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sex is overrated (pg. 8)
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| kuollutrunkkau5 |
| quote: | Originally posted by eckmek
Objectively...
Correct / incorrect data...
A machine that can look objectively...
Laden with things that were never proven...
Rigorously proven...
Objectivity is key in science...
Findings conflict with each other...this is unacceptable in science...
People are made of matter...
Now maybe it's just me, but i think all these things have the stench of truthiness on them :o |
Not really, that's the issue in philosophy of science, if all these things imply 'objective immaterial truth' or not.
Most people are in agreement that a lack of these implies absence thereof. But if these imply 'truth' or what 'truth' may be is quite vague and hard to answer.
For instance, if we look at mathematics, the weird thing is that there are mathematical statements which are true, but whose truth cannot be proven. But that they exist has been proven, but which it are no one knows.
| quote: | No, you publish your findings and a board of reviewers decide if it's worth being added to their compilation. However, you're the one making your article public, through their help.
Or do you like playing literal and saying that Britney Spears never released an album, she just had them released by her label? |
Fair enough, by 'published' I meant that it passed the review process. That's usually what people mean with a 'publication'.
| quote: | | By whom? Didn't you just say psychologists were pseudo-scientists? |
Does that matter?
I'm just saying that this ads nothing to the corpos of psychological knowledge, if this corpus contains falsehoods or not.
Also, establishing correlations isn't as much science as finding out why these things correlate and in what patterns they do so. Physics isn't the art of establishing that rocks fall, it's the art of finding out why and how rocks fall.
| quote: | Wait, we stop here.
Are you kidding me!? Post-modernism started in philosophy, and became all the rage among literary theorists. What are you talking about? Please cite at least a couple of psychologists famous in their fields for the value of their work who consider themselves post-modernists! |
This guy for instance: http://www.yorku.ca/christo/papers/pubs.htm
"postmodern psychology" is actually a term:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinic...ic_orientations
I'm not saying I agree with it, I'm just saying that it's a 'perspective' within psychology.
| quote: | | Sokal even published it in a magazine target at lit crit enthusiasts! You really don't know what you're talking about. |
Social Text? Literary criticism? you mean it discusses books or what?
As far as I know, it's an editoral for a variety of social issues where basically 'anything goes' where people write about social, including psychological things.
| quote: | | Yeah, but when someone claims to be hearing voices and whatnot, you're definitely going to take a completely different stance at their behaviour. |
And that this, necessarily, happens, is why modern technology does not allow psychology to ascend beyond a pseudoscienc at this moment.
For science, you have to be able to differentiate between what people claim about themselves, and what is the case about themselves, surely you have to agree with this?
You have to have some way, 'if you want to investigate the behaviour of people' to draw a line between what they say about themselves and what is the real case.
| quote: | | You can confuse the doctors, reason why wrong diagnoses are not exactly rare. |
That is not an answer to my quaestion. Can I simulate a broken leg like that?
Has someone ever been diagnosed with a broken leg lately when one didn't have a broken leg?
And wrong diagnoses are quite rare. And when they occur you can some-what objectively say which doctor was wrong in hindsight. Who will most likely admit mistakes. In psychology, it's going to be 'me vs you' games.
| quote: | | So psychology won't be a science unless it has x-rays? If a doctor thinks your "healed" leg is still fragile and he has enough reasons to doubt you can be discharged, he will probably want you to be under observation for quite a while. |
Yes, and no. If you suddenly can walk on a leg thatis just broken without any physical discomfort, the doctor will want to feel it, then realize he can't feel anything, then grab an X-ray, then to his amazement see that your leg has suddenly healed and immediately keep you for further investigation to what could lead to a breakthrough.
In the case of Rosenhan, these people were just kept as regular patients.
If you manage to by whatever means get yourself into a hospital with a fake diagnosis of a broken leg and when you get there suddenly don't display any symptoms anymore and walk happily on it. The doctors will either suspect some strange administrative error has occured or think someone has pulled their leg and not keep you there trying to make you believe your leg is still broken.
