A thread through the archive
Essays tagged “evolutionary psychology”. Follow an idea across the archive.
Scott Alexander's April 2026 links roundup covers diverse topics including Venn diagram complexity, flag desecration laws, AI developments, political analysis, scientific studies, and various cultural curiosities.
Scott argues that dismissing AI as 'just a next-token predictor' is like dismissing humans as 'just reproduction machines' - both confuse the optimization process that shaped an entity with how that entity actually thinks.
Scott shares humorous anecdotes about the daily chaos of raising toddler twins, from emergency police visits triggered by screaming over the wrong version of a song, to elaborate bedtime battles and the children's obsession with identifying vehicles and animals.
Scott Alexander examines recent studies on the Fraternal Birth Order Effect, finding evidence for a broader sibling birth order effect on homosexuality, though its exact nature and mechanism remain debated.
Scott Alexander critiques Emil Kirkegaard's evolutionary definition of mental illness, arguing for separate terms to distinguish between social dysfunction and evolutionary fitness concepts.
Scott Alexander addresses comments on his fetish and AI post, defending his comparison of gender debates to addiction and discussing various theories on fetish formation and their implications for AI.
Scott Alexander suggests that studying human fetishes could provide insights into AI alignment challenges, particularly regarding generalization and interpretability.
A technical dialogue between Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky exploring why AI alignment is difficult, covering the inapplicability of human moral development analogies, the nature of AI consequentialism, and skepticism about acausal trade as a safety mechanism.
Scott critiques evolutionary explanations for suitor-parent disagreements in mate choice, proposing that suitors use innate instincts while parents rely on reasoning, leading to different preferences.
Scott Alexander explores expert and reader comments on his post about motivated reasoning and reinforcement learning, discussing brain function, threat detection, and the implementation of complex behaviors.
Scott analyzes motivated reasoning as misapplied reinforcement learning, explaining how it might arise from the brain's mixture of reinforceable and non-reinforceable architectures.
Scott Alexander examines a genetic study distinguishing cognitive and non-cognitive skills in educational attainment, revealing unexpected correlations with mental health conditions.
The review critically examines and then steelmans Robert Wright's claims about meditation and enlightenment in 'Why Buddhism Is True', concluding with personal reflections on meditation's effects.
Scott Alexander proposes that confirmation bias might be a misapplication of normal Bayesian reasoning rather than a separate cognitive phenomenon.
Scott Alexander shares and comments on excerpts from Joseph Henrich's 'The Secret of Our Success', exploring cultural evolution and its impact on human societies.
Scott Alexander explores anorexia's biological aspects beyond cultural factors, presenting and analyzing del Giudice's 'self-starvation cycle' theory as a more comprehensive explanation of the disorder.
Scott reviews a book applying evolutionary psychology to psychiatry, finding the approach intriguing but hard to verify and potentially open to misuse.
Scott proposes that value differences arise from people crystallizing heuristics at different levels, rather than from fundamental, incomprehensible differences in values.
Scott Alexander examines the concept of 'laziness' and value differences, exploring how semantic debates can obscure practical communication and understanding.
Scott Alexander explores the motivational system as described in 'The Hungry Brain', connecting it to dopamine, willpower, and predictive processing theory.
Scott Alexander examines the conflict between predictive processing theory and evolutionary psychology claims about innate knowledge, questioning how genes could directly encode complex preferences.
Scott Alexander examines the synapse hypothesis of depression, which links decreased synaptogenesis to various depression research findings, and raises questions for future investigation.
Scott critiques Simler's theory of prestige, finding it insufficient for human behavior, and proposes five alternative explanations for the phenomenon.
Scott Alexander examines the theory linking inflammation to depression, finding it promising but cautioning against overconfidence, and discusses the potential and limitations of anti-inflammatory drugs as depression treatments.
Ozy Frantz provides a detailed critique of common 'manosphere' beliefs, particularly those of blogger Heartiste, using scientific studies and logical arguments to counter claims about human sexuality and dating.