Psychology: A Litany of Failures

Some few people are genuinely interested in developing an understanding of the human mind. As opposed to knowledge of the gross and pathetic circle-jerk that is the academic field of psychology. For those very few who seek genuine understanding rather than a PhD, it is vital to appreciate that only a tiny number of psychologists are worth reading.

Academics: Narcissistic Twats

It continues to baffle me how academics keep confusing a subject like the human mind with the history of their own understanding of it. Physicists do the same damned thing. The collective narcissism of these moronic twats is absolutely revolting to me. It is also hypocritical in the extreme since they claim to care about objectivity instead of their own self-aggrandizement.

You would figure psychologists have a better grasp on their own egos than to act in such a narcissistic manner. And that physicists have enough analysis to grasp the difference between the level of physics, the meta-level of their understanding of physics, and the meta-meta-level of the history of their understanding of physics. The real puzzle is that these two radically different mental handicaps result in the same damned collective behaviour.

Physicists don't have the slightest grasp on how their own minds work and some of the most celebrated among them were sick twisted fucks. Meanwhile, psychologists haven't the slightest grasp on logic and some of the most celebrated among them implied human minds don't exist. Yet for some incomprehensible reason, physicists and psychologists act, as a group, the same damned way!

The Ones Worth Reading

So anyways, Carl Jung, Kazimierz Dabrowski, Lloyd deMause and Julian Jaynes are pretty much the only psychologists in human history to have contributed any important insights to our modern understanding of the human mind. In What Are Core Values? I will show just how very little insight Dabrowski provided so you can see I really am scraping the bottom of the barrel here.

In the case of Carl Jung, his better ideas have so thoroughly permeated modern pop psychology that reading him will only leave you with the dreck. I recommend instead reading my articles on fundamental cognitive traits. They're so much better than that crap about supposedly equal archetypes. Worst case, read an overview of Jung's ideas then give him a pass.

The Ones Not Worth Reading

The Big Five Factors of Personality were uncovered through statistical analysis of essentially random questions. This is the kind of scut work which any second year statistics student could have done. You don't even need to know any psychology to do this. And "interpreting" the results of the factor analysis was no doubt just an exercise in free association. Yes you need to know what the Big Five Factors are but then you get that from pop psych so just read a summary.

Myers and Briggs were hacks who churned out an assortment of questions to fit Carl Jung's personality theory. The questionnaire named after them to this day shows not a trace of understanding of the underlying theory. It even contains errors which they no doubt considered "improvements" in their last trait which is just nonsensical and wrong. The entire test is verbose, redundant and unreliable as hell. And their interpretation of results, especially that some personality types aren't superior to others, is just blatant lies.

Fun fact: the MBTI data says men with analysis and synthesis are three times more common as women. Good chance on ever getting a date that's your peer. No, I don't believe that data. I already said it's crap.

Bloom's commission was a commission comprised of many groups not just psychologists. And they still managed to get it wrong as they never realized Judgement is the synergy of Analysis and Synthesis. This is forgivable since these people are all stupid. But they also claimed (or maybe just now claim) that synthesis is a faculty on top of, and not independent of, analysis. And that is just unforgivable. A single psychologist (or teacher) working a single hour should have realized how blatantly wrong that is.

Hare is disappointingly obvious. I'm sorry that psychologists are so fucking stupid they consider detecting psychopaths to be some kind of an achievement. It really isn't. And Hare himself proves that every culture has a concept of "someone who should be left to die on an ice floe because they lie, cheat and steal without ever expressing any genuine remorse". The concept of psychopathy is not even remotely novel.

Now, while the PCL-R is definitely a useful diagnostic tool, it in no way, shape or form enhances our understanding of psychopathy. In fact, there is no conception among psychologists of just what the hell empathy is (see Formal Definition of Empathy). All that crap about mirror neurons cognitive scientists have come up with is just crap. It is entirely on the wrong level, like talking about the features of Intel x86 CPUs when you want to know why MS Windows crashes.

Finally, Hare's latest work with (not on) psychopaths, trying to "redeem" them through intellectual discourse and logic is downright disturbing. Psychopaths should all be put to death, no ifs ands or buts about it. They harm society by being free. They harm society by talking. They harm society by existing. They harm society by us having to put them to death. The only real issue is which of our options minimizes the harm they do.

Maslow is just a quack spouting ridiculous and obvious nonsense. Nonsense which blatantly contradicts reality if you take it seriously. So you're asked not to but then what the fuck is the point of that? Maslow's concept of self-actualization is essentially a crappier, dodgier, fuzzier, less comprehensible version of Dabrowski's Multi-Leveling which at least has the Theory of Positive Disintegration as a huge juicy bonus.

Reiss is a right-wing possibly Nazi fucker whose "16 basic needs" is not even the 20+ basic needs of an animal. By the time you fleshed it out, it'd be 30+ basic needs, it wouldn't actually explain even animals, and a good few percent of homo sapiens sapiens would remain forever beyond such crass reduction. Reiss is almost a new Skinner.

