7 ms·

Mostly nonsense said with authority. Psychology and dietary advice really are crap sciences.

Broken_Hippo 9y ago
So was medicine at one time... and all the rest. We got a lot of stuff wrong, and a few things right and built on that. Psychology isn't all bad, since a lot more folks with severe mental illness can now go on to lead a much more normal life due to medication and coping mechanisms. Same for folks that go through trauma and have after-effects. But we are still refining this stuff, so some of it is going to be crap and there are going to be lots of pseudo-psychology fed to the uneducated masses. Nutrition is somewhat similar. We simply don't have the knowledge to understand its complexities right now. But it isn't all crap: We understand connections between malnourishment and stunted growth, for example. Understand folic acid helps prevent birth defects and vitamin C helps prevent scurvy. To confound matters more, we have a lot of misinformation, partially due to politics and business practices. This isn't really confined to nutrition, though. Society is prone to reject new ways of thinking. Heck, the US pushed against modern "european-style" medicine back in the 1800's - they didn't think they needed science in their medicine or something like that.
- transman 9y ago
  (I have an undergrad degree in Psychology.) Psychology has the means to be a proper science, but historically a significant amount of hasn't been. The examples you present tend to come from neuroscience, which in turn tends to be a much more empirically based field. - http://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-fail-reproducibility-test-1.18248 http://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-f... - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/psychology-s-credibility-crisis-the-bad-the-good-and-the-ugly/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/psychology-s-cred... - https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/05/25/was-the-crisis-in-social-psychology-really-that-bad-have-things-improved-part-one-the-researchers-perspective/ https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/05/25/was-the-crisis-in-socia...
  - Broken_Hippo 9y ago
    Disclaimer: I've read the articles well because I just woke up, but I'll read have the read in a bit (I like the subject). I do understand some of that, and probably see more of the psuedo-science application than most: there is a psychological model of occultism folks follow, some of it heavily leaning on Jung's work... who didn't have passable education that we'd like now. And that was pretty common for early psychology: It was more akin to basic philosophy and unbased theories than science. But I realize that is changing and I realize the good the system really does - my ex was schizo-affective (though he got diagnosed with regular schizophrenia after we broke up). Without the whole system, both the stuff based on shaky psychology and the more pure medical portion with the meds and psychiatrist, he'd have died - no exaggeration.
random_comment 9y ago
> Mostly nonsense said with authority. Psychology and dietary advice really are crap sciences. You don't appear to have presented any evidence or reasons that would make your hostile opinions a useful contribution here.
virgil_disgr4ce 9y ago
What do you think is nonsense?
KirinDave 9y ago
It might have been true 25-30 years ago. While dietary advice may still be fraught with charlatans, the general quality of work in psychology has improved tremendously. Methodologies have been devised, reproducible results have actually become an expectation, and psychology has benefited quite a bit from biology, computer science and information theory.
- Numberwang 9y ago
  And with all this we get gems like 'surrendering to a higher power' Pathetic.
  - KirinDave 9y ago
    Like many other scientifically backed disiplines, people with other agendas co-opt the prestige of the space.
redcat7 9y ago
It's bullshit as it assumes that hunters and gatherers worked together in a form of an altruistic bullshit society. We today are fucking far from altruistic society. Even people from political left are egoistic double standard ideological fanatics whose values only apply to themselfs. Political right is just their mirror image. Hunters and gatherers are two distinct, you can say, sub-species with diffferent attributes and action-reaction pairs. What the "specialist" wrote in that article is for gatherers.
- nkohari 9y ago
  It appears you might be suffering from anger, anxiety, resentment, and/or stress.
  - ebcode 9y ago
    You forgot basic humanity.
  - redcat7 9y ago
    It appears you might be suffering from not-your-fucking-bussines.
- manmal 9y ago
  We are far from an altruistic society because we might count our friends, maybe neighbors, and, just maybe, people we see on the subway as part of our tribe. The rest of society is viewed as "the others" for whom we could care less, emotionally. We can be tricked into caring for them by emotional TV ads (poor kids in Africa need water or are blind) or reading books or watching documentaries about them (e.g. indigenious people, we want them to keep their habitat). But as long as nothing brings us "close" to others, they remain.. others.

