Many bigshot social scientists during the last century or so were anything but rational (Foucault and Freud are two of many examples), but were able to convince other (equally biased people) that they were.
I understand that bashing Freud is a popular way to signal “rationality”—more precisely, to signal loyalty to the STEM tribe which is so much higher status than the social sciences tribe—but it really irritates me because I would bet that most people doing this are merely repeating what they heard from others, building their model completely on other people’s strawmans.
Mostly, it feels to me horribly unfair towards Freud as a person, to use him as a textbook example of irrationality. Compared with the science we have today, of course his models (based on armchair reasoning after observing some fuzzy psychological phenomena) are horribly outdated and often plainly wrong. So throw those models away and replace them by better models whenever possible; just like we do in any science! I mostly object to the connotation that Freud was less rational compared with other people living in the same era, working in the same field. Because it seems to me he was actually highly above the average; it’s just that the whole field was completely diseased, and he wasn’t rational enough to overcome all of that single-handedly. I repeat, this is not a defense of factual correctness of Freud’s theories, but a defense of Freud’s rationality as a person.
To put things in context, to show how diseased psychology was in Freud’s era, let me just say that the most famous Freud’s student and then competitor, Carl Gustav Jung, rejected much of Freud’s teachings and replaced them with astrology / religion / magic, and this was considered by many people an improvement compared with the horribly offensive ideas that people could be predictably irrational, motivated by sexual desires, and generally frustrated with the modern society based on farmers’ values. (Then there was also the completely different school of Vulcan psychologists who said: Thoughts and emotions cannot be measured, therefore they don’t exist, and anyone who says otherwise is unscientific.) This was the environment which started the “Freud is stupid” meme, which keeps replicating on LW today.
I think the bad PR comes from combination of two facts: 1) some of Freud’s ideas were wrong, and 2) all of his ideas were controversial, including those which were correct. So, first we have this “Freud is stupid” meme most people agree with, however, mostly for wrong reasons. Then, the society gradually changes, and those Freud’s ideas which happened to be correct become common sense and are no longer attributed to him; they are further developed by other people whom we remember as their authors. Only the wrong ideas are remembered as his legacy. (By the way, I am not saying that Freud invented all those correct ideas. Just that popularizing them in his era was a part of what made him controversial; what made the “Freud is stupid” meme so popular. Which is why I consider that meme very unfair.) So today we associate human irrationality with Dan Ariely, human sexuality with Matt Ridley, and Sigmund Freud only reminds us of lying on a couch debating which object in a dream represented a penis, and underestimating an importance of clitoris in female sexuality.
As someone who has actually read a few Freud’s books long ago (before reading books by Ariely, Ridley, etc.), here are a few things that impressed me. Things that someone got right hundred years ago, when “it’s obviously magic” and “no, thoughts and emotions actually don’t exist” were the alternative famous models of human psychology.
The general ability of updating. At the beginning of Freud’s career, the state-of-art psychotherapy was hypnosis, which was called “magnetism”. Some scientists have discovered that the laws of nature are universal, and some other scientists have jumped to the seemingly obvious conclusion that analogically, all kinds of psychological forces among humans must be the same as the forces which makes magnets attract or repel each other. So Freud learned hyphosis, used it in therapy, and was enthusiastic about it. But later he noticed that it had some negative side effects (female patients frequently falling in love with their doctors, returning to their original symptoms when the love was not reciprocated), and that the positive side effects could also be achieved without hypnosis, simply by talking about the subject (assuming that some conditions were met, such as the patient actually focusing on the subject instead of focusing on their interaction with the doctor; a large part of psychoanalysis is about optimizing for these conditions). The old technique was thrown away because the new one provided better results. Not exactly the “evidence based medicine” by our current standards, but perhaps we could use as a control group all those doctors who stubbornly refused to wash their hands between doing autopsy and treating their patients, despite their patients dropping like flies. -- Later, Freud replaced his original model of unconscious, preconscious and conscious mind, and replaced it with the “id, ego, superego” model. (This is provided as an evidence of the ability to update, to discard both commonly accepted models and one’s own previous models. Which we consider an important part of rationality.)
Speaking about the “id, ego, superego” model, here is the idea of a human brain not being a single agent, but composed of multiple modules, sometimes opposed to each other. Is this something worth considering for Less Wrong readers, either as a theoretical step towards reduction of consciousness, or as a practical tool for e.g. overcoming akrasia? “Ego” as the rational part of the brain, which can evaluate consequences, but often doesn’t have enough power to enforce its decisions without emotional support from some other part of brain. “Id” as the emotional part which does not understand the concept of time. “Superego” as a small model of other people in our brain. Today we could probably locate the parts of the physical brain they correspond to.
“The Psychopathology of Everyday Life” is a book describing how seemingly random human errors (random movements, forgetting words, slips of the tongue) sometimes actually make sense if we perceive them as goal-oriented actions of some mental subagent. The biggest problem of the book is that it is heavy with theory, and a large part of it focuses on puns in German language… but remove all of this, don’t mention the origin, and you could get a highly upvoted article on Less Wrong! (The important part would be not to give any credit to Freud, and merely present it as an evidence for some LW wisdom. Then no one will doubt your rationality.) -- On the other hand, “Civilization and Its Discontents” is a perfect book to be rewritten into a series of articles on Overcoming Bias, about a conflict between forager mentality and farmer social values.
But updating and modelling human brains, those are topics interesting for Less Wrong readers. Most people would focus on, you know, sex. Well, how exactly could we doubt the importance of sexual impulses in a society where displaying a pretty lady is advertising 101, Twilight is a popular book, and internet is full of porn? (Also, scientists accept the importance of sexual selection in evolution.) Our own society is a huge demonstration that Freud was right about the most controversial part of his theory. The only way to make him wrong about this is to create a strawman and claim that according to Freud everything was about sex, so if we find a single thing that isn’t, we proved him wrong. -- But that strawman was already used in Freud’s era; he actually started one of his books by disproving it. Too bad I don’t remember which one. One of the case histories, probably. (It starts like: So, people keep simplifying my theories that all dreams are dogmatically about sex, so here is a simple example to correct the misunderstanding. And he describes a situation where some child wanted an ice cream, parents forbid it, and the child was unhappy and cried. That night, the child had a dream about travelling to North Pole, through mountains of snow. This, says Freud, is what resolving a suppressed desire in a dream typically looks like: The child wanted the ice cream, that’s desire #1, but also the child wanted to avoid conflict with their parents, that’s desire #2. How to satisfy both of them? The “mountains of show” obviously symbolize the ice cream; the child wants it, and gets it, a lot! But to avoid a conflict with parents, even in the dream, the ice cream is censored and becomes snow, so the child can plausibly deny to themselves disobeying their parents. This is Freud’s model of human dreams. It’s just that an adult person would probably not obsess so much about an ice cream, which they can buy if they really want it so much, but about something unavailable, such as a sexy neighbor; and also a smart adult would use more complex censorship to fool themselves.) Also, he had a whole book called “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” where he argues that some mind modules may be guided by principles other than pleasure, for example nightmares, repetition compulsion, aggression. (His explanation of this other principle is rather poor: he invents a mystical death principle opposing the pleasure principle. Anyway, it’s evidence against the “everything is about sex” strawman.)
