you would certainly do yourself a favor
Ego much?
I would be most suspicious of a history book which is not written by a historian or a physics book not written by a physicist
Appeal to authority is not convincing.
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Say, 0.1 milliESR ;)
Authority? Really? Not being an expert in physics when I want to know something about, say, quantum mechanics, I should read a book by a trained physicist, or, say, a Medieval literature expert who never took a lecture in physics above high school level?
Granted, the physicist may be a kook and the literature expert a genius, but the probabilities of this are?
Obviously there are caveats: seeing in a work in a field I'm not familiar with badly botched statistics on which the work's argument depends I can be pretty sure I'm reading crap, no matter who wrote it. But unless you're competent in a field related to the work's argument you will do the best to rely on experts.
Lol, good one. I've butted heads with him, so I've experienced it first-hand, but you also came off initially to me as being too willing to accept some bullshit of academics as well. I'd prefer to keep my mind open and unfortunately I don't have enough time to read all those books so I can better respond on what I think is bullshit and also to learn what those authors have to say.
I agree except I find that academics often have an agenda, often based around who is funding their research and the culture that pervades these Ivy League cathedrals. See for example the AGW (man-made global warming) junk science.
The literature cited by @neilstrauss seems to support much of the thesis I grabbed from ESR and JAD as I expounded in my other comments on this page.
Also statistics are not proof of a causal relationship. Repeatable physics experiments are more in alignment with the scientific method, than what appears to me to more conjecture in the social sciences. But again I am not an expert, so perhaps I would change my mind if I had more time to read experts in those fields.
My mother who practically prays to doctors which I don't, shocked me recently when she said she doesn't listen to veterinarians about the best feeding practices for the dogs she rescues. She said she observed that her hands on experience was more relevant than their academic theories. It was validation for me that not accepting without careful study the experts in fields dominated by theory instead of practice, is a reasonable stance.
Well, a mind open might also be open to bullshit. Nobody can be expert in everything today, Renaissance is long gone. That's OK. What worries me, that too many people (and, sadly, it appears that you as well) are all too eager to think what is bullshit or not without actually reading all those books, as if admitting own ignorance was something of a shame. It is not. I'm pretty much completely ignorant of quantum mechanics and I do not feel ashamed, but neither do I feel a need to take a stance in Copenhagen vs. Everett (I know of such a dispute, yes, but I don't understand it at all). :-)
You missed the point, I never said they were. I said that if I read the work whose argument depends on statistics, and these statistics are clearly and badly fucked up, then I have a strong reason to think this work is worthless. Not so incidentally, this can be said of pretty much everything in evolutionary psychology.
But then again, it still does not do much more than argue that this is possible. Which it clearly is. But there's no real argument why it would be more probable than, say, a byproduct of other historical events.
We may, for one, argue, that Christianity was more friendly than Islam to philosophy and science from the beginning and therefore it's not very surprising that the Christian attitude to science was shaped by people like Augustine or Aquinas while the Islamic one by people like al-Ghazali and I could build an argument in defense of this, but I'm not really sure. What if in the world of Islam prevailed people like Alhacen or Averroes and in the Christian one people like Tertullian or Cosmas? Wouldn't we now discuss why polygyny was so successful an evolutionary strategy (or not)? :-)
Or, they argue that young males without a female partner tend to engage in crime. This is true, but there's a big warning bell: most of the evidence comes from normatively monogamic societies. So it's possible that non-monogamic societies find other ways to police young men than finding them wives, and they do not appear to discuss this (and some cue could be taken from some modern Islamic societies which, unless or maybe until the said society is destroyed by war, oops, liberated, tend to be less crime prone than Christian or post-Christian ones with a similar standard of living, think e.g. North Africa before 2011 vs. Latin America from Mexico to Brazil).
Frankly, I think there are way too many variables, most of them so far unknown, for us even think of being able to successfully determine whether monogamy was a successful evolutionary strategy (but if it was, then why in the most successful West it is being weaker and weaker?), or a byproduct of other, sometimes accidental changes.
In fact, even in biological evolution where there is a rich fossil record, and we are able more or less to trace the history of many developments, often we are unsure whether they were adaptations or byproducts. For example the os penis (the boner bone) which we humans do not have. Dawkins once famously speculated (I think in The selfish gene) which evolutionary forces could lead to humans losing the bone, but it's, well, speculation (and one that begs some obvious questions to boot). But we don't really know if it was adaptive or accidental. So why we would expect to know what was and was not evolutionary in mind and culture development where evidence is way less than that?
I don't want to discuss AGW as this is another field I am mostly ignorant of, but it seems to me more than accidental that the same people who had spent years on casting doubt on health effects of tobacco were later casting doubt on AGW. Clearly not only academics have an agenda. But then again, I don't know much about AGW so I don't feel competent to discuss it. So I only ask: how much are you competent in this field, how much works did you read, followed the footnotes, verified the statistics and so on?
Well there you go doing what you said I shouldn't do.
When we are in a mini-ice age from 2030 - 2050, then you maybe you'll realize how fucking junk that AGW science was. And that is a backtested prediction.
Yeah like the variety your academic cohorts are promulgating and then accusing everyone else of being ignorant because we refuse to waste our time reading their agenda indoctrination books.
Or you could consider the theory from my blog post which is that randomization is the strategy of nature. So it can all just be random diversity so as to be consistent with the Second law of thermo, that entropy is trending to maximum.