We are currently upset at a particular batch of experts, the health authorities who we believe consistently lied to us with bad motives. Some of that is true, both the lying and the motives. Yet conservatives especially are currently exaggerating what went wrong. Fauci is powerful and lied, and for poor reasons for example, but many real researchers and authorities gave the best they knew and...
well, never mind. You already know my view that the skeptics were even more unreliable, and if they weren't being dishonest then they were fools.
My main point is that we have always had experts who were fools. This is not some new phenomenon visited upon us by modern liberals and wokesters. Kinsey was considered a lion of modern scientific research in the late 40s and early 50s. The first expert in the topic, really, and is still regarded as a great liberator of our culture, especially of females and homosexuals.
But much of his data on the sexual responses of children came from imprisoned molesters, who insisted that the children liked this and were squirming from orgasmic excitement, not discomfort. Still more of his childhood data came from talking their parents into letting the children be fondled and studied. You don't even have to read the exposes. Read his actual books and read between the lines and it will dawn on you the only ways this information could be learned. He was determined to prove that lots of people were homosexual, and used his prison data as evidence. He had his, uh, own reasons for this.
Police detectives and other investigators insist they are experts on telling when others are lying. There are actually very few reliable indicators, and those take time and comparison to ferret out. It doesn't stop them, and they have sent people to jail for years on this nonsense. Were you taught in school to vary your adjectives in writing, so that you didn't sound repetitive saying "big" repeatedly, boring your audience and looking like you didn't know many synonyms? Did you know that on one of the major tests that detectives in many American jurisdictions administer, that is considered a clear sign that you are lying, and that will be present as such against you in court if your attorney isn't savvy enough to know this is entirely bogus? I was sent to "lie-detection" inservices early in my career, but the hospital eventually figured out they were worse than useless and it stopped.
When I came in to social work and mental health around 1980, Freudian psychology, who with his descendants like Jung, Adler, Erikson and on into the Fritz Perls and other ego- or dynamic- therapists was increasingly discredited and abandoned. BF Skinner was likewise being relegated to very specific lanes (where his theories could be quite useful), and the family systems people were just coming into their own. The medications were working, but it was mostly only psychiatrists who thought biology was key. Everyone else scored virtue points for sneering at "the medical model." Eventually people learned that all this "family work" was fun to talk about, but somehow the patients didn't stop being schizophrenic or manic or borderline. The weakness in the medication system is that the side effects are often miserable. Every year that has gotten better, but it is a long tough road for people with most conditions. As I was leaving there was an attempted revolution that looked similar to some earlier ones, discovering political and cultural causes for everything. It's not going to work and I'm glad I'm out.
Academic psychology had a replication crisis, and lots of experts were exposed. Social psychology looks ripe for that next. Remember the food pyramid?
I suppose the thing to remember is that some of the experts turn out to have been right, and to my eyes, humility is one of the keys for spotting them. But experts with feet of clay aren't new. Nor could you count on the skeptics in any of these fields to be right, either.
I notice that many of these examples are from psychology (to include at the margins even the police theories). The problem of identifying experts for the general population is significant in every technical field; but it may be worse in psychology, because the object of study is not directly accessible. Models like Freud’s or Jung’s aren’t falsifiable, especially since one can always tell another story to explain an unexpected outcome. (Eg, “I know this guy who just doesn’t have an Oedipal complex.” “Well, he’s just repressing it.”) Ultimately the brilliance of the theorist can be recognized, but that doesn’t mean that the theory is realistic enough to ground an ‘expert’ opinion.
ReplyDeleteStill, as I said at the Hall, the phenomenon of misidentified experts should be expected in every generation. It’s a genuinely structural problem.
When I came in to social work and mental health around 1980, Freudian psychology, who with his descendants like Jung, Adler, Erikson and on into the Fritz Perls and other ego- or dynamic- therapists was increasingly discredited and abandoned.
ReplyDeleteWhen I worked a year as an aide, a.k.a. Mental Health Worker, at a private psychiatric hospital in the mid-70's, that was the trend. There was also a practical reason for this. If your insurance program will pay for only 4-6 weeks, a long-term program like psychoanalysis is not a feasible treatment mode.
The weakness in the medication system is that the side effects are often miserable. Every year that has gotten better, but it is a long tough road for people with most conditions.
That was my recollection. A family friend did her student nurse duty at Bellvue in NYC, in the mid-'50s, when medications were becoming mainstream. For all the problems of medications, they were better than the straightjackets.
Several decades after my year at the psych hospital, I got shingles. The medication prescribed for pain reduction was a much lower dose of a medication I recognized as being used on psych patients. It worked. I left town for a conference, and missed one of my doses. I assumed that doubling up on the next dose would work. To my chagrin, I spent hours in a zombie state. IIRC, the double dose I took was still much lower than the standard dose I recall psych patients getting.
My year as an aide definitely influenced my view of experts and also of social programs that purport to solve something, like mental illness or poverty or homelessness. I concluded that while the psychiatrists knew a lot more than I, in many cases they were dealing with very difficult problems that had no quick solution, or no solution. That doesn't say that the effort shouldn't be made, but that saying that there is a solution doesn't necessarily mean that is the solution- or that there is one. Saying you have a program that will solve something often means no more than you have devised a way to throw money at a problem, and nothing more.
Just when I thought my opinion of Alfred ("Creepyquack") Kinsey could go no lower.
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