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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025

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Most humanities programs are, to put it bluntly, huffing their own farts.

...Psychiatry is hardly perfect in that regard, but we care more about RCTs than debating Freudian vs Lacanian nonsense. Does the intervention improve outcomes in a measurable way? If not, it is of limited use, no matter how elegant the theory behind it.

In other words, "our farts are different"? 😀

There would be the view out there that "okay, so you are trying to distinguish yourself, as a psychiatrist, from those squishy psychotherapists, but dude, the main difference is that you guys are legal drug pushers and now there's some doubt that the drugs even work".

Depression caused by lack of serotonin? Yeah, we don't think that anymore, but we still prescribe drugs to bump up serotonin levels.

Many such instances!

Well, duh. SSRIs work even if the original hypothesis was proven flawed. Hand washing worked, even before we had the germ theory of disease.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9632745/

If it works, it works, and knowing why it works is always nice.

I recall that you, in your Deiseach avatar, were noted to be the most prolific commenter of all time on both of Scott's blogs (in that recent guest post). In that case, you shouldn't be surprised at all to learn that Scott has written multiple posts about the topic:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/05/chemical-imbalance/

To this day, I don't know why people float it as such a gotcha. Psychiatrists have known better for a long time now, and the critique makes us groan in the same manner that economists are tired of claims that they only study perfectly spherical/rational humans in a vacuum.

People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. "It works but we don't know why or how and our last theory is gone up in smoke" does not read well for a position of "well my fart-huffing is more scientifically based at least!"