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David Rosenhan’s fraudulent Thud experiment set back psychiatry for decades

spectator.co.uk

101–110 of 127 posts

Re: David Rosenhan’s fraudulent Thud experiment set back psychiatry for decades

#101
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really seems like you're asking, "Must I believe this?" instead of "What is true?" You picked a couple of questions on the survey to try to dismiss the study. Someone believing the opposite of you could have picked "attraction to male physique" (where trans women score lower) combined with "attraction to feminine males" (where they score higher) to bolster the autogynephilia theory. There's also the complication t…

Let me put it this way: Being able to distinguish groups is not enough. The core of the theory is that these people have a fundamentally different underlying reason for feeling female. I'll keep this study in mind, but without more context it doesn't seem to show a difference like that on 90% of the parameters. With more numbers maybe it would... but I don't have them. I picked those questions because they showed som…

> No, I haven't spent that much time on this subject before to the point of digging up studies.

What? But you said this earlier:

> You can apply all the "autogynephilia" testing and logic to most cis women and they'll come out with a strong diagnosis.

Why did you state that as fact when you had no clue what the academic consensus was? If you’re going to make such assertions, you need to base them on evidence.

Re: David Rosenhan’s fraudulent Thud experiment set back psychiatry for decades

#102

The fact is psychiatry today still lacks tests or any proof of its claims of "chemical imbalance", which remains unproven. No one had established a profile for what a "balanced brain chemistry"looks like, nor do they test for any brain chemistry imbalance. Diagnosis is still left to the subjective assessment of the practitioner before prescribing powerful psychotropics that DO change brain chemistry in unpredictable…

> So the argument today that psychiatry lacks any scientific basis and rigor for its practices is still very valid and legitimate.

It's been said that psychiatry is the new religion and psychiatrists the new priests for a reason. Any good actor with enough information can pretend he has a mental illness and fool psychiatrists. Not only that, you can have psychiatrists come up with different diagnoses for the same individual - even to the point of contradicting each other. And there is no scientific way to show one psychiatrist is correct or not.

Just like religion was the best we could do with level of knowledge we had in the past. Psychiatry is sadly the best we can do with the current level of knowledge. It's pretty much voodoo, but it's better than the voodoo that came before it. If neuroscience ( an actual science ) lives up to its potential, then we'll finally be able to toss psychology into the same waste bin we put astrology in and perhaps psychiatry can have a scientific foundation.

Re: David Rosenhan’s fraudulent Thud experiment set back psychiatry for decades

#103
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me put it this way: Being able to distinguish groups is not enough. The core of the theory is that these people have a fundamentally different underlying reason for feeling female. I'll keep this study in mind, but without more context it doesn't seem to show a difference like that on 90% of the parameters. With more numbers maybe it would... but I don't have them. I picked those questions because they showed som…

> No, I haven't spent that much time on this subject before to the point of digging up studies. What? But you said this earlier: > You can apply all the "autogynephilia" testing and logic to most cis women and they'll come out with a strong diagnosis. Why did you state that as fact when you had no clue what the academic consensus was? If you’re going to make such assertions, you need to base them on evidence.

God forbid I use wikipedia once in my life. Is that the only part you want to reply to, not the substantive parts?

Let's just use the main study you linked to. It shows biological females scoring 5.07 out of 9 on "core autogynephilia", with a standard deviation of 3.5.

Re: David Rosenhan’s fraudulent Thud experiment set back psychiatry for decades

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also implies the decline of psychoanalysis was a bad thing, when it's basically pseudoscience.

If you mean Freudian psychoanalysis, you're right. Freud was a quack. The word "pseudoscience" was literally coined just to describe him. If you mean all psychotherapy is bullshit, you're wrong. There are bad therapists just like with everything else, but good psychotherapists have saved a lot of lives over the years. And if, on the off chance, you think all therapy is bullshit despite never having had therapy yourse…

Any citations?

Re: David Rosenhan’s fraudulent Thud experiment set back psychiatry for decades

#105
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you mean Freudian psychoanalysis, you're right. Freud was a quack. The word "pseudoscience" was literally coined just to describe him. If you mean all psychotherapy is bullshit, you're wrong. There are bad therapists just like with everything else, but good psychotherapists have saved a lot of lives over the years. And if, on the off chance, you think all therapy is bullshit despite never having had therapy yourse…

Any citations?

This is a pretty strong starting point:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Comb...

Re: David Rosenhan’s fraudulent Thud experiment set back psychiatry for decades

#106

While this is fascinating and I'm glad to have read it, it doesn't substantiate that this experiment set back psychiatry. The fact that the DSM-IV was prompted or encouraged by the experiment is suggested, but there's no argument for it. Even beyond that, the article doesn't even hint at an argument that the DSM-IV set back psychiatry (except offering the bare assertion that reductionism is false). Of course, the DSM…

Interestingly, the article makes no mention of the followup experiment where it seems a hospital invited a repetition and then claimed to have found 40 or so fake patients during the agreed period. Only to be told that the experimenters had sent none. Or at least that's the version told in Adam Curtis' documentary The Trap (part 1)[1] which engages in Curtis's usual enthusiasm for fashioning a sweeping historical nar…

>article makes no mention of the followup experiment where it seems a hospital invited a repetition and then claimed to have found 40 or so fake patients during the agreed period

'a hospital' - which hospital?

