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sex is overrated (pg. 6)
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| Lomeli |
| I don't look for sex, sex finds me. |
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| FuzzQi |
| quote: | Originally posted by Mattinsanity
before the segment you wanna do it but the process is boring and afterwards, you want her to go away. jacking off is better. |
I disagree
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| Lira |
| quote: | Originally posted by eckmek
Waiting for Lira to get you 'cause no way am i responding to that WALLOFTEXT :p
I'm sure he will too. There sure is a solid basis for it in your post. |
:stongue:
I completely missed this :D |
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| kuollutrunkkau5 |
Edit: To be honest, I get the feeling that you see pseudoscience more on a personal level than I, as if psychologists all have some evil intend to brainwash people. I more see it as that they are trying to study a thing that is elusive and vague at the moment and simply won't let itself be studied scientifically.
| quote: | Originally posted by Lira
Quote the article you mentioned. Copying and pasting what someone said is hardly a proof of how unreliable their work is: and, if there are flaws in the methodology, don't get your hopes up - one reason why people publish their findings is so they can be criticised, not because they found the holy grail. |
You mean submission for publication surely. You don't publish your own stuff, it gets published. You submit it, and the review process decides it.
Other than that, that depression and lack of sleep correlate is long known.
| quote: | | Alan Sokal sought to expose post-modernism and has no relevance to this debate whatsoever. |
Of course it bares relevance, that 'post-modernism' at the time was a non-neglectible part of psychology.
| quote: | | As for the Rosenhan experiment, you probably remember they simulated the abnormal symptoms so they could run the experiment. As it's stated in the original article |
It's a strong term. All they said was they heard voices calling words. There are a lot more symptoms of schizophrenia. There is apathy, distrust, lack of motivation and you name it. They did not simulate this.
The main point however is the simple ease by which this can be simulated which is a severe obstacle that is yet to be overcome.
In corporal care, can I simulate symptoms of breast cancer on queue? Can I simulate a broken leg to get a fake diagnosis on queue? I cannot. And even if I could, when I stopped doing so they would not continue to label me as having a broken leg, they would scratch their heads about a miracle cure.
| quote: | and I quote:Immediately upon admission to the psychiatric ward, the pseudopatient ceased simulating any symptoms of abnormality. In some cases, there was a brief period of mild nervousness and anxiety, since none of the pseudopatients really believed that they would be admitted so easily. Indeed, their shared fear was that they would be immediately exposed as frauds and greatly embarrassed. Moreover, many of them had never visited a psychiatric ward; even those who had, nevertheless had some genuine fears about what might happen to them. Their nervousness, then, was quite appropriate to the novelty of the hospital setting, and it abated rapidly. [source] |
And you quote selectively.
Another part says: After calling the hospital for an appointment, the pseudopatient arrived at the admissions office complaining that he had been hearing voices. Asked what the voices said, he replied that they were often unclear, but as far as he could tell they said "empty," "hollow," and "thud." The voices were unfamiliar and were of the same sex as the pseudopatient.
If this is 'simulating symptoms of schizophrenia', then it is a very bad simulation. It's like saying 'My leg hurts' to simulate a broken leg while otherwise continuing to walk on it normally. It would puzzle a doctor, you would be sooner taken into a psychiatric hospital for that, ironically, than get your leg fixed.
| quote: | Those responsible for these pseudo-patients had been fed wrong data concerning symptoms of abnormality, and you like it or not, they must've behaved in a very suspicious manner because they knew what they were up too (hardly a common behaviour). Seymour Kety's criticism is so famous it's even on Wikipedia, but I'm going to post it here as well:If I were to drink a quart of blood and, concealing what I had done, come to the emergency room of any hospital vomiting blood, the behavior of the staff would be quite predictable. If they labeled and treated me as having a bleeding peptic ulcer, I doubt that I could argue convincingly that medical science does not know how to diagnose that condition. [The original article isn't available on pdf, but he was quoted by Robert Spitzer, who in turn had quite a few things to say]. |
I know that criticism and it is also quite often countered by:
And if you stopped coughing up blood and claimed you were cured and you displayed no symptoms anymore, would they still treat you as having a peptic ulver or consider you a very strange case of a miracle cure?
The criticism of the experiment is not so much the fact that they got admitted, but the fact they couldn't get out easily. The simple thing psychologists like to call the power of suggestion. Psychologists themselves are no exception to this it seems.
Other than that, another more subtle difference has to be accounted for. The people didn't fake hearing voices at all, they just said they heard them. The aequivalent would be to say that you are coughing up blood while you evidently are not.
