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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28357 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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A psychologist himself, Adam Mastroianni proclaims: I'm sorry for psychology's loss, whatever it is.

I found this post on the slatestarcodex subreddit. The main article discusses how the replication crisis really isn't as bad as most people think, because:

Gino's work has been cited over 33,000 times, and Ariely's work has been cited over 66,000 times. They both got tenured professorships at elite universities. They wrote books, some of which became bestsellers. They gave big TED talks and lots of people watched them. By every conventional metric of success, these folks were killing it.

Now let's imagine every allegation of fraud is true, and everything Ariely and Gino ever did gets removed from the scientific record, It's a Wonderful Life-style. (We are, I can't stress this enough, imagining this. Buzz buzz, I’m bees.) What would change?

Not much.

Basically this idea can be boiled down to 'well most modern psychologists don't do anything that's even remotely important, so why do we care if these studies don't replicate?' I'm very wary of buying this type of argument. One reason is that over $2 billion dollars went into psychology research, in the US alone, way back in 2016. I'm sure it has increased since then.

On top of that, as psychologists themselves have acknowledged, many public policies get based on psychological research. In the light of the replication crisis, this is perhaps the largest and most under-discussed mistake of the 21st century. The majority of our politicians are basing their decisions, and public justifications, on a field of science that has been proven to be mostly fake. To me, that's not something we can just throw up our hands at and say is trivial.

Another interesting point, which I won't go too far into, is that many of the replicable studies in psychology are just completely ignored. Here's a highly-upvoted comment on the SSC subreddit:

Psychology has nothing interesting left because all of the rock-solid empirical results with tremendous real-world consequences were buried due to being politically awkward.

Psychometrics, heredity of various personality traits, innate gender differences, etc.

So you're naturally left with irrelevancies (monkey prostitutes) and lies (growth mindset, power posing, priming, multiple intelligences).

It's almost enough to make me empathize with Gino and Ariely. The modern discipline is all about garbing feel-good falsehoods with vestments of science. Their only crime was taking the more direct path to that end, rather than undertaking the standard rituals of plausibly innocent methodological infirmities (p-hacking etc.)

I'll leave it to the reader to decide whether or not Psychology deserves an equal place among the rest of the sciences.

I think that’s a poor way of measuring impact. Given that Arely has gotten his ideas into the mainstream is a huge problem. TBH it’s my problem with the entire field (which I suspect is mostly pseudoscience). We’re using it to help people, we’re making policy decisions based on psychology. And as far as I’m concerned the obvious mental health declines in our therapeutic cultures have proven disastrous. We have more and more people, including fairly young kids, on psychiatric drugs. We have more anxiety, depression and suicide than we did 100 years ago. We have more drug use as well.

In the past, things like religion and stoic philosophy had a much better track record. They weren’t committing suicide, they weren’t too anxious and depressed to function, they didn’t do drugs to numb themselves.

I personally find therapeutic culture revolting. It seems overwhelmingly coddling and feminine to me. So I am presupposed to believe it leads to bad outcomes. And from that predisposition I could make arguments that adversity leads to growth and therapy is used as an excuse to avoid adversity (eg difficult thing is bad for my mental health) thereby stunting growth making people miserable in the long run.

But is it true? Are there cultures that haven’t gone headfirst into therapy culture that haven’t seen the same deleterious outcome?

I’m not sure about any current culture, though I’d point out that there is some research on mental disorders manifesting differently or even just not existing in a given culture until widespread access to western ideas (https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10psyche-t.html). I think it’s possible and even probable that the way we talk about these illnesses, and treat everyday problems as traumatic, upsetting, and likely to cause a mental illness might very well be causing people to get these mental illnesses and making those who do get them malinger when in a “blind” state where those messages weren’t telling them that long lasting sadness is depression, depression is a brain disease that can only be treated by a psychiatrist issuing an antidepressant drug. Or when they suggest that trauma causes anxiety and then go on to tell people that everything up to and including stubbing your toe is traumatic, they might well cause anxiety simply because the public has been taught this.

I’m a bit more knowledgeable of Stoicism. And really, it’s a bit different in approach. They say that bad stuff will happen, and thus it’s better to not get attached to things being how they are right now. You might lose that house, car, even a child. You cannot control nature. Or to put it in the the words of Neil DeGrasse Tyson “the universe excels at finding ways to kill you”. But what you can control is the mind. The universe is free to smash your house with an asteroid. But you are free to not let that negative even control your mind. You can accept it, you can choose to rebuild the house or move away, you can choose to build telescopes and map asteroids so that it doesn’t happen to other people. You choose your thoughts and to some degree your emotions, and as such you don’t have to be traumatized by adverse events. It just do be like that sometimes. And beyond that, you can even without the asteroid hitting the house, choose to be a moral upstanding human and be a good person. This was a pretty standard way of living for quite a long time.

Whether or not you can modernize it, I mean, probably. It was a Greco Roman Philosophy. It also sort of exists in Buddhism. There are parts of the Bible that echo the same ideas. I don’t see it as complicated to adapt, nor does the core idea need that much updating.

I’m assuming in the Biblical tradition you are referencing Job?

Also how do we disentangle western ideas from western modernism?

Doubtful on Job. He endured his first few trials without much complaint, but then had a lot of understandable anguish and despair.

I’d say stoicism is more compatible with the gospels and epistles of the New Testament. There’s just a wealth of verses about enduring suffering, exercising self control, and reasoning.

Christ himself set a stoic example in voluntarily submitting to the cross. Even as he asked God the Father to spare him that trial, he accepted his role and did not engage in self pity.

Romans 5:3-5 Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.

1 Thessalonians 5:21 - Test everything; hold on to what is good.

1 Corinthians 9:24-27 - “Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.”

Titus 2:11-12 - “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age.”

2 Peter 1:5-7 - “For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love.”

James 1:2-4 - “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.”

2 Corinthians 4:16-18 - “So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” 2 Timothy 2:3 - “Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus.”

Hebrews 12:1-3 - “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.”

There are parts of the Bible that echo the same ideas. I don’t see it as complicated to adapt, nor does the core idea need that much updating.

I think the problem is that we don't have as much real suffering as we did in the past. It's hard to get people to follow Stoic teachings etc when their lives are relatively cushy.

You can introduce little suffering to prepare yourself. Try camping with minimal technology for a week. Take a cold shower, play a sport or work out. Sleep without a blanket in the winter. I don’t think that’s going to completely overcome our easy lifestyle, but I think it does teach you that you can actually do that and still be okay.

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