Skinner is a blatant charlatan who claimed that human consciousness does not exist and that humans are just animals. The fact anyone takes his crap seriously is ludicrous. The fact revisionists have tried to rewrite history to make Skinner seem less like the total fucking nutcase zealot he actually is is infuriating.

Freud has left us with pretty much nothing. His id, ego, superego divisions were, at best, specific to Victorians. The superego (persecuting alter) disappears entirely with childrearing mode 6. Conversely, there are people whose minds are segmented many more times (multiple personalities). So we're looking at the notion that the mind can be segmented and that's as obvious as ancient demonology.

Freud can't be credited with discovering the Victorians universally abused their children sexually since he reversed himself on it, trying to make excuses. His dream analysis is useless because symbology is too individual (can't be looked up in a dictionary) and people lie, especially patients.

What Freud is "best known for" is trite and obvious shite such as the subconscious existing or people repressing memories. Far from being some kind of giant in the field, Freud is a complete non-entity to modern psychology.

The Latest Failures

The latest coup among theoretical psychologists is to claim that multiple personalities does not exist. So-called "dissociated identity" means that a personality system's multiple concepts of self (multiple identities) are dissociated from the underlying truth of a unitary personality. IOW, that their senses of self are a lie. There is a lie here and it is in the DSM-IV and in the empty fucking heads of psychologists.

The truth is that it is a fucking miracle that something as ad hoc and arbitrarily complex as a mind ever manages to coalesce into a single unitary personality. There is absolutely nothing obvious about why it should happen. At all. And yet it does in nearly every modern person. That it does not in some people is unfortunate but entirely predictable. You have to be some kind of fucking retard to imagine that the present state of affairs of unitary personalities is a universal law to which deviations are simply impossible.

Julian Jaynes says humans didn't experience this coalescing as recently as 3000 years ago. And while he points to a great deal of psychosocial changes at the time that somehow resulted in this happening, the "somehow" remains a big question mark. Of course, Jaynes just had to die before he could answer these questions and I don't believe ordinary psychologists understand the questions to begin with. Also, multiple personalities do not spontaneously merge so that situation is only vaguely similar.

What's Wrong With Psychologists?

The reason why psychologists are such failures is because they're incapable of logic or synthesis. It's the same reason why they're incapable of detecting psychopaths. First because they're incapable of detecting contradictions in what the psychopaths say. Second because they're incapable of generating original psychological models of their patients so they can't check that those models (based on the psychopaths' lies) don't match up with their actual behaviour.

To work as a psychotherapist is to work overwhelmingly with people who lack analysis and synthesis. As someone who possesses those cognitive traits, I say "no fucking thank you!" Since psychologists are incapable of the basic processes of cognition (ie, they can't think), it should be no surprise that one person capable of those processes can, working alone, achieve a better understanding of the human mind than the entire community of psychologists put together.

Psychopaths

It should also be no surprise that the solution to reliably detecting psychopaths so they can be put to death lies in letting people like me diagnose them. People who refuse to work as psychologists but have an excellent understanding of the human mind. Now, while I'm certain it gives everyone a warm glow inside to think of me having the power of life and death over everyone I come across, let's all pause for a minute in order to appreciate the full magnificence of that wondrous vision, my actual recommendation is to summon random juries of my peers to decide on a case by case basis.

(The political side-effects of correctly putting all psychopaths to death is that it reduces magical thinkers to third class citizens since if they whine too much, they'll get conveniently diagnosed as psychopaths and be put to death. Mere analytic or synthetic people would become second class citizens since they are naturally less annoying than magical thinkers so would be given much greater leeway. This political situation is best described as "everything as it should be". This is obviously a great solution since it solves problems I never intended it to solve.)

And yes, I seriously believe that putting all psychopaths to death as they're detected (and instituting universal testing) in order to try to wipe them out of the gene pool is the biggest priority for psychology. Gaining a full understanding of the human mind is nice but the only thing it's useful for is building machine intelligences which themselves won't be useful until they can be built in the hundreds of millions. It's also useful to understand why I'm superior to you all and hate you but that's only of personal interest to me. So yeah, psychopaths. Psychotics used to be a big problem until thorazine was invented (not by psychologists). In our era, the biggest problem is psychopaths.

It might be an idea to start solving the psychopaths problem by criminalizing their creation. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome looks an awful lot like psychopathy. There is absolutely nothing wrong with jailing a woman for delivering a baby she's soaked in alcohol during her pregnancy. It's a good thing some countries recognize that. Yes, I know, it's a pipe dream. Psychologists are too stupid. Politicians are too stupid. The courts are way too stupid. And society is made up of stupid people who stupidly believe they're first class citizens. But I can still dream.

Imagine there's no religion.
No psychotics hallucinating Jesus.
No nutters or zealots.
And no psychopaths too!
You may say I'm a dreamer,
but I'm not the only one.