Comment on Why isn't jerking off more valorized as an easy dopamine hit that's also literally good for you?
daltotron@lemmy.world 3 weeks agoI mean that’s definitely just a checkout aisle self-help book, though. Psychology, along with nutritional science and some other softer, more survey-based fields, has been suffering a pretty massive replication crisis, where something like 50% of papers are totally incapable of being replicated, depending on the journal and subject.
So I dunno, I’d generally be pretty skeptical of anything a book like that says about how you have to live your life or what you should be doing or how you should be doing it. Even if it’s something like “mindfulness”, right, generally thought to be a therapeutic practice, which we’re extracting from zen buddhism or whatever, just like carl jung travels around and extracts a bunch of “archetypes” from other cultures and then supposes that they’re universal when really it’s all just kinda some schizo bullshit canon he’s coming up with on the fly.
I uhh, I don’t like the scientific paint that is painted onto psychology and psychotherapy, is I guess what I’m saying. The attempt at formalization. What is just as good for one person, to be mindful, is probably something that someone else should rather not think about at all. Maybe even as a functional adaptation, a functional delusion that they can go on believing, and still end up having a fulfilling and uplifting life for everyone around them.
TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
Hayes is not a checkout aisle self-help book lol he pioneered a major branch of CBT
daltotron@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I mean, both can be true, right. It’s not uncommon for pretty popular scientists to get into kind of the grift economy after a little while. Jordan peterson has how many citations to his scientific papers or whatever? But then he still rolls around and spews a bunch of bullshit that’s sort of framed under the guise of his psychological background, and you can still tell is pretty easily influenced by his jungian type bullshit. I dunno, been a while since I actually looked into him, but it shook my ability to trust psychology more as a field, after that one.
No yeah for sure I haven’t read it, don’t claim to have read it, I’m just extremely skeptical of that kind of book, which presents science to the public at large, because most of the experiences I’ve had with that sort of thing have been damaging psuedoscientific bullshit that I slowly have to talk my friends out of. Which becomes much harder when they think they know things on a topic because they’ve read like one book about it. I don’t even try to talk them into a different stance, I just try to talk them out of the kind of, oversimplified takes which they tend to get from these types of books. Steven pinker type books, “Guns, Germs, and Steel” type books, “The Bell Curve” type books, “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, “Poor Dad, Rich Dad”, shit like that. Admittedly not all of those are science guys, and some of that shit’s kind of old, but, you see what I’m getting at, it all blends together for the public. Pop psychology, that’s probably the term for that specific type of book, and uhh, yeah, that book gave me that kind of vibe.
If I’m really being skeptical, than, not evaluating anything else, because I just got up and still haven’t finished my coffee, the first study at the end of your post has two experiments. The first has a sample size of 34, the second has a sample size of 44. I dunno if I would say that you can really extrapolate anything from such an incredibly small sample size, to be honest. Especially one that’s like, taken from standard college campus volunteers. I know there are lots of scientific studies that rely on sample sizes which are pretty small, and I would throw that criticism at those studies, too. Shit happens in nutrition and exercise science too, I know for sure, which is why you see shitty fad diets circulate so much. I dunno, maybe I’ll read the rest of the paper, but that’s just like my general, me throwing shit at psychology as a field, right? But, maybe more, like, maybe more to, I think, some sort of point, if I have it, right:
Like what do you mean by this? Because you’re looking at this through “treatments”, right, and I dunno if that’s the correct lens with which to view most people’s problems that they have in life. I mean it’s not a fuckin, incredibly new take, right, but like, you have a society where you’re expected to work 9-5, probably more, hours, five days a week, probably go in on a rental with your significant other, or increasingly, with your significant others, for like, 60 something years of your life? It’s not a shocker when we’re experiencing increasing amounts of depression at large, then, to me. That people have problems with that. I mean like, does changing society at large, qualify as a kind of patient treatment? I suppose my problem, if I’m really trying to have one, is just kind of that like, there’s not really any amount of psychological help which makes it better that your fingers are getting crushed in industrial machinery. Psychological help, in that case, just looks like copium. I don’t think psychology can help a lot of those problems, I think the best it can do is put a band-aid over a crippling tumor, which is nothing.
If you were to ask me what we were to do with the mentality I have, I’d probably want to incredibly balloon sample sizes and drastically increase the amount of evidence that we’re collecting, compared to just like, some guy’s written observations on like 50 people in some random experiment. Probably though, this is impossible, because school funding does not look to be going up anytime soon and google isn’t gonna share their massive amounts of data they’re collecting on people, and even if we had a glut of data to go through then we’d probably still be having to come up with and apply some sort of framework to it. At which point we just end up with a bunch of hacky bullshit, where you just take the noise and draw something in it and then say that this was somehow a natural occurrence, so you’d also need more rigorous standards for what conclusions we’re actually able to draw from the noise.
