I find online this list of psychologists along with a comment on their field: — tim wood

The very title of the web page shows that you fond a list of 'personality theorists', not a list of psychologists. His are we to take this as anything less than willful ignorance in the light of the post above where I already showed you the error in your definition?

And for all your pretence at philosophy, you've yet to address the very basic counter argument I raised at first.

If all you've got is that some of psychology is unscientific ,then you have, by fundamental logic, failed to make the case that psychology sensu lato is unscientific. Again, it's really hard to infer anything short of malice if you deliberately overlook such a fundamental logical principle in order to maintain your attack.

once you have granted the principle, which seems obvious enough, that people (and societies) are altered by the prevailing psychology of the time, which you seem not to dispute in principle, then it is but a semblance. What is clear enough, surely, is that electrons are not affected significantly by the theories we have about them, but people most certainly are. this means that if there is something like an understanding of the human psyche to be had, it is not of the same order as physics. — unenlightened

Indeed. Psychology has a unique challenge in that respect with regards to the small proportion of its theories that become part of mainstream culture. Still not seeing an argument that this challenge renders the entire field unscientific. As you rightly pointed out, physics is facing a similar challenge, is physics thereby rendered unscientific?

My point was that archeological and genetic evidence says we have to consider that violence and proto-war may have been part of the prehistoric human world. — frank

What form does that consideration take? As far as I read it, @Kenosha Kid was suggesting that the balance was in favour of peace, after having considered the possibilities. Responses have been given to the articles and evidence you cited, so the possibility has not been ignored at all, it's been considered. It remains a possibility, but the balance of evidence is in favour of an existence at least as peaceable, if not more peaceable than the one we have in the West.

Again, remember that hunter gatherer tribes still exist. It's possible that you are a psychopath. We'd not have the ground to deny the possibility. Is it not simply human decency to charitably assume you're not until more compelling evidence arrives? Do not existing hunter gatherers deserve the same level of decency?

It's only becomes racism, I would say, if an ideology is created based on ethnicity or race to consolidate or strengthen that domination. — ChatteringMonkey

I see. Then...

We probably do use a different definition. — ChatteringMonkey

I'm not going to open the whole systemic racism debate again, but that seems to be our difference.

If they are supposed to have that same measure of legal power, then psychologists should get their act together and agree on one theory and enforce it, one objective system of measurement. — baker

Well for a start they have the DSM, but aside from that, I really don't see how further unifying the criteria (even if it could be done) will help reduce either stigma or false diagnoses, you'll have to lay out for me a bit more clearly how you see that working.

someone in position of power can tell you "who you really are" and "what your problem is", issue a legally binding document that stigmatizes you — baker

Yes, definitely a very difficult and contentious issue in clinical psychology. What do you propose as an alternative?

All that data means is that prehistoric humans may have been extremely violent. If you have a hard time accepting that possibility, you need to look at how your own personal issues are effecting your outlook. — frank

Who said anything about not accepting the possibility? I'm talking about one's choice when presented with a range of such possibilities. I could hardly be making such a point if I were simultaneously denying that such choice existed, could I?

tim wood and I get along pretty well, philosophically, except when we don't. He has some pretty strong... opinions that always get me started - his antipathy towards religion and psychology are prime examples. — T Clark

Yeah, I didn't mean the quip as a personal insult, but the logic here is childlike, even if the personalities aren't.

I'm always happy to get to use "antipathy" in a post. — T Clark

Who isn't!

The list of defunct mental illnesses and defunct psychological theories is a very long one. — unenlightened

That they're defunct doesn't lend any support to your theory. There are lots of defunct theories in physics too. The aspect of your theory which most stands in need of evidence is that prevailing theories in psychology affect the subjects of future studies. It seems obvious to me (from this site alone) that the vast majority of people are completely unaware of the vast majority of theories in contemporary psychology.

If say a big group conquers a previously relatvily unknown separate small group that happens to be another etnicity and stays to dominate them — ChatteringMonkey

It's the second part I'm having trouble reconciling. How is 'staying to dominate them' not racism? We still seem to have this picture of a large powerful ethnic group dominating a less powerful ethnic group, but we're wanting to not call that racism for some reason. It seems to tick all the boxes.

