

Time Review of Geoffrey Miller's Spent: Skim - mshafrir
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1900032,00.html

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whacked_new
While not wrong, this research leads to foolish decisions: people will read
them, and use it to justify their actions: "this is how it is, so this is how
I am."

But no. This is projecting how people are meant to behave _in their natural
state_ to the complexity of modern civilization. It depends on the assumption
that the human mind is a crystallized, unchanging bundle of desires. This is
where most of us humans fall short.

We have the ability of metacognition. Hence, we have the ability to self-
evolve. A better way to go about publicizing this kind of research is "sex
sells, by default, and is optimal for [these set of conditions -- i.e. if your
goals are all sex-centric. Maybe they are, good for you]. For [another kind of
condition], this is the optimal strategy, which leads to [these kinds of
interesting interactions]."

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jseliger
The problem is that this article isn't very good. You'd be better served to
read the piece I wrote:

[http://jseliger.com/2009/05/20/spent-sex-evolution-and-
consu...](http://jseliger.com/2009/05/20/spent-sex-evolution-and-consumer-
behavior-—-geoffrey-miller)

and Robin Hanson's work at Overcoming Bias:

[http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/05/spents-main-
argument.h...](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/05/spents-main-
argument.html)

<http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/05/engaging-spent.html>

I believe I submitted the first link to HN, but it didn't get voted up. That
Time's facile article did instead is somewhat disappointing.

~~~
cubedice
Not to say that this is a good reason, but the Time headline is extremely
catchy. BTW, I did find your review to be actually a review (unlike the Time
piece)

EDIT: I see the anti-catchy police have changed the HN title ;)

