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Gregor  Fuge, late, tace.  2yr ago (text post)   4878 thread views

Psychology is overrated.

I'm a latinamerican psychologist, and I've been working for 5 years in this field. Starting in my undergraduate years, I've always been very aware of some fundamental flaws of my profession, and I've gathered some arguments that I'd like to discuss. My point is the following: Psychology is grossly overrated, and this allows all sorts of abuses. I believe that I'm not saying anything new, and I'm certainly not the first one to bring up this issue. However, I've found that psychologists have very little interest in discussing it.

For the most part, all of my arguments stem from a conference given by philosopher Georges Canguilhem at a conference back in 1956. My main thesis is the same as his, but I say it in my own words, and I have adapted it to the recent developments of psychology.

This conference was called: What is psychology? So, what is it?

If we go to the American Psychological Association's webpage, we'll find the following definition:

Psychology is a diverse discipline, grounded in science, but with nearly boundless applications in everyday life.

They then go on to detail the different fields on which a psychologist may work. Notice how the emphasis is less on what psychology is, and more in what psychology is useful for. This is because, as Canguilhem says, as psychologists cannot define what they are, they are forced to justify their existence as specialists by means of their efficacy.

Now, this isn't necessarily bad. You can help people without knowing why or how you are helping them. The problem is that psychologists take their efficacy as proof that their theories are right. For instance, let's take one of psychologist's objects of study: Depression. There are literally hundreds of psychological theories about depression, and you'll find the whole range of them: From those that state that it's merely a neurochemical imbalance in the brain; to those that state that it's a lack of positive reinforcement in life; to those that believe it to be an existential and spiritual crisis arising from capitalist conditions. They all have techniques to treat depression, and they all work. But they cannot be all equally correct at the same time. It's the Dodo bird Verdict: "Everyone has won and all must have prizes".

A psychologist may argue that this is in fact something good, since psychology studies a complex problem, and having a diversity of opinions broadens the discussion. And perhaps, there must be some common factors that explain why different, and even opposing theses all seem to work at the same time. This is a good argument, but it's already far from mainstream psychology: Each psychological school is only interested in selling their particular brand, and they explain the other schools' success only because of the parts of their own theory that the other schools implement. And there's a good reason for this: It's simply impossible to integrate all of psychology without a common language. And this common language has never existed (Watson, the founder of behaviorism, complained in the 20's that two psychologists with different formations would define a simple concept like "emotion" in a different way). So the integration path only leads to an eclecticism where everything that is useful is sewed up into one profession in order to give the impression that it's just one seamless discipline, an eclecticism where everything works but nobody knows why, but the fact that it works is taken as the only and definite prove that it is true. As a psychologist called Steven Hayes said: "What is considered true is what works". I'm still still at awe at how a psychologist such as Hayes, who is one of the fathers of contemporary psychology, can blatantly speak about the epistemological bankruptcy of psychology in such outrageous terms, and how can he believe, even for a second, that it's a satisfactory answer to the problem at hand!

In the current state of the matter, the only reason why cristal therapy and angel therapy are not psychological therapies approved by the APA, is because they are lacking evidence of their efficacy. But this lack could easily be fixed if we really wanted to. Under the right circumstances, literally everything works. There's art therapy, massage therapy, cognitive therapy, psychoanalytical therapy, sex therapy... hell, under the right circunstances, even murder may be therapeutic. We can produce thousands of working solutions to a problem, without shedding any light on its nature.

Psychology is, therefore, the science of producing solutions that work for people that need them. Sounds too broad? It is. Psychology knows no limits. Are you depressed? There's some psychological advice for you. Are you having children? There's some for you too. In love? Out of love? Yep, we got it. Are you a political candidate? A psychologist may counsel you. A mathematician? Psychology is the science of cognitive processes. You want revolution? Not without psychology. Are you a failure? Then you need a psychologist, obviously. Are you the most successful man in the world? Psychology will help you manage all that success. Since all problems are human, and since psychology studies human beings, there's no single problem where psychologists don't meddle. This should be cause for caution. We shouldn't hurry to find solutions to problems that we do not yet understand. But psychology goes in the opposite direction, and it goes the whole nine yards, and then some.

