Psychologizing

[stormyserenity]

So I'm taking Psych 101 and it is fascinating and a bit disturbing. Fascination to learn about all the interesting things brains can do and even more interesting tricks people are developing to make them do the right things. Also interesting to me as a person with a mental illness. We now have to write a paper about a journal article with

Comments

[aniaj]

It's been a while since I took any of the social sciences classes, but I tend to take them with a huge grain of salt. Look at how drastically theory and practice have changed in the last hundred years. It's still a human attempt to explain human behavior, and comes with a hefty risk of bias (conscious and unconscious) on the part of the observer, not to mention the problems created in the attempt to quantify and statistically analyze patterns of behavior from data that may or may not have been collected consistently. Psych may be useful in application, but it may not be all that accurate as a theory. Also, correlation and causation are not the same, nor does the former imply the latter

[stormyserenity]

Yeah, the more I read the more grains of salt I'm inclined to take. It's all so interesting but there's this nagging feeling that the whole edifice could be constructed on confirmation bias. Brains are amazing and cool, but then there's stuff like mental illnesses that are real but only appear in some cultures so clearly some brain things are the brains being fooled by themselves in a sort of it's-brains-all-the-way-down thing and then MY brain starts to hurt and I want to go play video games.

Existential angst is a problem sometimes, but eventually I have to go to work which ends my philosophical problems. =)