Freud was an atheist, and very public about it. He essentially described religion as a collective mental disease, in a book called “The Future of an Illusion”. He used and recommended using cocaine… if he lived in the Bay Area today, and used modafinil instead, I can easily imagine him being a very popular Less Wrong member. -- But instead he lived a century ago, so he could only be one of those people spreading controversial ideas which are now considered obvious in hindsight.
lt;dr—I strongly disagree with using Freud as a textbook example of insanity. Many of his once controversial ideas are so obvious to us now that we simply don’t attribute them to him. Instead we just associate him with the few things he got wrong. And the whole meme was started by people who were even more wrong.
thanks for your interesting and thoughtful response. Possibly I should have used another example. There are other, more clearcut cases in e.g. the postmodernist tradition, but I wanted someone more well-known.
The reason I chose him was not to signal loyalty to the STEM tribe, but rather because he is taken to be a textbook example of irrationality by Popper and Gellner, two of my favourite philosophers. Popper claimed that Freud’s theories were unfalsifiable and that for any possible event E, both E and not-E was standardly taken to confirm his theories. This is inconsistent with probability theory, as pointed out in “Conservation of Expected Evidence” (which is a very Popperian post). The reason Freud and his followers (I think that some people have thought that some of his followers were actually worse on this point than Freud) did this mistake (if they did) presumably was confirmation bias (falsificationism can be seen as a tool to counter confirmation bias).
There is a huge literature on whether this claim is actually true. I have read Freud and Gellner’s (to my mind very interesting) book on psycho-analysis, as well as some of Popper’s texts on the topic, so I’m not merely repeating ideas I’ve heard from others. That said, I don’t know the subject well enough to go into a detailed discussion of your claims. Also, it’s sort of tangential to the topic. My point was not to bash Freud—that was so to say a side-effect of my claim.
Regarding your historical claims, I think that it’s very hard to establish who introduced nebolous ideas such as Freud’s tripartite model of the mind. Some claim that Plato’s theory of the mind foreshadowed it. Gellner claims that all good original ideas in Freud are taken from Nietzsche. I don’t know enough of the topic to determine whether any of these claims are true, but in order to establish whether they are, or whether Freud really was as significant and original as you claim, one would need to take a deep plunge into the history of ideas.
For the record, that long comment was not completely directed to you; it was something I have already thought should be written, and reading your comment was simply the moment when my inaction changed to action.
People are full of biases and rationalizations, and if you give them a theory which says “actually, other people often don’t even know what happens in their own minds”, well, that can hurt them regardless of whether the theory is true. And yes, this is what most amateur “psychologists” do after seeing “psychoanalysis” done on TV and learning the relevant keywords. And I guess not a few professional psychologists are not better than this. And yes, it made it difficult to argue against Freud in cases he was wrong.
Still, as I wrote, he was capable of changing his mind. And other psychoanalysts later disagreed on some topics. But without proper scientific method we can’t be sure that these changes really were improvements, as opposed to random drift (“I am a high-status psychoanalyst, so I will signal it by adding my random opinion to our set of sacred beliefs”).
Some parts of psychoanalysis make predictions; the problem is that unlike in physics, humans can react in many different ways. It’s like a black-box testing where each “box” is internally wired differently. We do have a prediction that a dream will contain a censored version of a suppressed desire. And it feels like it should be testable. But how specifically will the desire be censored? Uhm… this depends on the specific person, on what associations they have, so again we can suspect than any result could be “explained” as some form of censorship of something.
According to wikipedia Popper compared Freud with Einstein, as two people living in the same era, whose scientific rigor was completely different. Yeah, there was a huge difference. There was also a huge difference in the amount and quality of data they had, the available tools, the complexity of the studied objects, and the general waterline of sanity in their fields. (Again, “it’s magic” and “people actually don’t think” were the respected alternative theories. Imagine starting in a similar position in physics.)
Like I said, there is a huge discussion on this issue in the philosophy of science. My guess is that most of your arguments above have already been discussed extensively.
Grünbaum’s book is considered a classic on the subject and might be a place to start (I haven’t read it, though Gellner refers a lot to it). He is critical of psycho-analysis but rejects Popper’s view of it as a pseudo-science.
There are other, more clearcut cases in e.g. the postmodernist tradition
By how many standard deviations of the general public would you predict analytical philosophers or physicists outperform academic postmodernists once Stanovich test is ready?
Oh I don’t know. I think I’ve met some pretty irrational analytical philosophers too, actually. But I would expect the difference to be substantial, yes. Did you read about the Sokal affair? It says something of the level of irrationality and intellectual irresponsibility.
Irresponsibility is something very different than irrationality.
Do you judge postmodernists because their tribe does things that you don’t like or do you judge them because you think the average postmodernist would score less on a proper Rationality Quotient test than members of other tribes?
If you really think that they would score less on a Rationality Quotient test it should be possible for you to make predictions about the effect size in numbers. You are free to set your error bars as wide as you wish or chose another tribe to compare than analytical philosophers if you think there’s a better comparison.
Did you read about the Sokal affair? It says something of the level of irrationality and intellectual irresponsibility.
Right, finding a single anecdote where members of a tribe that you don’t like failed is a rational way to assess the general rationality of the average member of that tribe.
If you really think that they would score less on a Rationality Quotient test it should be possible for you to make predictions about the effect size in numbers. You are free to set your error bars as wide as you wish or chose another tribe to compare than analytical philosophers if you think there’s a better comparison.
I don’t even know how the test is constructed, so it would be downright silly of me to try to come up with predictions in terms of numbers.
Right, finding a single anecdote where members of a tribe that you don’t like failed is a rational way to assess the general rationality of the average member of that tribe.
Sarcasm does not further a constructive debate. Also, I think your way of arguing is generally too nit-picky and uncharitable. I wasn’t trying to argue against you or anything; I just wanted to give you a tip.
Sokal actually wrote a book with Jean Bricmont indicating that this was far from an isolated anecdote. Also my judgement from having (had to) read quite a bit of postmodernist crap is that Sokal is spot on.
I don’t even know how the test is constructed, so it would be downright silly of me to try to come up with predictions in terms of numbers.
No, the fact that you have some uncertainty about the test just indicates that your should choose a larger confidence interval than when you would know details of the test. It shouldn’t stop you from being able to produce a confidence interval.
I wasn’t trying to argue against you or anything; I just wanted to give you a tip.
I don’t have any issue with people arguing with me. I’m more likely having an issue with people who assume that I’m ignorant of the subject I’m talking about. Not knowing about Sokal would be a case of ignorance. But that’s still not a major issue.
Sarcasm does not further a constructive debate. Also, I think your way of arguing is generally too nit-picky and uncharitable.
Tribalism is a huge failure condition. I don’t think it’s helpful to pretend that it isn’t. Practicing charity in the same of assuming that the people with whom one argues are immune to effects like tribalism is not conductive to truth finding.
You yourself wrote a post about identifying patterns of bad reasoning. You won’t get very far with that project if you discuss with social norms that forbid people from pointing out those patterns.
The irony of you criticising Freud for not making falsifiable practicings while being unwilling to make concrete numeric falsifiable predictions about the supposed irrationality of postmodernists is to central to ignore it out of a desire for politeness.
Part of science is that you are not charitable about predictions and interpret those predictions as true regardless of what data you find.
That’s especially important when you say negative things about an outgroup that you don’t like. It’s a topic where you have to be extra careful to follow principles of proper reasoning.