But, by what authority? Why do we trust psychologists to speak about politics, family, or work? Because, according to them, they are grounded in science. But we have shown that this science is epistemologically bankrupt: It works, therefore it's true. So we may not argue with psychology's results, but we may question its authority. How do we know that psychology is more than just a systematization of common sense, categorized by the criteria of efficacy, and translated into scientific terms? I believe that this is why psychological theories are oftentimes awfully boring. They are just made to suit a specific audience, to answer a specific question with the terms that are popular at the time when it appears, and made to be discarded, not when better evidence comes up, but when something else becomes popular.

So, does this mean that we should stop teaching psychology, and burn all psychology books? Not at all. Psychology is useful, and it does help. But the fact that you have an effective technique to treat anxiety, does not mean that you get the authority to determine what's rational or what's irrational. You only have that: A technique to treat anxiety. And that's good enough, in my opinion. I believe that psychology's problems may be fixed with a healthy dose of skepticism and humility - two things of which we are in dire need nowadays. Psychology, to me, is a good example of how scientific hubris plants a whole forest in order to hide one leaf. In the current state of affairs, perhaps not all problems can be solved, and there are things that are outside our control. We shouldn't try to hide those problems, we should try to understand them to the best of our ability and live them as the problems they are. Psychology simply has too many solutions, and too few interesting questions.

Here are some references that I quoted on this text, I'm too lazy to cite them all in APA format:

Canguilhem, G. (1958). What is psychology? First published on Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale.

Hayes, S. (2004). Acceptance and commitment therapy, relational frame theory, and the third wave of behavioral and cognitive therapies. In S. C. Hayes (Ed.), The act in context: The canonical papers of Steven C. Hayes (pp. 210–238). Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2015-53131-013

Watson, J. B. (1913). Psychology as the behaviorist views it. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1926-03227-001

Definition of psychology by the APA: https://www.apa.org/about

It is of note that I didn't even mention the replication crisis in this text, which further complicates psychology's epistemological basis. Here's the wikipedia article about this problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_psychology

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I think people are reluctant to dive into this field because of how afraid we are of it.

We are afraid that if we look to deep, we realize just how stupid and predictable we can get.

It can be observed and quantified, but when done so it is evil and not put to good use (casinos, gambling).

Seems to me that Psychology can't be grounded without progress on the easy problem of consciousness; otherwise, it's just theorizing about abstractions. Quoting /u/GeriatricZergling on r/slatestarcodex:

Mechanism. If you don't have mechanism, all you have is a statistical study of the inputs and outputs of a black box, which is only as good as your statistics. That's not inherently bad, but it's only a first step, with all of the following steps being manipulative and natural experiments to open that black box. Doing further studies without opening the black box, just adding more inputs etc., is little more than a statistical fishing expedition prone to all the statistical problems outlined elsewhere, and doesn't really generate much knowledge compared to a single study that actually opens the box. Because opening the box, actually understanding how A leads to B leads to C in a causal way, allows you to understand so, so much more about the world than the fanciest statistical model

...

If you don't understand the mechanism, if you haven't opened that black box, you don't know shit.

This connects with something I've always been suspicious of. Therapy seems to be something of a religion here in certain circles in the western world. According to the adherents, everybody benefits from therapy all the time. Yet I've never met anyone who seems to have achieved quantifiable improvements in their lives due to it, or said that they've been "fixed" or "cured" from whatever was wrong with them and don't need it anymore.

Therefore I wonder - is this all a load of crap? Is there any real benefit from what amounts to talking to somebody who I guess seems sympathetic or at least a good listener? What if we're actually giving even more energy and power to whatever mental issues we might have by talking about them so much?

Note, I'm definitely not saying that it never benefits anyone. If you're getting actual quantifiable benefits from it and it seems to be progressing towards an achievable goal, well then good for you, carry on. I'm only leaning against the specific claim that many people are in fact making that open-ended therapy is beneficial for absolutely everyone.

