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Comment by WalterSear | Hacker News Reader

Good thing we have a thoroughly cross-cultural construct for developing an understanding of exactly that: clinical psychology.

So, yes, we do know what dysfunction looks like, to an extent.

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Psychology has a poor track of reproducibility, so it is not good at understanding yet.

Not to mention that results can also vary depending on, you guessed it, culture.

Cultural psychology is the field that investigates this. By investigating phenomenon in multiple cultures, you get a better idea of what the actual phenomenon you are investigating is, and what is a byproduct of culture. It's not a perfect, obviously, since we are all as much a product of our culture as anything else.

In any case, just because we the tools we have are still in their infancy, that doesn't somehow implies that A) they are utterly useless for anything at all, or B) that every culture everywhere is a perfect realization of a human conception of life, each one exactly equal of any other and none of them at all with any growing up to do.

It's just silly all around.

Your response demonstrates your ignorance of psychology if you’re not even aware of how results often vary across cultures. One area to start educating yourself in is looking into the discussion in the last decade or so of how psychological research has been skewed by over-reliance on “WEIRD” (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Democratic) test subjects, and that studies with subjects from places without these attributes often produce different results.

You don’t seem to understand what you’re talking about in the slightest.

I have an MS in research psychology.

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