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.
6. Defend your opinion
This is a bit of a mix of rules 4 and 5 to help foster higher quality posts. You are expected to defend your unpopular opinion in the post body. We don't expect a whole manifesto (please, no manifestos), but you should at least provide some details as to why you hold the position you do.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
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Oh yes lol, I am well aware that psychology is... fairly far from a 'hard', empirically based science.
It is slowly taking baby steps toward that, but uh yeah... as you say, there is a lack of rigorous analysis methods, and definitions are changing all the time.
I remember a psych. telling me that DSM V was gonna be the last one, the final one...
... and then a massive revision for it came out 10 years later, so basically that's Windows 10 is gonna be the last Windows, oops here's Windows 11 / DSM-V-TR (cough DSM-6 cough).
I am glad you concur that 'Autism' is likely to be reconfigured as a kind of family of more distinct, overlappable subclasses...
I have certainly met Autistic people with say, basically 0 impulse control and no capacity for emotional regulation... and while I do have some other 'abnormal' behavioral patterns and ways of thinking in common with those people...
I am not like that, I am, or was called at one point, a 'high functioning autistic'... but that was back when Aspergers was... still a distinct thing.
Ironically, this lack of consistent and coherent classification... well, this bothers me greatly, as I very much like ideas that are consistent and coherent, lol.
Oh well, back to making and modifying video game mods for me, hahaha!
Approximately 300 years ago, chemistry was still in a phase that resembles modern psychology. Instead of talking about electrons and atoms, chemists spoke about the affinity two compounds have for each other. Chemists observed reactions and made an affinity table of the results. Have a look at that picture, and you’ll see how messy it was back then.
They didn’t know what their materials were really made of or why they reacted. They were just observing the results, just like psychologists are still doing these days. Sure, there were interpretations and opinions, but most of them went out the window as soon as it became possible to analyze the elemental composition of the materials.
Since autism is defined based on its symptoms, the definition is inherently very nebulous. In medicine, you don’t clump every headache into the same category, because there are a million things that cause the same thing and in many cases you can find the root cause. You just need a few samples and long list of biochemical analyses to find most of them.
Psychology isn’t so lucky. Who knows how many different things got lumped into one big pile we call autism. Same goes for all the disorders too. I would argue that terms like depression and anxiety are about as useful as those 300 year old affinity tables.
I cannot think of anything clever to add to this, so I will settle for simply complimenting your way of putting this, and begrudgingly admit I am somewhere between jealous and impressed at you that I cannot think of anything to add to this, hahah!