Wood from Eden

She's essentially arguing that long-term happiness is an evolved signal that someone is on the right evolutionary path. It's the emotional self-help equivalent of a prosperity gospel. Her argument can best be illustrated by a paragraph from another article titled How I cured myself with evolutionary psychology [1] > In order to cure my depression, I did the evolutionary psychology thing hard-core: I got married and had children. I dropped out of university. I moved to the countryside. I started to renovate and build houses and to grow food for my family. As far as I can tell, she has no training as an evolutionary psychologist. It's self help woo woo wrapped up in barely coherent scientific jargon - that demographic loves evolutionary psychology because it can be used to spin any story you wish about why humans are the way they are. [1] https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/how-i-cured-myself-with-evolutiona…

If you wonder in what kind of environment human "reason" possibly evolved read this commentary on the experience of a young woman kidnapped by a primitive society and her survival among them. https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/the-survival-skills-of-helena-vale… Having allegiance to truth rather than to people would be definitely a maladaptive trait.

Reminds me of https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/my-long-goodbye-to-windows-xp

They published another article today: https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/exploit-the-weakness-of-thy-neighb… (ctrl+F "alpha")

Substack provides feeds for their stuff. e.g. https://woodfromeden.substack.com/feed

I assume you're referring https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/becky-is-depressed And your take on it is so utterly bizarre I can't believe you actually read it. He literally talks about how strange it is that the "Becky" concept exists as it never did when he was a teen (it seems equally weird to me).

I think the next article by the author addresses this point directly and, as far as I can tell, comes to largely the same conclusion as you [0]. [0] https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/why-do-humans-ever-develop?sd=pf

It feels like there is a lot of missing information in this article. However there is a bit more information in this previous one: https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/the-anti-autism-manifesto According to that article, the author's daughter was diagnosed with autism but the author has decided it is actually schizoid personality disorder. Her daughter is and has been receiving psychiatric treatment but for some reason it seems like it is really important to her that her daughter be labelled as having a personality disorder or "mad" rather than having some other type of mental or developmental disorder, and it seems like she feels like her daughter is getting the wrong treatment because of this. (I'm not sure I completely understand why she thinks this would make that much of a difference.) Her daughter apparently wants to do things like spend all day cooking and then throwing the food away and the author feels like this makes her "delusional" for not accepting that this is not something that will prepare her for her future. Curiously, in the current article the author says that her daughter "almost completely lacks any theory of mind" which seems a bit odd to me because that is something that is usually seen as a hallmark of autism specifically. In general, I'm having a bit of trouble understanding why the author is coming to the conclusion that the specific problem here is mental health professionals "deny[ing] the existence of high-functioning madness". It's an…

The author links to a post of what personally worked for her- dropping out of college (abstract work doesn't satisfy her primal brain), having kids (procreating does), and moving to the country (not really explained, but I guess nature). https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/how-i-cured-myself-with-evolutiona… What seems like the author's fundamental explanation is also written there: > It is exactly the same with psychological pain. Ideally, psychological pain is information saying "stop doing what you are doing". The mechanism is not perfect and many people suffer from inexplicable psychological pain. But still, the purpose of psychological pain is telling people they are probably hurting their genes. > One big problem is that our genes weren't invented yesterday. What was once good for our genes is not necessarily good for our genes today. So when we experience psychological pain, it is likely to be because we do something that was bad for our ancestors' genes. Also an important note that a lot of genes were selected for in the last 10k years: https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/the-10-000-year-explosion-the-book

Your post all sounds very good. Have an upvote! But here's the thing. How does this critical thinking methodology fit in with the strong leftward tilt? I don't know of any successful Marxist societies (forcible or voluntary), so why do critical thinkers think they can get Marxism to work? Here's a topical example: https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/violent-enough-to-stand-still When the facts don't fit Marxist theory, the researcher gets cancelled. Here's what I see is the difference between humanities critical thinking, and STEM critical thinking. In STEM, if you design an airplane, and the airplane doesn't fly, no amount of wishful thinking and rhetorical reframing is going to make it fly. The humanities have no such constraint. For another example, Seattle recently completed a $1 Billion new terminal at Seatac to accommodate new larger planes. After it was finished, they discovered that the airplanes did not fit in the slots for them. There's just no way to spin that one into a success. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/sea-tac-airport…