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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   29067 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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The Washington Post reports: Florida schools drop AP Psychology after state says it violates the law, a good example of the media getting as close to lying as you can get while still remaining in not-quite-lying territory.

As far as I know, this all started last Thursday, when the College Board issued a statement regarding its AP Psychology course and Florida law. In this statement, the College Board wrote: "The state has said districts are free to teach AP Psychology only if it excludes any mention of [content on sexual orientation and gender identity]."

Citation (desperately) needed! Contrary to what the College Board says, I have been unable to find any source on the internet prior to the College Board's statement corroborating their claim about what the Florida department of education requires. The Washington Post claims that the statement was based on a "conference call" between the board of education and school superintendents, but again, I have found no stories where the reporter interviews someone involved in the call in order to confirm the College Board's characterization of what was said.

On the contrary, on Friday, the day after the College Board published its statement, the director of the Florida Department of Education wrote a letter to the school superintendants, clarifying that

In fact, the Department believes that AP Psychology can be taught in its entirety in a manner that is age and developmentally appropriate and the course remains listed in our course catalog

As far as I know, this letter is the only official statement from the Florida Department of Education regarding the application of the Parental Rights in Education ("Don't Say Gay") law to the teaching of AP Psychology. And yet a google search of "ap psychology Florida" returns headline after headline of major news outlets reporting the College Board's interpretation of this law as if Florida had gone out and "banned" the teaching of AP Psychology in its schools.

Without knowing anything about the conference call (because no reporter bothered to check), I have to caveat that maybe Florida did suggest that some parts of AP Psychology could not be taught, only to backtrack after being called out by the College Board. But for me, it seems like a dishonest characterization of the law intended to make Florida and DeSantis look bad.

EDIT:

Okay, having done a bit more research by going back to read the College Board's previous statements on this matter, I have to admit that my characterization was mistaken. In particular, in their June statement on the AP Psychology course, they reference correspondence from the Florida Department of Education Office of Articulation (what a name!), asking the College Board to affirm that their AP Psychology course conforms to the new Florida law. Still not a "ban," but definitely the College Board is not engaged in the unprovoked attack on Florida that I was imagining. There was definitely some provocation.

I do still think this is more about grandstanding by the College Board than a straightforward application of the law, but I was wrong in thinking that the College Board was one-sidedly attacking the Florida Department of Education.

Crippling college applications to psychology programs is probably a net positive for both the students and the society. Keep the AP engineering and physics, encourage bright and ambitious kids to go there instead.

Unless colleges themselves start dropping Gen Ed requirements (which they should), AP courses of nonsense subjects are incredibly useful because they let you bypass them in college. I took AP Psychology and AP Government in highschool, they were mostly pointless, I passed the exam, and then when I went to college I had two fewer useless class eating my time and money so I could learn math and physics. (I also took AP classes for some of those too, but that just let me fastforward to more advanced ones in my major)

I certainly didn't have any psych requirement when I was in college. YMMV.

What about the ambitious but intellectually average students who excel in AP psych? What of their greatness?

I am of course sure that the answer from motteizeans is going to be ‘fuck em, don’t insist on educational opportunities you’re not smart enough to take advantage of’, but that ship sailed a long long time ago in America.

What about the ambitious but intellectually average students who excel in AP psych?

They still should not engage with political statements masquerading as science. Be more honest and take AP Poly Sci instead.

Apparently there is now AP precalculus. Just go with the flow and make everything AP.

I'm generally opposed to lowering standards but given that many colleges do offer a precalculus level course that counts for college credit this is probably a good thing

Wasn’t the whole point of AP courses to transcend the limitations of the standard high school curriculum - which should include precalculus in some form?

But if you’re good at precalculus you already don’t have to take it in college. It’s not “advanced placement”, it’s normal placement.

They'll benefit the most from being steered towards something useful instead.

I'm frequently confused by the opprobrium that gets elicited by academic psychology.

Do you think that the concept of psychology is fine, but it's just been irredeemably corrupted by political bias? Or do you think that there should be some sort of systematic study of human thought and behavior, but the methods currently employed by psychology (even in their most idealized form) are inadequate to the task? Or do you think that there should simply be no institutionalized study of human thought and behavior at all?

Have you.. met a psychology grad?

If yes, ask them if they are employed.

But the question then becomes as what? How many of them are employed in a useful job that makes use of their intellectual capacity? I think the same of humanities and liberal arts, they tend not to be employed at high level jobs.

To answer the original question, I think psychology should be replaced more or less by neurological sciences. It’s not wrong to ask why humans do what they do, but psychology lacks rigor and empirical studies that are common in other fields. In short, if it were held to the same standards as other sciences, it would probably be seen as unscientific.

