If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one.
3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.
4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
A few months ago I started using the Ultimate Geography Anki deck after performing quite abysmally on some silly geography quiz that was doing the rounds on Facebook. I now know where all the damn countries are, like an informed citizen of the world. This has proven itself very useful in a variety of ways, not least of which is in reading other material with a geographical backdrop. For example, the chapter in Guns, Germs and Steel on Africa is much more readable if you know where all the African countries are in relation to one another.
(In the process of doing this, coupled with an international event in Sweden, I've learned that the Scandinavian education systems are much, much better than that of the UK at teaching children about the rest of the world)
The geography deck was particularly easy to slip into because it developed an area I already (weakly) knew about. I'm looking for some new Anki content of a similar nature: a cross-domain-application body of knowledge I probably sort-of know a little bit already, that I can comprehensively improve upon.
Suggestions and anecdotes of similar experiences welcome.
Yep, I find the world a much less confusing place since I learned capitals and location on map. I had (and to some extent still do have) a mental block on geography which was ameliorated by it.
Rundown of positive and negative results:
In a similar but lesser way, I found learning English counties (and to an even lesser extent, Scottish counties) made UK geography a bit less intimidating. I used this deck because it's the only one on the Anki website I found that worked on my old-ass phone; it has a few howlers and throws some cities in there to fuck with you, but I learned to love it.
I suspect that learning the dates of monarchs and Prime Ministers (e.g. of England/UK) would have a similar benefit in contextualising and de-intimidating historical facts, but I never finished those decks and haven't touched them in a while, so never reached the critical mass of knowledge that allowed me to have a good handle on periods of British history. I found it pretty difficult to (for example) keep track of six different Georges and map each to dates, so slow progress put me off. Let me know if you're interested and want to set up a pact, e.g. 'We'll both do at least ten cards from each deck a day and report back to the other regularly' or something. In fact that offer probably stands for any readers.
I installed some decks for learning definitions in areas of math that I didn't know, but found memorising decontextualised definitions hard enough that I wasn't motivated to do it, given everything else I was doing and Anki-ing at the time. I still think repeat exposure to definitions might be a useful developmental strategy for math that nobody seems to be using deliberately and systematically, but I'm not sure Anki is a right way to do it. Or if it is, that shooting so far ahead of my current knowledge was the best way to do it. Similarly a LaTeX deck I got having pretty much never used LaTeX and not practising it while learning the deck.
Canadian provinces/territories I have not yet found useful beyond feeling good for ticking off learning the deck, which was enough for me since I did them in a session or two.
Languages Spoken in Each Country of the World (I was trying to do not just country-->languages but country-->languages with proportions of population speaking the languages) was so difficult and unrewarding in the short term that I lost motivation extremely quickly (this was months ago). The mental association between 'Berber' and 'North Africa' has come up a surprising number of times, though. Most recently yesterday night.
Periodic table (symbol<--->name, name<-->number) took lots of time and hasn't been very useful for me personally (I pretty much just learned it in preparation for a quiz). Learning just which elements are in which groups/sections of the Periodic table might be more useful and a lot quicker (since by far the main difficulty was name<--->number).
I am relatively often wanting for demographic and economic data, e.g. population of countries, population of major world cities, population of UK places, GDP's. Ideally I'd not just do this for major places since I want to get a good intuitive sense of these figures for very large or major places on down to tiny places.
Similarly if one has a hobby horse it could be useful. Examples off the top of my head (not necessarily my hobby horse): Memorising the results from the LessWrong surveys. Memorising the results from the PhilPapers survey. Memorising data about resource costs of meat production vs. other food production. Memorising failed AGI timeline predictions. Etc.
I found starting to learn Booker Prize winners on Memrise has let me have a few 'Ah, I recognise that name and literature seems less opaque to me, yay!' moments, but there's probably higher-priority decks for you to learn unless that's more your area.
What about learning a sense of scale, for both time and space?
replies to most common comments to the previous video
sub-atomic to hypothetical multi-universes-- uses pictures and numbers, no zooming. I hadn't realized how much overlap there is in size between the larger moons and smaller planets, and (in spite of having seen many pictures) hadn't registered that nebulas are much bigger than stars.
