Excellent! Both EricS' and Marcus' answers to the "dumb", "bizarre", "boneheaded", etc.
descriptors helps explain why they have that reaction. Both answers allude to higher order operators and the (often
abusive) motivations for choosing homosexuality instead of a more tractable aspect like parochialism or identity.
EricS' includes a concept of scope - material-functional distance. And I particularly like the reference to
"silverback" *templates* - to those with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Thanks for these answers.
One thing that sticks out, though, is the undeniable fact that "experts" are out there
providing evolutionary explanations for X even if the experts know that what the
"experts" are saying is bullshit. We, the laity, can't tell one from another. When
hucksters like Jordan Peterson tell their lobsters and lipstick stories, we (the laity) need some
non-expert heuristics to help us tell who's bullshitting us and who's not ... something more
refined than calling the laity's questions dumb or bizarre.
When I commiserate with my gay friend about how some "experts" use "science" to
bully them, he, being a literary philosopher not trained in biology at all, tends to argue against
Scientism. So, I have to do this gymnastic circus act to defend science, deconstruct Scientism [⛧],
explore the extent to which our templates do and don't apply across orders of the hierarchy, *and*
do it all without saying anything supremely stupid that damages our friendship.
It's a bit like the conversations we've had, here, about ivermectin and the
unfortunate correlation between right wing politics and distrust of the
government [⛤]. E.g. calling the ivermectin fans (like Bret Weinstein) idiots
is too blunt a criticism. What we, the laity, need are heuristics like the 5
W's for journalism, but for intricate, oft-abused concepts like biological
evolution.
I really appreciated EricC's validation that evolutionary explanations for
homosexuality don't *have* to be super convoluted. And
alternative/possibilistic explanations, parallax, within the same arching
narrative, *facilitate* demonstrating to people like my friend, the point
EricS' makes that our templates work well for some questions (like viruses) and
ill for others.
[⛧] Even though I often defend a form of weak Scientism.
[⛤] As I argued recently to a right-winger in the pub, we ALL distrust the government.
That's why there are so many left-leaning "watchdog" groups ... and the left's
support of a free press. The righties seem to think they have a monopoly on distrust of
the government. Pfft.
On 1/13/22 03:35, David Eric Smith wrote:
This is why I found my annoyance hard to articulate. I don’t think it is
something about sensitivity. I don’t have much affect one way or another about
who is sexually interested in whom. I find the system very interesting. The
thing that I think annoys me is that there is a kind of imaginationless
boneheadedness that becomes common among academics as they go into their
silverback phase, in which they take very crude models, and impose them on
anything that can’t get away, whether the models belong or not. It has the
appearance of an all-destroying mental vanity at the cost of empiricism.
So, to be a bit more concrete:
If we are talking about viral lifecycles, where the main functions (and nearly
the only ones) are: attach to cell surface, invade cell, use cellular machinery
to produce proteins and a genome, maybe do some crossover with anyone else who
might be in the same cell at the time, package it all into visions, escape and
diffuse, generating some probability to repeat.
For that kind of model, the “replicator” in all its glorious minimality is a
really great abstraction, and the notion of “Darwinian / Malthusian
competition” among replicators with variant sequences is an abstraction that
hews quite faithfully to much that is empirically real in the system.
But then, and here I want to be careful about a word you used and I didn’t, but
should have been more specific about:
On Jan 12, 2022, at 5:54 PM, glen <geprope...@gmail.com> wrote:
But why would this "evolutionary explanation for X”
I wasn’t objecting in any way to evolutionary explanations. It is a style of
boneheaded selectionism that annoys me. Evolution can be all of whatever
really happens; if we have some imagination we should want to expand our
appreciation of what-all that includes. That’s where silverbacks often fall
down.
All this, it will not surprise you to read, is related to my discontent this
winter about the way genetics handles “information” that — however it should be
defined, and on that I have opinions and constructions — depends on variations
distributed across pangenomes that undergo lots of material dynamical
shufflings, and later social and cultural constructs as well. Where functional
variation is quite localized to material variation, our abstractions and the
habits we have built form them tend to do okay. Where it is highly
distributed, we often lack good abstractions at all, and through having few
good tools and solved cases, people often haven’t developed much of a
systematic intuition.
be any more bizarre than any other question? That's what's interesting to me. I don't see
people claiming that asking about, say, a new virus variant is a bizarre question to ask. Why
does the subject of homosexuality evoke accusations of "dumb" or "bizarre”?
So, the ad absurdum opposite to the viral replicator would be a feature
somebody (Nick probably?) raised: sex is precisely _not_ heritable. So to ask
whether men or women are “fitter” in a Malthusian sense would clearly be a
category error.
But that may not be quite the right thing to analogize to sexual orientation,
because there are notions of heritability about it. I am looking, for an
analogy, to something more like:
Who is Darwin-Malthus fitter: people who engage in many punning dreams, or
people who engage in many face-mixing dreams? After all, I can declare a
predicate; why am I not allowed to ask for a selectioinist explanation of it?
That seems like a boneheaded question (worse, a deliberately incurious one),
because we have poor understanding even of what “a dream” is (as part of not
understanding much about what cognition or states of awareness “are”), then
about why dreams exist, what they do, how any given group are structured, how
many structural groups one can put into a typology, etc. It’s not that we
understand nothing — we know a little and have some ideas — but we are _vastly_
further from being able to identify a formal model than we are for viral
lifecycles. To just blow by that distinction and try to treat punning dreamers
and face-mixing dreamers as replicators in Darwinian competition seems “dumb”
in the way I meant.
For the orientation question, it seems to me we have four maybe-dimensions we
could identify that pertain:
Sexual morphology (physiological)
Sexual identity (complex physic/psuchological, but in some way maybe largely a
“trait” of a “phenotype”)
Sexual interest (the aspects that one might call an individual propensity)
Sexual orientation (all the individual propensities embedded in all the layers
of social engagement, convention, etc.)
Each of these individually, and certainly all of them as a pseudo-hierarchical
tower, already draws from a host of developmental (either physiological or
behavioral) elementary properties or capabilities that also participate in much
else. We’re going to somehow put an abstraction of replicators in Darwinian
competition on that, and claim we have understood _anything_?
So that was the drift of my complaint.
Eric
My guess is it's yet another manifestation of how sensitive the topic is.
On 1/12/22 15:13, Marcus Daniels wrote:
I don't have any problem looking for genetic correlates for things. To tease apart the
psychological and biological basis for an affinity toward some behaviors more factors need to be
considered. How does a genetic variant relate to many psychological properties and how often do
those biological/psychological co-occur without the genetic variant? It is suspicious to ask about
a religious or culturally charged question about one behavior, rather than the dozens of correlates
to less culturally charged properties that could be colinear with it or fail to show that the
behavior can result from many kinds of influences. Nothing needs to be "explained"
about homosexuality in the sense of "You have some explaining to do." Don't go there.
Let's do some data mining on the causes for parochial behavior. Maybe if we can identify the
variants, we can stop the pregnancies before it is too late? Parochialism is probably a deep
psychological property and not a superficial one, like homosexuality.
________________________________
--
glen
Theorem 3. There exists a double master function.
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