gam@amdahl.UUCP (Gordon A. Moffett) (12/10/84)
> = Charley Wingate umcp-cs!mangoe > ONLY two major means of persuasion? Utter rubbish. How about seduction? > How about fictional dramatization? How about ridicule? Do you own a > TV? Watch some commercials. If you want to know about persuasion, there's > your best source. Quite right. I didn't bother to argue that original assertion about the two ``major means of persuation.'' > Science as a source of truth (or whatever) is rather overrated. Yes, but: > Right now, > it is useless in the realm of personal interaction. Since no one has > thus far been able to attach numbers to emotions, what we have are > behavioral studies whose meaning is quite unclear. Take the various sex > surveys. Assuming that the numbers collected are sufficiently accurate, > what do they mean? Kinsey didn't even bother to ask what people thought > about the things that they did in bed (or wherever they did it :-)). I do not know if this is true (Kinsey not asking about what people thought) but this is not as important as what people DO -- that's what psychology is about (in my opinion). It is not true that ``behavioral studies['] ... meaning is quite unclear''. They may be unclear to you, but that is not enough to throw them out. Psychology IS a science (albeit a social science), and its data IS [oh, shut up!] useful. The very TV commercials you refer to are influenced directly by psychological methods. > Really, five or ten good novels will tell you more about the human mind > than all of psychology can (except for works like the books of M. Scott > Peck, which aren't in the least science). The arrogance of psychology in > asserting the validity of its technique is certainly in the same league as > almost any religion, by the way. Intimidation is not foreign to science. This is High Romanticism. Yes, you will learn a lot about people by reading great fiction (or non-fiction, even), but don't pass it off as ``psychology'' -- it's raw data, not science. (By the way, Freud in the early days of psychology drew directly from literary references; the most famous example is ``Oedipus'', originally a Greek myth, later a play -- a good one, too!). -- Gordon A. Moffett ...!{ihnp4,hplabs,amd,sun}!amdahl!gam 37 22'50" N / 121 59'12" W [ This is just me talking. ]