I think the reason for the 'religion' is that typical human relationships have in many ways broken down, especially male-female ones. When I hear descriptions of therapy they sound to me a lot like talking to my wife about something important, except that in my case we know each other and what we need far better than any therapist could.

Therefore I wonder - is this all a load of crap?

IMO definitely. Scientific Freud

In this month’s American Journal of Psychiatry: The Efficacy of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy and Psychodynamic Therapy in the Outpatient Treatment of Major Depression: A Randomized Clinical Trial. It’s got more than just a catchy title. It also demonstrates that…

Wait. Before we go further, a moment of preaching.

Skepticism and metaskepticism seem to be two largely separate skills.

That is, the ability to debunk the claim “X is true” does not generalize to the ability to debunk the claim “X has been debunked”.

I have this problem myself.

I was taught the following foundation myth of my field: in the beginning, psychiatry was a confused amalgam of Freud and Jung and Adler and anyone else who could afford an armchair to speculate in. People would say things like that neurosis was caused by wanting to have sex with your mother, or by secretly wanting a penis, or goodness only knows what else.

Then someone had the bright idea that beliefs ought to be based on evidence! Study after study proved the psychoanalysts’ bizarre castles were built on air, and the Freudians were banished to the outer darkness. Their niche was filled by newer scientific psychotherapies with a robust evidence base, such as cognitive behavioral therapy and [mumble]. And thus was the empire forged.

Now normally when I hear something this convenient, I might be tempted to make sure that there were actual studies this was based on. In this case, I dropped the ball. The Heroic Foundation Myth isn’t a claim, I must have told myself. It’s a debunking. To be skeptical of the work of fellow debunkers would be a violation of professional courtesy!

The AJP article above is interesting because as far as I know it’s the largest study ever to compare Freudian and cognitive-behavioral therapies. It examined both psychodynamic therapy (a streamlined, shorter-term version of Freudian psychoanalysis) and cognitive behavioral therapy on 341 depressed patients. It found – using a statistic called noninferiority which I don’t entirely understand – that CBT was no better than psychoanalysis. In fact, although the study wasn’t designed to demonstrate this, just by eyeballing it looks like psychoanalysis did nonsignificantly better. The journal’s editorial does a good job putting the result in context.

Suppose we accept the conclusion in this and many other articles that psychodynamic therapy is equivalent to cognitive-behavioral therapy. Do we have to accept that Freud was right after all?

Well, one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens. The other possible conclusion is that cognitive-behavioral therapy doesn’t really work either.

Yet I've never met anyone who seems to have achieved quantifiable improvements in their lives due to it, or said that they've been "fixed" or "cured" from whatever was wrong with them and don't need it anymore.

I feel like I satisfy these criteria and I'm willing to discuss this with you in further detail, if you'd like. I can quantify improvements on the following metrics post-therapy:

  1. Self-assessment of life satisfaction and mood (measured daily).

  2. Number of friends, number of minutes spent engaging in meaningful social connection (by daily self-assessment).

  3. Sleep schedule consistency (measured by, for example, number of appointments missed due to sleep issues).

  4. Income and work schedule consistency (measured by my working hours, which I log).

As well as a similar number of harder-to-quantify but very personally noticeable improvements to my quality of life, such as my excitement and eagerness to try out new things, my decrease in aversion to social risk, and the fact that I can now stand in front of a mirror and admire my appearance instead of hating it. I attribute my decision to go to a therapeutic rehab for 3-4 months, as well as the ~2 years of follow-up talk therapy, as the major causal factors in arriving at these results. And while "cure" is a strong word, I previously satisfied the diagnostic criteria of three major mental illnesses (major depression, personality disorder, and social anxiety), and post-therapy I no longer satisfy the diagnostic criteria of any of them.

Specific factors that helped me:

  1. Being thrown into an unfamiliar social environment and having no other option but to learn to engage with the people around me and engage in unfamiliar hobbies (since I had no PC during all of this).

  2. Receiving encouragement (and social pressure) to leave my comfort zone and overcome fears.

  3. Better understanding my own emotions, wants and needs, through talk therapy and critical analysis of my behavior.

  4. Providing exposure to, practice on and familiarization with alternative behavioral strategies to deal with negative emotions.