I'm going to post this before I spend a while noodling around science videos, but it might also be good to work on time scales and getting oriented among geological and historical time periods, including what things were happening at the same time in different parts of the world.
Great effort. If may suggest a topic without providing a deck, I'd say learn about the vocabulary of personal finance. Or more generally, learn the vocabulary of stuff relevant to most lifes from time to time, like medicine, law and, well, finance. This helps to search for the correct things when needed and helps communicating with the relevant professionals.
Is there an existing post on people's tendency to be confused by explanations that don't include a smaller version of what's being explained?
For example, confusion over the fact that "nothing touches" in quantum mechanics seems common. Instead of being satisfied by the fact that the low-level phenomena (repulsive forces and the Pauli exclusion principle) didn't assume the high-level phenomena (intersecting surfaces), people seem to want the low-level phenomena to be an aggregate version of the high-level phenomena. Explaining something without using it is one of the best properties an explanation can have, but people are somehow unsatisfied by such explanations.
Other examples of "but explain(X) doesn't include X!": emotions from biology, particles from waves, computers from solid state physics, life from chemistry.
More controversial examples: free will, identity, [insert basically any other introspective mental concept here].
Examples of the opposite: any axiom/assumption of a theory, billiard balls in Newtonian mechanics, light propagating through the ether, explaining a bar magnet as an aggregation of atom-sized magnets, fluid mechanics using continuous fields instead of particles, love from "God wanted us to have love".
I have uploaded a collection of My Little Pony one-shots called Flashes of Insight to both FIMFiction.net and FanFiction.net. While most of the stories have no particular relevance to LessWrong, "Good Night" draws heavily on ideas I first encountered on this site, and I expect most people here will find it enjoyable. Eliezer Yudkowsky called it "chilling," which, coming from him, I consider a very great compliment.
So, I made two posts sharing potentionally useful heuristics from Bayesianism. So what?
Should I move one of them to Main? On the one hand, these posts "discuss core Less Wrong topics". On the other, I'm honestly not sure that this stuff is awesome enough. But I feel like I should do something, so these things aren't lost (I tried to do a talk about "which useful principles can be reframed in a Bayesian terms" on a Moscow meetup once, and learned that those things weren't very easy to find using site-wide search).
Maybe we need a wiki page with a list of relevant lessons from probability theory, which can be kept up-to-date?
I might need some recalibration, but I'm not sure.
I research topics of interest in the media, and I feel frustrated, angry and annoyed about the half-truths and misleading statements that I encounter frequently. The problem is not the feelings, but whether I am 'wrong'. I figure there are two ways that I might be wrong:
(i) Maybe I'm wrong about these half-truths and misleading statements not being necessary. Maybe authors have already considered telling the facts straight and that didn't get the best message out.
(ii) Maybe I'm actually wrong about whether these are half-truths or really all that misleading. Maybe I am focused on questions of fact and the meanings of particular phrases that are overly subtle.
The reason why I think I might need re-calibration is because I don't consider it likely that I am much less pragmatic, smarter or more accurate than all these writers I am critical of (some of them, inevitably, but not all of them -- also these issues are not that difficult intellectually).
Here are some concrete examples, all regarding my latest interest in the Ebola outbreak:
Harvard poll: Most recently, the HSPH-SSRS poll with headlines, "Poll finds US lack knowledge about ebola" or, "Many Americans harbor unfounded fears about Ebola". But when you look at the poll questions, they ask whether Americans are "concerned" about the risk, not what they believe the risk to be, and whether they think Ebola is spread 'easily'. The poll didn't appear to be about American's knowledge of Ebola, but how they felt about the knowledge they had. The question about whether Ebola transmits easily especially irks me, since everyone knows (don't they??) that whether something is 'easy' is subjective?
