Prejudice in science fiction
quote:
Originally posted by DalekTek790:
You make posts saying that I am arrogant and offensive. After reading these, people are more likely to interpret ambivalent statements by me as offensive or signs of arrogance. You give people a preconceived bias against me. And your privileged status and charismatic demeanor just make you all the more convincing to people.
I don’t think that I have to *convince* people that you’re arrogant and offensive. You do a very good job of that on your own. The sad thing is that you are unable to see the arrogance and offensive nature of your own posts.
quote[quote]And I don’t buy into the concept that “energy” will manifest itself in some other way if it is consciously eliminated in one. I am quite balanced mentally…Few if any people today take all of Freud’s wacky ideas as the gospel truth (he said that schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder were caused by bad childhood experiences!), and the behaviorists essentially disproved the sublimation theory in the 80. Therapists now days don’t worry that eliminating a fear or behavior will cause any underlying problem to be expressed in another way. “On the contrary, they find that overcoming maladaptive behaviors helps people feel better about themselves.”-David G. Myers[/quote]
The behaviorists didn’t disprove anything. The behaviorists set up a differing model of how humans work. (And, for that matter, it wasn’t in the 80’s that they did the majority of their work. It was in the early part of the 20th century.) Behaviorism, as a science, fell out of favor for the simple reason that it refused to acknowledge mental states outside of reward/punishment scenarios. Many psychologists abandoned this school of thought in the latter part of the 20th century for this reason. Behaviorism cannot explain everything. *That* is why such standard principles of psychology as defense mechanisms have been utliized by many psychologists in the years since. And it’s ridiculous to throw out the baby with the bathwater. You cannot dismiss *all* of Freud’s theories simply because *some* of them have been changed or proven wrong. Time has proven that his theories on defense mechanisms are correct, and they have been expanded upon since their conception. I mean, you obviously haven’t tossed out all of B.F. Skinner’s theories even though he was the kind of guy that locked his children in boxes for extended periods of time.
Lovely man, he.
And David Meyers is a quack. I’m sorry, but anyone who uses religious faith as a basis for scientific knowledge should not be taken seriously as a scholar.And, of course, I see that any and all salient points that I made (concerning the inborn sexual instinct in humans, etc.) have been ignored, so that you could more easily address the more humorous or sarcastic remarks I made. Which goes to show that you fall into the same trap that I had said you did earlier: you ignore any evidence that contradicts your own little world-view and only accept that which supports it. You’re like the 18th century panel on science that stated categorically that rocks do *not* fall from the sky, no matter how many rocks people have seen falling from the sky.
–Aleck