  5. Literally just having a parental surrogate figure that cares about your well-being and is not themselves mentally disordered in the same genetically inherited ways you are.

But I will go out and say that therapy is not an abstract thing - the most effective interventions are also the most visceral and concrete. I would broadly speaking characterize it as the process of reprogramming my emotional reactions to certain stimuli. No amount of thinking will do that, you have to experience the world in a different way, to arrive at a different result.

I will also, quite frankly, propose that the success rate of therapy depends more on the individual receiving it than the practitioner, and that a better outcome is generally correlated with other good stabilizing factors - so ironically, those most in need of therapy are those least equipped to benefit from it.

Maybe OP can correct me, but certain therapies try pretty hard to be evidence based and have built up a decent track record, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

Two questions come to mind here when considering CBT/REBT or any of the third-wave behaviorist therapies (ACT, DBT):

  1. What is the effect size? To me, the cost of undergoing any therapy (>$200+ out of pocket per session, much more in the city I live in) means that the effect has to be quite large.

  2. Researchers studying these therapies probably practice them incredibly well compared to baseline--how well does the average person fair when an average therapist is performing these techniques with them?

I'd guess that the top 10-1% of therapists achieve great outcomes for their patients regardless of methodology (talk vs ACT vs something else), and the bottom 90+% do either nothing or worse.

It's definitely dangerous. People are always looking for answers, and there are psychologists out there willing to provide. How to be happy, how to live your life, even the meaning of life. I believe that this whole "go to therapy" thing is just a way of invalidating the other person: "You only say that because you don't do what my psychologist told me it's best, therefore you are irrational, sick, mad, and not to be taken seriously".

And in the end, if you are a jerk, psychology might just not help you. If psychology were a cure for stupidity, then psychologists would be all perfect human beings. My frequent contact with psychologists makes me a firm believer that this is not the case.

I definitely know such people. Some very close so that I can verify they are correct in claiming therapy has helped them a lot and in a way "cured" them. However all of them are people who can function normally under stable conditions but who had some destabilizing factor in their life (family chaos, bad breakup, some sort of issue that got them a mild mental illness label etc) that needed stabilization through discussions with a smart caring adult who seems to know what they are talking about and sometimes drugs. The OP's point stands and I don't personally know people who had "serious" mental disorders so I cannot judge that side of the spectrum.

In my experience, talk therapy is an extremely female-oriented thing. I would not be surprised to learn it helps women, and I am almost sure it almost universally fails to help men. Very rarely do I talk to a man who says it has ever helped, and the few who do are not on the more masculine end of the scale. I think there are very different stress responses between men and women, and that the treatment of therapy as a religion is another brick in the attempted feminisation of men wall.

It depends on what the guy is there for and what is discussed. If the focus is on how they feel and why it’s usually a waste of time. It can be helpful if the focus is on coming up with tangible goals and figuring out ways to accomplish them.

Plenty of therapy that is “talk” is also

Action oriented. There’s a huge branch literally called “behaviour therapy” based on this idea. It probably does help men better than women

I am a man who was helped through therapy. I consider myself cured. Not sure if therapy was the main driver but it did help.

I would guess it is because guys need to do something in addition to talk. So talk therapy + some constructive activity in addition might end up being a winner there.

That was how it worked for me. I would do a therapy session then immediately thereafter go to boxing class. Between the two of them it really helped clear my head.

I did a decent amount of therapy last year because I was dealing with some personal issues and the strain was impacting my ability to do anything but dwell on my emotional state. So I relented and gave it a try since I didn't want to go the pharmaceutical route.

I think it was helpful. Maybe not helpful enough for how much it cost but that's true of almost all medical treatments these days, it seems.

The factor that I REALLY did like, though, is that they were basically a professional 'friend' and confidant, where I could spill my guts and rant and admit to my own insecurities, etc. etc. and be relatively certain they wouldn't get bored, irritated, mock me, or otherwise reject my point of view as unreasonable, and also would never divulge them to anyone else.

This was useful so that I could avoid placing too much strain on my existing friendships. All my good friends were there for me and listened to me at length, mind, but I wasn't going to have hour-long weekly phone calls with them because that would be unreasonable to expect, and there was no way I could be fully honest to them anyway.

