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While it is true that we should be having a discussion about what really constitutes disinformation in a way that treats the concept as more than just a political tactic, this article reads as though it is doing almost the same thing. The bit about disinformation functions like a subterfuge to really assert what seem like the author's political views: covid skepticism, russiagate, ... If there is anything worse than throwing around the term disinformation to summarily dismiss ideas one disagrees with, it is having a discussion about this practice to underhandedly characterize ones own ideas as being "actually" true; as though these ideas are merely examples of real "fact-based" discourse. It is frustrating to see someone broach an important topic, then author between the lines of the discussion more of the very same problem.

"But in order to make individuals susceptible to ideology, you must first ruin their relationship to themselves and others by making them sceptical and cynical, so that they can no longer rely upon their own judgment"

As much as I am sure this does happen quite a lot, something that does not get enough emphasis is how much people's relationships to themselves erode under the very ordinary conditions of quotidian life with its stresses, indignities, and disappointments. Nothing so deliberate as a propaganda campaign is needed for this first step to already take hold of people through the subtle misery of their personal relationships. This is not to say that institutions and ideologies are not involved with this process, but I think the unconscious subtleties of this all too easily get overlooked when we culturally take a normative view of what it means to be mentally healthy as successfully living a normal life.

Arendt, in the same book, also argued that personal resentments fueled the rise of fascist regimes. I think in general, if, as a society, we want to curtail the rise of totalitarian politics, we have to really address the very personal individual antagonisms that arise in people's everyday lives; loneliness among them, but not alone as the sole culprit by a longshot.

Went down this road recently. I wrote some python code to handle some big archives of music, pdfs, and other media, normalizing the names of everything. I decided to try and correct the extensions to indicate the file type properly. This turned out to be a little complicated. In most cases the libfile estimate was good (using the magic number) and provides an mimetype as an output. However, it sometimes overgeneralized the file type to something more general, or outright flattened it out to "binary data". To make this more robust, I used pythons mimetype library to infer the mimetype from the filename as a secondary source of the information. I then needed to use a set of heuristics to reconcile the two mimetypes: derived from libfile and from the file name. This works pretty well to identify consistent cases, getting them out of the way. When the libfile mimetype is precise it is usually safe to fix the extension, particularly if the difference is just audio or image format. Nonetheless, there are a lot of corner cases. If I were even more ambitious, the tough cases could probably be drilled down on further with some media metadata utilities. I am curious if someone has just worked this out already in the form of a library.

We actually have a bit of a schematic diagram already. It is well known that both dopamine and serotonin are largely produced by clusters of neurons in specific fore/mid-brain regions that then project out into the rest of the brain. The axions of these modulator neurons secrete the hormone, and it is known for both serotonin and dopamine (1) what receptors they bind to, (2) what transporters reuptake them into the presynaptic neurons, (3) what enzymes break them down. So the schematic of the system can be sketched out, and details of it, such as receptor functioning, can be determined pretty well in vitro. What we don't have is the timeseries data to properly parameterize this model. This research starts to provide this. You should check out research in pharmacology; there is a big hole for this and people are just guessing based on this schematic what the dynamics are.

I am not aware of any work that has gotten a good timeseries of neuromodulator response. So much speculation is thrown around about how these hormones respond to real world experiences, but the evidence has been coarse grain from things like PET scans or sparse assays. Even if the tech used is not that new, the kind of data is. I am unaware of any data like this. Maybe I missed something. Is there another way neuroscience has managed to get an actual neuromodulator signal?

This is huge. So much of what we seem to know about these neuromodulation systems amounts to a number of "has to do with ..."s. Dopamine has to do with reward; serotonin has to do with happiness; etc... Knowing how these modulators actually modulate in response to circumstances may give us a much better sense of what they are actually doing.

Whether one assesses one or another proposed model as having promise is a matter of debate and not a means to credit or discredit anything. It does not seem as though there is any case here for the assertion that 'psychoanalysis has been discredited', as that issue is no longer being debated.

Instead, it seems that the question you are addressing now is whether psychoanalysis is a promising model. That is a different issue and bears upon a discussion of the theory itself. If you have never read a book about Freud's model without id/ego/superego, you don't appear to be familiar with Freud's work to begin with. Look at everything Freud wrote before 1920, and there is little mention of these things (the ego shows up some because the term in German was just "Ich" and is used anywhere a notion of "self" is referenced, but the "id" and "superego" certainly make no appearance until later). "Interpretation of Dreams", the "Introductory Lectures", the 19th century works on "Neurosis", and the metapsychological works primarily address unconscious processes, memory, repression, and other mechanisms of defense, with reference to hysteria, obsessional neurosis, paranoia, and psychosis. The id/ego/superego organization was introduced later in "The Ego and the Id" and other works around that time.