Then, even if you were able to do that, you’d still have no real way of distinguishing, say, one set of noise from another set of noise, to compare the two and draw a conclusion, because we’re just playing with like, one set of data, in a vacuum, compared to another set of data drawn from a vacuum, and there’s too many variables which might effect one outcome compared to another. So you’d probably need to be gathering pretty rigorous data over the course of many years before you’d be able to draw a real conclusion. Even then, the data might not be good enough, I dunno if you’d have enough information.
I’d maybe lean more into neuroscience to try and cut out some of the external noise, some of the factors that might fuck your shit up, but then that’s also not quite a good method because it doesn’t really cut out the external noise so much as ignore it, and you can still end up finding FMRI signals in a dead fish.
So, I dunno, probably I’d just use science for maths and astronomy and physics, stuff like that, and then otherwise I’d dismiss it, in looking for philosophies and methods with which to live my life or shape my being around. Or, you know, try to take it as it comes, and not really accept claims at face value. I’ve tried mindfulness, and I’ve found it wanting, because it just caused me to dissociate whenever I encountered an outcome I didn’t really like, and then instead of responding to things naturally, and flying by instinct, it causes me to kind of be like, the guy who smokes weed and then becomes hyper-aware of everything they’re doing but then their actual behavior devolves into nonsense.
Then, when I got farther than that, and I started to observe that behavior in the abstract, then it just sort of struck me as like, none of this realistically gives you a particular value judgement, right. It’s fine enough to just say, like, ah, well, think about it more, evaluate your life more, think about the long term consequences a little more. But, that train of thought doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to be making the correct judgements, and even over a lifetime, it might very well be that I could try everything and still come to the wrong conclusions, wrong judgements, or the right conclusions and right judgements, or whatever. I could be a hyper-conscious CEO evaluating my own life totally inaccurately and still be getting by fine and dandy, and I could be a homeless guy with accurate takes but still have a shit life. It’s basically nonsense, to just be like, oh, well, think about it a little bit harder, just be a little bit more conscious, because that isn’t nailed down to anything in particular.
TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
I respect your skepticism and I can see why you would mistrust the field broadly based on those figures in it. I just don’t think we need to throw out the whole field because of bad actors. Someone like Jordan Peterson is widely discredited in the field.
Treatment IS important. There are REAL problems with roots in our own psychology. It is not purely psychological, but always biopsychosocial. Disregarding the psychological is not the way to treat biopsychosocial issues. In fact, it is one of the only ones we have any real agency or control over. And the more we develop psychology, the more just our understanding becomes. Think about 50 years ago when almost everything was just called “schizophrenia” and we treated people by shocking the shit out of them. That’s where we’d still be if we didn’t do this kind of work.
When someone comes to me writing in pain from traumatic flashbacks, or wildly out of control of their lives due to mood swings, or losing grasp on what is real or not, or paralyzed with anxiety from the rat race you’re talking about, or they just plain cannot enjoy anything anymore and want to kill themselves… it is a low priority for me to discuss systemic issues with them. We can acknowledge them as a tool for alleviating shame and guilt surrounding mental disorders, and we can brainstorm ways to work around them, but expecting a suicidal client to begin marching in the streets? That is not going to be a sustainable means of making their immediate lives better. It is often more of a distraction than anything. Systemic justice and advocacy work is the kind of thing you do for no singular client in particular, and usually done in addition to the individual work.
But mental health treatment is how we help people find peace right here and now. It is how we empower people to find agency in their own lives, and help make them strong enough people to go out and support others in the longer term. It’s the people who do not treat their mental health that end up devoting themselves to bizarre causes. I mean, think about how many Q anon supporters have addictive or psychotic tendencies.
If you acknowledge that there are real mental disorders (with both internal and external etiology), and you acknowledge that treating the individual can be a positive step towards addressing systemic issues, then the question becomes what kind of treatment should we use? That’s where the scientific method comes in too. Yes there will always be problems and questions, but we do what we can with what we have.
I have seen people make real progress and really turn their lives around. That includes the masturbaters too lol, who do come through from time to time. Helping people figure out what is truly important to them can help them find strength to endure the shit they cannot change. Helping people build tolerance for and even appreciation for pain can help them make decisions that give their lives greater meaning. It helps people free themselves from the grasp of addiction and start giving back to others. It helps people find reasons to live. It is doing an immediate, person-to-person good. I don’t know what kind of world you dream of, but I hope it is one with room for that kind of justice.