Neal Blaikie wrote:
>
> "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" wrote:
> >
> > Margaret Mead did not make a
> > small improvement that was later replaced by a large improvement. She
> > made a horrendous mistake and screwed up the entire field of anthropology
> > for decades.
>
> This is a gross overstatement, and suggests you may be ignorant of the vast
> body of anthropological work that has nothing to do with Mead and is not
> influenced by her.
I'm sure there's a lot of anthropological work that has nothing to do with
Mead and is not influenced by her. Anthropology is one of the primary
sources of empirical data for evolutionary psychology. (Which is a bit
unnerving, actually; if anthropology has been that screwed up by politics
before, I must consider the possibility that it is presently being screwed
up by the same forces, and that some of the data underlying evolutionary
psychology is false.)
> No one in the field has ever held her up as some sort of
> icon or queen bee (or even as anthropology's Einstein), so to argue against
> this is pointless. You're entitled to your opinion, of course, but you're
> simply wrong.
Okay. I think the statement that "No one in anthropology has ever held up
Margaret Mead as an icon" is simply wrong. Perhaps nobody holds her up as
an icon today; she was certainly an icon in the past.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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