People seem to tend to stick to their cultural and ethnic roots and band together with other people with the same background. Racism can play a reinforcing role therein, but surely it's not the only cause of separation? — ChatteringMonkey

Maybe, but you introduced 'domination', not just separation.

I think maybe you may be just working with a different definition of racism to me and it causing crossed wires here.

One datum looking for interpretation is, as I mentioned earlier, that we appear to have more female ancestors than male. — frank

1.Background selection on the Y chromosome can influence levels of NRY diversity in human populations.

2. Sample sizes are very small with high variables so the conclusion itself has to be treated tentatively.

3. We're talking about possibly as few as 60 breeding pairs of early humans skewing the matriarchal and patriarchal lines, it's not something which needs perpertuating throughout human history.

4. The effect is missing from East Asia. So at the very least we can't extend it to a 'human nature' effect.

5. Polygamy.

It's not so much a datum looking for interpretation as a datum with six or seven interpretations laid out for you to choose from. The question is, why choose the one which makes white enlightened westerners come out looking best?

I'm a little surprised that people bring up biases about what early humans were like. That stuff just isn't on my radar, though maybe it should be. To approach the question with a strong reaction against those views, which I read Kenosha as doing, isnt the best way to get to the truth. — frank

Speaking for myself, who also reacts strongly to these views, my main motivation is that hunter gatherer tribes are clinging on to their existence by their fingernails as it is. It takes every ounce of pressure that groups like Survival International can bring to bear just to halt the genocide. The last thing they need is the image of brutal savages being re-invigorated for no good reason.

The other reason is that I think, even if it's not your motivation, perpetuating theories of 'original sin', leads to social welfare issues like oppressive child-rearing practices and "they get what they deserve" kinds of attitude towards violent crime and delinquency.

OK, so what would you call one organised ethnic group dominating ethnic minorities, but without a supporting ideology? What is it you're imagining constitutes this domination at an individual level, random chance, one group actually being better than the other ("it's not racism, it's just a fact")? I'm struggling to see how you could separate the two. If one organised group are dominating another on ethnic grounds, that is de facto racism, no?

You tend to see it where larger organised ethnic groups dominate other ethnic minorities. — ChatteringMonkey

Racism is larger organised ethnic groups dominating other ethnic minorities.

in psychology, the objects of observation are themselves observers, scientists, and psychological theorisers. — unenlightened

Rarely. We usually use students!

Their theories of psychology radically affect their own psychology. — unenlightened

Which would be a theory of psychology, so we'll just presume it'll become obsolete soon as fashion changes, yes?

So, for example, Freud's theories of sexual repression stemmed from observations of 'hysterical' wealthy women. It led to a change of mind of Western society, and eventually a sexual liberation — unenlightened

Good example. Got a second? Try it with ACT-R, for example, how's that theory 'radically affected' the psychology of the subjects it is being tested against. Or how about the fast-mapping approach to language acquisition? Or the declining attentional resource theory of age-related memory loss. Or Dual Coding Theory? Or, in fact, any psychological theory from at least this fucking century.

Therefore, the methods of science cannot be reliably used in psychology — unenlightened

Even if your theory had a shred of evidence from nearer than a hundred years ago, you've not shown at all how it would actually prevent the application of the scientific method, only that it would present the field with some unique challenges.

I think Tim has fallen victim to the No True Scottish Psychologist fallacy. — T Clark

Yeah, a shockingly poor argument from here.

Psychology is not a science.
Some psychologists do practice scientific methods sometimes.
But when they do so, they're not doing psychology.
Why? - because psychology is not a science.

