From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu Aug 12 1999 - 08:08:29 MDT
Darin Sunley <rsunley@escape.ca> writes:
> [And don't get me started on the tendency in psychological theories
> to divide human behavior into arbitrary, well defined "stages",
> either. These people aren't doing science. Don't get me wrong. Many
> psychologists ARE doing real science, but the not wannabe
> philosophers who write some of this stuff.]
Exactly. This is why I'm awfully critical of a lot of personality
psychology and other fluffy areas of psychology. And psychoanalysis is
IMHO not much better than witch doctors (that doesn't say it doesn't
work, it is just that the exorcisms used by witch doctors are usually
more interesting). Fortunately there is good scientific psychology
with empirical ambitions, unfortunately the whole field is dragged
down by having the baggage of much pseudoscience that it can't get rid
of.
> Anders, It IS entirely possible that my perceptions on psychology
> were badly warped by the intro class I took in it. Everything the
> professor taught, and everything the text said (and I studied it
> very carefully) painted a fairly complete picture of theoretical
> psychology as a bizarre form of philosophy. The text gave lip
> service to cognitive science and biology, but didn't seem to take
> them too seriously. I guess the moral is never trust a "science"
> taught by the Faculty of Arts :)]
:-) Yes, this sounds like a rather bad psychology intro. Mine involved
one part general psychology, one part statistics, one part cognitive
psychology, one part personality psychology and one part social
psychology; most was fairly reasonable, with some exceptions in the
general and personality parts.
Of course, the original issue still remains: what should go into the
intelligence bin? I don't feel much for debating it, but overall it
might be of transhumanist relevance - if it is an unitary phenomenon,
then we need to improve on the root, if it consists of different
independent abilities then each can be furthered, if it is some
complex combination we need to figure out which parts can be improved
how, and how they interlock with other parts.
> Mr. Badger, my psychology textbook was Psychology: Themes and
> Variations, Fourth Edition, by Wayne Weiten. It concentrates a lot
> on the above mentioned arbitrary "stages" psychological models, and
> has a large section on "intelligence" testing and models of
> intelligence. One of the major problems I have with psychology as
> presented by this text is that absolutely no effort is made to
> "ground" psychological theories in neural structures and
> matter. Alleged "psychology" that does not ground in neural
> structures is, in my humble opinion, not science, but a branch of
> philosophy.
I agree. And a lot of psychologists do not concern themselves much
with the brain (just like some software people never think of
hardware). But overall modern psychology seems to be moving towards a
more brain-directed view, or rather, the parts of psychology that
really are flourishing these days are flourishing just because they
can use the wealth of new brain information to develop themselves.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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