This is because a broken leg can be easily determined whereas psychological things like schizophrenia rely on gut feeling a lot and are immensely susceptible to the power of suggestion. If I make a suggestion to you about a perfectly normal person having schizophrenia before you meet that person. You will simply see symptoms of schizophrenia in simple things that aren't there. The charactaristics of schizophrenia are vague whereas the charactaristics of a broken leg are clear. A fracture in the bone, as simple as that. You cannot just fill in mentally a fracture that isn't there. However the human mind has a tendency to fill in all the vague attributes associated with schizophrenia.
| quote: | | Unfortunately, behaviour is a tad bit more difficult to analyse than your body. |
Yap, and this is why it's a pseudoscience. Again, I have the feeling you make this more personal than it is. I'm talking about the methodology and the capacities of the field as a whole while you seem to take this more to the personal level of individual psychologists.
| quote: | | Well, I can't paste the whole thing here, can I? |
Nothing would suffice to be honest. Your quotation implied that they simulated and tried to act like schizophrenes. While they were told to act as they always do, but just say they heard voices.
| quote: | | Except the doctor cannot hear the voices, whereas the doctor can see the leg. If someone complains they're hearing voices and then come up with an explanation like that, do you really think anyone would just ignore what |
Yes, and this is exactly the point I'm making.
This is why it's a pseudoscience up until some machine can be invented for the doctor to hear it. And this is why up to the point of the microscope, any investigation towards cancer, or contagious diseases was ultimately pseudoscientific.
You're basically raising the argument 'Psychologists don't have the means to do it properly scientific, thus it's not a pseudoscience.'.
Again, you really make this more personal than it is. I'm not addressing psychologists. I'm simply saying that the field of psychology is currently pseudoscientific because modern technology does not allow a scientific enquiry towards what they try to study.
You seem to debate more if people are 'at fault' here or if they 'can help it' than the issue whether this investigation occurs with scientific rigour or not.
| quote: | | Well, of course not. |
No one is. That is te idea of science and the scientific method, to eliminate this by minimizing human subjective interpretation.
| quote: | | Which would definitely a sign of hypochondriasis - and that's something to be accounted for |
Well, yes, and no. Basically what we have here is:
A: people that hear voices <-> psychotics
B: people that claim they hear voices, but they don't. <-> liars
C: people that think they hear voices while they don't (no idea how this would work though) <-> hypochondriacs.
There is also a difference in wilfully lying about a thing that is not true, and really believing it. Which is also a thing that is hard for psychology to differentiate between.
| quote: | | They can't explain one thing, so it pretty much makes the whole project worthless. Good call. |
You have to admit that interviews with people with no clear way to check if they tell the truth are commonplace and ultimately unavoidable in psychology.
Also, the point about studying human beings is that ultimately you get to be faced with ethics and all.
You can't really test for instance if people need sunlight as opposed to artificial light by denying them sunlight but giving a control group sunlight in the same setting. Because that is unethical if it turns out that people really suffer brain damage if they don't get enough sunlight.
| quote: | | Funny how string theorists haven't demolished the whole enterprise of physics yet, that's probably about to happen sooner or later. |
Interestingly, string theory is pseudo-science a lot of physicists will tell you.
It's mathematically a nice thing, but in the end, it's not really falsifiable or verifiable at this point of point particles in reality have a dimension.
| quote: | | Have you got an idea of how you can fix this? |
If I had, someone would have before me most likely and psychology would no longer be a pseudoscience.
| quote: | | Unlike medicine in general, you can only work on behaviour with... well, behaviour. |
That's half of it. The other half is that behaviour is very much open to interpretation. Some one studying the behaviour of other people will have to interpret this, and it could be so that another person says a different thing. I notice myself for instance that I have troubles differentiating with people that are annoyed (with me) and people that are tired. Both are some-what similar outwardly and I can imagine that others have a similar problem.
| quote: | | Oh, never mind what I wrote about x-rays... hmm... as a linguist, I wonder if I need a machine that can analyse languages before we can work on them... |
Languages have been analysed on the machine level since the start of linguistics. Ever heard of the Ashtadhyayi?
I'm pointing out a perticular case where it seems that culture and politics has taken a foothold in psychology.
I'm pointing out that the only way to categorize people as homosexual is effectively a self-diagnosis.
All researches correctly say 'we took 70 males that identified as homosexual'.
