Edit - Addendum: The video title is quite clickbait-y. The video doesn’t want to debunk any “serious” science, but rather investigates how badly done research with no reproducability or horrible statistical significance is used to influence the discourse in favour of regressive politics.
The video is 3 hours, 21 minutes and some seconds long. I watched the beginning, end and some samples from the center. The video is too long, she accuses others of communication failures and bad-faith communication (with good reason), but is also doing a communication failure.
To be blunt, the title of the video is also a false or exaggerated statement, hinting of the author’s excessive ambition. I think I was generous enough to try catching the point without devoting 3.5 hours to it.
I do not think you would welcome if I watched all the video, made notes about every problem, and posted them. I think you would consider that obsessive (well, at least I would).
There are behaviour patterns in animals and humans which evolutionary psychology can help explain, and knowing how evolution (past societies, past models of competing and cooperating, past interactions with food, disease, parasites and predators) can shape the psychological profiles of creatures is useful. There will be poor research in almost every field. I’m aware that psychology has a widely known problem with experiment repeatability. That’s no reason to discontinue doing psychology (or discontinue doing experiments). It’s a reason to increase diligence and to slow down jumping to conclusions.
You’re constantly making points already made in the video.
Edit: why are you on a breadtube community if you don’t like to watch hour long videos? Ever heard of hbomberguy, or Contrapoints?
Btw: Here’s the explanation why eugenics doesn’t work in the video
Actually, I’m not in the Breadtube community, I’m just a user of the “slrpnk.net” Lemmy server. Thus, I noticed the video on my feed, and as I explained above, it caught my attention because the title claimed to have “debunked” something that I was familiar with and had found useful.
Thank you, but you don’t need to explain me why eugenics was a bad idea. :) I understand that.
Nope, never heard about them.
You still critizised a video without watching it. That’s as close to judging a book by its’ cover as you can get.
As stated before, I watched the beginning, end, and various samples from the center.
You can not invalidate criticism by publishing a N-hour video and complaining that the critics didn’t watch every second.
Let’s switch perspective for a moment: if I publish a 24-hour video titled “I debunked classical mechanics” and talked about journalism during 23 hours of it, I should not be able to deflect criticism with the claim that “you didn’t watch all of it”.
Part of my criticism is inability to come up with short and falsifiable points. Public communication about science pretty much requires doing that. Already in my first post, I mentioned that I thought the video was needlessly long.
And yes, I’m not a fan of misleading people. When I see someone doing that, yes, I will criticize.
I’d claim that your samples aren’t enough to make anything about the contents of the video. You could claim that the title is misleading, but you clearly don’t have enough context to judge the video.
It’s a video essay, you act like you watched scenes from the Lord of the Rings trilogy and concurred that the firms are too long to convey the story.
You’re constantly ignoring that a field has a societal context. Evopsych books didn’t fall from the sky. The field has active members and the cultural impact is what’s being judged here.
You could have just stayed silent, if you don’t have anything valid to add, instead of mansplaining us to death.
Yes, my mistake was to think that people might benefit from pointing out problems with the information sources they consume. In reality, people get defensive, especially if an outsider comes to criticize (also a pattern which evolutionary psychology helps understand).
You didn’t point out jack shit, as you didn’t know any of the so-called “problems”, but rather assumed before you started mansplaining.
Also: isn’t that exactly what you did? Someone points out problems with evopsych and you got defensive?
Yeah, I call bullshit. That statement alone is ample example of all the bullshit flying around in evolutionary psychology.
BTW: Earlier you wrote
I call bullshit again. You stated earlier that eugenics would work if we knew the “good” from the “bad” genes and called it more euphemistically. That’s exactly the bullshit that the video calls out… once again.
Someone claimed that they had “debunked” evolutionary psychology. I pointed out that it has quite a firm footing - nobody is doubting that evolution can produce psychological traits, and psychological traits can have evolutionary value.
So, the maximum effect to which one can “debunk” that branch of biology / psychology, is pointing out that “people are doing it wrong”, and “people are understanding it wrong”.
My comparison: I publish a video where I “debunk classical mechanics”. In the video, I complain about mechanical problems with all sorts of products, point out that bridges can collapse (and indeed sometimes do), walls crack, cars are dangerous to crash at high speed, and that braking is difficult for roller skaters. Despite listing a whole slew of problems in applied mechanics, and despite having brought examples of people not getting their mechanics right… I have debunked nothing. Textbooks need not be altered.
This video accomplishes pretty much the same. I understand why it was made, but I would have made it very differently - and would have made it much shorter.
Actually, it is not. Willingness to trust outsiders and deal with them has an evolutionary aspect. Everyone’s ancestors have needed to address this in their evolutionary past. Results have influenced their evolutionary success. An outsider could bring useful techniques or information, but could also bring a disease against which locals had no immunity, or take back information and bring about hostile interest. Determination of who to consider an outsider is moderated by rational thought and culture, but willingness to risk is also influenced by genes. So, even today, we are influenced - sometimes for good and sometimes for ill - by psychological traits which enabled some of our ancestors to make better / worse decisions in their environment. To make better decisions for ourselves, we should keep that in mind.
I chose my example for a reason. It is not bullshit at all. Building a grand palace of superstructure onto this little bit of understanding, that would be bullshit. To apply knowledge, one must know approximately where it ends. A fool doesn’t and builds grand palaces onto one brick.
Here, please read again. My words:
From this paragraph, I expect a reader to understand (if they are willing) that I consider eugenics to deserve a prefix of “pseudo”, that is, I consider it a pseudoscience. I bring another example of such a science. I also point out that eugenicists attempted to fix problems which they did not understand.
In this paragraph, I make two main statements. I note down that eugenics took a character of repression and discrimination. But I point out that the goal of either fixing / improving genes or neutralizing the effect of bad ones - that didn’t die with eugenics. People started understanding better. In these days, nobody wants to touch the world “eugenics” with a six foot pole, but genetically modified crops are growing on fields, and some patients are even receiving gene therapy. Databases are being compiled to detect genetic predisposition to illness or give personalized suggestions for treatment. I too have donated my genome for research to a local university, and I expect to learn some day what my genetic risk profile is - so that I could behave accordingly and avoid illness.
Then I proceed to explain why evolutionary psychology, behavioural ecology and game theory are extremely unlikely to end up in the rubbish bin where eugenics landed. And I fully stand by my opinion. :)