My Psychology Professor, Is, Quite Simply, A Moron

The BBQ Pit
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My psychology professor, the topic of this General Questions Thread regarding the advent of anti-psychotic medications, is an idiot.

No, I don’t have a WAIS that points to “Ungifted”, or a Rorschach inkblot to say, “Know-It-All but Knows Nothing” personality, or a Thematic Apperecption Test to say the same thing, nor even the opinions of my fellow class mates, it’s just my own personal opinion.

Read the other thread if you desire, or I’ll summarize it here:
My psychology professor claimed that early anti-psychotic medications were derived completely be accident when administered as an analgesic (similar chemical makeup as aspirin) to a schizophrenic patient whose thoughts “cleared up”. It turned out that, in fact, they are more closely related to anti-histamines, initially tested in the hope that they would reduce anxiety and shock in post-op patients, and had known anti-anxiety effects when they were first tested on psychiatric patients. As I said in the other thread, “Worse, an inane, stupid, boring UL from somebody paid to know better.”

Today in class, when discussing the topic of correlation and causation, she used the typical pickles and air-crash, ice-cream and drowning correlations as examples of how correlation does not mean causation. She goes on to point to this example from President G.W. Bush: He recently stated that because the productivity of workers has risen, this will increase wages. She compared, “this level of logic,” to that of a three year old. She went on to try to balance out the political slant of this statement by stating that, “Democrats do the same thing.” Funny, she neglected to use any actual examples or include any fun ad hominem attacks.

First off, the argument made that increases in worker productivity would cause increases in worker wages is, IMHO, a fairly self-evident term; even if direct wage increases fail to materialize in current positions, it would increase the purchasing power of those same wages with reduced consumer costs. So, the statement made was, I think, true, yet she attacked it in a way as to introduce an unnecessarily politicized manner when so many other opportunities for people inaccurately actually claiming correlation=causation are readily available in current events with just a bit of preparation. More so, examples in which people actually try to point to specific studies of correlation and argue causation rather than people making appeals to general economic principles.

So, in conclusion, my psychology professor is an annoying little twit with the logical capabilities of a three year old, and I am pitting her.

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Wo bist die Linkenwürst ?

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So a company will always chage prices proportionally with employee productivity?

If I build concrete testing devices more quickly, my clothes will cost less?
You might be able to make a Great Debate, but you haven’t made much of a pitting.

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Damn, the link:http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=207643

Wikkit, yes, generally, increased productivity will lead to increased margins, competitive pressure on both the labor and consumer market will effect what Bush was generally pointing at. No, your clothes won’t be cheaper, but wherever the cost of that concrete testing device gets passed on to, you’ll see advantages there. And at any rate, you have to conceed that the point is at least one upon which reasonable people can disagree, and therefore a poor candidate for someone to use as a pedagogical example or compare to the intelligence of a three year old.

Trust me, I say this as no particuar fan of Bush’s economic policies (or that much else about his administration).

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Alright, this thread has the highest view/respone ratio that I’ve ever seen (~230/1), but what the hell… rather than make a new thread I’ll just tack on today’s fun:

When discussing why modern psychiatric medications such as Prozac, Wellbutrin, lithium, and specificaly Zoloft can have some nasty side-effects, she feels compelled to tell the class about her own little sob story about how she apparently developed PTSD after a car crash (from what I surmised, no deaths or serious injuries) and had to relate her own personal experiences regarding the sexual side-effects of Zoloft and her inability to have an orgasm.

That’s fucking fantastic!!! Glad you feel the need to waste this 500 person class with that little tid-bit, maybe it’ll get you some phone numbers, eh?

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I think that everything sounds like the logic of a three-year-old at a “sound byte” level. If you try to persuade someone of the benefits of increased productivity with the entire argument that “since productivity increased, wages will increase,” it indeed is a vacuous argument.

But if you were to explain it better, then indeed it would become at least a debatable topic.

But she gets points for relating her experiences. If they are true. I can never trust psychology professors, they seem to be always making things up.

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Your prof is wrong, and you are right (phenthiazines are indeed closely related to antihistamines. Also to insecticides, frighteningly enough). But your prof is closer to the general truth than the packet of unsupportable claims made by the folks who prescribe them, who tend to imply if not overtly state that psychiatric medicines were developed from scientific understandings of the “chemical imbalances in the brain” and that the drugs were designed to address them. (Like schizzies suffer from a thorazine deficiency disease or something).