Lindelof: “oh I don’t think so”.

Nobody hated on Nimoy for In Search Of.

That show opened with a firm disclaimer that it was all speculative.

Hancock does say his ideas aren’t mainstream, but it’s framed more like a conspiracy by academics to hide the truth.

I agree with you in general that you can have light entertainment shows about “unsolved mysteries” without falling into the trap of peddling pseudoscience.

Hey we need the grant money.

They are not always so distinct, and your definition of sex=gametes is completely arbitrary semantics that only serves to marginalize people.

It’s not my definition of course. And the binary nature of mammalian sex “marginalises” no one. Does the binocular vision of mammals marginalise the blind? Mammals have two kidneys but people born with renal agenesis have one or none, and yet no one is arguing that the mammalian renal system “is a spectrum”. Why use such obfuscatory language?

Why not describe human locomotion as a spectrum?

Because that would be factually incorrect at every level. Humans are bipedal. Canis lupis is quadropedal. If you describe both as having “spectral locomotive” properties, you have no language to distinguish between them. It is a ludicrous exercise in semantics that adds nothing to the explanatory power of science and only diminishes it.

The essay is not specifically targeted at scientists.

Of course it is “Biology faces a grave threat from “progressive” politics that are changing the way our work is done, delimiting areas of biology that are taboo and will not be funded by the government or published in scientific journals…”

clearly this is not in reference to random joes, but to career sceintists who decide what is funded or published.

You may be shocked to learn that “non-scientists” also read scientific journals and may also care about proper allocation of research funding. I am not a professional (or amateur even) tennis player yet the governance of the sport is of interest to me and many other “non-tennis” players.

It is not always worth having ideas challenged.

Oh no, it is always worth it. JS Mill makes the case for the vital necessity of dissent in ‘on liberty’ which is far too long to paste here but should he added to anyone’s reading list.

i’m not wasting my time with people arguing in bad faith like this article clearly is.

Then why engage? Why profess your desire to remain ignorant of the text? It adds nothing. Simply hold your peace and move on.

They contradict themselves in the very same sentence. “nearly every human on earth falls into one of two distinct categories” is just another way of saying "sex is a spectrum

That’s not a contradiction because a binary with some exceptions is not, therefore, a spectrum. A spectrum is a continuously varying attribute like height. An individual can move along the height spectrum. There is no continuous variable in mammalian sex; there are only two discrete gametes.

You may as well say humans aren’t bipedal because some individuals have one leg or none. But to describe human locomotion as a spectrum would be laughably misleading. And why corrupt the language in this way? Ideology, of course.

deserve to be considered in scientific research.

They are that’s why we know about them. Strawman suggesting the authors are implying NOT including them in research.

2. All behavioral and psychological differences between human males and females are due to socialization.

I very much doubt this is a common statement made by any legitimate scientist.

The essay is not specifically targeted at scientists. They cite examples of blankslate-ism in the media and the idea itself as a theory of mind has been around in philosophy from the likes of John Locke and Descarte.

Good psychologists of course know the effects of evolution and sexual dichotomy on human psychology, but this doesn’t always penetrate into society at large.

Given that they opened their article with these two clearly IDEOLOGICAL statements, I see no reason to read any further. The authors need to examine themselves for ideological biases, not accuse everyone else of it.

It’s worth a read and it’s not terribly long. Always worth to have ideas challenged.

Sorry where is the ‘neuroscience’ in the article?

Wouldn’t it be more concerning if it was speeding up?

Of course there were reasons to select him, he was am expert in assassinations of world leaders, after all, but those reasons should have been overridden by the clear and obvious conflict of interest.

He planned the coups in Iran, Guatemala and Cuba but those didn’t involve any assassinations. Is Dulles being an assassin part of the conspiracy as well? No evidence seems to exist.

But lets grant that because even then there is more plausible explanation why LBJ selected him for the board. The public at the time had no knowledge of the Kennedy administrations involvement in the bay of pigs disaster, Johnson wanted someone on the commission to make sure no awkward questions got asked.

He may have had a grudge and there may have been people still loyal to him in the intelligence community, but it’s also a question of power and ideology. The Kennedy assassination allowed the intelligence community, that Dulles spent his whole career building and strengthening, to increase its power. By demonstrating that they have the means to assassinate a president who steps out of line, they can exert control over future presidents, and no president since Kennedy has gone so directly against the wishes of the intelligence community. Furthermore, following the failure of The Bay of Pigs, Kennedy became somewhat more inclined towards deescalation and coexistence with socialist countries and his firing of Dulles was only a part of that. Dulles’ whole career was directly contrary to that approach, and he had had people killed over much lower stakes than that.

And how many people were involved with this? Because it sounds like every single CIA director (and probably a few deputies) since then would have to be “in on it”. And not one person has said something, or accidentally dropped a receipt or a recording or any physical evidence whatsoever? Sort of like the Moon landing conspiracy.

