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Comment by jacobrussell | Hacker News Reader

Take no. 6 for example: Behave by Robert M. Sapolsky. Dr. Sapolsky is a professor at Stanford with nearly 300 publications [0] and has been teaching biology and neurology for years. I'm curious, why do you think this book is pop-pseudoscience? Have you read it? Are there certain things you disagree with or think aren't based on research or reproducibility?

[0] https://profiles.stanford.edu/robert-sapolsky?tab=publicatio...

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I have read about half the books in the list and this is the only one I have read from that list that didn't really feel like pop science. This is an amazing book and is the only one I am familiar with from that list that I would actually recommend everyone should read.

Edit: I will also add that The Body Keeps The Score is an interesting book, but I would definitely not recommend everyone read it. If you have suffered some trauma it is definitely worth a read.

Have you read the Body Keeps the Score? It felt pop in the sense that it was on the leading edge, but I felt the author made a best effort to put forth the available science

Ha I just added an edit to my comment on that book specifically. It is definitely an interesting book and would agree that the author put forth a lot of evidence for everything he stated. I haven't tried EMDR personally but it is compelling.

Thinking Fast and Slow is also a serious book. There have been some hits on how Kahneman wrote up priming, but few dispute he and Tversky have a big body of brilliant and rigorous research. They don't deserve to be on the same list as Freud, Sacks or (probably) Ariely. While those guys are interesting, all are rather less scientific. Cialdini I'm not sure about. His "Focus Theory of Normative Conduct" has been very influential but perhaps it is a one-trick pony?

Minds aren't scientific, so psychology isn't scientific. It's that simple; you've fooled yourself into thinking that you have "a mind", a supposedly-measurable durable part of your personality which persists beyond the mere meat of your brain and neurons, not unlike a soul.

How are you going to fool yourself, qualitatively and subjectively, that you have a mind if you don't have something capable of qualia in the first place?

I'm not trying to argue for some kind of an immaterial soul, or claiming that all of psychology is scientific (many theories, at least as it appears to a layman, aren't). And sure, a durable personality and various other mental models we have might be illusions to varying degrees.

But if the lower-level immediate experiences are treated as a real (if emergent and somewhat culturally dependent) thing, I don't see why higher-level mental phenomena such as the common need for a durable sense of self couldn't be treated as real as well.

> Minds aren't scientific

What does that even mean? I have no idea what this is supposed to mean.

I’m not a psychologist, but I don’t think psychology is entirely comprised of studying “the mind” or the super ego/sense of self that you are referring. Specifically with human behavioral biology, it is concerned with what happens with synaptic responses influencing an action, hormonal responses influencing synapses, biological inputs (senses) triggering hormonal responses, environmental stimulus influencing the senses, and so on and so forth. It is very much rooted in evolutionary biology, and doesn’t touch on whatever is “beyond the meat.”

That being said what do you have to say about certain personality categorizations like the big five which were determined based off of statistical clustering [0]? Is this not science for some reason because it includes personality?

[0] http://socpers.psihologietm.ro/PDFs/Sava%20&%20Popa%20(2011)...

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