Sociopath Community

AliceInWonderland said: 

This is wise.

Psychological questions are hard to answer objectively.

This looks like you patting her on the back rather than making a general point, and she's very liable to take it that way. 

If that's what she believes than so be it. 

If I see something I generally agree with I may comment regardless of how another will interpret my intentions. 

You literally called her wise for saying it, how is she supposed to take it other than that? 🤨

Turncoat said: 

 

Howso, from browsing the internet? 

What's your background in it? 

Mathematical and Computational Statistics/Probability a long with a more general obsession with justification, verification, and inference.

I spend time in some mathematical communities where the hobby of analyzing the statistical results of papers from various fields is considered exciting. We literally just take the models that were used in a paper, we set it up the exact same way and then add noise. From that random noise the values the authors got will be spit out and with that the validity of their work should be met with extreme skepticism.

Social Science is the worst, followed by Psychology, and then Economics.

Though I find the economics situation to be the most egregious while the other two are understandable given their difficulty and the fact that your average psychologist isn't really in it for the statistics.

I will comment on correlation here because I see this mistake often in Psychology papers.

(1) Correlation is not a measure of dependence, its a measure of linearity.

The problem here is that its common to interpret it as dependence and more so that that its mistakenly used to measure variables that are not all linear.

(2) Correlation is a random variable

For many systems, especially ones in psychology, models must be complex. Metrics in these systems are more pron to gaining as a result. This means that even with large sample sizes a measured correlation, if when measured correctly between a y and x such that y = a + bx + ε, the correlation outputted is not statistically significant even if the model tells you it is.

With each data point we add the values of our metrics change and depending on the complexity of the system those metrics will take longer or shorter to converge to their true value. Even for samples in the many of thousands a metric like correlation will be spurious.

I am not saying anything you are referencing in your head fall victim to this but these issues are insanely common and if you pay attention you'll see them a lot in social science and psychology.  

Both have the aim of having an effect on a patient, yes? This is a genuine question I am asking, specifically in relation to Psychiatry. 

How do you feel about medicating people? I understand the move to this as a wide spread method given its a lot easier to measure the effect a medication has on someones state of mind, so in some sense it MAY be a better research program. 

lol so you don't apply Jungian Psychology to evolutionary psychology? 

Nah dude I'm more like Lilith from Fraiser, dropping the mumbo jumbo in favor of hard results. You don't have to explore the subconscious too far to understand why something like Pavlovian Conditioning works for instance as that's more about direct observation.

I don't know much about this field generally other than its actually quite expansive. 

I have critiqued a few papers and seen others do the same. Model uncertainty is often neglected, this is related to metrics being gained. 

Turncoat said: 

AliceInWonderland said: 

This is wise.

Psychological questions are hard to answer objectively.

This looks like you patting her on the back rather than making a general point, and she's very liable to take it that way. 

If that's what she believes than so be it. 

If I see something I generally agree with I may comment regardless of how another will interpret my intentions. 

You literally called her wise for saying it, how is she supposed to take it other than that? 🤨

I simply mean that heuristic is a good one to follow. 

Its good to follow if you are coming here seeking actual advice on how to deal with your problems. 

If she takes the post as "I am a wise all knowing goddess from Omicron Persei 8 reincarnated here on Earth" then so be it. I am too aloof to change my speech patterns in order to not play into others tendencies to enter psychosis after a trigger word or something. 

And yes, I will enter a thread with a topic name I like, completely ignore op and hijack it to talk about statistics. 

Turncoat said: 

AliceInWonderland said: 

This is wise. 

Psychological questions are hard to answer objectively. 

Consider the source, people give her normal advice and she goes off, or even just correct a source over non-psychological topics like witchcraft or the bible. She is moreso against the guidance of anyone who isn't herself, which lets a lot of bad delusions of hers linger. 

She addressed all of that last week, or the week before. Not long ago.

Yes she'll change so fast it'll make your head spin, but you'll have to keep up or else you'll be in the negative when it comes to Emily. And you are negative, maybe because certain formalities never came into play.

But yes you have to move fast with Emily, discard whatever she discards about herself when she does, or else you'll be lagging behind talking about her previous episodes which is is long over with.  

She also just got out of the ward, she might be wary for different reasons than usual. If she went on even a little bit about Majlak or Manifesting then she might have faced a lot of correction from people, lending perhaps to why all of her posts are in bold now? 

 It must be fun for Emily. Just last week she had your sympathy while it wasn't really called for, this time she has you questioning why she's boldening her text, and she won't respect your feedback toward Alice, who is better for her mental health than you are.

