. When you increase the size of a sample you decrease both type 1 and type 2 error. BUT the critical value is explicitly the chosen type 1 error chance. So if you increase the size of your sample but pick the same critical value all of the precision in increasing your sample size has gone into reducing type 2 error.
But maybe we don't want to minimize type 2 error? Maybe we want to reduce type 1 error instead of some amount of type 2 error?
I don't think people have a moral responsibility to change their attraction, or to eliminate any attractions they may have ("dammit, I *will* find brunettes attractive!"), but I do think it is a mistake to decide that desire is so individual and unchangeable that it's the one thing we must not examine and critique in ourselves, lest we become a nation of politically-correct androids or something.
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