"Bush meat": I've seen many places that people need to stop consuming bush meat in outbreak areas (for example). I don't know that much about how Ebola is spreading through this route, but wouldn't it be the job of the media and epidemiologists to report on the rate of transmission from eating bats (I think there has only been one ground zero patient in West Africa who potentially contracted Ebola from a bat) and weigh this with the role of local meat as an important food source (again, don't know, media to blame)? Just telling people to stop eating would be ridiculous, hopefully it's not so extreme. Also, what about cooking rather than drying local meat sources? This seems a very good example of the media unable to nuance a message in a reasonable way, but I allow I could be wrong.
Media reports "Ebola Continues to spread in Nigeria" when the increase in Ebola cases were at that time due to contact with the same person and had already been in quarantine. This seemed to hype up the outbreak when in fact the Nigerians were successfully containing it. Perhaps this is an example of being too particular and over-analyzing something subtle?
Ever using the phrase 'in the air' to describe how Ebola does or doesn't transmit, because this is a phrase that can mean completely different things to anyone using or hearing the phrase. Ebola is not airborne but can transmit within coughing distance.
The apparent internal inconsistency of a case of Ebola might come to the US, but an outbreak cannot happen here. Some relative risk numbers would be helpful here.
All of these examples upset me to various degrees since I feel like it is evidence that people -- even writers and the scientists they are quoting -- are unable to think critically and message coherently about issues. How should I update my view so that I am less surprised, less argumentative or less crazy-pedantic-fringe person?
My first suggestion would be to look at the incentives of people who write for the media. Their motivations are NOT to "get the best message out". That's not what they're paid for. Nowadays their principal goal is to attract eyeballs and hopefully monetize them by shoving ads into your face. The critical thing to recognize is that their goals and criteria of what constitutes a successful piece do not match your goals and your criteria of what constitutes a successful piece.
The second suggestion would be to consider that writers write for a particular audience and, I think, most of the time you will not be a member of that particular audience. Mass media doesn't write for people like you.
All of these examples upset me to various degrees since I feel like it is evidence that people -- even writers and the scientists they are quoting -- are unable to think critically and message coherently about issues.
That's a funny sentence. You yourself blame scientists with whom you didn't interact at all based on the way they got quoted without critically asking yourself whether your behavior makes sense.
If a journalist quotes a scientist the process might be: Journalists picks up the phone and calls the scientists. They talk 15 minutes about the issue. Then the journalist who thinks that it's his job to quote an authority picks one sentence of that interview that fits into the narrative the journalist wants to tell. It's quite possible that the scientists even didn't say that sentence "word for word".
It's also quite possible that you spend more time investigating the issue in detail then some of the journalists you read.
My limited experience with journalists supports this -- when they speak with you, they often already have the outline of the story ready (the nearest existing cliche); they only need a few words they can take out of context and used them to support their bottom line. You can try to educate them, but they don't really listen to you to learn about the topic, they listen to catch some nice keywords.
I recently decided to bite the bullet and started to use the Markdown standard in my plain-text documents (I would have preferred the syntax of txt2tags or Org-mode, but neither of those is nearly as widespread and well-supported). It's proven so useful that I am seriously considering uninstalling LibreOffice. Who needs a WYSIWYG editor when you have readable source code which can be easily converted to an html document? Not to mention that Notepad++ opens instantly, while LibreOffice Writer takes forever.
I highly recommend that anyone who deals with lots of text documents try Markdown. It will change your digital life. If you need help getting started, try the Markdown Tutorial.
Patrick McKenzie explains a bit more why he hates bitcoin:
My feelings about Bitcoin remind me of a fractal. Its a bad idea, and you zoom in at any part of it and discover new bad ideas, and there is in fact infinite resolution on how bad those ideas get. I have been working on a Why I Dislike Bitcoin For Technical Reasons essay for almost a year and cannot just hit publish because I dont know if ill ever be able to finish it.
Lets talk non-technical reasons.
When will I add support for crypto-currencies? Well, I sell a variety of products and services at price points between $29.95 and $30,000 a week, almost exclusively to professional Americans, with a small portion of the business being B2C and the larger part being B2B. I would accept Bitcoin if it were in demand from my customers. It isnt. It never will be because taking payment for legal products from the global rich is straightforward.
