Posted: Apr 20, 2018 10:22 am
zoon wrote:...
At the same time, I would perhaps agree with criticism of attempts to use evolutionary psychology to tell us anything substantive about how we think in ordinary social life, or, even worse, about how we should think? Even neuroscience, the direct study of the brain as opposed to the study of how the brain evolved, still tells us almost nothing of immediate usefulness in ordinary life, in spite of the vast amount that is being discovered. (I'm talking about everyday social interactions here, rather than the curing of diseases.) It's certainly interesting and fun to become aware of ways our behaviour could have evolved, and to see the precursors of our behaviour in that of other animals, but it seems to me unsafe to bring evolutionary thinking into, for example, political decision-making.
Now this I disagree with. I have spent more than a few years 'encoding' neuroscience into my mindset and it informs me about what it is I am doing, why, how, and further how I can make it better. Granted a lot of that is intuitive but remember that intuition is just a machine learning module for solving a particular problem that gets better the more highly trained it is. Highly trained means lots of information. Information is education. Useful education is called 'science'.
There! That one right there tells you something really important about how you think.
zoon wrote:
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Lots more to respond to here zoon. Your posts pack it in. Let me get back when I have more time.