This might seem to you as nit-picky but it’s very far from it. You don’t make a discourse more rational by analysing it in a dissociative way if you don’t actually apply your tools for bias detection.
The whole issue with the Sokal episode was that the journals editors where very charitable to Sokal and therefore published his paper.
I don’t even know how the test is constructed, so it would be downright silly of me to try to come up with predictions
No, the fact that you have some uncertainty about the test just indicates that your should choose a larger confidence interval than when you would know details of the test. It shouldn’t stop you from being able to produce a confidence interval.
The fact that you have some uncertainty about the test also has some implications about the distribution of possible results. If a group is 10% less rational than another and that 10% is due to a characteristic that makes those group members systematically worse than the comparison group, you can measure a lot of group members and confirm that you get measurements that average 10% less.
If a group is 20% less rational than another group but there’s a 50% chance the test detects the difference and a 50% chance it doesn’t, that can also be described as you expecting results showing the group is 10% less rational. But unlike in the first case, you can’t take a lot of measurements and get a result that averages out to 10% less. You’ll either get a lot of results that average 20% less or a lot of results that aren’t less at all, depending on whether the test detects or doesn’t detect it.
And in the second case, the answer to “can I use the test to make predictions” is “no”. If you’re uncertain about the test, you can’t use it to make predictions, because you will be predicting the average of many samples (in order to reduce variation), and if you are uncertain about the test, averaging many samples doesn’t reduce variation.
but there’s a 50% chance the test detects the difference and a 50% chance it doesn’t
Rationality is not a binary variable, but continuous. It is NOT the case that the test has a chance of detecting something or nothing: the test will output a value on some scale. If the test is not powerful enough to detect the difference, it will show up as the difference being not statistically significant—the difference will be swamped by noise, but not just fully appear or fully disappear in any given instance.
You’ll either get a lot of results that average 20% less or a lot of results that aren’t less at all
Nope—that would only be true if rationality were a boolean variable. It is not.
That doesn’t follow. For instance, imagine that one group is irrational because their brains freeze up at any problem that contains the number 8, and some tests contain the number 8 and some don’t. They’ll fail the former tests, but be indistinguishable from the first group on the latter tests.
I can imagine a lot of things that have no relationship to reality.
In any case, you were talking about a test that has a 50% chance of detecting the difference, presumably returning either 0% or 20% but never 10%. Your example does not address this case—it’s about different tests producing different results.
You were responding to Stefan. As such, it doesn’t matter whether you can imagine a test that works that way; it matters whether his uncertainty over whether the test works includes the possibility of it working that way.
Your example does not address this case—it’s about different tests producing different results.
If you don’t actually know that they freeze up at the sight of the number 8, and you are 50% likely to produce a test that contains the number 8, then the test has a 50% chance of working, by your own reasoning—actually, it has a 0% or 100% chance of working, but since you are uncertain about whether it works, you can fold the uncertainty into your estimate of how good the test is and claim 50%.
Right, finding a single anecdote where members of a tribe that you don’t like failed is a rational way to assess the general rationality of the average member of that tribe.
Keep in mind the editors of Social Text did not believe Sokal’s article was actually sound philosophy. Not understanding it, they preferred to give it the benefit of the doubt. The only thing that Sokal was able to trick them into believing was that the article was intended to be sound philosophy.
Keep in mind the editors of Social Text did not believe Sokal’s article was actually sound philosophy. Not understanding it, they preferred to give it the benefit of the doubt.
That’s like excusing oneself from causing a car crash on the grounds of being drunk.
Keep in mind the editors of Social Text did not believe Sokal’s article was actually sound philosophy. Not understanding it, they preferred to give it the benefit of the doubt.
Sokal is a physicist, and a publication like this would have been a major embarassment inside his field. So he had no choice not to disclose the hoax before anyone else (who maybe didn’t get the joke) would have commented.
There’s an anecdote near the beginning of “introduction to psychoanalysis” where he discusses the dreams of arctic explorers, which are almost entirely about food, not about sex, for understandable reasons.
Most people would focus on, you know, sex. Well, how exactly could we doubt the importance of sexual impulses in a society where displaying a pretty lady is advertising 101, Twilight is a popular book, and internet is full of porn? (Also, scientists accept the importance of sexual selection in evolution.) Our own society is a huge demonstration that Freud was right about the most controversial part of his theory.
Freud’s theory was supposed to be a theory of the human mind, thus it should apply to humans in every human society. So why are you focusing on one society in particular (specifically one that was heavily shaped by people who believed Freud’s theories) as your demonstration that Freud was correct?
Edit: Could you state the controversial theory of Freud’s that you claim has been demonstrated. Surely you don’t mean his entire theory of psychosexual development.
Surely you don’t mean his entire theory of psychosexual development.
No. That theory is a textbook example of burdensome details. (Also, typical family fallacy.) I can imagine that having a problem at age X—which in given culture is associated with doing Y—could visibly increase the probability of having a psychological symptom Z in adult age. But that theory just gives too much details for something that at best would be a wide probabilistic distribution of outcomes.
Could you state the controversial theory of Freud’s that you claim has been demonstrated.
Mind composed of multiple agents; people often motivated by sex even when they deny it; human mind not well adapted to civilization; religion as institutionalized neurosis.
They don’t seem controversial anymore. (Okay, the last one does to many people.)
That theory is a textbook example of burdensome details.
So Freud was correct if you ignore the details of what he said and steelman the hell out of what he “meant”.
Mind composed of multiple agents;
The idea of the mind being composed of multiple components has been around for all of recorded history. Granted it wasn’t phrased as multiple “agents”, but Freud didn’t phrase it that way either.
people often motivated by sex even when they deny it;
Yes, people sometimes deny their true motivations. However, the specific claim that these secret motivation is almost always sexual is still not clear today, and probably false.
human mind not well adapted to civilization;
If this is meant to refer to his theory of psychological repression. It’s become clear that he’s way of stating that wasn’t a good idea. Certainly worse that the traditional way of stating that, namely that children need to be taught to like good things and dislike bad things.
religion as institutionalized neurosis.
Well, the attempts at creating states without this neurosis created even more neurotic states, but I suppose you already knew that.
The idea of the mind being composed of multiple components has been around for all of recorded history.
I dispute that. There is evidence that some cultures had concepts of multiple souls; the Ancient Egyptians and Inuit come to mind. But Greek and post-Greek philosophy and the Abrahamic religions firmly established the idea that humans have a single indivisible (“monadic”) soul in all the cultures they pervaded, and that very much includes 19th century Vienna.
So you might say components models of the mind existed, but they certainly weren’t “around”. Freud might have heard of the Ancient Egyptian concept of the soul but it certainly wasn’t something a mainstream scientist could have referred to to credibilitize his theory.
But Greek and post-Greek philosophy and the Abrahamic religions firmly established the idea that humans have a single indivisible (“monadic”) soul in all the cultures they pervaded
Which is why one of the mot commonly read Platonic dialogues, The Republic had a famous treatment of the psyche as being three parts with not a little resemblance to the id/ego/superego, and his student Aristotle has a hierarchy of faculties?
Regardless of whether Freud’s ideas were correct or not, what about his methods ? How did he come by his ideas ? Were his hypotheses even falsifiable, and if so, did he attempt to rigorously falsify them ?
If the answer is “no”, then, while I will grant you that Freud was possibly relatively more rational than his colleagues at the time, it would still be quite a stretch to call him a rationalist in the absolute terms.
