psychology
Article
psychology is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between April 22, 2021 and February 27, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “borrows much from psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology”; “I feel like psychology is the same way”; “before the Federal money started streaming to my field, psychology”. It most often appears alongside Scott Aaronson, /r/NootropicsDepot, @fae_dreams.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 4
- Issue count: 4
- First seen: April 22, 2021
- Last seen: February 27, 2025
Appears In
- Your Book Review: Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are?
- Book Review: A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis
- Highlights From The Comments On The Academic Job Market
- Links For February 2025
Related Pages
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- Scott Aaronson (2 shared issues)
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- NootropicsDepot (1 shared issues)
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- @fae_dreams (1 shared issues)
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- @ObhishekSaha (1 shared issues)
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- @xlr8harder (1 shared issues)
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- A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis (1 shared issues)
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- ABC testing (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
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- Aella (1 shared issues)
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- Africa (1 shared issues)
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- African Gray Parrots (1 shared issues)
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- AGI (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Are We Smart Enough gives an overview of the study of animal cognition, its history, past and current controversies, and where the field might go next (as of 2016). "Animal Cognition" is a relatively new subfield that borrows much from psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology, but it is firmly rooted in its parent field of ethology. So, just what is ethology? It is the study animal behavior. Ethologists these days are certainly knowledgeable about evolutionary lineages, cladistics, and animal anatomy, but the heart of the field has always been observing animals interacting with their environments (whether a wild or experimental environment). As we'll see, it's a field with a history at least as tumultuous as psychology, with an early amateurish "wild west", a strict over-correction, and these days a hopefully more productive synthesis.
De Waal closes by acknowledging that the field has come around and these days, with animal cognition a respected field and the assumption of evolutionary continuity it rests on widely accepted. Even human psychology is coming around to seeing the benefits of animal studies that don't treat the animals purely as stimulus-response robots, especially those animals closest to us. Predictably, the fields that have longest held onto the very old human/animal dichotomy, with the accompanying belief that "evolution stops at the neck", are those concerned with humans and the furthest away from biology: the humanities (which pains me, as a former Classics major). Even folks you would not expect show occasional flashes of emotionally-motivated human exceptionalism, like the primate research team that learned a chimpanzee in Japan performed significantly better than humans on a specific memory-related task and responded by training to beat the chimp as hard as they could. Despite this, the field marches on. Many former bastions of evidence for human exceptionalism have not fared well: animals have been shown to remember things from the past, take action in the present to prepare for anticipated conditions, hold off on strong biological urges like hunger and lust until the time is right, and even perhaps metacognition, with clever experiments showing animals opting out of problems they recognize as harder to solve than the easier ones.
· My favorite in this category is the "Reverse Clever Hans" effect. You have probably heard of Clever Hans, the horse that could "count", who it turned out was just very good at spotting unconscious cues from his owner. It's a classic in psychology on the importance of careful experimental design. Well, a lot of human child/chimp comparison studies have run into the opposite problem. Human children, usually around the ages of 2-4, and chimps of various ages are asked to complete a variety of tasks and graded on how they do compared to each other. Chimps do pretty well on tool use comparisons, but human children blow away the chimps on tests of social skills. What's going on? With the tools, the experimenter basically just shows the tools to the humans/chimps and lets them mess around. But the social skills being tested are how well the subjects follow the experimenter's cues or learn from others. Is this because humans are so much better at social skills than apes? Or might it be because they are following the cues of someone from the same damn species and that the researchers are usually neutral, not well known, and do not engage in any friendly behavior with the chimps, but likely smile and encourage the human children? Where Clever Hans was given an unfair advantage by reading too much from a human, in a "Reverse Clever Hans" situation, humans compared with animals get all the benefits from reading the human and the animals do worse because they are relying on a human.
The idea of an ego at risk of collapse sort of reminds me of Buddhism - “desire is the root of all suffering” and “the self is an illusion” both seem like pretty Lacanian ideas. It’s interesting how far this has spread beyond either source: I think most pop psychology now just accepts that the “self” is some kind of projection or illusion, and that this probably has something to do with consumerism and whatever other modern maladies we’re supposed to be against. I guess I always just accepted this idea without really thinking about it. When I do think about it, I get kind of confused: if my entire life has been a series of desperate attempts to maintain the facade of my ego, how come I don’t feel able to stop having that facade even if I want to? How come if I sit in a dark room and think “okay, gonna stop propping up my ego right now!” nothing bad happens? If everything were to go wrong - if I were to become completely humiliated, if all my friends were to abandon me, if I lost all my material goods, if every defense mechanism were mercilessly stripped from me one after another - would something eventually happen corresponding to “my ego collapses”?
Physics is stuck in an annoying equilibrium where the Standard Model works for almost everything, and then occasionally we come across some exotic domain where it totally falls apart and we know that reality must be something deeper and weirder. I feel like psychology is the same way: you can explain almost everything with your standard scientific toolkit. Then you look at sex, and you realize you’ll need something much more complicated and worse. And since sex is maybe the strongest and most primal form of desire, if the Standard Model Of The Mind doesn’t explain sex, it probably doesn’t really explain anything else. There are probably all those weird curled-up shadow dimensions in everything, just out of sight.
I'm an odd duck in this case. I wanted to be an UG teacher back in 1974 (my mentor said, "I suspected that of you."), before the Federal money started streaming to my field, psychology. But there were no good jobs available then, so I took one at a comprehensive university that then got ambitious and shot up to R1 status remarkably quickly. So I had to get with the program and do research, and did get tenure, though I could not today, as I never got grants.
32: Related: Psychology is doubling down on wokeness (X). And Steven Pinker resigned from (X) the American Psychological Association, accusing them of anti-Semitism.