It's the sort of circularity a five year old could spot.

it's difficult to imagine humans as peaceable. It's the WYSIATI again: history is a list of wars punctuated by discoveries; the news is conflict punctuated by sexual assault stories. From a limited viewpoint, we do seem inherently cruel. — Kenosha Kid

True, but it always strikes me as a bit odd that people don't include any self-reflection in that. Or maybe they do and society is even more of a train wreck than I thought. But really...when people are thinking that humans naturally just bash in the head of anyone they dislike and rape anything in a deer-hide skirt, do they think to themselves "Yep, that's what I'd do if it wasn't for all this damned enlightenment etiquette I've been brainwashed with"? What we really get from the WYSIATI is that the word around us seems to be full of rapists and murderer except us and our community of friends and family who all seem perfectly nice and unlikely to do either. I'm curious as to why that second half of the image doesn't figure into default assumptions about human nature.

An interesting guess at an answer to this comes from Peter Gray. Unlike hunter gatherers, we are controlled almost every inch of our lives as children. We never get a chance to see what we would do without parental control. This creates a gap in the narrative, in our story of ourselves, which is both frightening and perpetually as dumping ground for every dark impulse we can't handle the existence of in our new shiny adult self-narrative. We don't see ourselves as the product of our own motives, but rather as having been 'built' from this mysterious 'state of nature'.

Advocates of prehistoric war aren't motivated by this sentiment. It's based in the evidence they've seen. — frank

What evidence? I'd wager almost no-one has seen the evidence bar a few archaeologists and authors. The overwhelming majority will read the theories of those who've seen the evidence. They'll pick up, for example, Pinker's book (The Better Angels of our Nature), read the blurb and think "that's for me". I picked up Pinker's book, read the blurb and thought "apologist bullshit". Unfortunately I then had to read it for work, so the point was moot, but otherwise I would have just put it straight back on the shelf. It's different if you keep stumbling across evidence in favour of one theory in the course of your general reading, but that's simply not the case for most ordinary people. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with those people who did pick it up thinking "that's for me", I'm saying it's a choice, people are not bombarded with evidence which they have to sort through, they're bombarded with adverts, and shit about celebrities. evidence is something they have to actively seek out, it's a motive driven exercise.

Nor do I see how you identified any as psychologists. — tim wood

Well then I should put in a call to Edinburgh University immediately, they'll be dismayed to learn of the imposters they have as the emeritus professor of their department of psychology.

Can you name a psychologist also a scientist, and what scientific work he or she did? — tim wood

https://royalsociety.org/news/2020/08/medals-and-awards-winners-2020/

The Royal Society’s medals and awards celebrate those researchers whose ground-breaking work has helped answer fundamental questions and advance our understanding of the world around us

I count five psychologists, and that's just 2020.

Ok. That's fine. l did say earlier about "on the table." — frank

Yeah, I see that. Really so long as overt comments about proof and disproof are avoided, it's all on the table. So the question is why anyone would favour an 'original sin' narrative. Given we have the option to assume things like violence and racism are remediable, by removing the conditions that give rise to them, I can't think why anyone would prefer to think we're all brutal thugs who need constant taming. You can see why it's tempting to consider such positions as excuses (either for personal failings or for white colonialism), they seem to have so little else going for them.

There are two equally viable options. Hunter gatherers were largely peaceable and egalitarian, or hunter gatherers were violent brutes. Given that hunter gatherers are the very people we tended to violently slaughter to steal their land for our empires, is it really too far of a leap to posit guilt as a reason for preferring the latter?

I said that due to genetic and archeological evidence, the possibility that violence was prevalent among early humans is a consideration that's on the table. I didn't say anything had been proven. — frank

No, you said.

Archeology contradicts the thesis that prehistoric people were peaceful. — frank

It doesn't.

Your archeology will never get a girlfriend. — Kenosha Kid


Your response to old fashioned ideas has autism. — frank

No. Your stats are just shit. https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf

Basically it comes across to me that there's a certain political aspect to the way early human groups are portrayed, like there's a need for a certain kind of person to find some natural justification for their own personality traits. — Kenosha Kid

Exactly. As evidenced by this thread. Five citations indicating a natural tendency toward morality-based coexistence vs. a whole slew of "I don't reckon that can be right because I've just got this gut feeling about it, I'm sure I read somewhere..."

And this is not a question that it is possible, to have a neutral, dispassionate default position on. We start to raise nearly 400,000 new children every day, they're either monsters who need taming or angels who need protecting from corruption (or, of course, some point in between). Whatever we pick we will be doing so in the light of evidence which is sketchy at best, either way.

