I Debunked Evolutionary Psychology (New münecat video)

[Orayn]

While she is trying to do important work try to dispel psuedo science, she's making some pretty bad mistakes in the process. Claiming she debunked this entire field should maybe raise some questions, no?

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The entire field is phrenology tier junk science so yeah a well researched 3 hour video is plenty. Just because people put a lot of "work" into it doesn't make it any less laughable bullshit based on an incorrect premise.

 

[B-Dubs]

I mean if google is to believed about the definition of mansplaining:
Mansplaining — the combination of "man" and "explaining" — is a colloquial expression used to describe situations in which a man provides a condescending explanation of something to someone who already understands it.

She manages to show she doesn't understand how social science works very quickly.

At 1:24:03 before it hits 1:24:19 (yes not even a minute into the segment) she states the only way we can test heritability is through twins. This is false, we have found multiple correlations between parents and children on numerous occasions and we are still finding new ones. Twins are one of the most reliable they are far from the only ones that have show statistical/practical significance. If she made the most basic research in heritability she would know this.

Then right after she points out how rare identical twins are. This is true as they only consist of about 0.5% of births. There were 4,265,555 born in 2006 in the United States which means there are tens of thousands of people turning into adults this year alone which means we can get statistically significant sample sizes. If you knew expected value you would know this and you would know expected value if you took your intro to statistics for psychology class.

The she states how we can't completely control twin studies because we can't separate them. Unfortunately psychology has a history of less than ethical studies and there have been times where twins were separated at birth for the sake of study. This is one of the first things they cover when going over twin studies and ethics in psychology.

Using what we found out in those twin studies and heritability studies of other siblings vs twins, it's not hard with statistical software to control for these factors. You would know this if you took a research methods class because they should cover multivariable correlations.

She then goes on to cover that ancient fraudulent study that tried to show that IQ was 80% heritable (which is is not, not that IQ is a very strong psychometric) and then goes on to try to debunk the more recent ones which either psychology already acknowledges as bad or she dismisses for not controlling for everything. In social science, it is not possible to control for everything nor does it promise to. This is why psychology is statistical and cares more about trends. Again, they cover this the research methods class.

In a very short amount of time she managed to show some very key gaps in her knowledge, namely the foundational philosophical context in which cognitive-behavioral psychology operates. It isn't just two books I read, they are the basis on which modern psychology operates on. Messing up this quickly and this badly is not a good sign for the rest of the video. If I saw a piece of a video saying how Columbus and the indigenous Americans were total besties I would also be very skeptical about the rest of the video also.



I cover why she lost a lot of credibility so quickly with me right above here. The problem is less the studies she cites or debunks (a lot of the studies she debunks are indeed garbage) it's that she does not know how to interpret them and show a lack of understanding of some fundamentals of psychology. It's not just that she managed to make incorrect statements, it's that she made those incorrect statement because she lacks understanding of core concepts of psychology. I tried to watch more of the video but she kept making the same basic mistakes over and over again and I just tapped out.

I don't need to her to tell me that a lot of popular evolutionary psychology is pseudo scientific. I have anthropology books on my bookshelf that can debunk them while still adhering the the basics of research methods.



I mean I took some psych classes and stats classes as part undergrad/grad school, read some additional textbooks in my free time and based of what I learned on there I found some fundamental issues with how the video is structured. I pointed out that it didn't take me very long to find structural issues with it and you should take what she says with a very large amount of salt.

Like it is understandable to side eye someone who dismisses an entire video off a small chunk but it is far from unreasonable to raise a red flag when that small chunk shows foundational gaps in knowledge that somebody would learn about in their literal first year of a psych program.

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So, what you're talking about is actually easily avoided if you don't make yourself the centerpiece of the story. It's essentially the fundamental difference between these sorts of video essays/podcasts and actual journalism. Sure, the essayist will do the needed research to tell the story but then they will tell you everything themselves, essentially centering themselves in the topic and making themselves the expert. The issue is they don't have the needed qualifications to be the expert and, as such, will invariably get basic stuff wrong. This is why, in journalism, it's not the writer that tells the story but the people who they interview.

If this was something from, say 60 Minutes, you'd have Anderson Cooper doing the story and he'd basically be asking experts to explain what's going on and doing a bit of work himself to stitch it all together. Cooper wouldn't be the expert telling you the story--even though he's done enough research that he probably could--instead he'd be getting actual psychologists to explain what is happening and why. It's why you get those silly moments of the reporter asking a leading question to the expert, they can't be the one to say the obvious since they're just the storyteller so they need to expert to do it for them. That's in direct contrast to video essays where the person making the video is the person telling you everything. Sure they'll quote stuff that they've read on the topic, but how many of them actually go and do entirely new interviews when making these videos?

The reason this sort of thing winds up happening in video essays is largely because the people making the videos need to take advantage of the parasocial effect and they can't really do that if they aren't centering themselves in the narrative. Never mind that there's ways to do actual journalism while still doing this, Bourdain's Parts Unknown was really really good at this. You'd be experiencing a new culture through him and his experiences, but he'd be getting people from said culture to explain everything going on to you. The issue is doing this sort of thing is difficult and not everyone wants to, knows how to, or even can, go through that much effort.

None of this is to say that people cannot enjoy podcasts or video essays like this one, or that they can't be useful tools for learning about new topics, it's just we need to keep in mind that they are more vulnerable to bias and factual inaccuracies as a result of how they are made and probably shouldn't be quoted as authoritative on a given subject unless the person making it is themselves an expert on the topic.

 

[Oddish1]

Finally watched this. Her research seems to be pretty solid to me and her criticisms of evo psych and psychology research in general certainly strike true. I feel like she gets a little off-topic and the video broadens into points about how conservatives use their own interpretations and misunderstanding of science to push their agendas, which is certainly related to evo psych but I think would warrant its own video to really delve into.