The Science of Stupid
Nov. 6th, 2010 10:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
luna_manarIt makes me somewhat insane that shit like this is still going on.
It occurred to me a couple weeks ago that I am in some way a product of a failed system. This may seem obvious, and I've talked about it before, but this was the first time I'd ever actually thought about what that means, without getting angry about it.
In 1985, a movement was taking place in the "pediatric" mental health community. It had been discovered that medications could be used to calm "hyperactive" children and keep them focused. There's a lot more history to this, but basically, that was the wave everyone was surfing on.
Psychologists were quickly rising into positions of medical authority. Because their practices appeared to yield tangible results in a large number of individuals, that practice became regarded as a "science" in the uneducated, misinformed public eye.
The fundamental social failure that was occurring here was complete inability to understand what science is on a massive scale, and subsequently an unfounded trust and, even worse, faith in the authority of anything logical enough to masquerade as science. If there are "studies," people thought, it must be scientific. Better yet if the majority of those studies came out with a positive result. That's just confirmation that a given "theory" is correct, right?
Thus continues this blind adherence to "scientific" authority. And in the late 80s to mid 90s, the new pseudoscientific fad was child psychology. Headlines reading "Problem Children (and What to do About Them)" ran rampant in magazines, newspapers, and as blurbs on the back of books. Parents were suddenly watchful for "signs" that their kid might have one of these dreaded disorders, and if he or she showed any of the symptoms, frightened moms and dads would drag their bewildered offspring into an intimidatingly formal therapist's office, begging this trusted stranger to act fast so as to prevent this child from growing up to be a miserable nobody. The kid would be interrogated about any number of things and given "tests" to complete, all the while being told "you're not being judged," when in fact the very questions and tests themselves imply judgement. How do you react when a kid at school teases you? Do you think homework is important? Arrange these pictures to tell a story.
If this kind of treatment teaches children anything, it's that adults, particularly adults wielding great authority, are deceptive. As a child emulating my elders (even as I fought them), I responded with subtle deceptions of my own.
Of course, when asked what I thought I should do when children picked on me, I said, "tell an adult about it." When asked how I think most people get a job, I said, "they go to college." I figured out what my elders' values were, and when asked, I recited them. I knew that my values would get me in trouble, so I kept them to myself, even as I acted on them. I did not do much of my homework. I did not care about getting a degree. I kicked my bullies in the face.
Of course, when asked why I did that, I responded with "I don't know." The perfect noncommittal answer; I knew that if I told them the truth, I would be "corrected" and told that responsible adults don't behave that way (au contraire, as I have observed they do). But there was no way to lie my way out of it. I could not tell them that I really did think telling a teacher about the bullying was what I should have done, because clearly I had acted in a manner that showed I thought otherwise. So I left it to the adults to figure it out, knowing very well they would only be confused and frustrated with me. Far better to be punished for obstinateness than ridiculed and having my values de-valued.
But the point isn't how badly I was treated, or even what scars that treatment may or may not have left on my brain. The point is that the culture was swept up in the promises of psychology, not of cures, but of psychological maintenance; through the marriage of psychiatric therapy and medicine.
Medicine. Psychologists, with only limited education in anatomy and the physics of the human body, were then issued license to practice medicine.
Let me be clear. Psychology is not science. Where results cannot be replicated over and over using the same controls and the same experiments, science does not exist. What you have are observations and assumptions, and no way to verify or falsify your theories. Worse, you have "theories" based on inconsistent results of other unfalsifiable theories. This is not just bad science, it's not science at all. When you base conclusions on observational, rather than quantifiable evidence, you are trapping yourself in the mire of belief, of faith. Without points of reference, without a physical definition of normalcy, without a baseline, you're as good as a cartographer without a compass. You can extrapolate all you want, you can have the most wonderful insight and beautiful epiphanies, but unless you are willing to admit that no matter how right you are, you are still wrong, then you're not practicing any sort of science. Not even close.
I am not saying that psychological treatment is all nonfunctional. Clearly, some of it has worked. But we should not pretend that we know why it worked. No one, as yet, has those answers. We are still treating hyperactive children blindly, hoping, not knowing, that the Ritalin will do its job.
I am a product of a system that wanted to be useful, that did not understand the difference between education and ideology, but honestly believed it was moving in the right direction. And to be fair, it was better in a lot of ways to the preceding decades. I was never jumpstarted with voltage to make me behave, and I was never subjected to the paddle.
