"If we do not have causality, we are buggered"...

[eFestivals]

Now we don't know for sure. You're making it up as you go along. There is just as much basis for gravity as there is for motivation. They are both abstract concepts of which there is absolutely no physical evidence. It's the same for all action, because action isn't an object.

Which part of "as sure as it gets with science, anyway" didn't you get, along with not getting that ideas that are having to be constantly revised (unlike gravity) are not trustworthy?

Using a scientific method only proves that a scientific method has been used. It says nothing about what trust a person can have in the conclusions - that requires a different method of assessment.

Now, you might be - are, it seems - foolish enough to place your trust only in scientific method, but real scientists are not. It's the whole starting point in this thread.

[worm]

What part can't you understand? Thought is a force, not an object. It is measured by its output, not its physical form. It's exactly the same for all forces. Even objects are made up of forces. Material is not dormant.

[eFestivals]

How is that even relevant? What are you spouting now? Gravity is an idea.

and so is the idea of science, but it says nothing of the value or trust that can be placed in any scientific conclusion.

We know thru hundreds of years of testing that the idea of gravity is a trustworthy idea. It's been there to be knocked down for all that time, and nothing has knocked it down. It proves (same caveat as ever) that the scientific method used to prove the idea of gravity was strictly applicable, and that the conclusions drawn from that method were also correct.

Compare and contrast that 'science' with the 'science' that 'proved' the world was flat. It turned out that the scientific methods were wrongly applied, and that the conclusions drawn were wrong.

Science by itself says nothing about how right an idea might be. It only says "this is what we conclude right now". But if that conclusion stands the test of time, and gets extrapolated into other things and those other things also stand the test of time, then we can start to trust what science has told us.

Name just one idea (not merely a label) of psychology which has existed in an unchanging state for (say) 100 years. .... The idea of what thinking is has changed, and everything that comes from that has changed as a result.

Can we yet even trust the ideas we have of what thinking is? Nope. The proof is your insistence of sticking to an idea that has been proven wrong since you swallowed your now-dated textbook.

Show me evidence of a physical force? You can't.

the dent in your head from a brick. Oh, you wouldn't see that, but I would.

[eFestivals]

This is exactly the same for motivation. It's exactly the point I'm putting to you. If the independent and dependent variables are the same then the study will be replicated.

yep, an absolutely correct scientific approach.

But the problem for psychology is that it doesn't have the first idea what independent or dependent variables there are, and has no way of knowing them or testing for them - because there are an infinite number of possibilities.

Unless you're going to tell me how the variables of every person's every experience have been included in the test?

We KNOW these are of relevance to the output of thinking (one of the few things which psychology does know), but they are not of relevance to gravity on a brick (once we've established that everyone's experience of a falling brick is the same of course).

But there is no evidence of what is creating the gravitational force, just as there is no evidence of what is creating the motivational force. All we have from a scientific perspective is the behaviour of objects indicating that there is a force. In object behaviour, we call that gravity. In human behaviour, we call that motivation.

We do have unchanging evidence of what creates a gravitation force.

We have no unchanging evidence for what creates a motivational force.

So very different things, with very different substance in fact.

[worm]

Which part of "as sure as it gets with science, anyway" didn't you get, along with not getting that ideas that are having to be constantly revised (unlike gravity) are not trustworthy?

[worm]

We know thru hundreds of years of testing that the idea of gravity is a trustworthy idea. It's been there to be knocked down for all that time, and nothing has knocked it down. It proves (same caveat as ever) that the scientific method used to prove the idea of gravity was strictly applicable, and that the conclusions drawn from that method were also correct.

[worm]

But the problem for psychology is that it doesn't have the first idea what independent or dependent variables there are, and has no way of knowing them or testing for them - because there are an infinite number of possibilities.

[eFestivals]

The part where you say it as if it doesn't apply to psychological forces when it does.

Are the ideas of psychological forces proven for all people at all times, as the ideas of gravity are?

