view the rest of the comments
Unpopular Opinion
Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
Even some of the stuff you mentioned, such as MBTI (personality “types”), Freud’s theories, Maslow’s hierarchy, and behaviourism are discredited. My point about the TED talk pop psych stuff being discredited though was not to say the general public has rejected these theories. They haven’t. It’s that science has moved on but the public lags behind.
Notice that I never said (throughout this discussion) that the general public is skeptical of psychology. The general public tends to lack the tools of critical thinking needed for healthy skepticism in general (not just in regards to psychology). Saying something is discredited is only saying that science has moved on, not the general public (which even continues to believe in silly things like astrology that have been discredited for centuries).
However, that is not to say the public is totally clueless. While they lack proper critical thinking skills, they do have the ability to become aware of when scientists’ reputations are damaged. This is a far more diffuse effect because the public isn’t generally aware of the differences between individual scientists and their debates within a field. And that’s where the really big problem exists:
An individual scientist can become popular communicating their theory to the public. But when their theory is later discredited the reputational damage can affect the field or even all of science as a whole. Over time this can lead to popular anti-intellectualism, such as we see with climate change denial.