Pseudoscience

[Echo]

Does anyone else get triggered when they see that description? Anytime you tell people about socionics their first reaction is “Well, I just did a quick google and Wikipedia says it's a pseudoscience…”

I acknowledge that socionics is a pseudoscience. But then so is psychology in general. Or really any of the social sciences. But they don't receive the same kind of flack.

Calling it a pseudoscience also ignores the work of people like Talanov, who are applying scientific method (at least to the extent it can be applied) to their data collection.

I often wonder why there seems to be so much hostility, aimed towards soconics. Is it simply a byproduct of the time (since it came out of Russia during the Cold War)? Or is it because at first glance it looks similar to MBTI (which is ill-defined and made even more dubious by the fact that it's been so commercialised)?

[Distance]

There are some psychologies steeped in empiricism and it reflects into anything outside of the scope. I attribute it to a bias of letting scientific circles determine truth or the majority opinion on leading edges are where "best truth" resides.

If it can't been seen and measured it is not science.

But we are all scientists at heart and conduct true false experiments about experience, that are just as biased as the priests and guardians who hail from empiricism land.

I don't ride that bandwagon. If you do not believe in X, you are ignorant and to me in another religious chanting, and that is also ignorant and a bias estimation to keen observers.

I bend my knee to my sense, not to authority in those realms.

[godslave]

Psychoanalysis is also a pseudoscience. The Freudian lobby is powerful though and psychoanalysis has made it to the collective unconscious of western societies (as well as in some other part of the world) so that it is accepted almost like a religion. Indeed, psychoanalysis as well as Jung's Analytical psychology are more like philosophical movement then really therapeutical science. I've never been a fan of the "talking cure" in the sense that making conscious some unconscious content (mostly repressions of traumatic nature) is enough "to cure" a patient. The idea that "now that you know" you are cured (or that most of the work is done) has always been nonsensical to me. Modern psychology and in a larger spectrum cognitive sciences as a whole don't give a lot of scientific credits to most Freudian (and Jungian) theories. This is the reality of the situation.

That said, socionics is not a psychology even if it is of psychological nature. Indeed, typologies are systems, no more no less. There isn't much psychology beyond that systematic aspect. We are talking about Models, cognitive mechanisms and psychical interactions. What Aushra and others have done in this field, is not something that far from a scientific methodology as it is based on observation of real phenomenon that exist since the dawn of humanity namely temperaments and the quality of communication between human beings according to their understanding of the world that is to say their point of view. This aspect is not pseudoscience, it's real. Trying to understand it and coming up with Models, systems and taxonomy to better classify these phenomena is not far from the proper scientific method in fact it is rather rigorous.

The downside of it is of course tied to very nature of the work i.e. modelisation and systematisation. Indeed, we all know that real human beings are not Androids, but what is to blame here is not he work but its literal interpretation by people who don't understand it well enough. Indeed, Models are essentials to science but we all know that the model is just a simplified abstraction of a complex phenomenon reduced to its essence. Its application to the real world must take into account a transposition to the complexity of the real phenomenon it has modeled. Nothing is more complex than the human mind. Indeed, each individual is a universe and a unique representative of the TIM it carries. It is therefore very difficult to present a certain predictability in terms of behaviors beyond what the theory a priori informs in terms of intertypes relations.

That said, it has been internally demonstrated (within the socionics circles) that there are some truths in most predictable ITR on the basis of the Core Type dynamics. It deserves to be studied at larger scales. The truth is that we all know that temperament do exist and some people get along better with other people that resemble them in terms of worldview, this is inscribed as a universal truth in the human condition. The rest is literature..

[Kalinoche buenanoche]

maieutics =P

Isn’t it possible to see who edits a wiki entry?

All science is receiving flack, esp since the ‘reproducibility crisis’, although I read that it is acknowledged that quantum physics is inherently not reproducible with all the entanglement stuff.

I guess if you are not a mechanic, a hairdresser, a cleaner, a property owner or a wizard you are skrood.

Anyway, reasons to quit Bacon