Are those ideas of psychological forces so fixed that they've been established for centuries, and unchanged for all that time despite every test that's been thrown at the ideas?

Have other no-less-solid and unchanging ideas been able to be built on top of those fixed and unchanging psychological ideas, and proven no less true and applicable for all than the initial ideas they're built on?

Method is not all there is to science. Applicability is also relevant. When the applicability fails, so does all of the science.

The 'science of psychology' is built on shifting sand; the 'science of gravity' is not.

The approach you take with psychology and 'science' should have you believing that the world is flat - that idea had method too, no less a scientifically relevant method than you believe makes everything about psychology such a solid idea.

So if psychology is such a solid idea on the basis of reasonably-questionable 'science', how come you don't take the same approach to the 'science' that 'proved' the world as flat? This very fact that you're applying differing criteria to these false* things, by accepting the revisionism of the shape of the world but not the revisionism of psychology gets to show the difference in approach you take, the blind faith you have in ideas that have already been proven as wrong, that you don't take the scientific approach to psychology you believe of yourself.

(* psychology as 'false' on the basis that what was 'scientific psychological fact' only yesterday isn't today)

[eFestivals]

We know thru hundreds of years of testing that the idea of gravity is a trustworthy idea. It's been there to be knocked down for all that time, and nothing has knocked it down. It proves (same caveat as ever) that the scientific method used to prove the idea of gravity was strictly applicable, and that the conclusions drawn from that method were also correct.

That's no different to motivation.

How many more times do you want me to spell this out for you? Each time you say gravity, motivation also applies.

Yeah, cos the ideas of motivation within psychology are unchanged and constant for hundreds of years just as the idea of gravity is.

You don't half talk some worthless shit.

You have such an appreciation of science and an adherence to it that you'll make anything up to try and prove yourself right. I bet you glow with pride.

[eFestivals]

At last we're getting somewhere

with something I said three weeks ago, and which you refused to accept as right you mean? And which got us here, because you refused to accept it back then?

So to return to what I've said all along, when the findings of one experiment do not match up with another you do not throw out the experiment.

except in feral's case they did. Because that 'scientist' operates no less bad a version of science as you manage yourself. It's dogma wrapped up as science.

Rather, you look to see what variables are different from the original study. This way, you'll find out more variables at work in relation to motivation.

and the point of that is what?

You know that the variables - ALL variables - are different for everyone.

And so it is a pointless path. The smart man gives up at this point, and realises that he needs to ask different questions, not try and reach the forever-unobtainable.

By your version of working things, you'd be saying that the world is not round, we've just not got the right variables to prove it's flat.

You just seem to be chucking out the experiment because it didn't replicate.

no, I'm chucking out the worth of what psychologists say because they'll warp the data &/or results to make it replicate established dogma - because that's exactly what feral said happened, and it's a very normal approach of psychologists; you are the living walking talking proof with your posts here over the years (tho my conclusions are based on way more evidence that just you or feral).

If it doesn't replicate, then you start looking for the reason why. That's what science is all about.

yep, I do and you don't. And that's why the version I operate is perhaps science but what you do definitely isn't.

We didn't chuck gravity out when we landed on the moon and found weightlessness.

that's because everything about gravity proved true at that point, it didn't prove it wrong.

Edited September 29, 2011 by eFestivals

[Kizzie]

Oh God….how uninteresting are you two, I wish you'd do it in private.

I came on here for a quick tea break read…..'I'm out'.

Anyway I thought it was about 'Casualty'…..disappointed.

[eFestivals]

What a fucking snoozefest ...

Yep, but still relevant (for once) to this thread all the same.

Just because something has been discovered by scientific method doesn't mean that the result should be accepted as being of solid and trustworthy substance. If something about the result looks wrong then it probably is.

Which is precisely the view that these scientists have taken with what they've discovered with neutrinos.

Discretion is the better part of valour science.