If you, like me, want to sell software, get a Stripe account and youre done. If you cant code sufficiently then use Gumroad or one of the numerous e-commerce systems and youre done. You will, at no point, have to explain to a Kansas schoolteacher (who thinks Internet Explorer is called the blue Googles ) what crypto currency is, why she needs to download a new program to pay you, why she needs to give a company shes never heard of which isnt you withdraw access to her bank account to buy Scary Internet Voodoo, or how to process a novel transaction type shes never had to deal with before. You just get her to put in one of the several visa cards she has in her pocket.
But wait Patrick. You routinely transfer tens of thousands of dollars from the US to Japan. Wouldnt Bitcoin make that fast and easy?
No. Wire transfers are fast and easy annoyingly expensive, to be true ($50 in fees plus the currency slippage), but J->US takes 45 minutes and US->J takes 48 hours. Throwing Bitcoin in the mix introduces numerous sources of risk. The odds-on place to do business for them in Japan which people told me I should go get a job at (!) is currently undergoing bankruptcy proceedings after losing about half a billion dollars of depositors money. If one of my $50k transfers had been tied up there, well, thats all she wrote for that, but at least I saved $50 on wire fees?
Asking my clients to acquire Bitcoin and pay me in them, which cuts out Bitcoin exchanges from the value chain, is a poor use of my time. Large companies, like the ones which happily pay $X0,000 invoices, will not do it. Full stop. To the extent that I want to change their minds about processes which are deep in the sinews of their company, it should not be their Accounts Payable department but rather their Marketing department, and after successfully implementing my ideas (which, unlike Bitcoin, will make them a lot of money) I will send in an invoice for a huge amount of money and predictably receive it.
> But Patrick, isnt Bitcoin a great platform for remittances? No, its a terrible platform for remittances because 98% of the problem of remittances is what is called in networks the Last Quarter Mile Problem and Bitcoin has no infrastructure for solving it on either end of the remittance and, even if they did, would not find themselves cost-competitive with Western Union. (The part between the last quarter miles being close-to-free doesnt help. Western Union can transfer money internally for close-to-free. The supermajority of their costs is maintaining an office which someone can go to in abuelitas village. Seriously, check their annual report.)
The above does not apply if you want to acquire nootropics from a questionable source overseas.
Stanovich draws an interesting distinction between intelligence and rationality, where intelligence, as measured by IQ test, is so to say the strength of an individual's analytical abilities, whereas rationality is this individual's tendency to use these analytical abilities (as opposed to fast and unreliable Systems 1 processes); i.e., his or her tendency to "overcome his or her biases". According to Stanovich, there are large individual differences not only regarding IQ but also regarding rationality, and he is now in the process of constructing a test measuring people's rationality quotient, RQ. Now my question is this: in which areas do you think that a higher RQ people have comparative advantages, and in which areas do you think that high IQ people have comparative advantages? My hunch is that IQ pays off better in precise fields like mathematics, physics and computer science, where the problems are often so hard that most people can't solve them even if they overcome their biases and use their System 2, whereas high RQ pays off better in more ill-structured fields like qualitative sociology, where any individual line of reasoning usually is fairly simple, and therefore does not require a very high IQ, but where it is easy to fall prey to (politically) motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, and all sorts of other biases.
Hence in order to arrive at true theories, it seems to me that you need a high RQ in the social sciences. On the other hand, in order to sell your theories, RQ is not necessarily always helpful: on the contrary, a fair dose of overconfidence bias can be useful here. Many bigshot social scientists during the last century or so were anything but rational (Foucault and Freud are two of many examples), but were able to convince other (equally biased people) that they were.
As fields become more exact (as for instance psychology gradually have become), you gradually need a higher and higher IQ to compete: rationality is no longer enough. My guess is that as more and more fields grow more exact, moderate IQ people will be of less and less use in the academia.
