5HC : Skinner, Turing

Iorwerth Thomas · 04 Feb 2005, 06:02 · from 2005-February.txt.gz

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From: iorweththomas at hotmail.com (Iorwerth Thomas)
Date: Fri Feb  4 06:02:08 2005
Subject: (urth) 5HC : Skinner, Turing
In-Reply-To: <1f76173705020310562d45183a at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <BAY102-F1685542379D3CEBB7B90C3B9700 at phx.gbl>

>From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>

>For what it's worth, there's a lot of interesting work going on
>right now that is putting some of the "human sciences" on what
>I would call a genuinely and appropriately scientific  basis. In
>psychology, for example, you have the whole  "evolutionary
>psychology" movement, which is producing some pretty
>stunning results in terms of explaining "why we are the way we
>are," and a lot of it looks to be apply-able, for purposes of
>creating more human(e) "behavioral technologies" than the
>Skinnerians ever could have done.
>

Yeah.  Of course, with most stuff like this, you have to be careful with how 
you proceed; evolutionary psychology got a very bad name when it started up 
due to the flagrant crassness of some of its backers (a good history of this 
is Andrew Brown's 'The Darwin Wars').  Things have apparently improved, 
though on the origins of ideas that some evolutionary psychologists don't 
approve of (say, religion) things don't appear to have moved much beyond 
Freud (this is less an attack on the scientific study of religions, how they 
form, develop and what this has to say about us as a spiecies - which is 
wholly worthwhile - and more a statement that a lot of these commentators 
don't actually know what they're talking about).

Iorwerth

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