When Emily says she's leaving, don't take her seriously, she finds the "goodbye and suffer humor" entertaining and is doing it herself it seems.

If you give Emily shit for the wrong reasons she won't respect you, but if you give her shit for the right reasons, she'll retaliate for a day and be fine later, kinda like a normal person.

You might have noticed a weak person won't survive Emily. You have to get hard cause she's facing hard truths to a point she's willing to destroy her ego in search of the truth. She won't respect or conform to the sissy weak enabler at this point in time. 

I assumed they were bolded so that she could see her own replies much easier 

Didn't know Spatial was such an expert when it came to The Divine Mother, look at him preaching. 😏

AliceInWonderland said: 

Mathematical and Computational Statistics/Probability a long with a more general obsession with justification, verification, and inference.

I spend time in some mathematical communities where the hobby of analyzing the statistical results of papers from various fields is considered exciting. We literally just take the models that were used in a paper, we set it up the exact same way and then add noise. From that random noise the values the authors got will be spit out and with that the validity of their work should be met with extreme skepticism.

Social Science is the worst, followed by Psychology, and then Economics.

Though I find the economics situation to be the most egregious while the other two are understandable given their difficulty and the fact that your average psychologist isn't really in it for the statistics.

Okay, but how would you suggest they fix it?

The study of the mind isn't really at the point of math yet, the tools haven't really gotten there. Statistics isn't usually Psychology so much as Sociology, with Psych rooted from seeing how behaviors between people show as symptoms towards larger bodies of patterns. 

You have to somewhat eyeball it to get to the point of refining it into something more exacting further down it's development, and with experience it becomes easier to recognize the patterns to the point of being able to measure mental activity based on their physical tells and stories, allowing for the basis to form a case study that can be compared to former data from other patients of a similar path if not an admixture or recombination of multiple. 

Again, when you sort people into who do and don't conform towards these clusters of symptoms, you begin to find things they have in common even outside of that categorization. It works like a means of sorting people, which can be useful for finding more uniform solutions that work broadly across the board and otherwise helping them get through similar struggles they seem predestined to find themselves in over their own tendencies and perceptions, sort of like how groups like AA appeal to more of a mass audience from being more relatable to one another. 

Turncoat said:

I actually knew someone in the field who was a lab tech/monkey for brain scans, it's a budding field but looks pretty optimistic. 

Its much easier to apply metrics to a set of images, especially in the age of sophisticated image processing, than to things like testimony. 

You can still observe over enough test subjects what kinds of responses are and aren't more typical, then for every person who accuses it of not having a large enough sample they can improve upon the data. 

Turncoat said:

THIS, SO MUCH THIS. 

Psychology as it stands right now is more like an encyclopedia, the study itself not one of what to do with the knowledge so much as compiling the knowledge itself, one that when used as a tool lend to people defending very different outcomes from one another. 

Yes, which is why we need to be careful and critical of how we use that knowledge. Plus we have the added dimension of what knowledge in that encyclopedia is genuine knowledge.   

Or pick fields where you study the mind rather than healing it, it's not like it's just a bunch of therapists and counselors with half of them being able to give you drugs. 

Turncoat said:

Psychology versus Psychiatry are two very different approaches to the study of the mind, one that cannot prescribe pills that carries eight years of study versus someone who effectively took four years of psych and four years of medical. Because of that, we often see people in the field pushing pills onto their clients over how they come across as more of a doctor, when really the one who is constrained to not being able to provide medication has twice the education in a single field who is otherwise willing to work twice as hard before settling on it. 

Both have the aim of having an effect on a patient, yes? This is a genuine question I am asking, specifically in relation to Psychiatry. 

One sees the mind as a puzzle while the other sees the mind as a diseased body, the former moreso focusing on coping strategies while the latter tries to bandage a wound. 

The mindset they bring into it is a big deal for what the patient will get out of it. 

How do you feel about medicating people?

In my personal opinion...

It should be a last resort, those undergoing it need to be more directly observed, the first doses should be lower than they typically are and it shouldn't be allowed until they're between 22 and 24. We also need better programs for curbing people off of them, and the idea of being on a medication for their entire life should be reserved for special cases to try to avoid the problems that follow tolerance buildup. The patient also should be made to be more mindful of their diet and med schedule, as this is where I always see patients doing shit wrong. 

