"Offbreed" wrote in message
...
Ed Huntress wrote:
It's an
interesting field, but it sounds like a lot of guesswork, so far.

Unless psychology has changed drastically in recent years, it always has
been mostly guesswork. They did not make falsible studies.

Back in 1968, a CulAnthro professor told me about a study by someone in
the CulAnthro field (IIRC) comparing the effectiveness of witch doctors
and "modern psychology", with an untreated control group. The witch
doctors did some good, the "modern psychologists" did harm. I've been on
the look out for that study for some time, haven't found it on the net.

Haha! I'd like to see that one, too.


So, priests of assorted types are able to do some good, along with the
obvious harm they sometimes do.

Well, pysch and the social sciences are built upon inferential models, which
is all you can do when you don't know what the exact causative mechanisms
are. Even medicine has elements of such modeling, as I've learned over the
past year and a half. And witch-doctoring is all about inferential models,
most of which are nonsense but some of which are very useful and effective.

The wonder is how much they've learned in the life sciences and the "soft"
sciences, and how much actually works. As understanding of causation grows
deeper in those fields, the old models fall away fairly rapidly in favor of
better ones. But the models they have now are surprisingly useful and
effective, in my opinion. In fact, I'm alive today because of such
inferential reasoning and modeling, in a medical field in which the actual
causative mechanisms are only vaguely understood.

--
Ed Huntress