The answer is “no”. However, compare with Darwin. His method was also “observing and creating models that fit observations”. (He also got some things wrong: AFAIK he assumed that all traits are continuously divisible; genes were discovered by Mendel later. But generally, his success ratio was much better. But also his field was much saner.)
Also, Freud did some kind of experiments. He was not merely a philosopher, he also cured people, and it seemed to him that his theories work. But he didn’t have a control group, etc.
I could be wrong, but didn’t Darwin actually formulate some hypotheses, and then go out there and count finches (and other things) to see if his predictions were true ? I think that’s why his success rate was so much better (though, admittedly, not perfect): he conducted experiments in the real world, using real math.
Also, Freud did some kind of experiments. He was not merely a philosopher, he also cured people, and it seemed to him that his theories work. But he didn’t have a control group, etc.
How did he know if his theories actually worked, then ? Was he even making his patients better in any way (as compared to other patients who saw other doctors, or perhaps no doctors at all) ?
He was convinced that “couch therapy” worked better than hypnosis, but I don’t know whether he kept records to prove it.
(Sorry, I have read all this decades ago, and then I was interested in his models of mind, not in technical details. Now I know that those details are critical, but I don’t remember whether I read about them or not.)
Thanks for your long and insightful comment. I think it should be edited and put as a top-level article. It’s something that I’d personally love to link my friends to everytime they start strawmanning Freud.
“No, this is horrible; decent people don’t have dirty thoughts! You are completely ignoring the supernatural aspects of the human soul” kind of people.
As someone who has actually read a few Freud’s books long ago (before reading books by Ariely, Ridley, etc.), here are a few things that impressed me. Things that someone got right hundred years ago, when “it’s obviously magic” and “no, thoughts and emotions actually don’t exist” were the alternative famous models of human psychology.
This is a completely inaccurate depiction of Psychology as it existed during Freud’s time. You list Jung, one of Freud’s victims, as the only example of a “rival.” I think perhaps this is standard continental Euro-Chauvinism. Could it be that you are really unaware of Francis Galton’s development of psychometrics or William James’ monumental Principles of Psychology? James is a good example of someone who was a predecessor/contemporary of Freud who studied the same topic but did not go utterly off the rails into Crazy Land the way Freud did. He took a naturalistic view of the human mind, drawing upon introspection and empiricism. Galton’s contributions were vast and showed actual mathematical rigor.
Freud’s biggest contribution was probably his attempt to invent Psychopharmocology. (The short-term outcome was getting a lot of unfortunate people addicted to cocaine, but the basic idea had merit.) As for his theory of the human mind, it is worthless and set Psychology back by decades.
Sadly Freudian Psychoanalysis is Religion and Big Business now, and still practiced heavily in Mitteleuropa and parts of South America.
James was impressive. Galton… did something a bit different; also impressively.
With regard to Galton and psychometrics in general: That’s another problem with psychology, that it is a wide field, and somehow (at least in the past) the things that were interesting were difficult to measure, and the things that were easy to measure were not interesting to most people. This is why there were so many different schools in psychology: they often didn’t strictly contradict each other, it was more like everyone discussed something else—and yeah, sometimes they made huge generalization based on the part they studied.
Imagine that you go to a doctor and say: “I feel unhappy, sometimes I have problems to sleep at night, and I don’t know why but I noticed myself behaving irationally towards my girlfriend lately. Can you help me, doc?” And the doctor says: “You know, I specialize at something else. I shine people flashlight into their eyes, and measure how many milliseconds it takes them to blink. I have a lot of data, serious statistics and stuff. I can measure how fast you blink, and tell you whether you are a slow-blinker or a fast-blinker with p < 0.0001. Certified 100% pure science.”
That’s not doing the same thing better; that’s doing a different thing. Yes, he is a good scientist, but he didn’t answer your question, and he can’t cure you. Fifty years later, someone may build a therapy by gradually expanding his research, though.
I understand that bashing Freud is a popular way to signal “rationality”—more precisely, to signal loyalty to the STEM tribe which is so much higher status than the social sciences tribe—but it really irritates me because I would bet that most people doing this are merely repeating what they heard from others, building their model completely on other people’s strawmans.
Mostly, it feels to me horribly unfair towards Freud as a person, to use him as a textbook example of irrationality.
At the risk of outing myself as a smug STEM tribalist...my view of Freud is pretty dim, a big reason for which is that secondary sources (e.g.), citing specific details, argue that Freud exaggerated the robustness of his theories, failed to keep basic factual details straight, and even fabricated observations outright.
Admittedly, I haven’t read Freud himself (I’m one of the people “merely repeating what they heard from others”), so the charges levelled at him might be groundless, but they seem plausible & well-substantiated. And once substantiated, a pattern of self-aggrandization, sloppiness, and fabrication seems to me fair grounds for calling Freud (epistemically) irrational, even though some of his ideas turned out to be true.
It isn’t clear to me that we would have anything resembling the approaches to a scientific concept of consciousness that we have today, were it not for passing through something like psychoanalysis on the way. Freud’s contributions would have been replaceable, of course, had he not been there — just as Galileo’s would be. But condemning Freud seems like condemning Newton, who likewise had plenty of wrong ideas.
The cult of Freud is unfortunate, but not particularly relevant to his contribution.
This brings us to a couple of additional reasons why Freud-bashing, or tarring Freud as irrational, could be unfair. Maybe he was a necessary step along the road to scientific psychology. Maybe it’s an unfair double standard to bash Freud while ignoring the wrongnesses of (e.g.) Galileo & Newton.
I personally disagree with the first reason. True or not, I don’t see it as justifying the wilful shoddiness from which a big chunk of Freud’s work apparently suffers. I see no reason why a counterfactual Freud couldn’t have come up with basically the same ideas without engaging in PR campaigns, unforced errors, and lies.
I’m more open to the second argument, but I’d want evidence that Galileo & Newton not only had “plenty of wrong ideas”, but tried to further those wrong ideas by bullshitting & fabricating as much as Freud did to further his wrong ideas. Otherwise there’s no real double standard.
As it happens, both Galileo & Newton have been accused of scientific misconduct. I don’t really know the details about Galileo’s case, but I know some for the case against Newton. In short, Newton used fudge factors to shift various estimates of physical quantities in his Principia. However, reading the rap sheet more closely, it sounds like Newton was quite explicit about making his adjustments, in which case he wasn’t engaging in misconduct. I’d guess there’s some similar subtlety in Galileo’s case which people miss, but as ever I could be wrong.
There may be other similarly famous scientists who were crowned geniuses and really did use misconduct to defend substantially wrong beliefs. Mendel, Kepler, Ptolemy, Pasteur, Robert Millikan, and even Einstein are promising candidates, having all been accused of scientific misconduct.
I know little about the Einstein, Kepler, or Ptolemy accusations. As for the others, my lay understanding is that scientists still argue over whether the close match between Mendel’s data and Mendel’s theory is suspicious (and indeed whether it can be explained by unconscious bias rather than conscious fiddling); that Pasteur suppressed the results of experiments which seemed to contradict germ theory, and didn’t cooperate with other scientists who wanted to run such experiments; and that Millikan lied about excluding his least plausible data points in his reports on his oil-drop experiments. So Pasteur & Millikan both lied about which results they were presenting, but the results themselves were all genuine, and both researchers were defending theories which were basically correct, not incorrect. Mendel, meanwhile, may not have committed misconduct at all! So I’ve yet to find a true parallel to Freud in the STEM pantheon.
tl;dr Galileo went beyond the data he had to justify the Copernican model—his argument about tides was incorrect (he neglected the role of the moon) and his argument via the motion of sunspots was explicable within the Tychonic model.