@frank, I don't think the archaeological evidence proves anything, it may fail to disprove positions, it may open discussions about positions, it cannot under any circumstances prove those positions, the data provided is simply too small a sample with too high a possibility of selection bias ranging over extreme events of an unknown frequency. Ethnological data is much the same, but for different reasons (translation problems, biased exposure, cultural barriers...).

I do realise that naming fallacies can be lazy way of avoiding having to counter arguments, this is why I still suggest explaining why a particular argument is fallacious — Bradaction

Yes, but, to be fair, you dropped responding to the points raised in your misgendering thread and opened a new one instead trying to name the fallacy you perceived as being in use there. It's not exactly leading by example is it?

Psychology does have its scientific corners where real science is done. As a "science" of personality, not-so-much, or not at all.

Psychology in this sense is like the cheap tools from Sears. — tim wood

It will likely take a few more generations before mainstream psychology realizes that rather than psychology trying to emulate the approach to science taken — Joshs

Sounds about par for the course... Damned if we do, damned if we don't.

I ask this because what you're doing is meaningless goodness, and you know it at a rational level, but you do it anyway. — Hanover

I don't think this is true. Not allowing oneself to be complicit in causing harm is a habit worth cultivating regardless of the (potentially limited) consequences of any individual action resulting from that cultivation.

It's not necessarily about avoiding the harm caused by the actions themselves. It's about avoiding the harm caused by developing a psychological means of allowing oneself to be complicit in causing harm. Once you have those defenses so firmly in place that you can see the suffering you're complicit in yet feel no compulsion to act, you have a means by which any complicity can be accepted without dissonance, and I think that's a dangerous tool to encourage a population to develop.

When you're older you'll realise that naming fallacies is just a lazy way of avoiding having to counter difficult arguments.

If "you're too young to understand" is a poor argument in the context then counter it by explaining why, don't reach for the list of accepted fallacies. That would be an argumentum ad verecundiam.

standing out in some way, good or bad. Being perceived as an individual was earned, not demanded. — James Riley

Yes, I suspect it's just more commercially benficial to give the impression that individuality can be built through social media conducive symbols rather than real world activity. Sometimes the blind actions of commercial interests have odd knock on effects.

It makes me a bit leary, but this is why, I think, there's often an unholy confluence of old school socialists and right-leaning Hoover style rugged-individualists... Neither make good consumers.

Sorry for the confusion. I wasn't trying to be evasive, I may have quoted the wrong person initially. I'm not sure exactly what your position on the matter is to be honest. — Cheshire

No problem, I thought something must have got mixed up somewhere along the line. It happens.

How other's talk about me is none of my business. — James Riley

I think it's a generational thing. There's a strong trend these days toward individualism and controlling one's identity in society is part of that, the Facebook page, the modified Instagram images....it's all toward creating a society of easily -defined individuals rather than of connections. In my day we got nicknames at school, we didn't ask for them, they were assigned to us. Shortenings of names at work too. We didn't even control our own name, let alone our pronoun, it was a reflection of the connection we had with our social group rather than an avatar of individual identity. Times change I suppose.

Yeah, except for the subject who may be themselves experiencing it. — Cheshire

To what is 'the subject' the exception? It's as if you're responding to someone else's posts. I haven't said anything to which "...except for the subject who may be themselves experiencing it." would make any grammatical sense as a reply.

The burden on society is negligible relative to the contrived controversy manufactured from conservative social views. — Cheshire

The burden of what? I've not mentioned anything at all which would require society to take any action whatsoever, so I can't understand what burden you might be referring to here.

If you're not going to respond to the actual posts I'm writing, but rather just to the general issue of gendered pronouns, it might make your contributions easier to follow if you didn't use the reply function at the opening of your posts.

You are genuinely unable to grasp multiple genders across binary sexes? — Cheshire

No. I'm unable to grasp the the position I quoted in the actual post you seemed to be responding to.

Nope. Could not make head nor tail of any of that. If English is your second language we could try to draw out what you're trying to say, if not, it's probably too late by now.

