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.
Yes, especially when they treat others in their field as if they are objectively wrong ideologues.
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in favor of attempting to found better systems, and a lot of things we deem part of the canon now may become entirely outdated once superior findings are founded.
The thing about IQ though is that we don't need alternative findings we just need to analyze the current ones.
IQ is real and a robust result. The associations it has with outcomes are usually wrong. The 'inferences' people make given the major studies that support it as a concept are completely misguided in most cases.
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...).
I agree with the comment that it is useful in picking out patterns and that makes it a worth while area of study even when its speculative. Speculation pushes boundaries and produces new hypothesis.
I want to avoid things like the horrors done to people in the name of psychology and medicine during their early development. I think that an emphasis in understanding why a theory is believable and once one is believable what you can reasonably say with it would go a long way in avoiding unnecessary growing pains.