And the fact that psychology at this point has no way to differentiate between people that hear voices, and people that say they do but don't is in fact one of te major things that make it a pseudo-science.
Amongst that the fact that they have no unit for 'how strong' the voices are to objectively ascertain if the magnitude has increased or decreased and all that shebang.
Imagine what would happen if you went to a doctor and you said 'I have pain in my chest', and without a scan, without blood investigations, just by interpreting how you describe that feeling, he'd diagnosed breast cancer, and begin chemotherapy. That is the primitive level psychiatry is currently at. And yes, I know that there is a difference between psychiatry, clinical psychology and psychology in general.
| quote: | | Complaining that professionals who were fed wrong data couldn't "get it right" is far from being fair, don't you think? Would the awesome physicists be spot on if some particle started acting up just to test them? Would that validate Bruno Latour's criticism? |
The criticism is the fact that psychology lacks a capacity to filter out incorrect data from correct data.
Until psychology has some machine which can look objectively into people's minds and ascertain these things via more rigorous channels than simply what they say and very vaguely describe, it is doomed to be a pseudo-scientific endeavour.
| quote: | | Are you really trying to disprove psychology claiming that therapists don't know enough about psychology? That's an argument against the quality of the education these people have received. I mean, even the psychology undergrads I chat with often tell me how awesome it is that memories are fallible! |
That is not as much the issue here, if memories are fallible or not. The issue is that psychology is laden with things which are taken as fact but in fact were never proven and are perpetuated by the parroting effect.
Homosexuality is a perticular example, the mainstream consensus has seen a shift from bad parenting to born with it to 'probably a mixture between nature and nurture', none of which was ever rigorously proven, and I don't see how any could be proven rigorously, because you can always point out the one escape. Namely 'Yes, they say they aren't gay, but they are in reality, they just suppress it' or the reverse.
And this again suffers from the same flaw as the above. The only way to "diagnose" homosexuality is to ask someone again 'are you homosexual' or 'are you attacted to people of your own sex'. Which is the major flaw psychology is currently limited by.
Tell me, in what way exactly do my three criteria collide with the four of Popper?
[qupte]By the way, psychologists have been tried to ditch the concept of mind for quite a while (hell, William James a hundred years ago was bold enough to claim consciousness didn't exist[/quote]I would say that currently the idea of 'consciousness' is not reconcilable with a naturalistic perspective of the world. As far as we know, human beings are soulless machines whose behaviour towards survival is perfected over millions of years of natural selection. Human beings may claim they are conscious, but that is not a proof that they are. Note the difficulty again that psychology has no capacity to differentiate a lot between what people claim and what is true, or if there even is such a difference.
| quote: | | and, as I recall it, homosexuality no longer counts as a mental disease. |
Where did I say it did?
And this is exactly the point I'm raising. These things shift way too fast in psychology from one perspective on it to another. In 30 years time the perspective will have again been changed. Then surely what psychologists think today and what they will think in 30 years can't both be reasonable?
Also, 'disease' is another point of it. What is a 'disease', define 'disease'? This term is vague. It's just an agreement, it's not scientific any more, it's polistical. Where does 'asperger' start (apparently a disease) and where does 'reclusive person' end?
Where does 'sombre person' end and when are you 'clinically depressed', where does 'being full of yourself' stop, and when does 'clinically narcissistic' start? Where is the line between 'stoic' and 'schizoid personality disorder'. It's all just too vague, objectivity is key in science. A mitochondrium is a mitochondrium, there is no debate possible there.
| quote: | | It's a young field of research, having become independent only in the past hundred years or so. Given that scientists are human beings and they're hardly perfect exemplars of rationality, it comes as no surprise that they're still trying to discard old ideas that have been retained from the pre-psychology era. |
This sounds almost as if you take the debate from what psychology as a field is to defending psychologists as people being competent.
If they are competent or not, if it's altogether with the current technology humanly psossible to study the mind scientifically (which I believe it is not) doesn't change the fact whether it's pseudoscience or not.
In fact, that it's a young field with lots of inconsistencies more or less implies that it's still a pseudoscience, or a protoscienceif you like.
| quote: | | And lest we forget, the awesome science of physics had quite a hard time trying to get rid of loads of Aristotelian nonsense until quite recently in the history of ideas. |
Phyiscs was essentially a pseudoscience back then. Aristotle did not investigate physics within scientific rigour, that practise is only about 500-odd years old. Natural sciences are a fairly recent invention, mathematics is some-what older.