Again, it's a bit vague.
| quote: | | I'm saying you're quite a follower. Popper says science must be falsifiable to distinguish it from pseudo-science, and you accepted it. Popperian enough to me. |
Sure, he said more things than that, and so said I.
But you imply to say you don't agree with this? Surely falsifiability is one of the cornerstones of science? That there must be a way to find out if your ideas are wrong when they are?
| quote: | | Yeah. So far, we have not been able to tell apart the zombies from the actual people in psychological research. One day we might be able to tackle this problem. |
What if it turns out that people truly have no soul or introspection and that we are in fact the soulless machines physics implies that we are?
| quote: | | When you said "homosexuality can be cured". |
Where did I say that?
| quote: | | When Einstein proved Newton was wrong, did that turn physics into a pseudo-science? I don't see how frequency changes that. |
Einstein never proved Newton wrong, Einstein affirmed Newton.
Special relativity does not contradict newtonian mechanics, it extends it. And a subset of relativistic mechanics produces (to a very high accuracy) the same results as Newtonian mechanics.
Newton did this before with Kepler's laws, he showed that the Kepler's laws were actually a subset of his new, and larger framework. This is how physics has been going for 400-500 years now I guess. New theories never displace old theories, they extend them. The old theories are still correct on their old domain.
In psychology however, new perspectives contradict older perspectives. In physics, if you have a new grand theory, a mandate is that you show that the older theory is a subset on it and it produces the same results as the older theory on the domain of the older theory.
| quote: | | When is species just a species and not just a variant? When is a language a proper language and not just a dialect? (if mutual intelligibility always worked, Portuguese and Galician wouldn't really be separate languages, but they are). |
Languages and dialects are political terms that are seldom used in linguistics. I don't believe in them myself. Neither do I believe in 'species' and I consider both to be a fruit of people's desire to categorize, even if there is a continuum and obviously you cannot do so. (I also don't believe there is a meaningful destinction between 'alive' and 'lifeless')
So surely, any endeavour that relies on such a destinction I would call pseudo-scientific. Taxonomy I do not consider a science, it's a debate about what to call stuff, not to investigate how stuff works.
If you suddenly decide to group humans and chimps in one genus, it doesn't change what they are.
| quote: | | What exactly are you calling a pseudoscience? |
As I said, a field that at first glance may appear (or even claim) to be scientific, but in the end is not backed up by the rigours of experimental verification, objective assesment, control groups and all that shebang.
Basically, if two people come to two different (contradicting) conclusions from the same data, they cannot both be scientific in their assesment, this can also imply that neither are, of course.
| quote: | | Reeeeeally? Well, now I really want your answer. |
Back then, people just speculated stuff and didn't really put them to the test. It was just 'aesthetic reasoning'. I wouldn't call just making up that stuff travels in the arc of a circle without testing it science.
That practice is as much science to me as homoeopathy, making stuff up like 'Ohh, if you have a chemical that causes a certain ilness. If I delude it and delude it enough, it will take that ilness away!' without putting your hypothesis to the test.
| quote: | | No, that's not. What Galileo did was speculation, he never dropped anything from the top of a tower. He formulated hypotheses and developed thought experiments. |
Galileo actually did drop some things, but not from towers. But they never bothered to test their idea of the arc of the circle.
| quote: | | If you throw an object up it will travel in curve because of the gravity pull, by the way. |
Yap, it's a curve, but that curve is not the arc of a circle. If there was no air drag and gravity was constant (gravity of course diminishes as you go higher in altitude), it would be a parabola. In fact, it could be a circle if you throw it hard enough, when it goes in orbit around the earth. It's actually pretty interesting how this works with how bodies curve around other objects due to gravity. You should look it up, you'll find out that parabola, hyperbola and elipses are all faces of te same coin in a way.
| quote: | | No, it isn't restricted to this. There's also an awful amount of observation and data gathering in psychology. |
There is indeed. Just as some psychology does take fully objective measurements such as putting people on a weighing scale.
But in the end, the observation is still human interpretation of the situation. What one observer would call 'frightened' another would call 'aggressive'
| quote: | | Yeah, there are no disagreements in physics either, that's why they've managed to unify all their theories quite harmonically. |
There is no disagreement and there are no 'proponents' of either theories.
