this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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The biggest lesson from neuroscience: Most psychology is BS and the entire field is little better than pseudoscience.
I think this is a very incorrect take. I don't think neuroscience has been able to make a single claim against psychology yet, nor any real and predictable claims at all which place it above psychology in application or correctness. Psychology of course has problems, and I'm very open to discussions of issues with methods and shit. But don't act like neuroscience has much of anything to say about it. They're entirely tangential fields with one at the experiential level and the other at the technical/non-experience level. Common mistake of thinking you know too much from the meme
If we weren't talking about a brain, but instead a piece of computer software, neuroscience would be digging into the source code to figure out how it works. Meanwhile psychology is like watching a bunch of YouTube videos of people demonstrating the software.
One provides answers. The other provides guesses.
Computer touchers stop assuming everything in the universe is a computer program challenge. Difficulty level: actually trying to respect fields of academia that aren't about computers.
It's a metaphor, my god. You want a less technical version? Neurology is like a farmer analyzing his soil to figure out it's pH and NPK content to determine what crops will go best. Psychology is studying decades worth of Farmers Almanacs. The point is, only one deals with hard, definitive numbers.
I will grant that my view is a matter of opinion, but it is my firm belief that any science that can not answer it's own questions with solid, irrefutable, numerical answers is an undeveloped science.
You may take that as an insult, in which case 1. It's not meant as one, and 2. Get over yourself. It's an observation. I'm not saying these fields aren't important and won't eventually develop far enough to have such answers, but as they are, right now, they are filled with deficiencies.
Because there are no hard, irrefutable, numerical answers, these fields inherently invite biased studies with conclusions searching for evidence rather than the other way around. And while this may not be the norm, it absolutely exists and can be used to justify anything. Then other studies cite that study which cites that study, and on and on. And since it can't just be disproven with an equation, its much harder to refute and correct.
It's educated guesses. Maybe some day they won't be guesses, just like we don't guess that 1+1=2 or that oxygen and hydrogen can combine to make water; but for right now, they're guesses. And no amount of saying that's offensive to those who study it will change that.
Nothing good is going to come after an opener like that.
Reductionism may make you feel very smart, but eliminating everything that doesn't fit and doubling down on the belief that your hobby/specialization knows better than entire fields that are actually dedicated to the subject is sheer hubris.
I didn't say that. I said the arrogance is obnoxious, because it is. And conjuring up imaginary enemies that are "offended" by your le logical factual facts is a crybully move.
You first. You're making extraordinary claims without extraordinary evidence, and in the process saying that entire fields of academia are false/pointless because they're not special Main Characters with an exclusive grasp of reality like, presumably, yourself.
Yea, and nothing good will come from a shitty meme attacking a choice of metaphor rather than it's content. Which is what you did to start. What a great picture you posted, is that supposed to represent the strawman you built rather than form any actual argument other than "no you're wrong"?
You don't deserve better because you didn't offer anything of value to respond to with better.
"Psychology worthless because brain is a computer" is a level of arrogance on the level of a physicist claiming that they are the master of all things biology by extension of their field and that biology is a worthless subject.
Similar actual usefulness in application too. I wouldn't ask a physicist how to preserve coral in the Great Barrier Reef, and I certainly wouldn't ask you to perform therapy sessions for PTSD victims. It'd be just as disasterous, probably moreso in your case considering the sheer arrogance you're presenting because you touch computers and think very highly of yourself and believe that your computer touching has godlike universal application.
Actually, it's worse than that, because at least the physicist has a straight line that can be drawn, however distant, to biology through chemistry. You don't even have that.
See this? This right here? This is you attacking the choice of metaphor rather than the content.
See this? This right here?
Such metaphor!
Until you touch a computer enough to come up with a superior replacement to EMDR or CBT therapy procedures that actually helps people in need of such help, you're just huffing your own farts while trying to invalidate centuries of academia.
Cock and Ball Torture therapy?
I think even psychologists cackle about that one now, but it's Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and it's actually quite effective with treating certain personality disorders if the program is adhered to. Compared to "that's all bunk, brain scans/computer comparisons are all you need bro, trust me bro" dismissive claims backed by nothing, one has actually helped millions of people.
