A Psychologist Pretended to be Expert on Fact Checking Skills

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: Yes, One Can Be a Writer Without Affording a Secretary · I Think I Know What I am Looking For as Income Pretty Well · A Psychologist Pretended to be Expert on Fact Checking Skills · Language · New blog on the kid: "He obviously wants to self publish, why doesn't he just go to Amazon KDP?" · Diverse People are Pretending I'm Irresponsible, And Have No Idea of What I'm Doing, If I Think I Can Live as an Author

First half of following video:

We need to talk about pseudo-intellectuals
Psychology with Dr. Ana | 16 Sept. 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odPnVhT_YAc

1:00 I actually don't think the question is one of psychology, but one of having some glimpse of the actual qualifications or what they lead to.

I also don't think "qualifications" are an unequivocal thing. In some few areas, they are. Medicine and law. Engineering.

I'm legally not qualified to give advice on someone's physical health (if that's the whole concern, medical ethics are a different kettle of fish that doctors have no business declaring their own prerogative).

I'm legally not qualified to give advice on whether someone can legally get away with such and such a thing. Or win a court case. Or how to loose with least damage.

I'm legally not qualified to build a bridge. That's about it.

There is no legal requirement for everyone speaking on palaentology to be a qualified palaeontologist. There is no legal requirement for everyone speaking on Medieval history to be a qualified Medieval historian. There is very obviously no legal requirement for people pretending to know how human language developed to be actual linguists ("evolutionary linguist" doesn't qualify as such). Tecumseh Fitch, Tomasello, Pascal Picq aren't, only Picq actually consulted linguists for his work. Chomsky is one, but single leap hypothesis isn't a model for how language was acquired. Very unusually, Jean Aitchison is one, her book on language change is excellent, but her book on evolutionary linguistics attributes to birds the "double articulation" which they haven't, because double articulation means three levels of sound expression, birds have two.

And equally obviously, mental health practitioners (psychologists and psychiatrists) vary from country to country, decade to decade, on how much they second guess patients, on how much liberties they take away from patients, on how necessary their therapies are and so on ... as with evolutionary linguists, academic qualifications are not much beyond a scam.

"3:27 so a person having Authority is not a 3:30 logical argument as to why they're 3:32 automatically right about something just 3:33 as a person not having Authority on 3:35 something doesn't automatically mean 3:37 they don't have a right to speak up"

Thank you.

From the intro, I thought you were engaged on the contrary to this take ...

7:42 I wouldn't necessarily say that a bachelor in Classics is worse than a doctorate in psychology for speaking up on the human psyche ...

Is there something in particular that Robert Greene gets really wrong on your view?

8:00 When C. S. Lewis wrote on theology, he sometimes did go out of his way to state his authority was on literature.

Nevertheless, his perspective on literature is a valuable take on some theologians (liberal ones) who's take on such and such a Gospel involved being a total ignoramus on literature in general.

One called the forth Gospel a certain set of literary terms less than fully compatible between them and sometimes very incompatible with the actual text, like "allegory". CSL quoted his actual words, he had specialised precisely in allegory, and he said in basically so many words: when someone has said something like this, do we need to ever take their word on literary matters again?

But he never actually said he was a theologian. He was about as competent a Thomist theologian as you get when you are not a Catholic and not a Geocentric and Young Earth Creationist, even if to Higher Criticism he was (as he should be) a hostile outsider.

I do not see any point in his saying whenever he discussed a point about the philosophy of prayer to caveat himself by adding "oh, by the way, I'm into literature, not theology" ...

On my first internet site, an MSN Group, I stated as my main intellectual qualifications being a long time reader of four authors, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien. All MSN Groups were taken down in February or early March 2009, but I still think that's about as good a qualification as you get. I've also had the opportunity to read St. Thomas a lot since those early years. I mean Aquinas, the Didymus is not generally acknowledged as an author (and the "Gospel of St. Thomas" is certainly pseudepigraphic).

8:33 "chronically make so many unscientific takes" ...

Sorry, but here you are idealising science on the collective level.

You are singling out individuals (in principle) for disagreeing with the collective. I e, while you agree, as you should, individual intellectuals aren't infallible, you implicitly treat the collectives of intellectual fields as such.

9:11 "expert in everything"

Or simply a philosopher who actually thinks that philosophy can deal with anything, once one takes into account informations from different fields.

Sounds like you have a hatchet against philosophy ...?

[couldn't add]

10:41 I don't think qualifications of the person are the first thing you want for each and every discussion about epigenetics or neuroscience.

I do think someone may have been intentionally making it vaguer than it need be. It need not have been Joe Dispenza. The bookseller wrote the blurb, presumably he didn't write it himself.

[new comment]

Speaking of shady, I'm not saying it's you, I am also not saying it isn't you.

But someone has deleted all my comments after the 3:27 to 3:38 long quote. I was just trying to add one on 10:41 under a previous one on 9:11

I think there is a way of being vague about what type of pushback one is facing. It could be you. It could be done vicariously for everyone I'm going after (time stamp after time stamp). Or it could be a policy youtube has implemented (though it's decidedly unequal between different channels on how fast it happens, so it shouldn't be).

I think that's worse than being vague about one's qualifications.

[Was also taken down. While the guy in the cyber was out. It turns out, Ana Yudin is from Romania, a former Communist country, where some Communist attitudes about things other than government or economics may persist. But obviously, it coud also be a policy decided on the level of youtube. "Expert in everything" said with irony or sarcasm is a Commie take on using "general competence" rather than subject specific qualifications.]