Politically, he had just about the best hand dealt to him from the start and proceeded to play it stupidly. He had many close friends in the Church (including the Pope himself!) but his bullishness and lack of tact led him to alienate them one by one. By the standards of the time he got off with a slap on the wrist.
Of course, none of this is to say that his opponents didn’t do and say similarly stupid things, but it wasn’t a simple Brave Rational Iconoclast David vs Decrepit Reactionary Goliath Institution narrative.
tl;dr Galileo went beyond the data he had to justify the Copernican model—his argument about tides was incorrect (he neglected the role of the moon) and his argument via the motion of sunspots was explicable within the Tychonic model.
Thanks for the summary. In itself that doesn’t sound much like misconduct, as it’s quite possible to go beyond the data and make incorrect/superfluous arguments without being negligent or deceptive.
(I could read the series you link, plus its references, to try to discern whether negligence or deception actually was involved, but after flicking through the first three parts — 14,000 words or so — and not spotting big smoking guns, I put the remaining posts on my mental when-I-get-round-to-it-on-a-rainy-day list.)
I understand that bashing Freud is a popular way to signal “rationality”—more precisely, to signal loyalty to the STEM tribe which is so much higher status than the social sciences tribe—but it really irritates me because I would bet that most people doing this are merely repeating what they heard from others, building their model completely on other people’s strawmans.
Mostly, it feels to me horribly unfair towards Freud as a person, to use him as a textbook example of irrationality. Compared with the science we have today, of course his models (based on armchair reasoning after observing some fuzzy psychological phenomena) are horribly outdated and often plainly wrong. So throw those models away and replace them by better models whenever possible; just like we do in any science! I mostly object to the connotation that Freud was less rational compared with other people living in the same era, working in the same field. Because it seems to me he was actually highly above the average; it’s just that the whole field was completely diseased, and he wasn’t rational enough to overcome all of that single-handedly. I repeat, this is not a defense of factual correctness of Freud’s theories, but a defense of Freud’s rationality as a person.
To put things in context, to show how diseased psychology was in Freud’s era, let me just say that the most famous Freud’s student and then competitor, Carl Gustav Jung, rejected much of Freud’s teachings and replaced them with astrology / religion / magic, and this was considered by many people an improvement compared with the horribly offensive ideas that people could be predictably irrational, motivated by sexual desires, and generally frustrated with the modern society based on farmers’ values. (Then there was also the completely different school of Vulcan psychologists who said: Thoughts and emotions cannot be measured, therefore they don’t exist, and anyone who says otherwise is unscientific.) This was the environment which started the “Freud is stupid” meme, which keeps replicating on LW today.
I think the bad PR comes from combination of two facts: 1) some of Freud’s ideas were wrong, and 2) all of his ideas were controversial, including those which were correct. So, first we have this “Freud is stupid” meme most people agree with, however, mostly for wrong reasons. Then, the society gradually changes, and those Freud’s ideas which happened to be correct become common sense and are no longer attributed to him; they are further developed by other people whom we remember as their authors. Only the wrong ideas are remembered as his legacy. (By the way, I am not saying that Freud invented all those correct ideas. Just that popularizing them in his era was a part of what made him controversial; what made the “Freud is stupid” meme so popular. Which is why I consider that meme very unfair.) So today we associate human irrationality with Dan Ariely, human sexuality with Matt Ridley, and Sigmund Freud only reminds us of lying on a couch debating which object in a dream represented a penis, and underestimating an importance of clitoris in female sexuality.
As someone who has actually read a few Freud’s books long ago (before reading books by Ariely, Ridley, etc.), here are a few things that impressed me. Things that someone got right hundred years ago, when “it’s obviously magic” and “no, thoughts and emotions actually don’t exist” were the alternative famous models of human psychology.
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The general ability of updating. At the beginning of Freud’s career, the state-of-art psychotherapy was hypnosis, which was called “magnetism”. Some scientists have discovered that the laws of nature are universal, and some other scientists have jumped to the seemingly obvious conclusion that analogically, all kinds of psychological forces among humans must be the same as the forces which makes magnets attract or repel each other. So Freud learned hyphosis, used it in therapy, and was enthusiastic about it. But later he noticed that it had some negative side effects (female patients frequently falling in love with their doctors, returning to their original symptoms when the love was not reciprocated), and that the positive side effects could also be achieved without hypnosis, simply by talking about the subject (assuming that some conditions were met, such as the patient actually focusing on the subject instead of focusing on their interaction with the doctor; a large part of psychoanalysis is about optimizing for these conditions). The old technique was thrown away because the new one provided better results. Not exactly the “evidence based medicine” by our current standards, but perhaps we could use as a control group all those doctors who stubbornly refused to wash their hands between doing autopsy and treating their patients, despite their patients dropping like flies. -- Later, Freud replaced his original model of unconscious, preconscious and conscious mind, and replaced it with the “id, ego, superego” model. (This is provided as an evidence of the ability to update, to discard both commonly accepted models and one’s own previous models. Which we consider an important part of rationality.)
Speaking about the “id, ego, superego” model, here is the idea of a human brain not being a single agent, but composed of multiple modules, sometimes opposed to each other. Is this something worth considering for Less Wrong readers, either as a theoretical step towards reduction of consciousness, or as a practical tool for e.g. overcoming akrasia? “Ego” as the rational part of the brain, which can evaluate consequences, but often doesn’t have enough power to enforce its decisions without emotional support from some other part of brain. “Id” as the emotional part which does not understand the concept of time. “Superego” as a small model of other people in our brain. Today we could probably locate the parts of the physical brain they correspond to.
“The Psychopathology of Everyday Life” is a book describing how seemingly random human errors (random movements, forgetting words, slips of the tongue) sometimes actually make sense if we perceive them as goal-oriented actions of some mental subagent. The biggest problem of the book is that it is heavy with theory, and a large part of it focuses on puns in German language… but remove all of this, don’t mention the origin, and you could get a highly upvoted article on Less Wrong! (The important part would be not to give any credit to Freud, and merely present it as an evidence for some LW wisdom. Then no one will doubt your rationality.) -- On the other hand, “Civilization and Its Discontents” is a perfect book to be rewritten into a series of articles on Overcoming Bias, about a conflict between forager mentality and farmer social values.