Many bigshot social scientists during the last century or so were anything but rational (Foucault and Freud are two of many examples), but were able to convince other (equally biased people) that they were.
I understand that bashing Freud is a popular way to signal "rationality" -- more precisely, to signal loyalty to the STEM tribe which is so much higher status than the social sciences tribe -- but it really irritates me because I would bet that most people doing this are merely repeating what they heard from others, building their model completely on other people's strawmans.
Mostly, it feels to me horribly unfair towards Freud as a person, to use him as a textbook example of irrationality. Compared with the science we have today, of course his models (based on armchair reasoning after observing some fuzzy psychological phenomena) are horribly outdated and often plainly wrong. So throw those models away and replace them by better models whenever possible; just like we do in any science! I mostly object to the connotation that Freud was less rational compared with other people living in the same era, working in the same field. Because it seems to me he was actually highly above the average; it's just that the whole field was completely diseased, and he wasn't rational enough to overcome all of that single-handedly. I repeat, this is not a defense of factual correctness of Freud's theories, but a defense of Freud's rationality as a person.
To put things in context, to show how diseased psychology was in Freud's era, let me just say that the most famous Freud's student and then competitor, Carl Gustav Jung, rejected much of Freud's teachings and replaced them with astrology / religion / magic, and this was considered by many people an improvement compared with the horribly offensive ideas that people could be predictably irrational, motivated by sexual desires, and generally frustrated with the modern society based on farmers' values. (Then there was also the completely different school of Vulcan psychologists who said: Thoughts and emotions cannot be measured, therefore they don't exist, and anyone who says otherwise is unscientific.) This was the environment which started the "Freud is stupid" meme, which keeps replicating on LW today.
I think the bad PR comes from combination of two facts: 1) some of Freud's ideas were wrong, and 2) all of his ideas were controversial, including those which were correct. So, first we have this "Freud is stupid" meme most people agree with, however, mostly for wrong reasons. Then, the society gradually changes, and those Freud's ideas which happened to be correct become common sense and are no longer attributed to him; they are further developed by other people whom we remember as their authors. Only the wrong ideas are remembered as his legacy. (By the way, I am not saying that Freud invented all those correct ideas. Just that popularizing them in his era was a part of what made him controversial; what made the "Freud is stupid" meme so popular. Which is why I consider that meme very unfair.) So today we associate human irrationality with Dan Ariely, human sexuality with Matt Ridley, and Sigmund Freud only reminds us of lying on a couch debating which object in a dream represented a penis, and underestimating an importance of clitoris in female sexuality.
As someone who has actually read a few Freud's books long ago (before reading books by Ariely, Ridley, etc.), here are a few things that impressed me. Things that someone got right hundred years ago, when "it's obviously magic" and "no, thoughts and emotions actually don't exist" were the alternative famous models of human psychology.
(continued in next comment...)
(...continued)
The general ability of updating. At the beginning of Freud's career, the state-of-art psychotherapy was hypnosis, which was called "magnetism". Some scientists have discovered that the laws of nature are universal, and some other scientists have jumped to the seemingly obvious conclusion that analogically, all kinds of psychological forces among humans must be the same as the forces which makes magnets attract or repel each other. So Freud learned hyphosis, used it in therapy, and was enthusiastic about it. But later he noticed that it had some negative side effects (female patients frequently falling in love with their doctors, returning to their original symptoms when the love was not reciprocated), and that the positive side effects could also be achieved without hypnosis, simply by talking about the subject (assuming that some conditions were met, such as the patient actually focusing on the subject instead of focusing on their interaction with the doctor; a large part of psychoanalysis is about optimizing for these conditions). The old technique was thrown away because the new one provided better results. Not exactly the "evidence based medicine" by our current standards, but perhaps we could use as a control group all those doctors who stubbornly refused to wash their hands between doing autopsy and treating their patients, despite their patients dropping like flies. -- Later, Freud replaced his original model of unconscious, preconscious and conscious mind, and replaced it with the "id, ego, superego" model. (This is provided as an evidence of the ability to update, to discard both commonly accepted models and one's own previous models. Which we consider an important part of rationality.)