I would suggest if you are skeptical about Freud, and want to actually evaluate his ideas, and not cartoons of them, you should at least read "The Unconscious" or "Interpretation of Dreams", particularly the third part of the latter text. If you read Freud, you will see that he most certainly looks at data and syntheses solutions. Freud very clearly and methodically deduces most of his ideas from accounts of neuroses, dreams, and other mental phenomena. In the "Interpretation of Dreams" for instance, Freud discusses previous research on dreams, observes many interesting qualities of recorded dreams as well as discourse in therapy, "and then synthesized" a model of cognitive mechanisms that would account for the phenomena, among them condensation, displacement, and regression. He then goes on to further synthesize a plausible model of how these processes work in general, how memory and consciousness plays a role in them, and how these models are consistent with cognition in general. Modern research on dreams actually substantiates this fairly well thus far, taking the position that dreams are forms of memory consolidation and the consequence of "regression".

You really have to read some of this stuff and not just parrot what you have heard others say about Freud. The "Elektra Complex" is not even Freud's idea; it was an idea of Jung's that Freud was critical of.

At the moment, there is no canonically useful model of the mind that is established in the consensus of those who study it. You are writing this as though psychoanalysis has been replaced by some better theory that explains more of the phenomena that it addresses, but no such theory exists. One of its main contenders, evolutionary psychology, does not actually provide a model for the mind, just the conditions under which it developed. Other models have offered piecemeal models of isolated effects such as cognitive dissonance, many of which are subsumed by psychoanalytic models anyways. The point of Kandel referring to it as the "most satisfying model of the mind" (at least in 1999) is because it addresses a territory of phenomena that still does not have a clear alternative. There is no analogous "geocentric system" against which psychoanalysis looks Ptolemaic. From the above reference to work, clearly psychoanalytic models are not useless, and hence researchers continue to find reasons to stick to it.

I think you are conflating Freud's model of the mind with a couple of particulars. The id/ego/superego is not particularly central to Freud's work until it makes an appearance as the "second topography" in the 1920's. The most important part of his model involving unconscious processes are almost taken for granted by psychology today after trying to soft shoe around the idea for half a century via reductive behaviorist models that fail to substantially account for anything complex like language, culture, thought and memory.

Even if we address the second topography, why is it that it "probably doesn't exist?". Is it because Feynman doubted it? It would certainly be dogmatic to suppose that this suffices to justify this claim. Solms et al. have done a lot of work showing correlates between the model of the ego and the id and functional neuroscience, so there is work to show that they very well may exist. You cannot just assert that these things don't exist because you or Feynman don't personally buy into them. None of these researchers are taking Freud as gospel, as you seem to be taking the words of Feynman. Denying that psychoanalysis is useful means engaging in those actually working on its ideas, or even engaging in Freud's ideas substantially, and making clear arguments for why this should be treated as useless.

The question is not whether Kandel proved anything, but merely whether psychoanalysis has been discredited. I am not making the case here that it is proven, verified, or completely substantiated in any particular way (here at least). That people are still taking its ideas seriously in mainstream research fields is enough to show that it is not discredited. The whole point of the aforementioned article is argue that psychoanalysis has credibility as a theory.

Kandel points out several connections between ideas from Freud's model and potential neuroscientific correlates. The subsequent works of Solms have further pursued these connections as a rigorous scientific project. How can you compare all of this to Feynman arguing against psychoanalysis on the basis of personally doubting someone could come up with it?

These are not marginal outsiders doing basement research. A theory being discredited means that there is a consensus in research against it. There is plenty of active research in reputable institutions both in psychoanalysis and neuroscience as I linked to explicitly, as well as in therapy research (which could be surfaced pretty easily). Many may have contested psychoanalysis, but tis is not what a discredited theory looks like.

On one hand, I think there is certainly a perspective in this doc that shows where critical views are needed around the consequences of certain business models coming from big tech. On the other hand, it seems to attribute a lot of the recent political divide to the rise of social networks without considering that a lot of these changes happened alongside the wake of the 2008 economic collapse, which almost certainly has contributed a lot to this political division. The suggestion that things were good before these social networks permeated people's lives overlooks a much longer narrative of wealth inequality in the West, and particularly in the US issues with housing, jobs, and the education ssystem. In some ways, the social dilemma is the ultimate #firstworldproblem of our time.

The difference between Kandel and Feynman is that Kandel is a neuroscientist who understands psychoanalysis and Feynman clearly hadn't really read Freud's work, only expressing skepticism on the basis of his vague intuitions about how long it should take to come up with a theory.

While I did not find this article particularly deep, psychoanalysis has hardly been discredited. The core of the theory has been infused into almost every psychological modality practiced today aside from CBT, and studies have shown its general efficacy as a practice to be on par with others and in some cases superior. For the past 20 or so years, the field of neuropsychoanalysis under Mark Solms et al. has done a lot of good work understanding memory, dreaming, and higher cognitive processes stemming from Freud's ideas. Nobel Laureat Eric Kandel wrote in the 90's that psychoanalysis still constitutes the most intellectually satisfying model of the mind; Kandel has gone on to promote studying psychoanalytic ideas with modern neuroscientific techniques. Although several authors have been critical of psychoanalysis, having been criticized by some does not make an idea instantly discredited. There remains no clear way to verify a model of higher cognitive processes in the same fashion as a physics formula.