Both theories, two at the moment, the standard model and general relativity are simply used for two completely different things. The standard model is used for creating atomic bombs and general relativity to describe einstein lensing. And neither says anything meaningful about the other's field.
The 'two ununified theories of physics' are really just be seen as the fact that you have different principles in oeconomics for different parts of the market, that's it.
You'd think it's not a big deal, and it isn't that much. But physicists would really like to have only one principle which explains all observable data. The standard model is one principle that explains about all things you see around you, why bombs explode, why your clothes don't fall apart. Why you can't walk through walls. All that follows from that principle. Except one thing, why rocks fall and all that. It does not explain gravity, it can work with gravity once it's been explained, but it cannot explain it itself. That's where general relativity kicks in. People would rather have one theory, mostly from an aesthetic point of view, and there are some cases where you can't just put them together.
But in the end, that they are not 'unified' is the same thing that the theory of evolution is not unified with the fact that you die when you don't have oxygen in biology. It just means physics has two principles which explain all things. In most fields they have 38293232782 or something.
The reason this is such a fuzz is probably that this schizm is fairly new, physics used to have only one principle for a very long time, but then came general relativity and tadaa. They don't really contradict each other, physicists would just like to have one principle you can use to explain all things, not two, it's mostly aesthetic.
| quote: | | I doubt your studies in psychology lasted more than one semester: either you never bothered to pay any attention to what you were being told and ditched it for this reason (or, worse yet, you didn't understand and became spiteful towards the whole discipline) or you're making this up to sound more credible. No one who's opened a psychology book could be so full of misconceptions and claim they count as valid criticism. |
Rosenhan could, he finished his studies.
The belief that psychology is a pseudoscience for these reasons is not unknown even amongst psychologists by the way. I've spoken to enough psychologists who freely admit that psychology is not backed by the same rigours as hard science, but that it's mostly interesting to read.
Interestingly enough, the antipsychiatry movement and the view that psychology is basically just speculation started from within the psych* fields. This was al back when I wasn't even a sperm cell of course.
In any case, you've already admitted all the things I claimed. I'm mainly concerned with these things:
Except the doctor cannot hear the voices, whereas the doctor can see the leg. If someone complains they're hearing voices and then come up with an explanation like that, do you really think anyone would just ignore what
If you still believe you can still do an earnest scientific investigation without access to such data then that's your own call. Extrapolation of the success of the field of psychology doesn't seem to agree though. Also, in your opinion physics was a 'science' in the time of artistotle, I'm not yet willing to agree with such lax standards of the name and of investigation. But call it what you like, all I'm saying is that psychological hypotheses quite often aren't falsifiable, if you can live without that, it's your call. I praefer to have a way of knowing when I'm wrong. |
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| kuollutrunkkau5 |
Nothing more awesome than spelling like connexion, praedict, oeconomics, aëroplane and last but not least: octopodes.
Of course.
Edit: Maybe I should write prædict and œconomics, it would make me even more pædantic, or should I say pædagogantic and ſtart uſing the long-s. I covld ivst as vvell ſtart typing like þis. |
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| Lira |
I see you slyly left the bit about linguistics out... did you somehow find out that's my field of research? :p
"Languages and dialects are political terms that are seldom used in linguistics"? Political terms, yes; seldom used, not a chance, you've got to be an i-language freak and insulate yourself from all other theoretical approaches to have the nerve to say that.
And "Einstein affirmed Newton"? No, Newton believed there was such a thing as an absolute time (or space) and that's what made Einstein so awesome - he showed Newton was wrong.
You're passionate about your stance, I like that. You just need to do some more reading, your arguments have too many flaws and your knowledge is clearly too shallow. Psychology is often called a "soft science"... but a pseudo-science? I hope your professors were talking about psychoanalysis, which is what Popper hated with a passion ;) |
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| kuollutrunkkau5 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lira
I see you slyly left the bit about linguistics out... did you somehow find out that's my field of research? :p |
What did I leave out where?
| quote: | | "Languages and dialects are political terms that are seldom used in linguistics"? Political terms, yes; seldom used, not a chance, you've got to be an i-language freak and insulate yourself from all other theoretical approaches to have the nerve to say that. |
How can you found any linguistical research on this if the term is ill-defined?
