[ExI] In defense of psych; was Re: aeon article - you have no memory

[John Clark]

On Sat, May 21, 2016 at 12:44 PM, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com
> wrote:

​> ​
> Psychologists are everywhere:  designing  dashboards for NASA (as well as
> being intimately involved in training astronauts), doing great cognitive
> work like Kahneman and TVersky (and winning a Nobel Prize for it),
>


​OK maybe I was a little too hard on psychology, but only a little; and
they won the Nobel Prize in 2002​ for work that was done decades before
that, and it was for economics not psychology.



> ​> ​
> Our brains are the most complicated thing in the known universe.
>

​I certainly agree with that.​

​> ​
> Read Stephen Pinker if you want some really up to date good science.  He
> may be our best.
>

I've read
​"​
The Language Instinct
​"​
and
​"​
The Better Angels of Our Nature
​" and liked them​ both, and I've already bought "How The Mind Works" and
put it into my book queue and should read it in a month or two,  but Pinker
likes interesting stuff like linguistics neurology and AI, and yes
evolutionary psychology and I admit that can be interesting too.


 > Most people, like you, are just not aware of what psychology has evolved
> to.


It's just that when you look at what psychology has discovered in the last
50 years and compare it with what physics or biology or computer science
has found it's day and night, hell astronomers discovered that all the
planets and stars and galaxies that they thought was all there was turned
out to be only 4% of what there was.

  John K Clark


>
>
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