But updating and modelling human brains, those are topics interesting for Less Wrong readers. Most people would focus on, you know, sex. Well, how exactly could we doubt the importance of sexual impulses in a society where displaying a pretty lady is advertising 101, Twilight is a popular book, and internet is full of porn? (Also, scientists accept the importance of sexual selection in evolution.) Our own society is a huge demonstration that Freud was right about the most controversial part of his theory. The only way to make him wrong about this is to create a strawman and claim that according to Freud everything was about sex, so if we find a single thing that isn’t, we proved him wrong. -- But that strawman was already used in Freud’s era; he actually started one of his books by disproving it. Too bad I don’t remember which one. One of the case histories, probably. (It starts like: So, people keep simplifying my theories that all dreams are dogmatically about sex, so here is a simple example to correct the misunderstanding. And he describes a situation where some child wanted an ice cream, parents forbid it, and the child was unhappy and cried. That night, the child had a dream about travelling to North Pole, through mountains of snow. This, says Freud, is what resolving a suppressed desire in a dream typically looks like: The child wanted the ice cream, that’s desire #1, but also the child wanted to avoid conflict with their parents, that’s desire #2. How to satisfy both of them? The “mountains of show” obviously symbolize the ice cream; the child wants it, and gets it, a lot! But to avoid a conflict with parents, even in the dream, the ice cream is censored and becomes snow, so the child can plausibly deny to themselves disobeying their parents. This is Freud’s model of human dreams. It’s just that an adult person would probably not obsess so much about an ice cream, which they can buy if they really want it so much, but about something unavailable, such as a sexy neighbor; and also a smart adult would use more complex censorship to fool themselves.) Also, he had a whole book called “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” where he argues that some mind modules may be guided by principles other than pleasure, for example nightmares, repetition compulsion, aggression. (His explanation of this other principle is rather poor: he invents a mystical death principle opposing the pleasure principle. Anyway, it’s evidence against the “everything is about sex” strawman.)
Freud was an atheist, and very public about it. He essentially described religion as a collective mental disease, in a book called “The Future of an Illusion”. He used and recommended using cocaine… if he lived in the Bay Area today, and used modafinil instead, I can easily imagine him being a very popular Less Wrong member. -- But instead he lived a century ago, so he could only be one of those people spreading controversial ideas which are now considered obvious in hindsight.
lt;dr—I strongly disagree with using Freud as a textbook example of insanity. Many of his once controversial ideas are so obvious to us now that we simply don’t attribute them to him. Instead we just associate him with the few things he got wrong. And the whole meme was started by people who were even more wrong.
Hi Viliam,
thanks for your interesting and thoughtful response. Possibly I should have used another example. There are other, more clearcut cases in e.g. the postmodernist tradition, but I wanted someone more well-known.
The reason I chose him was not to signal loyalty to the STEM tribe, but rather because he is taken to be a textbook example of irrationality by Popper and Gellner, two of my favourite philosophers. Popper claimed that Freud’s theories were unfalsifiable and that for any possible event E, both E and not-E was standardly taken to confirm his theories. This is inconsistent with probability theory, as pointed out in “Conservation of Expected Evidence” (which is a very Popperian post). The reason Freud and his followers (I think that some people have thought that some of his followers were actually worse on this point than Freud) did this mistake (if they did) presumably was confirmation bias (falsificationism can be seen as a tool to counter confirmation bias).
There is a huge literature on whether this claim is actually true. I have read Freud and Gellner’s (to my mind very interesting) book on psycho-analysis, as well as some of Popper’s texts on the topic, so I’m not merely repeating ideas I’ve heard from others. That said, I don’t know the subject well enough to go into a detailed discussion of your claims. Also, it’s sort of tangential to the topic. My point was not to bash Freud—that was so to say a side-effect of my claim.
Regarding your historical claims, I think that it’s very hard to establish who introduced nebolous ideas such as Freud’s tripartite model of the mind. Some claim that Plato’s theory of the mind foreshadowed it. Gellner claims that all good original ideas in Freud are taken from Nietzsche. I don’t know enough of the topic to determine whether any of these claims are true, but in order to establish whether they are, or whether Freud really was as significant and original as you claim, one would need to take a deep plunge into the history of ideas.
For the record, that long comment was not completely directed to you; it was something I have already thought should be written, and reading your comment was simply the moment when my inaction changed to action.
People are full of biases and rationalizations, and if you give them a theory which says “actually, other people often don’t even know what happens in their own minds”, well, that can hurt them regardless of whether the theory is true. And yes, this is what most amateur “psychologists” do after seeing “psychoanalysis” done on TV and learning the relevant keywords. And I guess not a few professional psychologists are not better than this. And yes, it made it difficult to argue against Freud in cases he was wrong.
Still, as I wrote, he was capable of changing his mind. And other psychoanalysts later disagreed on some topics. But without proper scientific method we can’t be sure that these changes really were improvements, as opposed to random drift (“I am a high-status psychoanalyst, so I will signal it by adding my random opinion to our set of sacred beliefs”).
Some parts of psychoanalysis make predictions; the problem is that unlike in physics, humans can react in many different ways. It’s like a black-box testing where each “box” is internally wired differently. We do have a prediction that a dream will contain a censored version of a suppressed desire. And it feels like it should be testable. But how specifically will the desire be censored? Uhm… this depends on the specific person, on what associations they have, so again we can suspect than any result could be “explained” as some form of censorship of something.
According to wikipedia Popper compared Freud with Einstein, as two people living in the same era, whose scientific rigor was completely different. Yeah, there was a huge difference. There was also a huge difference in the amount and quality of data they had, the available tools, the complexity of the studied objects, and the general waterline of sanity in their fields. (Again, “it’s magic” and “people actually don’t think” were the respected alternative theories. Imagine starting in a similar position in physics.)
Like I said, there is a huge discussion on this issue in the philosophy of science. My guess is that most of your arguments above have already been discussed extensively.
Grünbaum’s book is considered a classic on the subject and might be a place to start (I haven’t read it, though Gellner refers a lot to it). He is critical of psycho-analysis but rejects Popper’s view of it as a pseudo-science.
By how many standard deviations of the general public would you predict analytical philosophers or physicists outperform academic postmodernists once Stanovich test is ready?
Oh I don’t know. I think I’ve met some pretty irrational analytical philosophers too, actually. But I would expect the difference to be substantial, yes. Did you read about the Sokal affair? It says something of the level of irrationality and intellectual irresponsibility.
Irresponsibility is something very different than irrationality.
Do you judge postmodernists because their tribe does things that you don’t like or do you judge them because you think the average postmodernist would score less on a proper Rationality Quotient test than members of other tribes?
If you really think that they would score less on a Rationality Quotient test it should be possible for you to make predictions about the effect size in numbers. You are free to set your error bars as wide as you wish or chose another tribe to compare than analytical philosophers if you think there’s a better comparison.
Right, finding a single anecdote where members of a tribe that you don’t like failed is a rational way to assess the general rationality of the average member of that tribe.
I don’t even know how the test is constructed, so it would be downright silly of me to try to come up with predictions in terms of numbers.
Sarcasm does not further a constructive debate. Also, I think your way of arguing is generally too nit-picky and uncharitable. I wasn’t trying to argue against you or anything; I just wanted to give you a tip.
Sokal actually wrote a book with Jean Bricmont indicating that this was far from an isolated anecdote. Also my judgement from having (had to) read quite a bit of postmodernist crap is that Sokal is spot on.
No, the fact that you have some uncertainty about the test just indicates that your should choose a larger confidence interval than when you would know details of the test. It shouldn’t stop you from being able to produce a confidence interval.
I don’t have any issue with people arguing with me. I’m more likely having an issue with people who assume that I’m ignorant of the subject I’m talking about. Not knowing about Sokal would be a case of ignorance. But that’s still not a major issue.
Tribalism is a huge failure condition. I don’t think it’s helpful to pretend that it isn’t. Practicing charity in the same of assuming that the people with whom one argues are immune to effects like tribalism is not conductive to truth finding.
You yourself wrote a post about identifying patterns of bad reasoning. You won’t get very far with that project if you discuss with social norms that forbid people from pointing out those patterns.
