A while back, Caine posted some pictures from Vaught’s Practical Character Reader. I did what I usually do when someone posts about an interesting old book – I checked for it on Ebay.
That’s how I wound up with this hugely giftable copy of Vaught’s for the whopping price of $10, shipping included. It will be the foundation of my new career as a face-reader.
I have to say “brilliant marketing” to add the word “practical” in the title. So we can tell it from, presumably, the other impractical character readers. Sadly, I found the book to be impractical – it has a lot of illustrations that seem to say more about the author’s perception of class and race than anything else.
According to his own theory, Vaught looks like a good, genuine father, but otherwise neutral and possibly honest. One thing I found particularly interesting about his brand of nonsense is that he doesn’t appear to factor in the appearance of the eyes: “the window of the soul” is not taken into account. I wonder what the slightly droopy corners of Vaught’s eyes might really be saying, or whether that dust-mop he has on his face is hiding the weak chin of a liar.
In other postings I have attacked the field of Psychology as being largely worth dismissing as pseudo-science until the advent of neuroscience. This sort of thing is why – when a defender of Psychology says “you can’t just throw out psychology based on popular psychology” they are ignoring the fact that, for all intents and purposes, popular psychology is what psychology is. I am not throwing out the baby with the bathwater – it’s pretty much all bathwater until recently.
While it’s fun to poke at these people, for being wrong, they are actually part of the scientific tradition of American civilization. We like to point out that the social darwinists were wrong (they were) and then somehow we slide by the fact that the social darwinists were also using their bad science in the service of institutionalized American racism. The connection between social darwinism and American racism is so tight that, for all intents and purposes, it’s not worth trying to separate them – the whole basis for psychometry and all the measures that were applied to people, were attempting, at their core, to explain why white people are so magnificent. Basically.
At the time it wasn’t “pop psychology” – it was psychology. All those tests to measure IQ or to see if people could defer gratification: what do you think they were really trying to measure? Two things:
- Why are white people so awesome
- What about rich people is so special, that they should be rich
In other words: motivated reasoning in service of the status quo.
It wasn’t just this clown Vaught, who pulled stuff out of his backside and wrote it down in an authoritarian voice: that was the mode and method of American social science, until the 1970s with very few glaring exceptions. Those exceptions were also embarrassing, just in other ways (for example, Skinner realized that we cannot talk about the inner mind of a pigeon, we can merely observe its behavior. Meanwhile, all of the rest of psychology was cheerfully making up fanciful air-castles about conscious and subconscious, and this and that.
How is what Vaught is doing better founded on science than Steven Pinker’s evolutionary psychology?
These images are also based on the idea that there is something innate about a person, which influences their behavior, and affects their social outcomes. Perhaps it is the bumps on their head or the shape of their nose. Or perhaps it’s whatever the hell Steven Pinker thinks it is (he is remarkably cagy about this “human nature” of which he is so convicted).
Vaught doesn’t seem to be a very good artist, so he didn’t cross-hatch any of the illustrations to simulate skin color. But it’s pretty easy to notice that his virtuous faces all show some of the characteristics of white European ancestry, and the lazy face? Take a look at it.
I can’t tell what kind of head features an evolutionary psychologist would be expected to have. Vaught’s system lacks predictive power.
Here is a man with an astonishing degree of “home, country, family and love sentiments.”
India doctors remove world’s ‘largest brain tumour’
The facial recognition of yore. It hardly bears thinking about, that we still do this shit, just with computers now, so it’s for real good, you bet.
Caine@#2:
The facial recognition of yore. It hardly bears thinking about, that we still do this shit, just with computers now, so it’s for real good, you bet.
It’s SPECIAL ‘cuz it’s ALGORITHMICAL!
I think we should continue to hammer on evolutionary psychologists to differentiate what EXACTLY they are doing that is so different from hucksters like Vaught. They’re getting away with claiming they’re all scientific and shit, but … why? When they fall back on population studies they have to admit that they’re measuring social bias. That even rank amateurs can point out the biases in their studies ought to be problematic, but instead we get more books.
Reginald Selkirk@#1:
Here is a man with an astonishing degree of “home, country, family and love sentiments.”
Similarly, if phrenologists had an encounter with John Merrick, their responses are unrecorded,
That drawing in page 79 looks like this person has got some brain tumors. That’s not a normally shaped human head. I also love the sentence, “We say this with absolute certainty.” It’s amusing when people are so wrong yet so certain. For me that face in page 147 looks simply like an overweight person, which is another stupid bias.
This reminds me, a while ago I read about a study, which suggested that in domesticated animals visual appearance correlates with certain behavior traits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Belyayev_(zoologist)#Belyayev%27s_fox_experiment
So the idea that the same genes influence both behavior and visual appearance might not be completely false (at least in animals).
