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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
yeah, i wasn't really attracted by the "magic science" though. which i knew upfront to be total bullshit. i mean, we all read "microexpressions", but it's not like the exact arithmetic of the show.
where it got watchable for me was in the complications that fictional knowledge brought to life and personal relationships-- that is, the writing of the characters on top of the magic science gimmicks-- who do you trust, and with what, and how much, and how do you relate to them-- that sort of thing.
since the pseudo-science was psychology, it naturally fed into more intricate character writing.
and tim roth is lots of fun to watch, yeah--that definitely made it entertaining. not groundbreaking anything though, just fun stuff. i've paid a lot of bills in front of that show.
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Ok, but psychology isn’t pseudoscience. The show stole from real theories, and made it look like a superpower. But ... y’know... *actual* psychology — that is, the systematic study of human behavior in relation to the brain — is not pseudoscience. It’s science science.
I took chemistry classes that were soft as butter compared to advanced quantitative research methods in neuropsychology, or psychopharmacology.
The show actually pisses me off because it feeds the public misconception that psychology is just sitting in a chair and judging people. That’s just clinical psychology, and yeah, it’s not great.
I just didn’t like how old that shit got. “You’re lying.” Wow. Ok. Way to knock the wind out of me, whatever-the-fuck your name is. I had no idea this episode was going to be about you dealing with someone who was *lying*. Whoah.
It’s a lot like that OTHER-other science gone stupid show “Bones.” That show does an excellent job of making a perfectly reputable (but nowhere near as reputable methodologically as psychology or medicine) science, in that case applied anthropology, and just making it look like a goddamn joke.
What’s the deal with making science look LESS INTERESTING than it actually is by cooking up drama around it? I’d rather read a textbook than watch that show.
The dude in Lie to Me is based on a real person — Dr. Paul Ekman — whose work and theories on deception and identification have been pretty roundly criticized. He’s a pop psychologist, and his work was applied to airport SPOT technology, and has come under fire for being hastily implemented despite insufficient internal validity testing.
I had a cognition professor who would roll his eyes when talking about Ekman and go on tangents. Loved that guy.
Anyway, these are all bad television shows, but as far as I’m concerned, House is the best because it doesn’t make any reputable fields of study look positively daffy. It just goes to way too much trouble to make microscopic stuff exciting, and to find obscenely ridiculous ways of telling captivating stories based loosely on the tenants of medicine. But at least it doesn’t make people call psychology a pseudo-science. Yeeesh.