All of the drivel here between me and worm has been my attempt to get this across to him. Our different views are merely opinions on how value can be put against knowledge, tho history gets to show that one approach to this but not the other gets to reduce the number of wrong paths that get taken and so gives a better and more reliable valuation.

[feral chile]

I think it's cases like this, the origins of the theory of multiple personality disorder, that Neil has the most objection to, and I agree and deplore this type of psychology/psychiatry:

http://skepdic.com/mpd.html

Dr. Herbert Spiegel, who also treated "Sybil", believes Wilbur suggested the personalities as part of her therapy and that the patient adopted them with the help of hypnosis and sodium pentothal. He describes his patient as highly hypnotizable and extremely suggestible. Mason was so helpful that she read the literature on MPD, including The Three Faces of Eve. The Sybil episode seems clearly to be symptomatic of an iatrogenic disorder. Yet, the Sybil case is the paradigm for the standard model of MPD. A defender of this model, Dr. Philip M. Coons, claims that "the relationship of multiple personality to child abuse was not generally recognized until the publication of Sybil."

The MPD community suffered another serious attack on its credibility when Dr. Bennett Braun, the founder of the International Society for the Study of Disassociation, had his license suspended over allegations he used drugs and hypnosis to convince a patient she killed scores of people in Satanic rituals. The patient claims that Braun convinced her that she had 300 personalities, among them a child molester, a high priestess of a satanic cult, and a cannibal. The patient told the Chicago Tribune: "I began to add a few things up and realized there was no way I could come from a little town in Iowa, be eating 2,000 people a year, and nobody said anything about it." The patient won $10.6 million in a lawsuit against Braun, Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Hospital, and another therapist.

[worm]

Yep, but still relevant (for once) to this thread all the same.

Just because something has been discovered by scientific method doesn't mean that the result should be accepted as being of solid and trustworthy substance. If something about the result looks wrong then it probably is.

Which is precisely the view that these scientists have taken with what they've discovered with neutrinos.

Discretion is the better part of valour science.

All of the drivel here between me and worm has been my attempt to get this across to him. Our different views are merely opinions on how value can be put against knowledge, tho history gets to show that one approach to this but not the other gets to reduce the number of wrong paths that get taken and so gives a better and more reliable valuation.

[worm]

And this is what gives psychology a bad name, while I'm sure that there are many respectable psychologists trying their hardest to be objective, and not to allow theory to lead them (and their clients) astray. The evidence should lead to a theory, and not the other way round.

Edited September 30, 2011 by worm

[worm]

..

Edited September 30, 2011 by worm

[eFestivals]

No, it's you not understanding the scentific method and abstract forces. It has nothing to do with psychology.

do stop with this idiocy, eh? I have a far better understanding of scientific method than you - because I appreciate the limitations of what that method might tell.

There is scientific method. There is fuck all which demonstrates that any scientific method is the right method to use as a form of discovery outside of the reliability in fact of the results from that method. If you ask the wrong question of a set of data, you only get worthless bollocks out of the other end.

The reliability of some scientific discoveries is constantly re-enforced by testing from all sorts of angles which keep on showing that that discovery holds true.

The reliability of other scientific discoveries is constantly undermined, because other tests throw that discovery into doubt or negates it altogether.

The difference between those is the time that a discovery has held true. The longer it's held true, the more reliable the results/conclusion can be said to be.

Gravity has held true for hundreds of years. Almost nothing of any depth from psychology holds true for longer then ten minutes. It requires constant revisionism not because its ideas are right but because they're not right.

The difference with motivation is that the constraint in which it is measured is far more complex.

I get this. It is only your stupidity which has you constantly saying that I don't. It's a waste of your finger tips to keep typing it, and as waste of mine to have to call you a moron each time you do.

That does not mean that science abandons the concept.

No, it means that sensible people accept that the conclusions that are drawn are quite likely to be wrong.

