What an Idiot: Part VI

I really have to stop reading Stevie Boy:

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, widely known as the bible of psychiatric medicine, is under revision and the American Psychiatric Association is accepting public comment at a new website.

Medpage Today reports that the revision has already been changed several times in response to these comments. These include several areas within the Sexual and Gender Identities categories, and modifications to the criteria for adjustment disorders and eating disorders.

By contrast, the American Physical Society is not asking the general public to weigh in on the prospects for supersymmetry, nor is the American Economic Association surveying the general public on the properties of dynamic stochastic general equilibria. So much for any pretense that psychiatry is a science.

And so much for any pretence that certain economists have a clue about what makes a science. Here's a hint: it takes more than staring fixedly at your own navel to make a science.

And just for informational purposes, psychiatry is a healing discipline rather than a science, and as such is based on science both theoretical and empirical but focussed on healing rather than investigation. The theoretical underpinnings of psychiatry are hardly massive, but rather sturdier than those of economics, it would appear - shrinks can pretty frequently do their patients good. Supersymmetry, on the other hand is an untested but interesting idea, and if anybody has a good idea for how to test it, lots of physicists will prick up their ears.

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