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Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

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Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#121

Post by el_nahual »

maratc wrote: post #94
el_nahual wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just wrong. Depression is a descriptive condition, not a prescrtive one. Many psychiatrists--the quack ones--will use the language of "chemical imbalance" as a sort of "appeal to authority" fallacy. It should be obvious that this is a fallacy because: A) at no point have they actually measured the patient's brain chemistry (and it's not obvious what it would even mean to do this? an imbalance where ? compared…

I'm not arguing, but for a person suffering from depression, who of the following is right? A. People saying "It's all in your head" and reducing depression to a non-biological condition (which is not very helpful at best), or B. Doctors saying "Here, have a pill" and reducing depression to a biological condition? I think that we still don't know, and maybe it's a bit of both, or maybe neither. But TLA seems to go wi…

I must have not done a good job explaining. Of course depression is a biological condition (because the mind emerges from the brain). That doesn't mean it's a single condition with a single cause or even a group of pathological causes, the way cancer is, or MLS.

But yes, of course it's biological. What an intellectually honest psychiatrist would say is something like "look, you're not doing well. Here are some things we can try to shift the playing field a bit. We don't know exactly how they work or why, but we know they do work, somewhat. Want to try? Here's the side effects: "

That would be intellectually honest. Saying "you have A (single, diagnosed) disease, caused by "a chemical imbalance", and the root cause of that disease is treated by this medicine" is dishonest.

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#122

Post by Sharlin »

maratc wrote: post #60
Sharlin wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No no no no. The diagnosis of depression absolutely does not revolve around "changes in body chemistry and the functioning of the brain", except insofar as "functioning of the brain" equals the symptoms reported by the patient! There are no known physical or chemical tests for depression. Even if we have some vague theories about "chemical imbalance in the brain", for the most part the neurological or biochemical mec…

> There are no known physical or chemical tests for depression. The absence of evidence is not an evidence of absence. It is true that so far , we don't have physical or chemical tests for depression. This doesn't prove that the chemistry or the brains or neurotransmitters are functioning the same way in depressed and non-depressed people, it just says the science still can't tell.

Yes, but for now what we call "depression" is those patient-reported symptoms – it cannot be any other way because at the neurochem level there may not even be any single thing that could be called "depression"! The term may not be useful except for denoting a certain syndrome, ie. a set of symptoms. Just like there's no single thing that causes the upper respiratory syndrome that we call "common cold".

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#123

Post by whimsicalism »

ahelwer wrote: post #58
hermannj314 wrote: post #29

I struggle often with this somewhat arbitrary desire for everything to be data-driven and backed by science. People hope, pray, follow best practices, listen to advice on the internet and yet, every now and then we are reminded that only fools do these things. Really intelligent people only listen to science and do things backed by science and lots of data. How does anyone accomplish anything if every step they take…

Well, someone like Taleb would say that human nature (if there is such a thing) has remained unchanged for at least as long as there has been writing. So we have writings thousands of years old on what people thought about how other people work. These have been subject to the best truth filter we know of: time. So you’ll learn more about how your fellow humans operate by reading the classics than whatever bullshit ps…

> human nature (if there is such a thing) has remained unchanged for at least as long as there has been writing

I've seen statements of this sort very frequently - ie. that the "behaviorally modern" human evolved tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago.

I'm curious what the backing of such claims are. It seems profoundly unintuitive to me that human behavior would remain evolutionarily unchanged over tens to hundreds of thousands of years of evolution/founder effects, especially when you consider widespread evolution of various other traits like lactose tolerance in the past ~5,000 years.

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#124

Post by golemotron »

dathinab wrote: post #87
alkonaut wrote: post #41

The interesting question here perhaps isn’t so much whether knowing if you are a particular color or 4-letter Myers-Briggs combination helps you or whether there is a solid foundation to the categorization at all. What’s interesting here is rather: what happens when you think of everyone as a pigeonholed category. Intuitively it seems it should be mostly negative especially if the categories don’t even offer any beha…

> But something tells me that there could also be some positive effects from actually wondering about the behavior of others and how you treat them, even if it’s pigeonholing and preconceptions based on bogus research. I doubt it, any benefit (if there are any) will be FAR outweighed by the negative effects. It makes it way too easy to use the category as a excuse for bad behaviour. It makes it way too easy for someo…

This critique also applies to intersectionality.

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#126

Post by gherkinnn »

> Red: dominant, driven, solution focused -> Powerpoint

> Blue: analytic, careful, meticulous -> Word

> Green: patient, considerate, nice -> Excel

> Yellow: extroverted, creative, verbal -> Outlook

Interestingly enough, these colours map quite well to the Office suite of old.

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#127

Post by dathinab »

dmingod666 wrote: post #48
wwilim wrote: post #9

Anything that boils an entire branch of science down to something this simple is by definition a scam. The funniest part of the article was how Forbes lists this as a top ten must-read. And why wouldn't it, removing all nuance and operating on big words invented by an "expert" is peak C-level thinking. Finally, I feel obliged to point out that the four types described are essentially the Houses of Hogwarts with the c…

Big 5 boils down to 5 words, not a scam..

Bit 5 doesn't try to explain behaviour, but only classifies statistical differences in test results.

It also boils down to a 5-dimensional vector not 5 categories of people.

If we see each dimension in just 10 bins then that's still 100000 different categories.

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#130

Post by arbitrage »

zibzab wrote: post #8

The book maybe is garbage, but it makes people think about others feelings and goals in meetings. This is already much more than an average person does walking into a social situation.

You can start your meeting with an agenda and achieve the same effect.

What you are describing is an institutional problem requiring an institutional solution: the people organising meetings need better training on what it is they're trying to accomplish.

Update your meeting invites with an agenda. No agenda? No meeting. It's pretty straightforward, and you don't have to assign people into 16 or 81 pseudo categories to trick them into paying attention to a meeting that didn't need to happen in the first place.

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