Astral Codex Ten

EEA

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EEA

Article

EEA is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between September 07, 2023 and July 03, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA)”; “which assumes the EEA (see the Supplemental Material)“. It most often appears alongside Denmark, schizophrenia, Scott.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: September 07, 2023
  • Last seen: July 03, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Contra Kirkegaard On Evolutionary Definitions Of Mental Illness
September 07, 2023 · Original source
Emil didn’t mention this in his post, but a common response to this complaint is that the definition should actually rely on conditions in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA), ie the African savanna 100,000 years ago, when there were no condoms.
A 65 year old man who’s only attracted to adult women 40+. Most people in our society would classify 1 (an ephebophile) and 2 (a non-obligate pedophile) as mentally ill or at least worrying edge cases. But I think Emil’s theory rules that only Person 3 (the man attracted to people close to his own age) is mentally ill, since he’s ruled out mating with the vast majority of fertile women. 4: Plato …never had children. “Platonic relationship” jokes aside, I guess he was too busy philosophizing. Great men (and women) who can’t slow down to raise a family seem to be a type. Is an interest in philosophy (or science, or art, or any other worthy endeavor) that reaches the point where it consumes your life a mental illness? Kierkegaard bites the bullet and admits that the priests and monks who took vows of celibacy were mentally ill by his definition. But I think he has many more bullets of this type to bite. Even if we agree that we should classify Plato as mentally ill, this again seems very different from the practical concept of “this person has mental problems and needs help with them”. 5: Chronic Pain, Panic Attacks, Or, If You Insist, Nightmares Is chronic pain a mental illness? It seems pretty bad. But as long as it doesn’t impede your ability to hunt, gather, or have sex, I think Emil would have to say no. Same with panic attacks, anxiety, etc. If it’s hard to imagine a form of chronic pain that doesn’t impede those things, consider nightmares. These surely don’t impede any daytime activity, but chronic nightmare disorders seem very unpleasant! I think Emil has to bite the bullet that conditions which make people miserable and ruin their lives aren’t mental disorders as long as they don’t affect functioning. 6: Severity In his post, Emil includes a few turns of phrase indicating we can talk about severity - ie some mental illnesses are more severe than others. But by his framing, “severe mental illness” would indicate not schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, but homosexuality and asexuality. After all, schizophrenics are more likely to have children than gays. Again, this is pretty different from the way you want to use words when talking about real-world problems around how to help people with mental problems get better. 7: Is Emil’s Definition Of Mental Illness Itself A Mental Illness? Emil’s crusade to reclassify homosexuality as a mental illness doesn’t sound like it would be very popular in his home country of Denmark. Maybe there are even some nice Danish women who would be willing to date Emil otherwise, but are turned off by his un-PC opinions. Willingness to violate taboos couldn’t have been very helpful in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. I imagine some distant ancestor of Emil’s standing up in front of the tribe and saying “Me think Bear God stupid and ugly! Me piss on Bear Idol!” Might mean fewer Kirkegaards around today. So is contrarianism a mental illness? I would say no, because it’s a matter of personal choice and serves a valuable social function. I’m not sure what Emil’s answer would be. * * * I don’t want to assert any of these too strongly. Maybe Emil knows something I don’t about the EEA, and can prove that actually ADHD would be maladaptive there, or ephebophilia would get you in trouble. If so, I think that would restore some concordance between our intuitive notion of mental disorders and Emil’s version, but that concordance would be coincidental, not necessary. The next day we might learn some different fact about the EEA that would make the two notions discordant again. So to repeat my claim: mental-disorder-(Emil) and mental-disorder-(Scott) both describe useful concepts, but they’re not the same concept. Mental-disorder-(Emil) is useful for talking about evolutionary genetics; mental-disorder-(Scott) is useful for talking about present day mental health problems and what to do about them. We won’t convince people to literally use the terms “mental-disorder-(Emil)” and “mental-disorder-(Scott)”. So who should keep custody of the current term “mental disorder” and who should have to make up a new word for their thing? I think Emil should have to make up the new word, because: There are a few thousand evolutionary psychologists, and a few hundred million normal people who want to talk about mental disorders for normal reasons (like because they have them).
Highlights From The Comments On Missing Heritability
July 03, 2025 · Original source
First, his claim that extended pedigrees drop the EEA is not quite correct. For example, the Swedish study he cites uses an extended twin-family design which assumes the EEA (see the Supplemental Material).