The irony of you criticising Freud for not making falsifiable practicings while being unwilling to make concrete numeric falsifiable predictions about the supposed irrationality of postmodernists is to central to ignore it out of a desire for politeness.
Part of science is that you are not charitable about predictions and interpret those predictions as true regardless of what data you find. That’s especially important when you say negative things about an outgroup that you don’t like. It’s a topic where you have to be extra careful to follow principles of proper reasoning.
This might seem to you as nit-picky but it’s very far from it. You don’t make a discourse more rational by analysing it in a dissociative way if you don’t actually apply your tools for bias detection.
The whole issue with the Sokal episode was that the journals editors where very charitable to Sokal and therefore published his paper.
The fact that you have some uncertainty about the test also has some implications about the distribution of possible results. If a group is 10% less rational than another and that 10% is due to a characteristic that makes those group members systematically worse than the comparison group, you can measure a lot of group members and confirm that you get measurements that average 10% less.
If a group is 20% less rational than another group but there’s a 50% chance the test detects the difference and a 50% chance it doesn’t, that can also be described as you expecting results showing the group is 10% less rational. But unlike in the first case, you can’t take a lot of measurements and get a result that averages out to 10% less. You’ll either get a lot of results that average 20% less or a lot of results that aren’t less at all, depending on whether the test detects or doesn’t detect it.
And in the second case, the answer to “can I use the test to make predictions” is “no”. If you’re uncertain about the test, you can’t use it to make predictions, because you will be predicting the average of many samples (in order to reduce variation), and if you are uncertain about the test, averaging many samples doesn’t reduce variation.
Rationality is not a binary variable, but continuous. It is NOT the case that the test has a chance of detecting something or nothing: the test will output a value on some scale. If the test is not powerful enough to detect the difference, it will show up as the difference being not statistically significant—the difference will be swamped by noise, but not just fully appear or fully disappear in any given instance.
Nope—that would only be true if rationality were a boolean variable. It is not.
That doesn’t follow. For instance, imagine that one group is irrational because their brains freeze up at any problem that contains the number 8, and some tests contain the number 8 and some don’t. They’ll fail the former tests, but be indistinguishable from the first group on the latter tests.
I can imagine a lot of things that have no relationship to reality.
In any case, you were talking about a test that has a 50% chance of detecting the difference, presumably returning either 0% or 20% but never 10%. Your example does not address this case—it’s about different tests producing different results.
You were responding to Stefan. As such, it doesn’t matter whether you can imagine a test that works that way; it matters whether his uncertainty over whether the test works includes the possibility of it working that way.
If you don’t actually know that they freeze up at the sight of the number 8, and you are 50% likely to produce a test that contains the number 8, then the test has a 50% chance of working, by your own reasoning—actually, it has a 0% or 100% chance of working, but since you are uncertain about whether it works, you can fold the uncertainty into your estimate of how good the test is and claim 50%.
Keep in mind the editors of Social Text did not believe Sokal’s article was actually sound philosophy. Not understanding it, they preferred to give it the benefit of the doubt. The only thing that Sokal was able to trick them into believing was that the article was intended to be sound philosophy.
That’s like excusing oneself from causing a car crash on the grounds of being drunk.
In what way? Who was injured?
They are both pleading incompetence as an excuse for failure.
We only know that’s what they said afterwards.
By the same argument, we only know it was intended to be a hoax because Sokal said so afterward....
Sokal is a physicist, and a publication like this would have been a major embarassment inside his field. So he had no choice not to disclose the hoax before anyone else (who maybe didn’t get the joke) would have commented.
There’s an anecdote near the beginning of “introduction to psychoanalysis” where he discusses the dreams of arctic explorers, which are almost entirely about food, not about sex, for understandable reasons.
Freud’s theory was supposed to be a theory of the human mind, thus it should apply to humans in every human society. So why are you focusing on one society in particular (specifically one that was heavily shaped by people who believed Freud’s theories) as your demonstration that Freud was correct?
Edit: Could you state the controversial theory of Freud’s that you claim has been demonstrated. Surely you don’t mean his entire theory of psychosexual development.
No. That theory is a textbook example of burdensome details. (Also, typical family fallacy.) I can imagine that having a problem at age X—which in given culture is associated with doing Y—could visibly increase the probability of having a psychological symptom Z in adult age. But that theory just gives too much details for something that at best would be a wide probabilistic distribution of outcomes.
Mind composed of multiple agents; people often motivated by sex even when they deny it; human mind not well adapted to civilization; religion as institutionalized neurosis.
They don’t seem controversial anymore. (Okay, the last one does to many people.)
So Freud was correct if you ignore the details of what he said and steelman the hell out of what he “meant”.
The idea of the mind being composed of multiple components has been around for all of recorded history. Granted it wasn’t phrased as multiple “agents”, but Freud didn’t phrase it that way either.
Yes, people sometimes deny their true motivations. However, the specific claim that these secret motivation is almost always sexual is still not clear today, and probably false.
If this is meant to refer to his theory of psychological repression. It’s become clear that he’s way of stating that wasn’t a good idea. Certainly worse that the traditional way of stating that, namely that children need to be taught to like good things and dislike bad things.
Well, the attempts at creating states without this neurosis created even more neurotic states, but I suppose you already knew that.
I dispute that. There is evidence that some cultures had concepts of multiple souls; the Ancient Egyptians and Inuit come to mind. But Greek and post-Greek philosophy and the Abrahamic religions firmly established the idea that humans have a single indivisible (“monadic”) soul in all the cultures they pervaded, and that very much includes 19th century Vienna.
So you might say components models of the mind existed, but they certainly weren’t “around”. Freud might have heard of the Ancient Egyptian concept of the soul but it certainly wasn’t something a mainstream scientist could have referred to to credibilitize his theory.
Which is why one of the mot commonly read Platonic dialogues, The Republic had a famous treatment of the psyche as being three parts with not a little resemblance to the id/ego/superego, and his student Aristotle has a hierarchy of faculties?
BTW, FWIW IIRC Dante Alighieri in the Divine Comedy claimed that the soul was indivisible and pointed to inattentional blindness as evidence for that.
Regardless of whether Freud’s ideas were correct or not, what about his methods ? How did he come by his ideas ? Were his hypotheses even falsifiable, and if so, did he attempt to rigorously falsify them ?
If the answer is “no”, then, while I will grant you that Freud was possibly relatively more rational than his colleagues at the time, it would still be quite a stretch to call him a rationalist in the absolute terms.
The answer is “no”. However, compare with Darwin. His method was also “observing and creating models that fit observations”. (He also got some things wrong: AFAIK he assumed that all traits are continuously divisible; genes were discovered by Mendel later. But generally, his success ratio was much better. But also his field was much saner.)
Also, Freud did some kind of experiments. He was not merely a philosopher, he also cured people, and it seemed to him that his theories work. But he didn’t have a control group, etc.
I could be wrong, but didn’t Darwin actually formulate some hypotheses, and then go out there and count finches (and other things) to see if his predictions were true ? I think that’s why his success rate was so much better (though, admittedly, not perfect): he conducted experiments in the real world, using real math.
How did he know if his theories actually worked, then ? Was he even making his patients better in any way (as compared to other patients who saw other doctors, or perhaps no doctors at all) ?
He was convinced that “couch therapy” worked better than hypnosis, but I don’t know whether he kept records to prove it.