Speaking about the "id, ego, superego" model, here is the idea of a human brain not being a single agent, but composed of multiple modules, sometimes opposed to each other. Is this something worth considering for Less Wrong readers, either as a theoretical step towards reduction of consciousness, or as a practical tool for e.g. overcoming akrasia? "Ego" as the rational part of the brain, which can evaluate consequences, but often doesn't have enough power to enforce its decisions without emotional support from some other part of brain. "Id" as the emotional part which does not understand the concept of time. "Superego" as a small model of other people in our brain. Today we could probably locate the parts of the physical brain they correspond to.
"The Psychopathology of Everyday Life" is a book describing how seemingly random human errors (random movements, forgetting words, slips of the tongue) sometimes actually make sense if we perceive them as goal-oriented actions of some mental subagent. The biggest problem of the book is that it is heavy with theory, and a large part of it focuses on puns in German language... but remove all of this, don't mention the origin, and you could get a highly upvoted article on Less Wrong! (The important part would be not to give any credit to Freud, and merely present it as an evidence for some LW wisdom. Then no one will doubt your rationality.) -- On the other hand, "Civilization and Its Discontents" is a perfect book to be rewritten into a series of articles on Overcoming Bias, about a conflict between forager mentality and farmer social values.
But updating and modelling human brains, those are topics interesting for Less Wrong readers. Most people would focus on, you know, sex. Well, how exactly could we doubt the importance of sexual impulses in a society where displaying a pretty lady is advertising 101, Twilight is a popular book, and internet is full of porn? (Also, scientists accept the importance of sexual selection in evolution.) Our own society is a huge demonstration that Freud was right about the most controversial part of his theory. The only way to make him wrong about this is to create a strawman and claim that according to Freud everything was about sex, so if we find a single thing that isn't, we proved him wrong. -- But that strawman was already used in Freud's era; he actually started one of his books by disproving it. Too bad I don't remember which one. One of the case histories, probably. (It starts like: So, people keep simplifying my theories that all dreams are dogmatically about sex, so here is a simple example to correct the misunderstanding. And he describes a situation where some child wanted an ice cream, parents forbid it, and the child was unhappy and cried. That night, the child had a dream about travelling to North Pole, through mountains of snow. This, says Freud, is what resolving a suppressed desire in a dream typically looks like: The child wanted the ice cream, that's desire #1, but also the child wanted to avoid conflict with their parents, that's desire #2. How to satisfy both of them? The "mountains of show" obviously symbolize the ice cream; the child wants it, and gets it, a lot! But to avoid a conflict with parents, even in the dream, the ice cream is censored and becomes snow, so the child can plausibly deny to themselves disobeying their parents. This is Freud's model of human dreams. It's just that an adult person would probably not obsess so much about an ice cream, which they can buy if they really want it so much, but about something unavailable, such as a sexy neighbor; and also a smart adult would use more complex censorship to fool themselves.) Also, he had a whole book called "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" where he argues that some mind modules may be guided by principles other than pleasure, for example nightmares, repetition compulsion, aggression. (His explanation of this other principle is rather poor: he invents a mystical death principle opposing the pleasure principle. Anyway, it's evidence against the "everything is about sex" strawman.)
Freud was an atheist, and very public about it. He essentially described religion as a collective mental disease, in a book called "The Future of an Illusion". He used and recommended using cocaine... if he lived in the Bay Area today, and used modafinil instead, I can easily imagine him being a very popular Less Wrong member. -- But instead he lived a century ago, so he could only be one of those people spreading controversial ideas which are now considered obvious in hindsight.
lt;dr -- I strongly disagree with using Freud as a textbook example of insanity. Many of his once controversial ideas are so obvious to us now that we simply don't attribute them to him. Instead we just associate him with the few things he got wrong. And the whole meme was started by people who were even more wrong.
Hi Viliam,
thanks for your interesting and thoughtful response. Possibly I should have used another example. There are other, more clearcut cases in e.g. the postmodernist tradition, but I wanted someone more well-known.
