My brief take (for what its worth—I can imagine its better not to give a ‘rapid response’ as opposed to a well thought out one): That seems to me to be a ‘tour de force’ even though I mostly skimmed it, and skipped some parts—its the kind of thing I would print out if I had a working printer. I am only slightly familiar with psychological literature and measures (eg ‘Cohen’s d’) though I read (or glance at at some of it), and am often skeptical of the results claimed to be found. (People often do something like a poll, or give some sort of test, without looking at things like context, wording, ordering of questions, etc.--but these lead to alot of publications)
The ‘procedure section’ for me was the first clue that was going to be a well thought out discussion.
The various tables on different studies I couldn’t really understand but from the discussion I felt I got the drift.
When the ‘drift-diffusion equation’ and ‘biased random walk’ appeared, I felt like I was walking on firm ground again (even if it was what is called in biology or complexity theory a ‘rugged fitness landscape’—its firm ground, not a swamp, just rugged and complex, like climbing a mountain.)
The discussion of culture and socioeconomic status, personality, genes, and social embededness seemed ‘spot on’—especially because the work of Boyd and Richerson was cited (although I cannot claim to be an expert, I view their books and papers to be basically the current theory of evolution—they are to Darwin what Einstein was to Newton, though B&R’s gene-culture evolution theory might be more analogous to Einstein’s special relativity—a slight modification of Newtonian dynamics—than to General Relativity which has a much more intricate math apparatus and wide applicability. B&R were preceded by qualitative discussions by several people, and a mathematical one by E O Wilson and C J Lumden (‘genes , mind and culture’) which used nonlinear diffusion equations—but EOW and CJL seemed to later agree that while the math in the book was correct (which came from statistical physics) their interpretation was not—B&R I think is the standard or (closer to) correct one (though in what i read they used discrete dynamical systems and evolutionary game theory rather than de’s).
I am familiar with some of the references (Tooby and Cosmides, Plomin, Heinrich , and more).
Also some of the literature on ‘universal moral grammar’ (papers by John Mikhail, Marc Hauser, etc.) and Chomskyian linguistics and ‘poverty of the stimulus’. (I agree with the connectionists that while Chomsky and people like S Pinker are correct that humans are not ‘blank slates’, both of them (along with evolutionary psychologists like Cosmides and Tooby, and J Fodor) go too far from proposing there is a ‘language organ’ , or ‘instinct’, or ‘module’ , nor are there ones for morality. Babies are not smartphones which have ‘apps’ such as a dictionary, calculator, political platform, religious text , 10 commandments, ’12 rules for living’, or even ‘universal grammar ’ genetically coded in them as part of their ‘god given’ hardware. Boyd and Richerson i think have a better take on what people are born with. (And some more recent work sort of adds some of what C Geertz (anthropology) called ‘thick detail’ about ‘social embededness’-ie people aren’t born with video games in their heads.
There are many papers critiquing Chomsky’s ‘poverty of the stimulus’ argument e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0212024 None of these however contradict the conclusions in the above paper about the unreliability of moral judgements. You don’t need a plane built with inherint design flaws to crash—planes with no such flaws can crash anyway due to human error, maintenance problems, or the weather.
My brief take (for what its worth—I can imagine its better not to give a ‘rapid response’ as opposed to a well thought out one): That seems to me to be a ‘tour de force’ even though I mostly skimmed it, and skipped some parts—its the kind of thing I would print out if I had a working printer. I am only slightly familiar with psychological literature and measures (eg ‘Cohen’s d’) though I read (or glance at at some of it), and am often skeptical of the results claimed to be found. (People often do something like a poll, or give some sort of test, without looking at things like context, wording, ordering of questions, etc.--but these lead to alot of publications)
The ‘procedure section’ for me was the first clue that was going to be a well thought out discussion.
The various tables on different studies I couldn’t really understand but from the discussion I felt I got the drift.
When the ‘drift-diffusion equation’ and ‘biased random walk’ appeared, I felt like I was walking on firm ground again (even if it was what is called in biology or complexity theory a ‘rugged fitness landscape’—its firm ground, not a swamp, just rugged and complex, like climbing a mountain.)
The discussion of culture and socioeconomic status, personality, genes, and social embededness seemed ‘spot on’—especially because the work of Boyd and Richerson was cited (although I cannot claim to be an expert, I view their books and papers to be basically the current theory of evolution—they are to Darwin what Einstein was to Newton, though B&R’s gene-culture evolution theory might be more analogous to Einstein’s special relativity—a slight modification of Newtonian dynamics—than to General Relativity which has a much more intricate math apparatus and wide applicability. B&R were preceded by qualitative discussions by several people, and a mathematical one by E O Wilson and C J Lumden (‘genes , mind and culture’) which used nonlinear diffusion equations—but EOW and CJL seemed to later agree that while the math in the book was correct (which came from statistical physics) their interpretation was not—B&R I think is the standard or (closer to) correct one (though in what i read they used discrete dynamical systems and evolutionary game theory rather than de’s).
I am familiar with some of the references (Tooby and Cosmides, Plomin, Heinrich , and more).
Also some of the literature on ‘universal moral grammar’ (papers by John Mikhail, Marc Hauser, etc.) and Chomskyian linguistics and ‘poverty of the stimulus’. (I agree with the connectionists that while Chomsky and people like S Pinker are correct that humans are not ‘blank slates’, both of them (along with evolutionary psychologists like Cosmides and Tooby, and J Fodor) go too far from proposing there is a ‘language organ’ , or ‘instinct’, or ‘module’ , nor are there ones for morality. Babies are not smartphones which have ‘apps’ such as a dictionary, calculator, political platform, religious text , 10 commandments, ’12 rules for living’, or even ‘universal grammar ’ genetically coded in them as part of their ‘god given’ hardware. Boyd and Richerson i think have a better take on what people are born with. (And some more recent work sort of adds some of what C Geertz (anthropology) called ‘thick detail’ about ‘social embededness’-ie people aren’t born with video games in their heads.
There are many papers critiquing Chomsky’s ‘poverty of the stimulus’ argument e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0212024 None of these however contradict the conclusions in the above paper about the unreliability of moral judgements. You don’t need a plane built with inherint design flaws to crash—planes with no such flaws can crash anyway due to human error, maintenance problems, or the weather.