It was a genuine question. I am not a native speaker so I know a different set of specialized terms for this type of thing.
It's all good.
Whether or not it may be useful to you, looking up Cognitive Behavioral Therapy may be interesting to you all the same.
The metaphor was the only content you fucking moron, and it wasn't even a good one. And that's not even to mention whatever you were saying about the brain being like soil or whatever lmfao. Just admit the few sentence throwaway comment you made was stupid and move on, Jesus Christ.
The only self-described neuroscientist I've seen that had such open and direct hostility toward psychology, and had such "everything psychologists do is bunk, trust me bro" arrogance like yourself, was Sam Harris.
And Sam Harris is a quack and a fraud that has failed to submit even a single peer-reviewed scientific paper since his family-funded "foundation" assigned him his doctorate so he could peddle books. You're not a Sam Harris devotee, are you?
https://rhizzone.net/articles/sam-harris-fraud/
I'd dig into you here but comrade @UlyssesT@hexbear.net managed to perfectly. You use the analogy because you believe in what the metaphor represents (that brains can be better analyzed at the level of neurons to understand what they are, while dumbass psychologists think you can get it from experiential analysis). The computers are always of course a metaphor, but you're influenced deeply by the thought processes which arise from the simplification of human experience (or any living experience) to a mathematical basis which computers also use. There is no reason to believe this or take the analysis at that level as any more serious than experience (which we also can't prove but I can feel something so I believe it)
Really? What psychology has been disproven by neuroscience? Are psyc people resisting it or are they working together? Considering how much psyc has changed the world and helped people I think the idea that it's BS is a little strange.
we don't understand the brain very well, psych is somewhere between leeches and luminiferous aether.
if it was more well understood then people won't need to go to 15 fucking different therapists before finding one that helps (if you're lucky), antidepressants would do better than batters do at baseball, you wouldn't need to try dozens of different medications to find one that works (if you're lucky), and they'd take effect more quickly.
Capitalism doesn't put money into social sciences so social sciences are leeches and humour theory pseudoscience. It's unknowable, because the money just isn't there. The free market had decided.
There is money in psychology, but it's all put into making people act more normal. This can be good and useful for some people, many people need aderall to comfortably live, and it's good to stabilize depression, but these being driven by profit means often the underlying problem isn't fixed(in the cases this is possible) and society remains ableist(for issues that are endemic). Other social sciences can be kind of a crapshoot. Many anthropologists are doing very good, important, meaningful work. But not all. Archeology is a land of contrast, and sociology is good when not practiced by privileged westoids.
The only real money in psychology is from marketing and advertising.
You cannot tell me there isn't money in drugs.
Tbh I feel like that's more a fault of capitalism than a shortcoming unique to psychology.
i mean, (some) painkillers, muscle relaxers, and lots of other drugs work pretty fucken good. we don't have a great understanding of general anesthesia but all that stuff works most of the time in a way that is simply not the case with brain stuff..
Consciousness is complex in a way that isn't effectively modeled by insurance-mediated healthcare and science, which overemphasizes quantitative variables in a field that's profoundly qualitative. Not to mention the obsession with the individual, ignoring the systems that individuals exist within.
cool i just want to not feel shitty all the time and i felt like this when i had a stable financial situation and a partner so i know it's not exclusively because of capitalism, which means the psych field needs to step up its shit, not just help build the guillotines.
It's not that every psychological problem is directly due to capitalism (though many are directly or indirectly) it's that capitalist psychology mostly cares about profitable treatments, whether they're effective or not. I'm inclined to think some form of talk therapy or psychoanalysis may be more helpful to a lot of people than solely symptom-based treatment. But who can afford to go to therapy for years?
Even from the pharmaceutical side, we're mostly just tweaking the mechanisms of consciousness without necessarily addressing or understanding the holistic structure, so the best we can hope for is trying various meds until one sort of works. But most of us can't afford to spend years trying a new med every few months, with all the turbulence and uncertainty that goes along with it.
Cbt, dbt and the like are somewhat useful at treating certain symptoms, but generally fail to address root causes. And the way they're often applied, they seem more intent on teaching people to accept their treatment under capitalism than anything.
Damn I should have been a psychologist. I'm great at BS.
You could have even gotten a BS in psychology