The reason I chose him was not to signal loyalty to the STEM tribe, but rather because he is taken to be a textbook example of irrationality by Popper and Gellner, two of my favourite philosophers. Popper claimed that Freud's theories were unfalsifiable and that for any possible event E, both E and not-E was standardly taken to confirm his theories. This is inconsistent with probability theory, as pointed out in "Conservation of Expected Evidence" (which is a very Popperian post). The reason Freud and his followers (I think that some people have thought that some of his followers were actually worse on this point than Freud) did this mistake (if they did) presumably was confirmation bias (falsificationism can be seen as a tool to counter confirmation bias).
There is a huge literature on whether this claim is actually true. I have read Freud and Gellner's (to my mind very interesting) book on psycho-analysis, as well as some of Popper's texts on the topic, so I'm not merely repeating ideas I've heard from others. That said, I don't know the subject well enough to go into a detailed discussion of your claims. Also, it's sort of tangential to the topic. My point was not to bash Freud - that was so to say a side-effect of my claim.
Regarding your historical claims, I think that it's very hard to establish who introduced nebolous ideas such as Freud's tripartite model of the mind. Some claim that Plato's theory of the mind foreshadowed it. Gellner claims that all good original ideas in Freud are taken from Nietzsche. I don't know enough of the topic to determine whether any of these claims are true, but in order to establish whether they are, or whether Freud really was as significant and original as you claim, one would need to take a deep plunge into the history of ideas.
For the record, that long comment was not completely directed to you; it was something I have already thought should be written, and reading your comment was simply the moment when my inaction changed to action.
People are full of biases and rationalizations, and if you give them a theory which says "actually, other people often don't even know what happens in their own minds", well, that can hurt them regardless of whether the theory is true. And yes, this is what most amateur "psychologists" do after seeing "psychoanalysis" done on TV and learning the relevant keywords. And I guess not a few professional psychologists are not better than this. And yes, it made it difficult to argue against Freud in cases he was wrong.
Still, as I wrote, he was capable of changing his mind. And other psychoanalysts later disagreed on some topics. But without proper scientific method we can't be sure that these changes really were improvements, as opposed to random drift ("I am a high-status psychoanalyst, so I will signal it by adding my random opinion to our set of sacred beliefs").
Some parts of psychoanalysis make predictions; the problem is that unlike in physics, humans can react in many different ways. It's like a black-box testing where each "box" is internally wired differently. We do have a prediction that a dream will contain a censored version of a suppressed desire. And it feels like it should be testable. But how specifically will the desire be censored? Uhm... this depends on the specific person, on what associations they have, so again we can suspect than any result could be "explained" as some form of censorship of something.
According to wikipedia Popper compared Freud with Einstein, as two people living in the same era, whose scientific rigor was completely different. Yeah, there was a huge difference. There was also a huge difference in the amount and quality of data they had, the available tools, the complexity of the studied objects, and the general waterline of sanity in their fields. (Again, "it's magic" and "people actually don't think" were the respected alternative theories. Imagine starting in a similar position in physics.)
Most people would focus on, you know, sex. Well, how exactly could we doubt the importance of sexual impulses in a society where displaying a pretty lady is advertising 101, Twilight is a popular book, and internet is full of porn? (Also, scientists accept the importance of sexual selection in evolution.) Our own society is a huge demonstration that Freud was right about the most controversial part of his theory.
Freud's theory was supposed to be a theory of the human mind, thus it should apply to humans in every human society. So why are you focusing on one society in particular (specifically one that was heavily shaped by people who believed Freud's theories) as your demonstration that Freud was correct?
Edit: Could you state the controversial theory of Freud's that you claim has been demonstrated. Surely you don't mean his entire theory of psychosexual development.
Surely you don't mean his entire theory of psychosexual development.
No. That theory is a textbook example of burdensome details. (Also, typical family fallacy.) I can imagine that having a problem at age X -- which in given culture is associated with doing Y -- could visibly increase the probability of having a psychological symptom Z in adult age. But that theory just gives too much details for something that at best would be a wide probabilistic distribution of outcomes.
