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Re: Emacs psychiatrist


From: David Hansen
Subject: Re: Emacs psychiatrist
Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2008 14:30:29 +0100
User-agent: Gnus/5.110007 (No Gnus v0.7) Emacs/23.0.60 (gnu/linux)

On Fri, 21 Mar 2008 18:13:15 +0100 Lennart Borgman wrote:

> David Hansen wrote:
>> Psychoanalysis doesn't play any role in modern psychology.  Psychology
>> is mainly applied statistics.  And I doubt any serious scientist these
>> days will count psychoanalysis as "science".  Check out some Popper or
>> the "light" and understandable comments from Feynman.
>
> Or check what happened later, read neuropsychoanalysis.

At least they try to find some scientific base.  Don't know about their
success though.

> Psychology is absolutely not only applied statistics.

I said `mainly' (though this might be the case with almost any science).

> That is part of it. There is simply more knowledge than that kind you
> can catch with statistics. Why throw away things that does not fit?

"Knowledge" is kind of worthless if you can't prove it wrong or right.
Without falsifiability it's nothing more than a neat idea and no
knowledge at all.  And statistics is more or less the only way to deal
with any data, no matter if you observe planets orbiting the sun or far
more complex and weird objects like human beings.

David





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