I would not call it 'science' when people claim that an object launched into the air always travel in a curve that forms an arc of a circle and don't bother to test it, nor have a way to test it. That's speculation.
| quote: | | Read a psychology book before being so sure of yourself. There are tons of definitions of what psychology is, and most self-respecting psychologists will tell you that they investigate human behaviour or something analogous. Not even cognitive scientists tend to be so naïve. |
Some say that, some won't say that. Some will admit it's a pseudoscience, some will defend it. Does it matter what it's called?
The simple point is that psychology is not backed at the moment by the rigours of experimental verification, units, magnitudes, objective instruments and all that shebang. As I said, psychology relies on asking and interviewing people too much. It's like practicing biology by asking people how they think their organs work on the inside instead of cutting them open after they died.
And other than that, it's all just too vague and open to interpretation. You cannot deny that in psychology, findings published in peer-reviewed journals tend to outright conflict each other. This is unacceptable in science.
| quote: | | Yeah, right, because that's its only modus operandi. |
I never said it isn't, but you cannot deny it's quite common and ultimately unavoidable in psychology.
| quote: | | Oh, sure... because progress is really what pseudosciences are all about. |
"If you improve your work by a large margin every day, it means you're no-where yet."
Psychology makes such ridiculous amounts of 'progress' over such small intervals of times with no indication that it will stop anytime soon that it implies that about all findings of modern psychology are soon to be superseeded and therefore simply nonsense.
| quote: | | Are you really claiming that there's no such thing as quantitative research in psychology, just qualitative ones? And that it makes no predictions? |
No, I'm claiming you don't have hard mathematical frameworks that 'describe the behaviour of people', if that's what you apparently do.
Physics incidentally does because people after all are made of matter. The unconvenient part is that it would take the most powerful computers gazillion years to work this out. But hey.
| quote: | | Props to biologists, yay! |
You know that this 'having a thing to say back' behaviour sort of implies you're not really after a serious debate to come to a consensus or help each other out but that you're getting defensive, right?
| quote: | | What do you think psychologists have used to entertain themselves since the rise of behaviourism in the previous century? Why do you think they design experiments? |
'experiments' is a bold claim. As I said, it's open to interpetation and it doesn't deal in hard magnitudes and units. It's vague, and if you try hard enough you can justify it going the other way.
| quote: | | Out of curiosity: Are you a physicist? |
I studied it for a while, decided that I found formal linguistics and computation theory to be cooler.
| quote: | | Have you ever bothered to study psychology |
Yes, actually, I at first doubled in psychology and physics.
| quote: | | or even any philosophy of science after Karl Popper? |
I've never extensively studied Karl Popper. The only philosophy I find interesting is the Russell-esque school of analyticism. The rest I find too much speculation and too little hard solid formal reasoning.
Anyway, briefly, as I said, physics 500-600 years back had all the qualities of a pseudoscience to me. They just said things that sounded 'aesthetic' or 'intuitively correct' but simply lacked the capability to test them rigorously and I feel psychology is currently at that level.
Asking people things in interviews or observing them with the human eye simply does not offer the rigours of scientific instruments. |
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| igottaknow |
overrated is star wars sex not.
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| WittyHandle |
| quote: | Originally posted by kuollutrunkkau5
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| EddieZilker |
| Lira. If you mirror his thinking he'll quit posting with you. Might be helpful to avoid that giant wall-o-text. :p |
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| eckmek |
| Doesn't it really come down to the fact that one of you believe that there is such a thing as "truth" and that it can be proven, and the other doesn't? |
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| kuollutrunkkau5 |
| quote: | Originally posted by eckmek
Doesn't it really come down to the fact that one of you believe that there is such a thing as "truth" and that it can be proven, and the other doesn't? |
Not sure who you're pointing at, but I don't believe this. I am too nihilistic for my shirt.
I've simply laid out a template for scientific enquiry and don't believe that psychology meets this, or could possibly meet this with modern technology as it tries to investigate a thing that is simply too vague for science to investigate. |
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| igottaknow |
| BLAH-BLAH BLAH-BLAH! |
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| EddieZilker |
| quote: | Originally posted by kuollutrunkkau5
I've simply laid out a template for scientific enquiry and don't believe that psychology meets this, or could possibly meet this with modern technology as it tries to investigate a thing that is simply too vague for science to investigate. |
You gotta love the hubris it takes to put this out. He might be ******** 2.0. |
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