We are more careful about prescribing medication to toddlers now, but that isn't to say psychology has gotten any better, as a practice. Ideally, all psychiatrists would reject their license to practice medicine and go back to school for a degree in neuroscience. That won't happen, considering how many livelihoods would be at stake. Like it or not, we're stuck with a slow transition, not a revolution. The blossoming field of neuroscience should eventually put an end to psychology's authority, but it will be a while before that happens, and in the meantime, millions of people are facing "medical" care that is accurate by accident, abused by many, and questioned by few. The caution psychiatrists exercise in prescribing antidepressants is a result of scientific falsification presented in public, and unfortunately, does more to hide psychology's shortcomings than fix or apologize for them. "Oh, they're more careful about that, now." That's something I keep hearing. The problem is, it doesn't matter how careful you're being. If you are working off bad information, you are not going to arrive at a solution to a problem except by pure accident.
Psychology is a profession based on observations of accidents. There is nothing deliberate or informed about psychiatric cures. There was nothing informed or knowledgeable about what I was put through in my school years. There was the trouble I was having in school, the unwillingness of the school system to communicate with me, the fear my parents had that I would be summarily rejected by society, and the promise psychologists offered that everything would be all right, if only we would believe in their expertise. My parents bear no blame beyond ignorance in a time where good information was hard to come by. But there was a great transgression occurring, and that was on the part of society recognizing in psychology a scientific authority that, frankly, no one deserved. Still, no one deserves it. No matter how modern, Psychology still operates on a "best guess"; it takes in observations and tries to make them make sense, no matter what backflips in logic are necessary to make it all fit together. It's philosophy masquerading as science, and it gets away with it because it performs extensive and often very expensive "tests."
Not all tests are scientific, and the more frequently you see positive results in various different tests, the more suspect are courses of experimentation.
For example: Let's say you have a "theory" that girls are more inclined to like pink than yellow, and the opposite is true of boys. You gather a wide range of participants from all over the world and ask them all which color they like better. Sure enough, more ladies chose pink over yellow than men, and more men chose yellow than pink. You try it with the colors in front of the participants. You try it without the colors in front of the participants. You try different lighting effects. The results are always similar. So it seems that women are more inclined to like pink better than yellow, and men are the opposite, right?
Absofuckinglutely the biggest load of bull. Ever. You have done nothing more than confirm your observation that more women than men like pink over yellow. That's all you've done. You haven't explained why. You can't even pretend to know whether something in the male brain is genetically configured to prefer yellow over pink--the very fact that one man chose pink over yellows eradicates that idea--but to hell with that. Psychologists put a great deal of weight on "most people who do/say/think/feel X are this/that." A majority is good enough to establish a pattern, and a pattern is as good as a standard. If most serial killers turn out to have mommy and daddy issues, so must they all. If most hyperactive kids respond well to Ritalin, that's the first thing you try when faced with a hyperactive child. Forget knowing what could be wrong. It's sufficient just to guess, and any guess is plausible, so long as you can find a way to make it make sense.
I'm not saying that being scientific about everything will mean you know everything. On the contrary, science is best at showing us exactly what we don't know. But knowing what something isn't is far better than making rationalized guesses about what something is.
Things we now understand about some common forms of mental "disease:"
There's more. There is so much more that we are learning, and it's exciting. No longer can we blame autism on vaccines, or ADD on too much TV. Science is not only showing that certain medications work, but for the first time, we're seeing how they work, what they do, and we have concrete ideas on how we can best use these treatments to maximize effect and minimize risk. We are also learning that some "symptoms" are not symptoms at all, but simply diversity between individuals. Just because you're a little bluer than others around you doesn't mean you have clinical depression and must be put on a truckload of meds immediately before you decide to kill yourself. Sometimes a person is sad because shit sucks. The difference between a clinically depressed person and someone without depression is that when things stop sucking, the person without depression will become happier. Until now, that had simply been an observation, leaving us free to speculate on why that is. Technology is changing things. We now have the ability to view electrical activity in the brain in a way we never could before, and this has opened the door to the aforementioned new brand of science: neuroscience. We can tell the difference between the two brains and take action accordingly, where before, we were left to guess whether or not we should risk medication.
This science has not been done anywhere in the field of psychology, which does not require that its graduates learn to operate complex lab equipment. You can be a psychologist with little more than a pen, paper and some comfy chairs. You must learn brain anatomy and spend hours upon hours in a lab to even hope to be called a neuroscientist.