Psychology because of the lack of rigor has unleashed a lot of problems. The advice they give is generally bad for relatively normal people, as it tends to cause people to overthink their feelings and turn them into facts. A person who’s depressed and goes to therapy will be told that their feelings are true and valid, and to focus on feelings. You tell them to feel better. But if you’re focused on the lies your brain is telling you, then you’ll take them at face value. And for normal people, the approach tends to create pathology as people try to be happy, and when something goes wrong, fall to pieces because they’ve been taught that they’re fragile. This leads to anxiety, depression, and other mental illnesses, or to turning a fleeting into a full blown identity.

Or do you think that there should simply be no institutionalized study of human thought and behavior at all?

I might agree with that. I think we're very lucky the whole thing ended up to be sham so far, the moment they crack the mystery of the human mind, we're getting, for all intents and purposes, enslaved.

I'm frequently confused by the opprobrium that gets elicited by academic psychology.

The entire edifice is and always has been based entirely on fraud. The field as a whole has probably been the most influential branch of "science" in terms of direct social and political impact. Its theories having driven the mass-rewriting of large portions of our society, despite being unmitigated bullshit. That influence is entirely the result of systematic lying on the part of its practitioners and advocates, who have never honestly engaged with or accounted for their failures. Its history is my go-to example for why the Enlightenment is a bad idea, and why rationalist positivism of the sort endorsed by @fuckduck9000 in our ongoing debates is foolish and self-destructive: it demonstrates that motivated lying outperforms truth-seeking in Enlightened, rationalist societies hands-down and for arbitrary lengths of time.

Do you think that the concept of psychology is fine, but it's just been irredeemably corrupted by political bias?

What, in your view, is the "concept" of psychology? Because from where I'm sitting, the concept is and always has been "come up with a story for how the brain works and why that means society has to be changed to match your preferences, fake some evidence, smear dissenters as anti-science luddites, claim the resulting disaster proves you should be granted more power".

Or do you think that there should be some sort of systematic study of human thought and behavior, but the methods currently employed by psychology (even in their most idealized form) are inadequate to the task?

That seems accurate. People can study whatever they want, so long as they're honest about what the evidence actually shows and where its limits are. Psychology has never been able to do that.

Or do you think that there should simply be no institutionalized study of human thought and behavior at all?

If forced to choose between what we've actually gotten and no study at all, I'd happily choose no study at all. It seems obvious to me that the field as a whole has been strongly net-negative for its entire history.

I think your criticism of psychology would actually be true of most of the university endeavor. It’s no longer a place (outside of extremely hard sciences) of dispassionately going where the evidence leads. Most of the research done in soft “sciences” or humanities is much more about finding the answers you actually want, or in twisting texts and history to tell the narrative of human nature the way you need it to be to get the outcome you want.

And this, I personally believe is why so much of modern society has gone off the rails as compared to our ancestors. When issue advocates can sneak their pet ideas into the narrative by publishing them in a academic journals, teach them unopposed in college classrooms, and slowly trickled out to broader society without them having to meet even the sniff-test of replication (which is not exactly a high bar anyway, but more of a fraud and absolute bullshit detection method). When people believe untrue things, and act as if they are true, society in general declines, and unless it’s stopped, it collapses into the sea of ignorance and superstition. And on the way out, it creates absolute human misery as people do things that don’t work, create cultures that don’t achieve, and so on.

Real, rigorous study has never actually failed when applied honestly. Nations who value it tend to punch very high above their weight given their populations and natural resources. Jews without a state for thousands of years managed to punch so far above their weight that people needed to invent conspiracies to explain it. The cultures of East Asia following Confucius managed to produce great civilizations even in places like Japan where there weren’t a lot of natural resources to sell.

Do you think that the concept of psychology is fine, but it's just been irredeemably corrupted by political bias?

Yes.

the methods currently employed by psychology (even in their most idealized form) are inadequate to the task?

Yes. Most effective research into the realm is now currently banned as unethical.

In principle, I could imagine that it would be an actual scientific field. I don't have any idea how to get it there though, and I don't think anyone else does either. If people want to tinker with that on private dollars, more power to them. For what it's worth, I value non-scientific insights from psychologists that don't dress their work up with fake scientific rigor. At this time, I think subsidies for both academic and clinical psychology are a net draw on society though.

More to the point, I would strongly advise any bright, enterprising student to pick another field, either one that's more ruminative or one with more scientific rigor. Eliminating AP Psychology, hopefully, would be a step towards nudging kids in that direction.

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