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[smjjames]

Freud was a lot of things, many of the just kinda' wrong. Not a very good source of psych findings. Actively a bad one, really. Best thing the guy ever did was get more people interested in the field, and that was substantially offset by getting them interested with bupkis.

Last I paid attention the taboo thing's only occasionally effective to any degree, and far from universal. Depends a lot on the specific subject.

He seems to be credited with giving the field of psychology a good kickstart though.

[Neonivek]

Freud was a lot of things, many of the just kinda' wrong. Not a very good source of psych findings. Actively a bad one, really. Best thing the guy ever did was get more people interested in the field, and that was substantially offset by getting them interested with bupkis.

Last I paid attention the taboo thing's only occasionally effective to any degree, and far from universal. Depends a lot on the specific subject.

He seems to be credited with giving the field of psychology a good kickstart though.

Specifically he is the one who popularized Psychology I think...

Though he isn't the one who first took Psychology from a philosophy into a science (almost all sciences came from philosophy... as long as they aren't an offshoot of a science)

Though his field of study was different then that guy

[smjjames]

Anybody know what the difference is between libel laws in the UK and US? Because Trump apparently wants UK style libel laws 'because over here (the US), they don't have to apologize: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2016/oct/24/donald-trump-news-hillary-clinton-polls-president-2016?page=with:block-580de8cee4b0c146d5891358#block-580de8cee4b0c146d5891358

[Rolan7]

Tom Scott has a neat little video discussing the issue from a British perspective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z49LjJj3VTI

As I understand it, you have to be very careful about what you say in a publication if you can't absolutely prove it.  Even if you point at a bar and say people are getting drunk in it (and then publish that).
You can use euphemisms, though.

[Strife26]

UK libel laws are, in a word, horrifying.

[TheBiggerFish]

UK libel laws are, in a word, horrifying.

Yyyyyyeah.

[Frumple]

He seems to be credited with giving the field of psychology a good kickstart though.

Well yeah, which is why I specifically mentioned him getting more people interested :V

But as mentioned, the problem is his shit was shit. Freud was pretty much a quack, and an embodiment of many of the negative stereotypes associated with psychology in general t'boot. Popularized the stuff to a fair extent but even by the standards of his time (never mind today) he was a freaking terrible psychologist. By and large the few times he was actually something approximating accurate, it was more coincidence than anything he actually did.

It's difficult to overstate just how bad the guy was at what he brought more attention to. Freud's one of the go-to examples I've seen used in modern psychology teaching as what to not do. How to not do research, how to not diagnose, how to not treat, and on, and on, and on. Pretty close to every aspect of psychology you can think of, freud screwed up on. Dude's almost impressive just for that alone

[Neonivek]

UK libel laws are, in a word, horrifying.

Yyyyyyeah.

Yeah the UK has quite a few backwards laws.

For example you can be successfully sued for copyright in the UK for making a clear Parody so long as it is physically possible to confuse those two things.

In otherwords... the UK has made laws intentionally to go around "Fair use"

[DJ]

Well it's not like psychology is a real science anyway. How do you test a hypothesis without objective measurements?

[Neonivek]

Well it's not like psychology is a real science anyway.

There are parts of it that are a hard science.

[smjjames]

Tom Scott has a neat little video discussing the issue from a British perspective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z49LjJj3VTI

As I understand it, you have to be very careful about what you say in a publication if you can't absolutely prove it.  Even if you point at a bar and say people are getting drunk in it (and then publish that).
You can use euphemisms, though.

I guess that might explain all the slang and way of talking. Yes, that's a friendly jab at our cousins accross the pond.

[DJ]

You mean like math parts? Yeah, math is as hard as science gets, but it's meaningless without rigorously and objectively measured data.

[Rolan7]

The libel thing doesn't seem so bad to me, once you know about it.  Just means you can't state unproven theories as facts.  Like if a newspaper headlined "Donald Trump is a Rapist" or something.

[Frumple]

Well it's not like psychology is a real science anyway. How do you test a hypothesis without objective measurements?

As best you can when objective measurements are impossible to collect. Basically the same way you do any science before you have sufficiently precise measurement tools. Which is still most science to some degree, really, because we've still not really managed precise enough to call it genuinely objective, to the extent that's even an obtainable state of development.

Though all of it's science what is hard, if not necessarily hard science. Psych researchers laugh long and hard about the folks claiming experiments where you can actually pare things down to one or two variables in a controlled environment is anything approach difficult. Said it before and I'll say it again, those folks let their stuff be called soft science to save the fragile egos of the people playing easy modo science and calling it hard

[Neonivek]

If science required objective measurements to work... we would have no science

Freud's major fault as a "scientist" is that for the most part... he didn't do science