Bunnies are slow getting started due to many, many things gone wrong in the past few days, but here’s a tiny bit. (Warning, a slight ending spoiler for Nagi no Asukara below.)
Staring at his notes, Professor Mihashi rubbed the side of his head. “Are you saying that the harbor thawed – and we’ve possibly averted long-term climatic disaster – through the power of love?” He winced at the thought. “Or at least accurate communication?”
Seriously, you have to feel for the guy in the wake of the Ofunehiki. That was… definitely not a scientific ending. Oh, certainly the right kind of ending for the anime, which was all about, don’t just assume you know what your beloved wants, talk to them! But not scientific.
Prof. Satoru Mihashi must have an awful headache.
The plotbunnies think this is an interesting bit of the loose ends to explore, because – among other things – this is actually a way to show more science, by pinpointing what the scientific method can and can’t handle. So I have an idea for those closest to the situation to be trying to pin down what are the factors involved in gaining ena. Not all of those are things you can measure; love, emotional connection to the sea, and others. But there are common circumstances they can identify, and possible reasons those might affect the body when other factors don’t.
For example, check this out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_reflex
So there are things science can bring to the situation. And then it’s a leap of faith.
…Also, I refuse to believe Akari, who is a very good mother, just let Akira jump off a pier or something. She’d want to know everything she could first!
Crossover Queen's Creative Chaos 
I’m pretty sure a psychologist would try to develop a metric for all that squishy stuff. They have tried measuring guilt and shame. Here is the link to the paper that released the GASP scale:
http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2514&context=tepper
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Thing is, some of the folks from the harder sciences think that the methodology of the psychologists and sociologists is full of feces.
Someone recently tried to do a survey of how respondents felt about how evil men are, and about whether it is okay for men to hit women. (Wording changed to keep from compromising sources and methods.) Then followed up about the lack of male responses. A competent study would have looked at risks and biases that could affect sampling, and avoided phrasing it like a politicized fishing expedition for self incrimination. The male respondents were likely only fools and sympathetic ideologues. This got past the university human testing review board, which suggests that the university’s experimental oversight in that discipline may have an extremely low level of competence.
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Paraphrasing a bit from a webcomic (that otherwise wasn’t really worth it):
The problem with Psych (both -ology and -iatry) is that the people who study it are either crazy or manipulative, and they use each other as both references and ‘restraints’, so their methodology is flawed, their data is compromised, and their interpretations are skewed.
Sure, that’s a bit of an over generalization, but it does concisely describe the basic flaw in the concept. There’s a small sampling of people like us who find “learning stuff” to be inherently interesting, and have reason for learning specifically about the workings of the brain (tho I’m not sure we don’t fit under the heading of “crazy” in the generalization), but it does seem like the overwhelming majority are either so out of touch with reality that calling them “crazy” is maybe understating it, or that are studying it because they can’t avoid trying to manipulate people (even if they don’t recognize that about themselves, and cover it with labels like “helping”).
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OTOH, it was the psych field that finally identified PTSD as a real condition, so people stopped getting shot for being “cowards” simply because they couldn’t take anymore.
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As fields of science, I have some major reservations.
As fields of medicine, I also have major reservations, but I must speak out in defense of good practitioners. There are some very good psychiatrists and psychologists, who’ve done an excellent job keeping some very sick people alive and even functional. There are ones who aren’t simply rent collectors goldplating. There are people alive now who would not be if not for at least marginally competent psychiatrists.
(Oh, and I have major reservations about the practice of medicine as impacts the mentally ill, and also thereby the public welfare. But that perhaps goes quickly into starting fights I don’t need to start here. I think everyone who has been paying a lot of attention to the issues gets how heartbreaking it can be. It ain’t something we are going to fix this blog post, for sure.)
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I have to say if there weren’t books out there on the various variants of the human psyche, I’d be in a world of hurt myself. So – trust, but verify, as they say.
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Oh, definitely agreed. I wasn’t saying there aren’t individual practitioners who are quite good, or who have good intentions going in, just that the fields themselves are flawed and the majority of the flaws are due to the normal sort of people who are interested expanding the fields as fields.
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Sigmund Freud anyone?
I was addressing my own statements as much as anyone’s. I can be an extremely harsh critic of a number of professions. But my sense of rigor forces me to concede the positive points when I am doing a complete list of negatives.
I think some of the problems of psychology and sociology are simply due to the fact that an intelligent mind is measuring and responding to a wide range of things when you are trying to measure it.
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Freud at least identified that some problems could be fixed. As opposed to chaining people up naked until they died. Ow.
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About PTSD, that is so often comorbid with other conditions that it should probably be a modifier. My first hint that that was true was noticing that the members of a message board for the mentally ill I used to post at/moderate who had PTSD all had something else, too. I noticed that same thing with adult ADHD and that everybody who got depressed every winter got manic every summer and mixed state every fall. Mixed state, by the way, is likely the reason why you can’t call it bipolar disorder anymore. It’s when you meet all of the criteria for mania and depression simultaneously for at least seven consecutive days. They’re very carefully written so as to make that possible.
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“Or at least accurate communication?”
Don’t knock it, Professor. There are a lot of problems that could be solved (or least minimized) if people learned to use their words or use them better. And not assume everyone is on the same page. Not assume a lot of things. And do their best to have an open mind.
Still . . . not exactly scientific. Probably because feelings aren’t logical so it’s hard to quantify objectively . . .
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*G* Hence part of the idea. “What can we quantify, and what do we have to just write down as observation?”
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…and add //another// reason why I should look up this anime. Power of love saves all is always nice.
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*G* Never underestimate a Hot Blooded Shonen Protagonist!
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