SkepticalButOpenMinded

Having skimmed the study summary, I suspect that even more than sampling bias is research design shenanigans. There are a lot of new measures being introduced. They’ve somehow finessed the numbers so that India ranks high on “employee well being” despite having high levels of burnout, worse healthcare outcomes, and lower happiness than many other countries. The study repreatedly says that this new measure of “holistic health” is independent of those other factors.

I suspect that this is less about genuine scientific concern for “well being” and more about guiding businesses with their hiring decisions.

Thanks. Misread that.

That is a possible explanation, but I don’t understand why these same errors don’t show up literally anywhere else. Shouldn’t Turkey, China, and India be in the running for happiest countries in the world too then? And why aren’t even more repressive autocratic countries ranked even higher? Is it really so hard to complain about healthcare access to a foreign pollster in India?

I don’t know why you wouldn’t be able to complain to a pollster in India. I’ve seen other polling done in China that finds extreme dissatisfaction with the brutal 996 work culture. This ranking contradicts so many other data points.

Thanks for the perspective. But all those problems you mention are much worse in other countries. Norway has some of the best health outcomes in the world. E.g. Every rich country practices medical tourism. In Canada, almost every province (except BC) is run by conservatives who have been cutting healthcare spending, even during the pandemic. It’s an actual crisis.

I did confuse Norway with the Netherlands, but on any objective measure, Norway is doing better on physical, social, and mental health than Turkey, India, and China! (I don’t even know how “spiritual health” would be measured. More bullshit it sounds like.)

The CBC is also one of only a few major non-conservative news outlets. In Canada, “Most media is Postmedia”. Without the CBC, the news would be absolutely dominated by conservative viewpoints.

This ranking is bonkers. Turkey, India, and China are in the top 3. The bottom 3 are Norway, UK, and finally Japan. Mexicans work some of the longest hours in the world, but has a ranking similar to Sweden. Norway and Sweden are some of the happiest countries in the world, with some of the strongest safety nets and worker protections. Why do their “employee well being” scores not reflect this? I don’t trust this ranking at all.

Edit: misread Netherlands for Norway. Still, the Netherlands actually ranks even higher on happiness than Norway, so my point stands.

I like the article, but red tape means pointless or needlessly complicated bureaucracy. Doesn’t apply to just any regulation.

You seem to be confused. My claim is not that there are no challenges or criticisms to evolutionary psychology, or that the topic isn’t very hard to study. It’s that these are live debates in a live field because that’s how science works. It is misunderstanding and arrogance like yours that spreads misinformation online.

Your argument is akin to saying “something is hard to study so it doesn’t exist”. We can’t get evidence for how psychology evolved, so psychology didn’t evolve. This was the mistake of radical behaviourists like B.F. Skinner, who thought internal cognitive states were impossible to measure, so cognition must not exist. That is obviously an error in inference, but also a lack of imagination.

Ugh, your comments are everything I hate about the internet. Both of us know that only one us does research on cognitive science, and it's not you. Yet, because it's the internet, you think you can get by with bluster and false confidence.

Of the many mistakes you make: No cognitive neuroscientist would say, without huge caveats, that we can't make deep comparisons between animal and human brains — not after all the groundbreaking work finding deep functional similarities between bird brains and human brains in the last 10 years. These are groundbreaking findings in comparative neurology, and it's pretty obvious you know nothing about them. You go on to propose a standard of evidence which require that we can predict protein synthesis based on genetic variances, which is laughable. You also seem to be completely unaware of phylogenetic analysis, which is actually the standard way we make many of our evolutionary inferences.

Look, I'm not even an evolutionary psychologist. I have no skin in that game. But I do hate bullshit artists on the internet.

If you actually take a graduate level course on scientific methodology or on the philosophy of science, you will learn that “falsifiability” is no longer a viable standard for scientific validity. This is because, logically, no claim is falsifiable: one can always adjust background beliefs to evade a logical contradiction. See the Duheim-Quine thesis.

Moreover, if your argument were correct, we would have to reject evolutionary inferences altogether! What you say about the cognitive system is true for, e.g. the immune system or the endocrine system. But that’s ridiculous. Evolutionary claims are part of the bedrock of the so-called Modern Synthesis in the biological sciences of the last hundred years. Yours is similar to bad arguments made by creationists.

Your “No True Scotsman” response is just deeply confused about what evolutionary psychology even is. What a mess.