Makes sense to carefully re-examine the other claims of the paper.

Re: David Rosenhan’s fraudulent Thud experiment set back psychiatry for decades

#107
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you mean Freudian psychoanalysis, you're right. Freud was a quack. The word "pseudoscience" was literally coined just to describe him. If you mean all psychotherapy is bullshit, you're wrong. There are bad therapists just like with everything else, but good psychotherapists have saved a lot of lives over the years. And if, on the off chance, you think all therapy is bullshit despite never having had therapy yourse…

Any citations?

Within the humanities there will probably always be a lot of people who love Freud because he lets them say subversive things about society.

But in the sciences he’s been debunked. Any Psych 101 book will tell you his methods are no longer used. Their most direct descendant, psychodynamics, is very different from its ancestor.

Within the sciences, check out Karl Popper’s work on falsifiability. Freud is his example of pseudoscience: it sounds smart, and it can explain lots of things in retrospect, but if you write down it’s predictions in advance they often don’t match outcomes. Practitioners don’t acknowledge this or try to correct it.

Re: David Rosenhan’s fraudulent Thud experiment set back psychiatry for decades

#108
post #62
post #46

Note that Rosenhan was a social psychologist. The list of faulty or outright fraudulent experiments done by psychologists grows ever longer. The entire field seems bankrupt to me. Part of the problem are perverse incentives. Get one positive and interesting result (which you can tailor to the zeitgeist for maximum impact) and you can live off books, TED talks and lectures for your whole life. Recent examples include…

I can't seem to figure out the incentives behind [2], the idea that during door-to-door canvassing only gay people can be effective at changing non-gay people's minds about same-sex marriage seems like an odd narrative for someone to want to push. Other than encouraging employment of gay individuals by political campaigns/canvassers or maybe a general superiority complex, by stating that only gay people are capable o…

> I can't seem to figure out the incentives behind [2]

If I recall from discussion at the time, the reason the false finding was so welcome (and therefore so rewarding to the con man who wrote it up) was that it purported to show that making a large change to public opinion was cheap and easy to do.

Re: David Rosenhan’s fraudulent Thud experiment set back psychiatry for decades

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also implies the decline of psychoanalysis was a bad thing, when it's basically pseudoscience.

If you mean Freudian psychoanalysis, you're right. Freud was a quack. The word "pseudoscience" was literally coined just to describe him. If you mean all psychotherapy is bullshit, you're wrong. There are bad therapists just like with everything else, but good psychotherapists have saved a lot of lives over the years. And if, on the off chance, you think all therapy is bullshit despite never having had therapy yourse…

not op, but I think OP is talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoanalysis

and not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychotherapy

Re: David Rosenhan’s fraudulent Thud experiment set back psychiatry for decades

#110
post #46

Note that Rosenhan was a social psychologist. The list of faulty or outright fraudulent experiments done by psychologists grows ever longer. The entire field seems bankrupt to me. Part of the problem are perverse incentives. Get one positive and interesting result (which you can tailor to the zeitgeist for maximum impact) and you can live off books, TED talks and lectures for your whole life. Recent examples include…

The list of faulty of outright fraudulent experiments done in any number of fields, especially the biomedical sciences, also grows ever longer, but it it seems this argument is hardly ever leveled here. It's well-established now that these problems exist in other fields, such as immunology, oncology, and other fields. Even closely related fields, such as the neurosciences, have been shown to be full of improbable and unreplicable findings, and many neuroimaging results are not interpretable in the way that claims are made of them.

Theranos anyone?

Every field should be looked at with caution until the perverse incentives that currently exist in academics are addressed.

What I see instead is a bias in certain physical sciences to think that somehow experiential phenomena are less rigorous because they don't fit the mold of those sciences as much. The systems are more complex and different metaphysically, so their legitimacy is questioned. This is somehow still happening even as developments in fields like quantum physics and AI are leading many very competent scholars to question basic assumptions about the nature of experience and consciousness vis-a-vis physically observable phenomena.

The irony of the Rosenhan study is that Rosenhan was putting forth exactly the same arguments as you, that psychiatry lacks rigor because it's too subject to the whims of subjectivity. So when this paper is shown to have been a fraud (even though it was dismissed in the field for many other reasons, but overall because it was unscientific) it is evidence that psychology is unrigorous? When it is not widely known to be a fraud per se, it is cited as evidence that psychology is unrigorous as well? It seems there's no way to win: the critics of the field cite this work as evidence of lack of rigor, and then when it's shown to be fraudulent, it's also shown as lack of rigor.

The even greater irony is that many of these fraudulent studies are being identified by... you guessed it, psychologists. I would go so far as to say no field has done more for the scientific study of science than psychology. Meta-analysis has its birthplace in psychology, and all these discussions of replicability ultimately flow from psychology as a field. If anything, psychology is among the only ones to be open about these issues and to take them seriously. In many other fields, they're swept under the rug, and questioners are attacked with arrogant hostility and accusations of incompetence.

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