Ben Goertzel wrote:
>
> So I really do believe that, in this particular example at least, you're
> attacking a straw man.
Neal Blaikie wrote:
>
> 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. 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.
Lee Corbin wrote:
>
> Mead's influence within anthropology was immense. It was Mead
> who gave almost limitless credibility to Franz Boas' whole
> program of repudiating every 19th century belief about society
> and anthropology that he could. For all the evils of 19th
> century views, Boas and Mead went way too in the other direction,
> especially in causing entire abandonment of the very idea that
> there is a "human nature". Only in the last two decades of the
> 20th century were these baleful influences finally countered
> successfully.
Looks like the war rages on, Ben. There still seems to be a fairly large
disparity between the group that thinks that Mead was at most a minor
nuisance, or perhaps a good researcher who moved the social sciences in
the right direction despite her minor foibles, and the group that thinks
that Mead managed to do almost as much damage as Marx.
I'd like to just say, for the record, that a lot of ideas - my passionate
denouncements to be specific - would pass as normal in the hardcore
ev-psych community. Likewise, my ideas on altruism would pass for mundane
among most Eastern philosophies. But remember this: I USE A DVORAK
KEYBOARD. My strange allegiances are not random, though I've accumulated
enough of them that at least some of my opinions will be out of place in
any one community. I am more than an iconoclast: I am the Iconoclast of
the Better Way.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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