And "Einstein affirmed Newton"? No, Newton believed there was such a thing as an absolute time (or space) and that's what made Einstein so awesome - he showed Newton was wrong.[/quote]Where does Newtonian mechanics imply there to be absolute time and space?
Newtonian mechanics already places you at the point that you cannot find a point to meassure speed and time absolutely at. You need to take a reference point and meassure it relative from that.
As someone said in response to conservapedia:
The theory in no way encourages relativism, regardless of what Conservapedia may think. The theory of relativity is ultimately not so much about what it renders relative—three dimensional space and one-dimensional time—but about what it renders absolute: the speed of light and four-dimensional space-time.
The major addition of special relativity is the fact that the speed of light is absolute and independent of reference frames. Which wasn't Einstein's own novel idea.
| quote: | | You're passionate about your stance, I like that. You just need to do some more reading, your arguments have too many flaws and your knowledge is clearly too shallow. Psychology is often called a "soft science"... but a pseudo-science? I hope your professors were talking about psychoanalysis, which is what Popper hated with a passion ;) |
The only real difference between psychoanalysis and a lot of current-date psychological findings is that psycho-analysis has already phased out. All the things they think today will also be in some time.
But again, do you or do you not consider falsifability essential to science?
And yes, I consider all soft sciences pseudosciences. Soft science is just a more politically correct term for pseudoscience really, in the end it comes down to the same thing. A lot of speculation but no hard undeniable evidence to back it up. |
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| Lira |
| quote: | Originally posted by kuollutrunkkau5
What did I leave out where? |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lira
Formal linguistics, you say? How is that any more scientific than psychology? Aren't you looking for an universal grammar Chomsky postulated and that never got anywhere? |
Really. To this day, no one can even come to a conclusion regarding how many principles and parameters there are and Chomsky swears by the God he doesn't believe in that linguistics is a branch of psychology... which is a lovely twist in this discussion.
| quote: | Originally posted by kuollutrunkkau5
How can you found any linguistical research on this if the term is ill-defined? |
Well, I ask you. Are we ready to consider
| quote: | Originally posted by kuollutrunkkau5
Newtonian mechanics already places you at the point that you cannot find a point to meassure speed and time absolutely at. You need to take a reference point and meassure it relative from that. |
Yeah, and what did Einstein bring to the table then?
| quote: | Originally posted by kuollutrunkkau5
The major addition of special relativity is the fact that the speed of light is absolute and independent of reference frames. Which wasn't Einstein's own novel idea. |
So, what did Einstein do?
You're right when you Einstein mainly joined the dots, but don't you think you're overlooking a few things here?
| quote: | Originally posted by kuollutrunkkau5
The only real difference between psychoanalysis and a lot of current-date psychological findings is that psycho-analysis has already phased out. All the things they think today will also be in some time.
But again, do you or do you not consider falsifability essential to science? |
No, no I don't. It's too naïve a position regarding science. Not everything is perfectly sound and falsifiable in science, specially the axioms upon which it is developed.
What matters in the end is the power of prediction. If a theory is falsified, but still explains much of the data, we're not just going to ditch it - we try to fix it and make amendments. Only when it fails to explain too much of the stuff we want and we find a better theory to fit the data do we have a paradigm shift... and even then, only the younger generations jump on the new bandwagon.
There's a reason why both pomo madmen and logical positivists faded away: the two extremes were both too off the mark.
Edit: Now, can we go back to talking about sex? Do I need to post pictures of big breasts here so we can focus on what really matters? |
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| WittyHandle |
| Get a room you two. |
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| Lira |
| quote: | Originally posted by WittyHandle
Get a room you two. |
Rooms are overrated! |
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| dj_alfi |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lira
In all fairness, though the proper spelling is "predict", it comes from the Latin præ- (before) dicere (say), so it was a possible spelling in the past, albeit archaic now.
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Yeah, i assumed as much. But it still annoyed the out of me seeing him write it 14 times in one paragraph :P |
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| Spam |
| Being right is overrated. |
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| malek |
| my penis is underrated |
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| dj_alfi |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lira
There's a reason why both pomo madmen and logical positivists faded away: the two extremes were both too off the mark.
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who were the porno madmen?
oh and
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