It was a handy 'release valve' and helped get my emotional life on some semblance of a track because I could always tell myself "just hold out until therapy day and you can talk about it then." The mere act of having someone listen to your angst is potentially helpful, even if they aren't offering direct advice on how to grapple with the emotions, which mine did.

So if we just classify therapy as "paying money to have someone fill the emotional support role normally filled by one's spouse, parents, or best friend" then I think we can conclude there is value in it.

The problem is that therapy has an extremely questionable record with addressing actual detectable mental illness with anything better than placebo/self help rates.

Anecdote: I did both 1-on-1 talk therapy and outpatient group therapy to help treat clinical depression. I think both helped. Both were for short periods, and I haven't needed therapy again in many years - I consider myself "cured".

That was a gold mine! Thanks for sharing.

Quite a frustrating post: high standards for experiments, and low standards for anec"data":

However, what I learned through a few weeks of CBT, deconstructing every bad thought and bad emotion, is that the frequency and intensity of bad emotions is not affected at all by reasoning.

Glad that was settled rigorously.

Psychology has always been flimsy. It cannot or should not be held to the same level of rigor as engineering, and that is fine. Psychology has its uses, like psychometrics, personality inventory , behavior, etc. It's just that the signal is way dwarfed by noise in a lot of these respects, and the recurring tendency of fraud in the field.

It cannot or should not be held to the same level of rigor as engineering

I would argue that it's being held to a higher, more dangerous standard: that of replacement moral arbiter in a godless world.

Is there any correlation between the existence of psychiatrists and psychologists and people killing themselves less often, being less drug dependent, having happier relationships? Maybe psychologists should be studying what we can learn from the distant past, when we were doing well by various indices of mental health you could invent and doing so without any actual psychologists? I suspect the answer is the simple obvious conservative one --- we are fat, lazy, bored, weak, overstimulated and understimulated, and our purpose to our social circles has been replaced by the welfare state?

Could psychologists be positively harmful?

Could psychologists be positively harmful?

Yes, insofar as they:

  1. Obscure the material conditions that make people unhappy by framing it as some sort of "mental health crisis" that floats in the realm of collective human psychology

  2. And therefore personalize a collective social problem and propose panaceas that clearly target the wrong thing (perhaps the systemic issue is not a lack of mental health support but the growing need for mental health support?)

You can see this on the Left especially, where many discussions about what exactly is so toxic about modern Western society that it makes people unhappy essentially get permanently derailed into "we need more psychiatry" instead of "people need larger friend groups" or "steadier jobs or better hours" or "cheaper housing" or even just "they need to exercise more" or any other solution that poses even a slight challenge to how society is currently organized.

No serious discussion about whether truly radical changes need to be made cause people are on the quixotic "get everyone a therapist" hill.

What kind of leftists are you hanging around? I'm not trying to no-true-scotsman this, but at its core any leftist ideology by definition is "challenging how our society is currently organized". I've seen literally thousands of posts and comments on leftist boards talking about how our current economic and social conditions have directly led to negative psychological trends. It's one of the few things that all subgroups on the left would agree with and fight for.

In terms of practicality, that might be the only solution. If someone will stop suffering with the following two options:

  1. Give them some weird advice that doesn't address the root cause

  2. Tell them to deal with it but advocate for social change

then the second can be as effective as shouting into the wind.

Two problems with this:

  1. This depends on you actually delivering a passable alternative. I'm not sure that we do have for-like replacements for some of the human goods we're missing. If you have a weak support and friend network, bad job prospects and constant stress about money I don't think jogging, CBT or popping pills will necessarily fix the harms that come from this. Certainly not on a collective level.

  2. We don't know either way. But if we spend all our time looking to psychiatry for a solution we may never figure out if 1 actually is an insuperable problem and if we really do need to make that utterly radical shift (or if we can).

Maybe psychologists should be studying what we can learn from the distant past, when we were doing well by various indices of mental health you could invent and doing so without any actual psychologists?

