CraigOhMyEggo

I don't have a good outlook on psychology as a field. It's all influenced by people for leverage and different countries can't even agree on what qualifies as what (e.g. the definition for social anxiety in one country could be considered the definition for agoraphobia in another). But I think watching Simon Whistler give a very debunked rundown on psychology ten years into his career was the last straw for me this week. Misrepresenting psychology has very annoying implications and it gets tiring to see it done over and over.

To use one example, he mentions the former Axis Power officers in WWII saying they were "just following orders", which led to the highly rigged Stanford Prison Experiment, which has never been able to be replicated with the same results. Why? They rigged it, some say to support those officers. Here is an instance where history clashes with psychology, because near the end of WWII, German officers started recruiting and enslaving the Jews they were capturing to do the very dirty work they previously inflicted on them. Did these poor souls succumb to the wickedness like the Stanford Prison Experiment and the officers who inspired it would suggest in court? No, they were traumatized and went insane, because this was not in their nature.

Modern psychology is littered with these false rules and expectations. I'm sure many of you have heard a number of them. Maybe you remember the Milgram Experiment or Stockholm Syndrome for example. So let's play a game. Look back into your life. Think of all the things you've experienced and how it all played out. Out of all these experiences, which ones can you talk about that you can point to and say "if conventional psychology was right, this event in my life would've never happened how it did?

Example: There is a rule in the field of psychology called the Prisoner's Dilemma. It says that if you question two people a certain way, they will be incentivized to spill beans and betray each other. Me and a friend were once arrested because he got into a fight because someone cheated on his sister and I sped him away. The officers tried inflicting the Prisoner's Dilemma on us, but we're both open books, to the point where we knew the whole point was we were willing to face whatever comes. The cops had nothing. They let us free.

I don't have a good outlook on psychology as a field. It's all influenced by people for leverage and different countries can't even agree on what qualifies as what (e.g. the definition for social anxiety in one country could be considered the definition for agoraphobia in another). But I think watching Simon Whistler give a very debunked rundown on psychology ten years into his career was the last straw for me this week. Misrepresenting psychology has very annoying implications and it gets tiring to see it done over and over.

To use one example, he mentions the former Axis Power officers in WWII saying they were "just following orders", which led to the highly rigged Stanford Prison Experiment, which has never been able to be replicated with the same results. Why? They rigged it, some say to support those officers. Here is an instance where history clashes with psychology, because near the end of WWII, German officers started recruiting and enslaving the Jews they were capturing to do the very dirty work they previously inflicted on them. Did these poor souls succumb to the wickedness like the Stanford Prison Experiment and the officers who inspired it would suggest in court? No, they were traumatized and went insane, because this was not in their nature.

Modern psychology is littered with these false rules and expectations. I'm sure many of you have heard a number of them. Maybe you remember the Milgram Experiment or Stockholm Syndrome for example. So let's play a game. Look back into your life. Think of all the things you've experienced and how it all played out. Out of all these experiences, which ones can you talk about that you can point to and say "if conventional psychology was right, this event in my life would've never happened how it did?

Example: There is a rule in the field of psychology called the Prisoner's Dilemma. It says that if you question two people a certain way, they will be incentivized to spill beans and betray each other. Me and a friend were once arrested because he got into a fight because someone cheated on his sister and I sped him away. The officers tried inflicting the Prisoner's Dilemma on us, but we're both open books, to the point where we knew the whole point was we were willing to face whatever comes. The cops had nothing. They let us free.

I know artists often make art to try to get by, but you have to admit how high the prices would sound to outsiders, which is why I see people arguing over art pricing ethics all the time.

The arguments against pricey art: It is offensive to societal necessities to price art higher than that, and there comes a point in an art's price where it doesn't make sense to raise the price more based on what relative little went into making it.

The arguments in favor of pricey art: They help the artist and it's up to the person buying the art how much they're willing to pay.

Based on the arguments in favor of pricey art, what's the highest you've ever priced art (both with haggling intended/involved and without haggling intended/involved) and were able to sell it for that amount?

I know artists often make art to try to get by, but you have to admit how high the prices would sound to outsiders, which is why I see people arguing over art pricing ethics all the time.

The arguments against pricey art: It is offensive to societal necessities to price art higher than that, and there comes a point in an art's price where it doesn't make sense to raise the price more based on what relative little went into making it.

The arguments in favor of pricey art: They help the artist and it's up to the person buying the art how much they're willing to pay.

Based on the arguments in favor of pricey art, what's the highest you've ever priced art (both with haggling intended/involved and without haggling intended/involved) and were able to sell it for that amount?