(Sorry, I have read all this decades ago, and then I was interested in his models of mind, not in technical details. Now I know that those details are critical, but I don’t remember whether I read about them or not.)
You italicize words with asterisks, like this:
*methods*. There is a “Show help” button below the comment box, on the right.Sorry, it gets difficult to keep all the commenting systems straight after a while.
Thanks for your long and insightful comment. I think it should be edited and put as a top-level article. It’s something that I’d personally love to link my friends to everytime they start strawmanning Freud.
Thank you! I was considering this option, but as a LW article it would deserve better research, citations, etc. Maybe later, in unspecified future.
Who do you mean?
“No, this is horrible; decent people don’t have dirty thoughts! You are completely ignoring the supernatural aspects of the human soul” kind of people.
This is a completely inaccurate depiction of Psychology as it existed during Freud’s time. You list Jung, one of Freud’s victims, as the only example of a “rival.” I think perhaps this is standard continental Euro-Chauvinism. Could it be that you are really unaware of Francis Galton’s development of psychometrics or William James’ monumental Principles of Psychology? James is a good example of someone who was a predecessor/contemporary of Freud who studied the same topic but did not go utterly off the rails into Crazy Land the way Freud did. He took a naturalistic view of the human mind, drawing upon introspection and empiricism. Galton’s contributions were vast and showed actual mathematical rigor.
Freud’s biggest contribution was probably his attempt to invent Psychopharmocology. (The short-term outcome was getting a lot of unfortunate people addicted to cocaine, but the basic idea had merit.) As for his theory of the human mind, it is worthless and set Psychology back by decades.
Sadly Freudian Psychoanalysis is Religion and Big Business now, and still practiced heavily in Mitteleuropa and parts of South America.
James was impressive. Galton… did something a bit different; also impressively.
With regard to Galton and psychometrics in general: That’s another problem with psychology, that it is a wide field, and somehow (at least in the past) the things that were interesting were difficult to measure, and the things that were easy to measure were not interesting to most people. This is why there were so many different schools in psychology: they often didn’t strictly contradict each other, it was more like everyone discussed something else—and yeah, sometimes they made huge generalization based on the part they studied.
Imagine that you go to a doctor and say: “I feel unhappy, sometimes I have problems to sleep at night, and I don’t know why but I noticed myself behaving irationally towards my girlfriend lately. Can you help me, doc?” And the doctor says: “You know, I specialize at something else. I shine people flashlight into their eyes, and measure how many milliseconds it takes them to blink. I have a lot of data, serious statistics and stuff. I can measure how fast you blink, and tell you whether you are a slow-blinker or a fast-blinker with p < 0.0001. Certified 100% pure science.”
That’s not doing the same thing better; that’s doing a different thing. Yes, he is a good scientist, but he didn’t answer your question, and he can’t cure you. Fifty years later, someone may build a therapy by gradually expanding his research, though.
At the risk of outing myself as a smug STEM tribalist...my view of Freud is pretty dim, a big reason for which is that secondary sources (e.g.), citing specific details, argue that Freud exaggerated the robustness of his theories, failed to keep basic factual details straight, and even fabricated observations outright.
Admittedly, I haven’t read Freud himself (I’m one of the people “merely repeating what they heard from others”), so the charges levelled at him might be groundless, but they seem plausible & well-substantiated. And once substantiated, a pattern of self-aggrandization, sloppiness, and fabrication seems to me fair grounds for calling Freud (epistemically) irrational, even though some of his ideas turned out to be true.
It isn’t clear to me that we would have anything resembling the approaches to a scientific concept of consciousness that we have today, were it not for passing through something like psychoanalysis on the way. Freud’s contributions would have been replaceable, of course, had he not been there — just as Galileo’s would be. But condemning Freud seems like condemning Newton, who likewise had plenty of wrong ideas.
The cult of Freud is unfortunate, but not particularly relevant to his contribution.
The difference is that Newton also had plenty of right ideas.
What did you think of the four Freudian ideas Viliam_Bur suggested to you?
Edit, September 2: well, now I guess I know.
This brings us to a couple of additional reasons why Freud-bashing, or tarring Freud as irrational, could be unfair. Maybe he was a necessary step along the road to scientific psychology. Maybe it’s an unfair double standard to bash Freud while ignoring the wrongnesses of (e.g.) Galileo & Newton.
I personally disagree with the first reason. True or not, I don’t see it as justifying the wilful shoddiness from which a big chunk of Freud’s work apparently suffers. I see no reason why a counterfactual Freud couldn’t have come up with basically the same ideas without engaging in PR campaigns, unforced errors, and lies.
I’m more open to the second argument, but I’d want evidence that Galileo & Newton not only had “plenty of wrong ideas”, but tried to further those wrong ideas by bullshitting & fabricating as much as Freud did to further his wrong ideas. Otherwise there’s no real double standard.
As it happens, both Galileo & Newton have been accused of scientific misconduct. I don’t really know the details about Galileo’s case, but I know some for the case against Newton. In short, Newton used fudge factors to shift various estimates of physical quantities in his Principia. However, reading the rap sheet more closely, it sounds like Newton was quite explicit about making his adjustments, in which case he wasn’t engaging in misconduct. I’d guess there’s some similar subtlety in Galileo’s case which people miss, but as ever I could be wrong.
There may be other similarly famous scientists who were crowned geniuses and really did use misconduct to defend substantially wrong beliefs. Mendel, Kepler, Ptolemy, Pasteur, Robert Millikan, and even Einstein are promising candidates, having all been accused of scientific misconduct.
I know little about the Einstein, Kepler, or Ptolemy accusations. As for the others, my lay understanding is that scientists still argue over whether the close match between Mendel’s data and Mendel’s theory is suspicious (and indeed whether it can be explained by unconscious bias rather than conscious fiddling); that Pasteur suppressed the results of experiments which seemed to contradict germ theory, and didn’t cooperate with other scientists who wanted to run such experiments; and that Millikan lied about excluding his least plausible data points in his reports on his oil-drop experiments. So Pasteur & Millikan both lied about which results they were presenting, but the results themselves were all genuine, and both researchers were defending theories which were basically correct, not incorrect. Mendel, meanwhile, may not have committed misconduct at all! So I’ve yet to find a true parallel to Freud in the STEM pantheon.
[Edited 31⁄08 to fix “Einsten”.]
Here’s a series of articles about the history and background of the Galileo controversy
http://tofspot.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown.html
tl;dr Galileo went beyond the data he had to justify the Copernican model—his argument about tides was incorrect (he neglected the role of the moon) and his argument via the motion of sunspots was explicable within the Tychonic model.
Politically, he had just about the best hand dealt to him from the start and proceeded to play it stupidly. He had many close friends in the Church (including the Pope himself!) but his bullishness and lack of tact led him to alienate them one by one. By the standards of the time he got off with a slap on the wrist.
Of course, none of this is to say that his opponents didn’t do and say similarly stupid things, but it wasn’t a simple Brave Rational Iconoclast David vs Decrepit Reactionary Goliath Institution narrative.
Thanks for the summary. In itself that doesn’t sound much like misconduct, as it’s quite possible to go beyond the data and make incorrect/superfluous arguments without being negligent or deceptive.
(I could read the series you link, plus its references, to try to discern whether negligence or deception actually was involved, but after flicking through the first three parts — 14,000 words or so — and not spotting big smoking guns, I put the remaining posts on my mental when-I-get-round-to-it-on-a-rainy-day list.)