Medication is where eyeballing people shows the most danger, as while looking for coping strategies poses less risk... giving someone the wrong medication can straight up ruin their lives, and even giving them the right one can bog them down with nasty side effects that, often enough, don't fully go away if they quit the drug. With Big Pharmaceuticals giving enough doctors a cut of the profits to fence their drugs, many of them haven't even undergone thorough enough testing to be trusted (or they straight up lie). 

A common example I've seen has been bipolar or other mood swing disorders being mistaken for Depression, lending to them being given antidepressants that have them surge into insane heights of mania followed by swings of depression when the med wears off so strong that their suicidal urges aren't even really in their control anymore. Another common one is mistaking... pretty much half of the spectrum of disorders for ADD, even I fell into that net earlier on before further looking into it followed later on. 

Also the idea of giving kids pills to improve their performance, in most cases, should be a crime. How it affects them as adults after the fact comes from how it both trains them to think there's one-step solutions for more complex problems and lends towards the addictive mindset both through the trained behavior associations and physical attachments to these substances. It doesn't take going through very much withdrawal to change as a person, and this is without me even going into the PHYSICAL side effects this can have on developing bodies. 

I understand the move to this as a wide spread method given its a lot easier to measure the effect a medication has on someones state of mind, so in some sense it MAY be a better research program. 

Only for studying it's effects on the mind over what it's simulating in the body, otherwise having people be the lab rats is how we ended up with so many children as guinnea pigs over the past 30-something years. 

Psych is just a tool, how it's used goes by a lot of other names. 

Turncoat said:

I actually have problems with the pseudo-philisophical bullshit, down to a personal level from too many people presuming that if I say I have a degree in it that I must be either Freudian or Jungian. 

 That's understandable. 

lol so you don't apply Jungian Psychology to evolutionary psychology? 

The philosophers of early Psychology were a building block for better things later, someone had to write shit down for other people to refine and critique it, but nowadays their work serves as more as a case study into them through their history rather than something applied towards the field itself. 

There are still people who push the philosophy idea, but they look silly doing it. 

Turncoat said:

What began as speculative is becoming increasingly correlational, but somehow the field cannot avoid the pitfalls of culture, such as labeling homosexuality not a mental disorder. 

They really need to replace 'disorder' with something less judgy, as they still otherwise serve as a way of identifying the differences between different groups of behavior. 

Since correlation is brought up again a great example of how its not a great measure of dependence, especially between groups, is IQ. I like this example because its often coveted as extremely robust, one of the best tested results in all of Psychology. Yet, the inferences you can make from it our abused consistently both my lay people and experts. Plus the correlations between it and different properties are incredibly spurious to being outright nonsense.  

IQ had to be made for it to be seen for it's problems in favor of attempting to found better systems, and a lot of things we deem part of the canon now may become entirely outdated once superior findings are founded. 

In the meantime though, Psychology still works as a useful way of denoting patterns, and it lends into other fields such as the arts remarkably well. Whatever mistakes we make now should ideally be useful in the future so that they don't repeat such mistakes, and there's quite a colorful history of things like that that apply to the now (electroshock, lobotomization, the misguided studies that followed 'Female Hysteria', strapping down panicking people...).

It lends to streamlining of language, as without a name for some things it would be that much harder to identify what's being observed. I also see it as a gateway towards sympathy, giving people a codex to try to understand what's going on with both typical and atypical people while seeing what parts do and don't apply to themselves, rather than presuming they must be the normal one by ego-driven default. It's humbling through how it shows how unique we aren't beyond a recombination of existing things that can aim to be measured and categorized, trivializing the individual somewhat while granting value to the categorized cluster of similarities. 

Press X for doubt.

Turncoat said: 

AliceInWonderland said: 

Mathematical and Computational Statistics/Probability a long with a more general obsession with justification, verification, and inference.

I spend time in some mathematical communities where the hobby of analyzing the statistical results of papers from various fields is considered exciting. We literally just take the models that were used in a paper, we set it up the exact same way and then add noise. From that random noise the values the authors got will be spit out and with that the validity of their work should be met with extreme skepticism.

Social Science is the worst, followed by Psychology, and then Economics.

Though I find the economics situation to be the most egregious while the other two are understandable given their difficulty and the fact that your average psychologist isn't really in it for the statistics.

Okay, but how would you suggest they fix it?

It would take radical change but I think the following is at least possible. 

If do a masters or phd in Psychology, generally by the end of the program you should have an equivalent of an associates and bachelors degree in Statistics respectively. Maybe there are different programs where this requirement is less strict. 