The whole matter is under false context of causing anyone confusion — Cheshire

Well that's reassuring. Pretty damning of my own intellect (or morals, depending on how charitable you're feeling), but at least everyone else is fine.

Sounds good. Then I could drop this pretence of democracy. :wink: — jamalrob

Yeah.

I'm not sure if I'm the one who's missed the point or if everyone else has, but there's loads of discussion above about improving quality (and whether the 'likes' function will successfully do so). Reading through Jamalrob's original post, I see no mention at all of quality. I didn't read the feature as having anything at all to do with quality.

We're not writing a treatise here, this isn't a grand scheme to finally discover what actually is the Truth™ (God help us if it is). It's a social exercise. Who's of value to the community by virtue of their contributions is a perfectly valid metric in that game, we're measuring their contribution to the social enterprise, not global philosophy.

I don't understand. If...

gender is a social construct. — Bradaction

...then how come...

people don't 'choose' their gender identity. .. you are born like that. — Bradaction

...?

How can one be born as a particular social construct? If a baby is born as a particular social construct then it ceases to be be only by their say that they are he/she/they/xe... If you're claiming that you simply are X, not that you chose to be X, then it must be possible for a third party to judge your gender. Someone could validly disagree with you about it.

For something about which no fucks are given, this topic attracts a lot of posts. — Banno

Oh I definitely give a fuck about the loss of focus. The shift in the 'big issues' of the day from third-world poverty to first-world individualism is literally killing people. I just don't give a fuck about being misgendered.

the younger generation is suffering and the Boomers ignore their cries of pain. — K Turner

No. This is what young people suffering looks like.

Is this then a person continuously making the same mistake over a short time period?

What about when people, through ignorance, intentionally ignore someone's preferred pronouns, despite having knowledge of their gender non-conformity. Is this still a mistake of fact? — Bradaction

You're treating the issue as if it were a matter of naming, it's not, it's a matter of method. Old folk like me have had upwards of fifty years practicing the method of choosing a pronoun on the basis of visual cues (or things like names if those fail us). What we're being asked to do now is not just learn the correct term, it's to change the entire method by which we've spent the last fifty years determining the right term. It's not easy, even for those of us willing to give it a try, not too hard either, we'll get there in the end. It's one thing to re-invent an aspect of language - language changes all the time - but it's another entirely to treat those still trying to catch up with very fast moving changes as if they were the enemy.

The fact of the matter is that people, back in my younger days, were misgendered all the time. It was the fashion for boys to have long hair (as I did), and I, along with many others, were frequently referred to as she, using the say-what-you-see method which did for us back then. No one gave a fuck. We knew we were boys, we knew why they'd used 'she', there was nothing more to it.

I don't question why language and gender concepts are changing, they always do, and what you now think of as progressive will itself be seen as stubbornly conservative one day. What I do question is why there's such a strong desire to make enemies of anyone not waiving the flag for your chosen cause. To use the infamous but apposite cliche - there are children dying from poverty by the millions, who gives a fuck if pronoun evolution isn't happening quite as fast as you'd like.

How do you propose to guard aganist subversion and sabotage? — baker

I don't know, I'm not familiar with the site code. If anyone can be arsed to actually game the likes on a niche internet forum then good luck to them.

Then, maybe compare the likes to say the ratio of comments and replies to see if it tracks well. A "good" poster is one that inspires discussion and I suppose a poor one just litters all over the place, so the ratio should be relevant. — Cheshire

If it tracks well, then comments and replies would be sufficient metrics (which we already have).

@jamalrob. Strikes me the question is quite easily resolved. Let it run for another week or so, then take a look at the post history of the folk with the most likes. If they're the kind of posts/posters you want to encourage, the system works: if they're not, the system doesn't work.

I quite like it, it adds another element to the people-watching.

Not sure how it will achieve anything desirable though. Presuming there'd be a motivation to get high scores (not a given, but let's assume it for now), a poster would have to align their posts with one or more of the popular factions, yes? But since you clearly have more than one popular faction, all this could lead to is an increase in polemic arguments, I don't know, but I'm not sure that's what you want is it?