The act of interacting on YouTube used to be an entirely public matter. You could say anything you want as long as it didn't break any laws and trust it to be thrown into the public. Nowadays you comment on something, and there's a 75% chance of you being shadowbanned without knowing why, with the video owner being the main filter of what people see, forcing feuds to take place not in comments but in back and forth videos, since this means everyone's content has become their own little echo chamber, which means a stable argument is impossible, and combined with the fact YouTube is highly indifferent to even most of its most important rules broken, as well as combined with the fact popularity is based entirely on luck now, means anyone can use it as a platform to slander any person or topic completely unchallenged if they're the one who gets popular while the challenger cannot. And because YouTube once had a reputation for being the best platform for information, most people who grew up with this reputation who have never had to deal with its modern incarnation don't think to question anything. It's a literal den of snakes now, you got misinformation trolls coming out its wazoo. What ways have you used to circumvent the issue?

The act of interacting on YouTube used to be an entirely public matter. You could say anything you want as long as it didn't break any laws and trust it to be thrown into the public. Nowadays you comment on something, and there's a 75% chance of you being shadowbanned without knowing why, with the video owner being the main filter of what people see, forcing feuds to take place not in comments but in back and forth videos, since this means everyone's content has become their own little echo chamber, which means a stable argument is impossible, and combined with the fact YouTube is highly indifferent to even most of its most important rules broken, as well as combined with the fact popularity is based entirely on luck now, means anyone can use it as a platform to slander any person or topic completely unchallenged if they're the one who gets popular while the challenger cannot. And because YouTube once had a reputation for being the best platform for information, most people who grew up with this reputation who have never had to deal with its modern incarnation don't think to question anything. It's a literal den of snakes now, you got misinformation trolls coming out its wazoo. What ways have you used to circumvent the issue?

Suppose you have a fediverse admin, perhaps one of the several who are oppressive, and they are roaming around somewhere like Twitter or Reddit. One day they spot someone on there they don't like, maybe someone they know from the fediverse or maybe not, and they give the person a hard time. Are we allowed to talk about those activities, especially considering the barrier is already crossed the other way?

Forgive the vent, but it used to be that the instances were all simply opinionated in different ways. You could talk to anyone from any instance without anyone getting upset so as long as you were respectful. Being in an instance used to be enviable enough to jest about.

Early on, it went from that to "my opinion should not be pushed back against". For a while, you could not go into ML territory, for example, and challenge their status quo. Recently it has reached another new level, where people will obliterate you simply for being neutral, and this was after they began to break their own rules. Individual cities in my home country are beginning to consider banning the fediverse, and that's only because the country itself stopped short of doing it. I thought the fediverse was supposed to make things easier to enjoy. How can we trust we can look up to it in this social environment?

I feel like the one I would choose Xolotl. I am someone with has made few friends but who stands up for them all and who has been durable in doing so, and to this end have found myself opposing newly appointed leadership almost to the death.

I feel like the one I would choose Xolotl. I am someone with has made few friends but who stands up for them all and who has been durable in doing so, and to this end have found myself opposing newly appointed leadership almost to the death.

Topics of generational abuse, or intergenerational abuse, have suddenly become relevant in my life. I have a parent I barely know and was criticizing one day, and I was getting all kinds of excuses which mainly boiled down to either "appeal to authority", "appeal to psychology", or "not my problem". At one point, I ragequit the conversation after making sure I had made a statement. I contacted my sister who knew all my relatives better than I had and dropped a brief comment along the lines of "I wonder why they are like this" and she responded with a "you're not being tolerant enough, they have generational abuse, cut everyone some slack". So maybe I've been influenced the wrong way when I say intergenerational abuse as a phenomenon or a concept sounds like the biggest load of BS I've ever heard.

I'm also into learning about a lot of culty topics, and recently I watched a video about one of those televangelists you see on TV that claim you can pray your stigmatized relationship orientations away, and the video was chronicling his life and how he grew up in an environment that would always put him down for his lamentations towards many of those practices, and it mentioned he became the monster he feared growing up. Genuine question here, how DOES someone become the monster they fear? What kind of free will does someone have to lack to inherit someone's monstrosity? Even when someone says it simply, such as when they say "that's just how I was raised", that raises a huge red flag, because if you don't like how you were treated/raised, why the heck are you (even consciously) imitating it?

In general, in a world where we expect free will to be valued and where that "bad times make good people" meme still floats around, how are people so unquestioning enough of their bad experiences that they consciously use the lack of their questioning of something they never liked as an excuse to do that very thing onto others?

I got some stuff to get off my chest, but I don't know where to put it. It's about family issues.