So are a lot of things that a large percentage of humans have experienced for thousands of years.

So society has been living in a mentally disordered state for 1000s of years - yeah, sounds about right.

As a very fat person, I say yes

Did you actually read what was linked to you? These two.
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2012/06/27/peds.2011-2947
http://adc.bmj.com/content/83/3/196.full

As the first link mentions, they did in fact at least partially correct for such issues. Even the study's title bears the words "Results From a Nationally Representative US Sample".


From the latter link.

The bolded part.

and



and



and finally, from the conclusion.



What exactly about psychology is junk science apart from some of the studies disagreeing with your personal wishes? I'm sure that the effects of reinforcement is considered to be pretty much an indisputable fact in modern psychology even though the heydays of behaviourism qua behaviourism are long gone and I've not got the faintest idea of where you might've gotten the idea that it's not an accepted fact in the field. The criticisms of behaviourism, although at times undeserved, have very little to do with what you perhaps think them to be about.
If you wish to name-drop behaviourists you should also remember that it's important to understand what exactly it is that is being reinforced. Will the child learn that when an adult gets angry he will hit you? Will they learn that they, too, can control situations that they don't like by applying violence? Will they learn that the threat of violence is what should keep them from committing undesirable acts? etc. ad infinitum. This, of course, without even touching the myriad of other issues associated with parent-on-child violence.

This post was edited by Gastly on Mar 20 2016 06:12pm

They are exactly what I said: Torturing statistics. Self reporting surveys, not laboratory experiments in controlled conditions. From psychiatrists with an obvious bias. Try to weight the numbers around a dozen arbitrary metrics until they show the trend you want.
If you could plausibly account for every factor from socio-economic background to repression to larger maltreatment and so on- something you cannot do with such crass methodology- you'd still have the problem of causation. That is, children that have mood disorders, substance abuse and anxiety could be the ones who are more likely to receive corporal punishment from their parents. When the truant addict gives his dad a reason to sock him one, and the perfectly mentally healthy and responsible teen does not.

The problem of course is that psychology is a junk science because it can't tell you why anything actually works, only posit wild theories with no actual mechanical understanding of the brain to back them up. For all its pretensions, modern psychology may as well be phrenology. It is little more than the political correct zeitgeist of self reinforcing theoretics with a total absence of firm grounding. It swept on a whim from endorsing firm discipline to indulgent special snowflake treatment not under empirical evidence nor proven logical reasoning, but rather because one wanker pushed the idea and the hippies co-opted it.

If your science can't reduce to math and plain logic, if its dependent on throwing ten billion uncontrolled variables into a black box and seeing words in your alphabet soup come out, its junk science.

truth

I'm surprised that you had the time to read all the 892 papers of the meta-analysis that was referred to in such a short amount of time. Not only did you manage to do that, but you also somehow managed to discover the "obvious bias" of the researchers and throw a temper tantrum at the "obviously biased" researchers.
I'm not sure where you've gotten your ideas about modern psychology, but it probably involves very little modern psychology.


No science reduces to "plain logic" or math apart from logic itself, and even that's not a science in the English use of the word. I don't know what you're talking about. Just vaguely throwing around the words logic and math as if they were magic words doesn't actually mean that there is any substance in what you say. It just doesn't work like that.
Anyhow, the introduction to your philosophy of science went just about as well as I expected it to go.

A note for the future: your rants hold very little substance and all too much odd ego-fapping. Have a nice day.

It's all about willpower.

Weak willpower = not motivated to do anything to change their lifestyle to a healthy one.

In other words, "I AM LAZY AND I GIVE UP".

But our minds are much more mechanical than we give them credit for. Will power doesn't come from nowhere, and introducing effective habits or a positive environment can do much more than shaming.

tax credits based on a body composition calculating machine perhaps?

we could call it a fat tax but that'd seem too oppressive