And the constant revisionism of psychology (a revisionism that you've failed to keep up with) gets to show in facts that people are right to be sceptical about the conclusions that psychology draws on such a weak basis.

You only get a positively right answer by asking the right question of a full set of data. Psychology can never get the full set of data, and history has shown that it's also crap at asking the right questions of the data it does have available. The result is that the conclusions of psychology are weak and unreliable. The facts of psychological conclusions over the years get to prove this.

[eFestivals]

We're saying that science is capable of measuring psychological concepts and that they have just as much scientific validity as physical concepts.

The results of a scientific test of course have scientific validity.

But what you're not getting is that that says fuck all about whether they are positively right or not.

I asked you to tell me any concept of psychology which has been unchanged for 100 years. You swerved the question, because there is no answer you can give.

And that's because those psychological conclusions are so weak and unreliable in reality that they're constantly proven as wrong by further scientific tests, so causing the very basics of psychology to change, and everything upwards from that.

The same thing used to happen in the 'normal' sciences until they reached a certain level of knowledge which set the right basics to work up. Enlightenment.

Psychology has yet to reach the point of enlightenment, as the facts of psychology in history get to prove.

[feral chile]

That isn't relevant though. There is no theory being discussed. We're discussing the scientific method in relation to measuring abstract forces. Neil seems to believe that physical abstract forces are acceptable because of history or some such, whereas psychological ones aren't. It's a load of shit. Motivation is real and has been proven time and time again. The only difference is that the results of motivation are variable owing to its relationship with environmental and other psychological triggers, such as social norms and identity and such like. Gravity is variable too, but the measurement is generally taken in a constant constraint (on earth) so it is less variable.

We aren't arguing psychological theory here. We're saying that science is capable of measuring psychological concepts and that they have just as much scientific validity as physical concepts. So a mix of results reveals that there is a missing variable. There is no theory of motivation, there is just motivation - the thing that drives us to act and is measured through our actions.

[rabid]

Gravity has held true for hundreds of years. Almost nothing of any depth from psychology holds true for longer then ten minutes. It requires constant revisionism not because its ideas are right but because they're not right.

[eFestivals]

I thought 250 years of Newtonian mechanics was replaced by Einsteins General Theory. Isn't that a teeny bit of revision?

Technically yes, but it was only really a tweaking of Newton's. It makes an insignificant difference to just about an application of Newton's theory, it's pretty much only in experimental fields that Einstein becomes relevant.

It would have been an impossible paradox for Newton to have got that within his original theory anyway. Newton's theory was needed for Einstein to reach the point of knowledge where he could prove Newton wrong.

All the same, Einstein's theory is over a hundred years old, which gives it a fixed maturity to the idea, which any complex part of psychology doesn't have.

[Ed209]

Yup, Einstein's theories just reduce to Newtonian mechanics at small speeds (the world we operate in). Enforcing both of them.

Newton really was an incredible man.

[rabid]

All the same, Einstein's theory is over a hundred years old, which gives it a fixed maturity to the idea, which any complex part of psychology doesn't have.

[feral chile]

Einsteins General Theory was published in 1916, you do the maths. Fact is that gravity is far from the done deal you always seem to be implying it is. We don't really understand how it works. I'm no psychology expert, but I'm sure there are parts of it which are well established and other parts which are constantly evolving and being tweaked - just like our understanding of gravity.

Edited September 30, 2011 by feral chile

[feral chile]

Technically yes, but it was only really a tweaking of Newton's. It makes an insignificant difference to just about an application of Newton's theory, it's pretty much only in experimental fields that Einstein becomes relevant.

It would have been an impossible paradox for Newton to have got that within his original theory anyway. Newton's theory was needed for Einstein to reach the point of knowledge where he could prove Newton wrong.

All the same, Einstein's theory is over a hundred years old, which gives it a fixed maturity to the idea, which any complex part of psychology doesn't have.

Edited September 30, 2011 by feral chile