I am not in any way saying that psychologists are lazy or too stupid to learn neuroscience; they just picked the wrong major to do it. I would be delighted to hear of psychologists going back to school en masse for this exact reason. Alas, that doesn't seem to be happening. By and large, psychologists seem to think that their profession stands beside neuroscience, without realizing the field's potential to invalidate psychology in its entirety. These two fields of study cannot work in conjunction; they conflict with each other, and only one may win.
If I live to see the day that happens, I swear I will die happy. I know there will always be charlatans, and I know that science doesn't have the solution to everything (yet), and goodness knows that there's corruption and detailing even amongst the scientific community. But science itself is as honest as you can get, and such precious stuff are brainmeats that I think we deserve no less. Psychology is far, far less, and I find myself intrigued that I am part of its sad history. It's beginning to feel like I'm looking back on something that is finally in the past, something that is not happening now the way it was then, and I can say for certain that it's antiquated, primitive flim-flam with confidence and evidence. I feel wise, even as I see there is so much I still don't know, and so much I probably never will know.
The difference between speculation, deduction and inference, and theories based on evidence is not subtle, but unless you know what you're looking for, it's not easy to tell. It's this difference that I feel we must teach people. We must explain that science is not about being right but about being ever less wrong, that perfect science does not always yield perfect answers, and that even given this, it is ultimately more accurate than any philosophy or study that cleanly makes all the pieces fit. We never have all the pieces, and when it comes to our brains it is more important than ever to admit to this and not lock ourselves into a belief system.
I see neuroscience slowly pulling psychology apart at its seams, and it's such a welcome, releasing feeling. I feel like there's a part of my life I can finally view objectively, without hurt or confusion or frustration. There was this point in history, I lived through it, and I need not fear it any longer.
It occurred to me a couple weeks ago that I am in some way a product of a failed system. This may seem obvious, and I've talked about it before, but this was the first time I'd ever actually thought about what that means, without getting angry about it.
In 1985, a movement was taking place in the "pediatric" mental health community. It had been discovered that medications could be used to calm "hyperactive" children and keep them focused. There's a lot more history to this, but basically, that was the wave everyone was surfing on.
Psychologists were quickly rising into positions of medical authority. Because their practices appeared to yield tangible results in a large number of individuals, that practice became regarded as a "science" in the uneducated, misinformed public eye.
The fundamental social failure that was occurring here was complete inability to understand what science is on a massive scale, and subsequently an unfounded trust and, even worse, faith in the authority of anything logical enough to masquerade as science. If there are "studies," people thought, it must be scientific. Better yet if the majority of those studies came out with a positive result. That's just confirmation that a given "theory" is correct, right?
Thus continues this blind adherence to "scientific" authority. And in the late 80s to mid 90s, the new pseudoscientific fad was child psychology. Headlines reading "Problem Children (and What to do About Them)" ran rampant in magazines, newspapers, and as blurbs on the back of books. Parents were suddenly watchful for "signs" that their kid might have one of these dreaded disorders, and if he or she showed any of the symptoms, frightened moms and dads would drag their bewildered offspring into an intimidatingly formal therapist's office, begging this trusted stranger to act fast so as to prevent this child from growing up to be a miserable nobody. The kid would be interrogated about any number of things and given "tests" to complete, all the while being told "you're not being judged," when in fact the very questions and tests themselves imply judgement. How do you react when a kid at school teases you? Do you think homework is important? Arrange these pictures to tell a story.
If this kind of treatment teaches children anything, it's that adults, particularly adults wielding great authority, are deceptive. As a child emulating my elders (even as I fought them), I responded with subtle deceptions of my own.
Of course, when asked what I thought I should do when children picked on me, I said, "tell an adult about it." When asked how I think most people get a job, I said, "they go to college." I figured out what my elders' values were, and when asked, I recited them. I knew that my values would get me in trouble, so I kept them to myself, even as I acted on them. I did not do much of my homework. I did not care about getting a degree. I kicked my bullies in the face.
Of course, when asked why I did that, I responded with "I don't know." The perfect noncommittal answer; I knew that if I told them the truth, I would be "corrected" and told that responsible adults don't behave that way (au contraire, as I have observed they do). But there was no way to lie my way out of it. I could not tell them that I really did think telling a teacher about the bullying was what I should have done, because clearly I had acted in a manner that showed I thought otherwise. So I left it to the adults to figure it out, knowing very well they would only be confused and frustrated with me. Far better to be punished for obstinateness than ridiculed and having my values de-valued.