I stress this because I have been studying statistics and probability theory pretty hardcore for that lat two years and I'd say I'm about the bachelors degree level. I did this to understand value dynamics of financial products which is really hard to do right. Applying statistical methods and models to Psychological Experimentation is harder than that yet nearly every Psych person I talk to has a stats 101 level of understanding. That's concerning given my response to your next set of paragraphs. 

Beyond that, as I noted in a previous thread, publishing incentives need to change. A researchers career is tied to their ability to publish papers in research journals. Research journals do not publish papers that conclude with a result not being statistically significant. Metric gaining mechanisms hidden in the mathematics of modeling is what leads to false conclusions around some results being statistically significant. As such, you are financially better off if you are ignorant of how a metric functions within a particular model of an experiment. 

As someone who verifies studies as a hobby it would be nice if the data used in an experiment had to be public once published. In almost all cases data is hidden, so people like me are left with recreating results using the model constructed in the paper and adding noise to see what happens with the metrics used. It would be much easier if we had access to the data because we would also be able to check if the given model itself is even correct. This is a massive hurdle for anyone trying to recreate an experiment as well. 

The study of the mind isn't really at the point of math yet, the tools haven't really gotten there. Statistics isn't usually Psychology so much as Sociology, with Psych rooted from seeing how behaviors between people show as symptoms towards larger bodies of patterns. 

Sociology is really really bad, certainly worse off than Psychology at the moment. 

I am not familiar with Psychology in its totality as a field, I just know there is one specific area I have a bone to pick with. That is whatever you would call research based psychology that runs experiments and attempts to verify results statistically. 

There are areas of the field that can be approached scientifically and quantitatively, I am sure there are other areas that cannot. My specific issue is that those who work in the more scientific area suck at what they do, have few real results, yet treat their findings as objective and then use these to consult on how to deal with patients and inform policy. They essentially push misinformation. 

Turncoat said:

You have to somewhat eyeball it to get to the point of refining it into something more exacting further down it's development, and with experience it becomes easier to recognize the patterns to the point of being able to measure mental activity based on their physical tells and stories, allowing for the basis to form a case study that can be compared to former data from other patients of a similar path if not an admixture or recombination of multiple.

Again, when you sort people into who do and don't conform towards these clusters of symptoms, you begin to find things they have in common even outside of that categorization. It works like a means of sorting people, which can be useful for finding more uniform solutions that work broadly across the board and otherwise helping them get through similar struggles they seem predestined to find themselves in over their own tendencies and perceptions, sort of like how groups like AA appeal to more of a mass audience from being more relatable to one another.

This has to be treated with great care if we are to actually believe it to be robust knowledge. We are so good at seeing patterns where there are none. This is exactly why if psychology and social science are to become actually respected and believable, then rigorous forms of verification are necessary. Statistics is the only way we know of to deal with this atm. 

If that is not achieved then a big part of the field is equivalent to philosophy in my eyes. Not as a subject matter but in how sound it is epistemicaly. It would be like Marxism for instance. Marxism is formed by viewing seemingly real patterns in the world. It becomes a method of analysis and as a theory if you apply to the world it really seems to make sense of everything.

I am sure you can reference theories that actually consistently reproduce. If that's the case, they can be analyzed statistically. If the the groups and associations being described are too ambiguous to be analyzed statistically I will find them interesting and will support their development further. However, I will be skeptical of them as legitimate categories and associations. 

Turncoat said:

I actually knew someone in the field who was a lab tech/monkey for brain scans, it's a budding field but looks pretty optimistic. 

Its much easier to apply metrics to a set of images, especially in the age of sophisticated image processing, than to things like testimony. 

You can still observe over enough test subjects what kinds of responses are and aren't more typical, then for every person who accuses it of not having a large enough sample they can improve upon the data.

Indeed you can and in the same way you would deal with images. The only difference is its easier to set up an experiment with images because they are easily definable and analyzed. 

As to your comments on medication, it does seem crazy that a kid will be given Amphetamine everyday starting at a young age. 

I am entering pure fantasy now but sometimes I wonder if a completely alternative education system would make this method obsolete. The system we impose on kids seems really unnatural and its the expectations in that system that make the apparent need for adhd meds necessary.

The average school day is nearly 7 hours with approximately 6 hours of that being instruction. I wonder how effective it would be if we limited instruction to just 2-3 hours and made the rest of it elective. Maybe you don't have to pump a kid up with speed because they fail to pay attention for 6 hours. The most productive aspect of school seems to be as a place of socialization anyway. 

I went to a Monterssori school for a period and that experience had a big effect on me.