Speaking of psychology harming people, today I was reading about Henry Murray’s unethical experiments and the MKUltra project. The more I learn about the history of psychology, the uglier it gets. This makes me wonder how many people got hurt in various ways as a direct result of this kind of bullshit “science.”
Ieva Skrebele@#5:
today I was reading about Henry Murray’s unethical experiments and the MKUltra project. The more I learn about the history of psychology, the uglier it gets.
MKUltra is the tip of a huge horrible iceberg of unethical bogus science inflicted by psychologists. (And they are continuing it: remember that the torture program the CIA used and the imprisonment techniques used at Gitmo are based on ‘psychological principles’ and were developed by psychologists. The American Psychological Association (APA) did – in 2015 – announce that participating in torture is a violation of psychologists’ ethics.
(On a whim I was just now trying to find where Dr Taliaferro Clark, PhD, got his degree from, and what his field was. Betting he’s a psychologist… But it seems like no medical school is eager to claim him…)
Basically, anywhere you look at psychology, except for some of the most recent stuff that’s based on neuroscience, you’ll find it’s bullshit. And if you go back even a short ways you’ll find it was often used by psychiatrists to perform incompetent interventions on human subjects (based on bullshit spouted by psychologists). Psychology is a real shit-show. My saying that is usually a cue for someone to say “… but it’s better than nothing.” Which is also untrue.
I sort of suspected that. It looks like I’ll have to read more about the history of unethical research experiments (a.k.a. torture) committed by psychologists. Do you have any book suggestions?
That’s a politician’s fallacy:
We must do something,
This is something,
Therefore, we must do this.
Bad interventions definitely are worse than simply doing nothing. Students who got abused by Henry Murray probably would have preferred to be simply left alone. Reading the description of his experiments, I think that if I got exposed to something similar now, it wouldn’t hurt me much (if at all). By now I have grown a very thick skin, it would be pretty hard to hurt me exclusively by talking. But Murray conducted these experiments with students who were as young as 17. If my 17 years old self had experienced this kind of torture, it would have seriously hurt me. What Murray did was plain abuse.
Speaking of doing nothing, that’s how homeopathy gained support back when Samuel Hahnemann came up with the idea. He literally did nothing, and under his treatment patients often did better than under mainstream interventions. The problem was that at the time “conventional” medicine involved outright harmful treatments (like bloodletting), so doing nothing was the best option.
Bloodletting? Better than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobotomy
John Morales @#8
Yes, I had heard about lobotomies. In 20th century there have been plenty of harmful medical practices with mentally ill people getting subjected to many of those.
The problem is that some harmful practices still persist even today.
Autism rights activists have complained that some of the treatments (for example, forcing autistic children to do things they are uncomfortable with) are harmful.
I’m suspicious about ADHD medications too. It’s normal for children to be active and unwilling to sit still during boring lessons. Where I live children don’t get routinely drugged like in the U.S.
Circumcisions are a problem woo. I’m perfectly fine with consenting adults choosing to do with their bodies whatever they want, but a baby cannot consent, parents and doctors should have no right to mess with a child’s body. By the way, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the primary justification for circumcision was to prevent masturbation, and it was recommended for teenage boys who got caught jerking off. Whoops!
Intersex babies and children with ambiguously looking genitals are routinely butchered by surgeons too. And after growing up they are often dissatisfied with whatever gender surgeons assigned for them.
Speaking of consent, in the country where I live current laws allow parents and doctors to decide to sterilize mentally ill people (who, by definition, are unable to consent).
John Morales@#8:
Bloodletting? Better than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobotomy
Oh, psychiatry.
Ieva Skrebele@#9:
By the way, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the primary justification for circumcision was to prevent masturbation, and it was recommended for teenage boys who got caught jerking off. Whoops!
That’s OK, they retro-fitted some elaborate argument about “cleanliness” onto the process, so they could continue doing it.
When I was a kid, the doctors were still telling parents that it should be done, for the kids’ benefit and cleanliness, etc. Religious lies, of course.
Ieva Skrebele@#7:
Do you have any book suggestions?
Uuurrrggghhhhhh…. Psychologists have done yoeman’s work at burying the more sordid stories.
I’m not aware of any books that give a good survey of the landscape of horror. Mostly it’s nuggets stuffed into the cracks of the history of psychology. Most of the books I can think would be interesting are old – R.D. Laing and Erving Goffman – although the immediate rebuttal from the psychologists would be “those are psychiatrists.”
The tuskeegee syphillis experiment would be worth reading up on. And I referenced a book by the asshole psychiatrist who developed the CIA’s torture program (actually lifted it from the Gestapo, who lifted it from the FBI) https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/12/cia-torture-report-released/
Pretty much open any book about psychology that was published before 1960 and you’ll discover it’s shit.
Possibly relevant, this from HJ Hornbeck’s blog, either about the Tuskagee airmen, or Pinker and the Enlightenment, or something similar :
Timeline of Scientific Racism