But the point isn't how badly I was treated, or even what scars that treatment may or may not have left on my brain. The point is that the culture was swept up in the promises of psychology, not of cures, but of psychological maintenance; through the marriage of psychiatric therapy and medicine.
Medicine. Psychologists, with only limited education in anatomy and the physics of the human body, were then issued license to practice medicine.
Let me be clear. Psychology is not science. Where results cannot be replicated over and over using the same controls and the same experiments, science does not exist. What you have are observations and assumptions, and no way to verify or falsify your theories. Worse, you have "theories" based on inconsistent results of other unfalsifiable theories. This is not just bad science, it's not science at all. When you base conclusions on observational, rather than quantifiable evidence, you are trapping yourself in the mire of belief, of faith. Without points of reference, without a physical definition of normalcy, without a baseline, you're as good as a cartographer without a compass. You can extrapolate all you want, you can have the most wonderful insight and beautiful epiphanies, but unless you are willing to admit that no matter how right you are, you are still wrong, then you're not practicing any sort of science. Not even close.
I am not saying that psychological treatment is all nonfunctional. Clearly, some of it has worked. But we should not pretend that we know why it worked. No one, as yet, has those answers. We are still treating hyperactive children blindly, hoping, not knowing, that the Ritalin will do its job.
I am a product of a system that wanted to be useful, that did not understand the difference between education and ideology, but honestly believed it was moving in the right direction. And to be fair, it was better in a lot of ways to the preceding decades. I was never jumpstarted with voltage to make me behave, and I was never subjected to the paddle.
We are more careful about prescribing medication to toddlers now, but that isn't to say psychology has gotten any better, as a practice. Ideally, all psychiatrists would reject their license to practice medicine and go back to school for a degree in neuroscience. That won't happen, considering how many livelihoods would be at stake. Like it or not, we're stuck with a slow transition, not a revolution. The blossoming field of neuroscience should eventually put an end to psychology's authority, but it will be a while before that happens, and in the meantime, millions of people are facing "medical" care that is accurate by accident, abused by many, and questioned by few. The caution psychiatrists exercise in prescribing antidepressants is a result of scientific falsification presented in public, and unfortunately, does more to hide psychology's shortcomings than fix or apologize for them. "Oh, they're more careful about that, now." That's something I keep hearing. The problem is, it doesn't matter how careful you're being. If you are working off bad information, you are not going to arrive at a solution to a problem except by pure accident.
Psychology is a profession based on observations of accidents. There is nothing deliberate or informed about psychiatric cures. There was nothing informed or knowledgeable about what I was put through in my school years. There was the trouble I was having in school, the unwillingness of the school system to communicate with me, the fear my parents had that I would be summarily rejected by society, and the promise psychologists offered that everything would be all right, if only we would believe in their expertise. My parents bear no blame beyond ignorance in a time where good information was hard to come by. But there was a great transgression occurring, and that was on the part of society recognizing in psychology a scientific authority that, frankly, no one deserved. Still, no one deserves it. No matter how modern, Psychology still operates on a "best guess"; it takes in observations and tries to make them make sense, no matter what backflips in logic are necessary to make it all fit together. It's philosophy masquerading as science, and it gets away with it because it performs extensive and often very expensive "tests."
Not all tests are scientific, and the more frequently you see positive results in various different tests, the more suspect are courses of experimentation.
For example: Let's say you have a "theory" that girls are more inclined to like pink than yellow, and the opposite is true of boys. You gather a wide range of participants from all over the world and ask them all which color they like better. Sure enough, more ladies chose pink over yellow than men, and more men chose yellow than pink. You try it with the colors in front of the participants. You try it without the colors in front of the participants. You try different lighting effects. The results are always similar. So it seems that women are more inclined to like pink better than yellow, and men are the opposite, right?