Had tried to defect to the Soviets. Tried and failed.

He lived in Minsk for three years working at an electronics factory. He wasn’t booted out by the Soviets, he returned to the US of his own will. But why is his failure to defect important for you to dispute? Surely its completely immaterial? How would him being a communist affect the narrative?

“I am starting to reconsider my desire about staying [in the USSR]. The work is drab, the money I get has nowhere to be spent. No nightclubs or bowling alleys, no places of recreation except the trade union dances. I have had enough.”

Ironically quoting something that disproves your assertion above that he hadn’t defected.

Allegedly. If there had been proof of that, he wouldn’t have been walking free.

The bullet was eventually linked to a gun Oswald owned and Mrs Oswald testified that he did it, but this didn’t come out until later.

No. For years I fully accepted the official story and wrote off alternatives as conspiracy theories, without looking into it. I changed my mind because I became aware of actual reasons to be suspicious, such as the breach in custody of the bullet and the conflict of interest with Dulles. The evidence is extremely shaky, which is very much consistent with the idea of a cover up. Before becoming aware of that evidence, I was willing to accept the official narrative.

No investigation is perfect and the more plausible explanation is mistakes happen. In order for it not to be a mistake, it has to be part of a chain of deliberate events each with its own probability of being true and each with its own chance of going wrong. So we have to deny the possibility that a single mistake is the plausible explanation in order to allow us to believe that the very implausible event chain (ongoing apparently) of hundreds of possibilities all compounding was executed flawlessly, is true.

That’s why it’s stupid. I’m not trying to convince you otherwise so please don’t take my points above as worthy of responding to, I just wanted to tease out where the cognitive leap was.

He’s been firmly out of Trek since Enterprise.

And Rick the Dick Berman said fuck no, in fact here’s a blonde bombshell in a catsuit. Fuck you.

What makes the Kennedy assassination fall in with the rest of those conspiracies is that it relies on the same suspension of reasonable alternatives.

Can you think of no other plausible explanation for why Dulles was selected to be on the committee? None?

Dulles would have to be the sort of person who would commit to murdering the US president over a grudge. A grudge he held for two years. And what would this murder achieve for him? Did he expect he would get his job back? Personal satisfaction? Was that really worth destabilising the nation he had been doing all his CIA work in support of? Not much pay off for the risk he was taking.

And how did he manged to rope in a disgraced former marine who had defected to the Soviets? A marine who only a few months had attempted to assassinate a US General?

As they say in the video, smart people belive stupid things for all sorts of reasons. Here the narrative that a lonely disturbed former marine was behind it all, just isn’t appealing, “surely there’s more to it?” we say.

You’re not alone though, about 75% of Americans beleive in the kennedy conspiracy.

So you genuinely believe the conspiracy theory that the CIA was behind the Kennedy assassination?

That’s got to be the OG of conspiracy theories.

So who really killed Kennedy?

Don’t let me get started in what Isaac Newton used to believe. It ought to be a crime that we still teach his laws of motion in school.

Is there a solution to this problem?

Perhaps it’s the ability to abstract ‘empathy’ into a hypothetical or scenario that is non-local. For example, I’ve known anti-abortionists who were proud members of the movement until they themselves needed an abortion, and then suddenly, their entire philosophy of life does a one-eighty. Were they unable to imagine what it was like until they were in the middle of it?

Is there a component of intelligence in being able to imagine yourself in situation you aren’t currently in and thus reason how you should treat someone else who is in that predicament?

Well an easy intro is misconceptions in evopsych

https://areomagazine.com/2019/08/20/seven-key-misconceptions-about-evolutionary-psychology/

Which dispatches pretty much all the strawman objections.

Then I’d recommend the followup

Predicting new findings. https://areomagazine.com/2020/10/20/evolutionary-psychology-predictively-powerful-or-riddled-with-just-so-stories/

Contemporary essays that don’t shy away from the awkward past.

Thank you, I am happy to share some links for further reading if you are interested.

The question being debated in this thread, I think, is whether evopsych will also eventually be found to be a pseudoscience.

Respectfully, the point of contention appears to be between the several users who have already concluded it is a pseudoscience and myself who has not.

The fundamental premise on which it lies is evolution by natural selection. Yes, the possibility exists that may one day be falsified but…its pragmatic to continue as if that is unlikely.

I am a complete lay(wo)man here, so I’m not casting aspersions either way. I would need to do a lot more research for that. I see the other arguments devolving into semantics and rhetoric though instead of focusing on that core conceit.

That is most welcome.

So you feel any confidence in evopsych as a science? Why or why not? And if those same arguments could be applied to phrenology prior to its official debunking, how valid is that confidence?

The premises are fairly robust, and I’ve not seen a convincing argument against them. Nothing is certain so I wouldn’t describe myself as ideologically married to it.

That is not an unfamiliar experience, unfortunately. I often wonder if a significant portion of the population are just born without the ability to empathise, and they just hide it really well.