Could you state the controversial theory of Freud's that you claim has been demonstrated.
Mind composed of multiple agents; people often motivated by sex even when they deny it; human mind not well adapted to civilization; religion as institutionalized neurosis.
They don't seem controversial anymore. (Okay, the last one does to many people.)
That theory is a textbook example of burdensome details.
So Freud was correct if you ignore the details of what he said and steelman the hell out of what he "meant".
Mind composed of multiple agents;
The idea of the mind being composed of multiple components has been around for all of recorded history. Granted it wasn't phrased as multiple "agents", but Freud didn't phrase it that way either.
people often motivated by sex even when they deny it;
Yes, people sometimes deny their true motivations. However, the specific claim that these secret motivation is almost always sexual is still not clear today, and probably false.
human mind not well adapted to civilization;
If this is meant to refer to his theory of psychological repression. It's become clear that he's way of stating that wasn't a good idea. Certainly worse that the traditional way of stating that, namely that children need to be taught to like good things and dislike bad things.
religion as institutionalized neurosis.
Well, the attempts at creating states without this neurosis created even more neurotic states, but I suppose you already knew that.
As someone who has actually read a few Freud's books long ago (before reading books by Ariely, Ridley, etc.), here are a few things that impressed me. Things that someone got right hundred years ago, when "it's obviously magic" and "no, thoughts and emotions actually don't exist" were the alternative famous models of human psychology.
This is a completely inaccurate depiction of Psychology as it existed during Freud's time. You list Jung, one of Freud's victims, as the only example of a "rival." I think perhaps this is standard continental Euro-Chauvinism. Could it be that you are really unaware of Francis Galton's development of psychometrics or William James' monumental Principles of Psychology? James is a good example of someone who was a predecessor/contemporary of Freud who studied the same topic but did not go utterly off the rails into Crazy Land the way Freud did. He took a naturalistic view of the human mind, drawing upon introspection and empiricism. Galton's contributions were vast and showed actual mathematical rigor.
Freud's biggest contribution was probably his attempt to invent Psychopharmocology. (The short-term outcome was getting a lot of unfortunate people addicted to cocaine, but the basic idea had merit.) As for his theory of the human mind, it is worthless and set Psychology back by decades.
Sadly Freudian Psychoanalysis is Religion and Big Business now, and still practiced heavily in Mitteleuropa and parts of South America.
I understand that bashing Freud is a popular way to signal "rationality" -- more precisely, to signal loyalty to the STEM tribe which is so much higher status than the social sciences tribe -- but it really irritates me because I would bet that most people doing this are merely repeating what they heard from others, building their model completely on other people's strawmans.
Mostly, it feels to me horribly unfair towards Freud as a person, to use him as a textbook example of irrationality.
At the risk of outing myself as a smug STEM tribalist...my view of Freud is pretty dim, a big reason for which is that secondary sources (e.g.), citing specific details, argue that Freud exaggerated the robustness of his theories, failed to keep basic factual details straight, and even fabricated observations outright.
Admittedly, I haven't read Freud himself (I'm one of the people "merely repeating what they heard from others"), so the charges levelled at him might be groundless, but they seem plausible & well-substantiated. And once substantiated, a pattern of self-aggrandization, sloppiness, and fabrication seems to me fair grounds for calling Freud (epistemically) irrational, even though some of his ideas turned out to be true.
Stanovich draws an interesting distinction between intelligence and rationality, where intelligence, as measured by IQ test, is so to say the strength of an individual's analytical abilities, whereas rationality is this individual's tendency to use these analytical abilities (as opposed to fast and unreliable Systems 1 processes); i.e., his or her tendency to "overcome his or her biases".
There is a bigger problem. People's system 2 can be even more unreliable that their system 1. System 2 uses whatever one consciously believes, which can very well include large amounts of falsehoods and anti-epistemology, e.g., believing the theories of Foucault and Freud. In fact, system 1 frequently saves people from their system 2's irrational beliefs.