Absofuckinglutely the biggest load of bull. Ever. You have done nothing more than confirm your observation that more women than men like pink over yellow. That's all you've done. You haven't explained why. You can't even pretend to know whether something in the male brain is genetically configured to prefer yellow over pink--the very fact that one man chose pink over yellows eradicates that idea--but to hell with that. Psychologists put a great deal of weight on "most people who do/say/think/feel X are this/that." A majority is good enough to establish a pattern, and a pattern is as good as a standard. If most serial killers turn out to have mommy and daddy issues, so must they all. If most hyperactive kids respond well to Ritalin, that's the first thing you try when faced with a hyperactive child. Forget knowing what could be wrong. It's sufficient just to guess, and any guess is plausible, so long as you can find a way to make it make sense.
I'm not saying that being scientific about everything will mean you know everything. On the contrary, science is best at showing us exactly what we don't know. But knowing what something isn't is far better than making rationalized guesses about what something is.
Things we now understand about some common forms of mental "disease:"
- Schizophrenia is triggered by brain lesions--a physical, not a mental problem.
- Obsessive behaviors manifest as a cyclic loop of activity in the brain, much like a computer hanging up on a process. This process can be dulled or quieted by certain medications, or interrupted entirely with direct electrical stimulation within the affected portion of the brain (whether it will come back or not remains to be seen). It is not a "behavioral" problem, either, and if the person suffering from it has any control over it at all, it's extremely limited.
- Depression sufferers owe their frustrations to a tiny area of the brain called Area 25, essentially the "router" of the brain. This router is not functioning normally in depression sufferers, whose memories, fear centers, and stress responses interact without proper governance; all ports are open, all the time, and the brain never gets a rest from anxiety and stress hormone.
There's more. There is so much more that we are learning, and it's exciting. No longer can we blame autism on vaccines, or ADD on too much TV. Science is not only showing that certain medications work, but for the first time, we're seeing how they work, what they do, and we have concrete ideas on how we can best use these treatments to maximize effect and minimize risk. We are also learning that some "symptoms" are not symptoms at all, but simply diversity between individuals. Just because you're a little bluer than others around you doesn't mean you have clinical depression and must be put on a truckload of meds immediately before you decide to kill yourself. Sometimes a person is sad because shit sucks. The difference between a clinically depressed person and someone without depression is that when things stop sucking, the person without depression will become happier. Until now, that had simply been an observation, leaving us free to speculate on why that is. Technology is changing things. We now have the ability to view electrical activity in the brain in a way we never could before, and this has opened the door to the aforementioned new brand of science: neuroscience. We can tell the difference between the two brains and take action accordingly, where before, we were left to guess whether or not we should risk medication.
This science has not been done anywhere in the field of psychology, which does not require that its graduates learn to operate complex lab equipment. You can be a psychologist with little more than a pen, paper and some comfy chairs. You must learn brain anatomy and spend hours upon hours in a lab to even hope to be called a neuroscientist.
I am not in any way saying that psychologists are lazy or too stupid to learn neuroscience; they just picked the wrong major to do it. I would be delighted to hear of psychologists going back to school en masse for this exact reason. Alas, that doesn't seem to be happening. By and large, psychologists seem to think that their profession stands beside neuroscience, without realizing the field's potential to invalidate psychology in its entirety. These two fields of study cannot work in conjunction; they conflict with each other, and only one may win.
If I live to see the day that happens, I swear I will die happy. I know there will always be charlatans, and I know that science doesn't have the solution to everything (yet), and goodness knows that there's corruption and detailing even amongst the scientific community. But science itself is as honest as you can get, and such precious stuff are brainmeats that I think we deserve no less. Psychology is far, far less, and I find myself intrigued that I am part of its sad history. It's beginning to feel like I'm looking back on something that is finally in the past, something that is not happening now the way it was then, and I can say for certain that it's antiquated, primitive flim-flam with confidence and evidence. I feel wise, even as I see there is so much I still don't know, and so much I probably never will know.
The difference between speculation, deduction and inference, and theories based on evidence is not subtle, but unless you know what you're looking for, it's not easy to tell. It's this difference that I feel we must teach people. We must explain that science is not about being right but about being ever less wrong, that perfect science does not always yield perfect answers, and that even given this, it is ultimately more accurate than any philosophy or study that cleanly makes all the pieces fit. We never have all the pieces, and when it comes to our brains it is more important than ever to admit to this and not lock ourselves into a belief system.
I see neuroscience slowly pulling psychology apart at its seams, and it's such a welcome, releasing feeling. I feel like there's a part of my life I can finally view objectively, without hurt or confusion or frustration. There was this point in history, I lived through it, and I need not fear it any longer.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-11-08 05:15 am (UTC)This was a good post.