Not sure how you would know that about the distant past. Our knowledge about mental health in even the relatively recent past is very limited: even by (flawed) modern standards, there is a lot that wasn't measured well in the 19th century AD, let alone the 19th century BC.

For theoretical reasons, I suspect there was a surprising amount of happiness in the past, because I think the best source of happiness is meaningful work and that's easy to find when you need to spend a large fraction of your day just ensuring your long-term caloric intake, maybe some more preparing to fight for your life/wife or trying desperately to ensure that at least half of your 10 kids make it to adulthood, and another fraction praying to the gods so that they don't make your destitute/dead with a flood, famine, or plague. On the other hand, life had a lot of lethal uncertainties, which are probably bad for happiness, so I wouldn't want to bet either way as to whether average mental health was better or worse back then.

Psychology can be harmful for sure, since it doesn't know very well what it's doing. But I don't think that psychology as a whole is harmful. There are other factors to take into account. For instance, people 500 years ago didn't have cocaine, and even if they had had it, they wouldn't have been able to produce at the industrial levels we produce it today.

Yeah, but that's exactly what they hide behind - "ok yes obviously it would be better if all psychologists gave out industrial amounts of cocaine, but at least some of them do, so it's not all bad". And since they are psychologists, and all of them are familiar with the concepts of projection, transference and denial, I refuse to believe none of them know that "it's not all bad" almost always leads to "therefore we don't have to worry about it".

Edit: lol ok no jokes then. Which is it dude, does psychology know what it's doing or doesn't it? You can't end your op talking about psychology's hubris and the false perception of it as a cure all, and then say that it might be good anyway because we have bigger issues to deal with nowadays and need every tool we can get. You are just perpetuating the hubris. Better instead to take the tools that work and figure out why, and discard the detritus of a discipline with zero actual discipline, surely?

Edit 2: @Gregor, I think I have to tell you I edited my post.

But psychology does just that. They take the tools that work and implement them to solve problems. So, they know how to fix problems. What they don't know, is how to understand this problems. As it usually happens with everything, psychology has both good and bad things. The problem is that what good psychology does, is waaay overrated.

Psychology is shamanism, barely repackaged for those who scoff at "religious superstition".

Yes, I have a degree in Psychology.

I’d put it as “alchemy”: we’ve learned a lot, but it’s all mixed in with all the things we think we’ve learned.

And then there are the CIA, major corporation marketing departments, and freemium game developers, which really do have things figured out.

It would be way cooler to be an alchemist rather than a psychologist. And who knows, you might even succeed at summoning a demon ir something.

Summoning isn't alchemy, it's theurgy. Along with astrology, those were the three Hermetic Arts studied by Boyle, Bacon, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, etc., until the winnowing of nonsense from truth turned alchemy into the foundation of modern chemistry and medicine, turned astrology into the foundation of modern astronomy and physics, and turned theurgy into ... well, absolutely nothing, as far as I know, but in that esteemed company it's practically begging to be the subject of a conspiracy theory, don't you think? I hope it's at least part of the backstory of some YA Urban Fantasy series by now.

Or just giving yourself lead poisoning.

Only if you spell it as "alchymy," IMO.

I don't think that psychology is efficient at all. Most of it is not helping at all and a small part of it has moderate efficacy. That small part might even be a common sense methods. Like in medicine it would be a common sense to put a clean dressing on injury to prevent a person bleeding to death and possibly cleaning the wound first with something to minimise risk of infection.

Most of it is not helping at all and a small part of it has moderate efficacy.

There's also the question of the unmentioned section here: where psychology is actively exporting particular Western psychoses as allegedly-objective "diseases".

But think it this way: The more bandages you put, the better you get at it. So psychology is efficient, if only by the mere fact that it's been doing the same thing for several decades now.

Well, people in the past didn't know about germs and cleaning the wound and sterilizing bandages was not intuitive for them. And while some kind of natural antibiotics were used in ancient Greece, it was not properly understood until very recently.

Psychology is not like chemistry but I allow for a possibility that they are tinkering around things that eventually can lead to better therapies and outcomes.

