Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Hate Mail - If We Need A Science of Mental Health That's Not The Way To Make One

The problem of mental illness, dangerous irrational behavior, dangerous to those who are ill and those who are secondary victims,  personality flaws, etc. are certainly not going to be addressed scientifically by pretending that things like the TRIM Inventory are scientific.   That is especially the case when the accepted sample sizes in so much of what gets published as psychology couldn't even come up with information as to how a larger population - not to mention the entire world human population they pretend to address - would even answer the thing.  If you are to believe that clearly bogus science is effective in the world then you have not done anything to support the standards necessary to even comprise science, even less so its practices that have produced reliable information and useful things in the past.  And the work I addressed yesterday is hardly of therapeutic value.

Psychology, what is called the social sciences, are not science, they either can't or don't address the phenomena they pretend to address with sufficiently rigorous practices for the results to be science.  That is shown in how frequently schools of psychology rise to prominence, dominate for a time only to crash to the ground when another school overcomes it on the basis of its inadequacy.

The current fad of psychology pasting its standard on the science of evolution might sustain the current regime for a while longer, doing great damage to actual biological science in the process, would be my guess.  But since they can't even do the first thing necessary to address human minds on an evolutionary time scale, that begins with impossible claims.  Psychology, even in its clearly inadequate means of collecting data today depends absolutely on people saying what they are thinking.   The minds to do that on an evolutionary time scale are many millennia passed from articulating what's going on in them, no "data" that the proposed study would depend on will ever be available to the would-be "evolutionary" psychologist.

In lieu of that the "science" makes things up, the "Just-so" stories in Stephen Jay Gould's critique, which are likely to tell us entirely more about the story tellers and the peers they tell them for than they do about the minds of people none of them knew, living in cultural contexts that are likely to be about as far removed from the lives of university based social scientists as it would be possible to imagine.   The central faith of the evolutionary psychologist is that they can do that accurately based on extrapolation founded in their faith in some materialistic uniformity of reality when there is every reason to suspect their belief is an illusion based in their professional culture and its ideological predilections.  It is the same illusion that masks the total inadequacy of their scientific methodology.

It is not surprising that instead of refuting or confronting social, gender, class inequality that evolutionary psychology seems to pretty much confirm existing biases and inequality of distributions in wealth and power.  I don't think it's any accident that it arose in the 1970s, just as the conservatives were rising and overtaking the short and all too modest successes of liberalism from the 1930s through the 1960s.  While it might not have been any kind of plan in that, the instruction of college students with a psych-soc requirement in their degree program about "gene selfishness" and people in the biological sciences finding that they were required to uphold the new order would have certainly had the basis of their liberalism disconfirmed by it.

Conservatives, just as those a century earlier found, the latest science based on natural selection was good news for them.   There's a reason David Brooks and his like love evo-psy and the corporate media promotes it.  Traditional gender role differences, racial inequality, even national and ethnic stereotype were being supported "scientifically" and they certainly welcomed the news.   There would even be muted calls for eugenics being revived, as, in fact, it had never been totally done in by the lessons of recent history.   That evolutionary psychology failed in the clearest of the tasks necessary to establish it as even a pseudo-science, examining the minds and behaviors of ancient people and relating behavior to success in reproduction, was not to be mentioned when the results were so welcome to an establishment that would support the effort and so many grad students needed a new angle to hook their theses and dissertations on.  It doesn't even do what conventional psychology did and pretend to gather that data from the minds that were the alleged focus of its study.

The whole thing is a castle built on sand, it is useless in addressing mental illness, it supports a political system which has destroyed even the previous mental health system, leaving the tragically ill to die on the street and which has replaced mental hospitals for the prison system where so many of the mentally ill end up.   We have reverted, on such science, to the 18th century.   I think that a psychology that incorporates the survival of those who are fit and the death of those who are not could be expected to have those results.  And that is what evolutionary psychology proposed to be.

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