So was medicine at one time... and all the rest. We got a lot of stuff wrong, and a few things right and built on that. Psychology isn't all bad, since a lot more folks with severe mental illness can now go on to lead a much more normal life due to medication and coping mechanisms. Same for folks that go through trauma and have after-effects. But we are still refining this stuff, so some of it is going to be crap and there are going to be lots of pseudo-psychology fed to the uneducated masses. Nutrition is somewhat similar. We simply don't have the knowledge to understand its complexities right now. But it isn't all crap: We understand connections between malnourishment and stunted growth, for example. Understand folic acid helps prevent birth defects and vitamin C helps prevent scurvy. To confound matters more, we have a lot of misinformation, partially due to politics and business practices. This isn't really confined to nutrition, though. Society is prone to reject new ways of thinking. Heck, the US pushed against modern "european-style" medicine back in the 1800's - they didn't think they needed science in their medicine or something like that.

transman 9y ago
(I have an undergrad degree in Psychology.) Psychology has the means to be a proper science, but historically a significant amount of hasn't been. The examples you present tend to come from neuroscience, which in turn tends to be a much more empirically based field. - http://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-fail-reproducibility-test-1.18248 http://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-f... - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/psychology-s-credibility-crisis-the-bad-the-good-and-the-ugly/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/psychology-s-cred... - https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/05/25/was-the-crisis-in-social-psychology-really-that-bad-have-things-improved-part-one-the-researchers-perspective/ https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/05/25/was-the-crisis-in-socia...
- Broken_Hippo 9y ago
  Disclaimer: I've read the articles well because I just woke up, but I'll read have the read in a bit (I like the subject). I do understand some of that, and probably see more of the psuedo-science application than most: there is a psychological model of occultism folks follow, some of it heavily leaning on Jung's work... who didn't have passable education that we'd like now. And that was pretty common for early psychology: It was more akin to basic philosophy and unbased theories than science. But I realize that is changing and I realize the good the system really does - my ex was schizo-affective (though he got diagnosed with regular schizophrenia after we broke up). Without the whole system, both the stuff based on shaky psychology and the more pure medical portion with the meds and psychiatrist, he'd have died - no exaggeration.

random_comment 9y ago

> Mostly nonsense said with authority. Psychology and dietary advice really are crap sciences. You don't appear to have presented any evidence or reasons that would make your hostile opinions a useful contribution here.

virgil_disgr4ce 9y ago

What do you think is nonsense?

KirinDave 9y ago

It might have been true 25-30 years ago. While dietary advice may still be fraught with charlatans, the general quality of work in psychology has improved tremendously. Methodologies have been devised, reproducible results have actually become an expectation, and psychology has benefited quite a bit from biology, computer science and information theory.

Numberwang 9y ago
And with all this we get gems like 'surrendering to a higher power' Pathetic.
- KirinDave 9y ago
  Like many other scientifically backed disiplines, people with other agendas co-opt the prestige of the space.

redcat7 9y ago

It's bullshit as it assumes that hunters and gatherers worked together in a form of an altruistic bullshit society. We today are fucking far from altruistic society. Even people from political left are egoistic double standard ideological fanatics whose values only apply to themselfs. Political right is just their mirror image. Hunters and gatherers are two distinct, you can say, sub-species with diffferent attributes and action-reaction pairs. What the "specialist" wrote in that article is for gatherers.

nkohari 9y ago
It appears you might be suffering from anger, anxiety, resentment, and/or stress.
- ebcode 9y ago
  You forgot basic humanity.
- redcat7 9y ago
  It appears you might be suffering from not-your-fucking-bussines.
manmal 9y ago
We are far from an altruistic society because we might count our friends, maybe neighbors, and, just maybe, people we see on the subway as part of our tribe. The rest of society is viewed as "the others" for whom we could care less, emotionally. We can be tricked into caring for them by emotional TV ads (poor kids in Africa need water or are blind) or reading books or watching documentaries about them (e.g. indigenious people, we want them to keep their habitat). But as long as nothing brings us "close" to others, they remain.. others.