Yeah. After reading the unfiltered internet for years, and seeing people pour out their problems on the page, things I have never experienced, the more I am convinced that simple life hygiene is what is wrong with so many of them. They cause so many of their own problems. Moreover I think that so many of these problems are left over from when we lived in tribes. We stopped doing that a long time ago, and yet we still have all these neuroses because we don't make our own food or weave our own baskets any more. Especially not living in extended families, that one was a punch in the gut to humanity.

Heck I don't say this as some exemplar of a shining true life, either. I used to think I was depressed. Turns out, there was no brain chemical imbalance at all, it was just that I had a shitty life and that was because I was doing it wrong.

I am convinced that simple life hygiene is what is wrong with so many of them

I don't understand what this means. Are you saying these people don't clean themselves enough? Or does "life hygiene" have a specific meaning I can't figure out

Basic stuff. Really, really basic. Like showering every day, loving your children, shouldering responsibility for your life, being the changes you want to see, planning the life you'd like to have, going somewhere that's good enough so that the going is worth the while. So, so many people don't even do this, but it's that they don't even ask the questions in the first place. Or even know that they should be asking these questions. It's really sad.

In earlier ages, we had elders who would instruct the young. They knew what they had to do. Hunt the buffalo, weave baskets, fetch water, form families, respect the land, live such that your ancestors would be proud. Now that's gone and it's causing profound suffering.

Bravo! You had me at psychology is overrated.

Somehow sociology is even worse.

I think many of the problems I highlighted apply to many of the "human sciences", but the problem with psychology imo is that it's the loudest of them all, and certainly the more popular one. So I do not think that sociology is overrated at all, or at least not as overrated as psychology.

I see sociology/anthropology as having the Frankenstein problem. DEI, SEL etc come from "Sociologists" and is now being forced on all other science departments, including hard sciences.

As if chemists, upon discovering cocaine, not only became addicted, but

required all other science departments to become addicted to cocaine as a condition of employment.

Psychology is, therefore, the science of producing solutions that work for people that need them.

I thought it psychology was specific to helping people solve problems by analyzing their individual thought processes and proposing and assisting them in implementing changes to their thought processes?

Still very broad, but I assume excludes crystal therapy even if there was evidence of its efficacy.

The problem is that it doesn't matter if you analyze thought processes or not. In fact, it doesn't even matter if thoughts exist or not. What matters is getting a working solution.

This Yudkowsky tweet comes to my mind a lot when people say "Men would rather [X] than go to therapy."

https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1445193026641412096

God, yes. That tweet feels like a breath of fresh air among all the "go to therapy" posts.

I thought it psychology was specific to helping people solve problems by analyzing their individual thought processes and proposing and assisting them in implementing changes to their thought processes?

It sounds like you're referring to CBT here? Freudian psychoanalysis isn't really this. Notably, freud still "works". Also, EDMR works. At least freud, while absurd, is complicated, moderately-interesting in its absurdity, but EDMR seems like something out of scientology. And scientology's methods would, probably, succeed in a RCT just like cbt and edmr do.

Which begs the question - do CBT's claimed methods of changes of thought processes actually do anything, or are they just scientific sounding gloss to the same combination of social pressure and faux friendship as two hundred years ago? "the only reason why cristal therapy and angel therapy are not psychological therapies approved by the APA, is because they are lacking evidence of their efficacy. But this lack could easily be fixed if we really wanted to." - if crystal and angel therapy really do work as well as psychology, surely that's an indictment of psychology.

Scott has talked about this a bunch.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/20/book-review-all-therapy-books/

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/19/scientific-freud/

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/03/to-the-great-city

His conclusion was a tepid, yeah kinda.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/16/cbt-in-the-water-supply/

For a maybe CBT has something going for it over the other methods.

Oh, that's easy - crystal therapy works because the people who are treated with it believe that it works. The placebo effect. It's the same with witch doctors, faith healers, and TCM.

But it's also the same with cbt and Freudian pa and edmr. We are talking about the mind - there is no placebo effect, or rather everything is a placebo effect, because it is all in your head.

But then either psychopharmacology doesn't fit your definition, or if it does, it would be trivial to create a version of crystal therapy that would.

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