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Wikipedia Debates Rorschach Censorship
GigsVT writes "Editors on Wikipedia are engaged in an epic battle over a few piece of paper smeared with ink. The 10 inkblot images that form the classic Rorschach test have fallen into the public domain, and so including them on Wikipedia would seem to be a simple choice. However, some editors have cited the American Psychological Association's statement that exposure of the images to the public is an unethical act, since prior exposure to the images could render them ineffective as a psychological test. Is the censorship of material appropriate, when the public exposure to that material may render it useless?"
I think the doubt thrown on the validity of the tests is all over the place anyway. Why not just let the tests out and end the debate there?
Everyone knows they're all pictures of boobs anyway.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
The test is, and always has been, pop-psychology nonsense. It's a cold reading in a phony clinical setting. The diagnoses is always "more costly therapy sessions".
This is like the association of soothsayers trying to supress the "secret" of tarot or tea leave reading, because if everybody knows it wont be magic anymore.
On the contrary, in order to interpret the results scientifically, you have to have already used them and determined a basis for scoring. How this is classically done with the original Rorschach is a series of markings based on the contents of the respondent's answer. They also score things like whether you pick the card up, whether you turn it around, whether you give more than one answer, etc. Without a fixed means of scoring the blots, you don't have data, you just have hand-waving.
But there are other tests out there, with their own means of scoring. Some of them even try to generate random inputs.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
... because if they aren't on wikipedia, then nobody will ever find them on the internet and the images will be safe forever!
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Wait until the optometrists discover that Wikipedia is using an uncensored Snellen eye chart. Pssst! The big letter at the top is an "E."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Those are the outlines of the inkblots. Those have been public for quite some time now but psychologists believed they had no significant influence on the reliability of the actual test (which, I guess, means the outlines didn't make the tests less unreliable). The wikipedia images are the actual colored blobs and DO have the desired effect of making a useless test unusable.
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Try going to a Penn & Teller show and telling everyone how each trick is done.
Why bother? Penn& Teller already do that as part of their act.
Thread should end right here. While the Rorschach test does have some limited scientific validity, it doesn't deserve to be as widespread as it is. The test's "effectiveness" relies on exactly the same psychological blindspot that fortune telling does. Wikipedia isn't hampering the effectiveness of anything that isn't already broken.
Not a typewriter
I am both a dope smoker and a scientifically-minded person, you insensitive clod!
Psychologists used other means to diagnose people, then gave them the Rorschach test. They found correlations between certain diagnoses and certain types of answers or behaviors exhibited during the test. The Rorschach test is not a definitive test that will tell you unequivocally what specific mental issues you have. Like all psychological tests, it is just one tool among many that helps a trained expert make a diagnosis. For instance, if the Rorschach test says you are a psychopath, but you show a capacity for empathy and remorse, any trained psychologist will know that the test simply didn't work on you.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I think the doubt thrown on the validity of the tests is all over the place anyway. Why not just let the tests out and end the debate there?
They are useful. Here were my answers: butterfly, butterfly, butterfly, butterfly, butterfly, butterfly, butterfly, butterfly, butterfly, butterfly. Based on my answers, my analyst, Dr. Lector, said I was a tedious but promising candidate to be a murderous sociopath. He said it was going to take some work, though. I'm now in a cage taking heavy doses of barbiturates "to help me with my progress". I'm still waiting for the next phase of treatment when I get the spinal injections before being forced to listen to Beethoven's Ode to Joy and watching Nazis have sex with prostitutes.
Who would have thought so much treatment could be advised from how one interprets bilaterally symmetric and colorful images that have the same vague appearance as a major phylogeny from the tree of life. I feel better already!
Just callin' it like I see it.
I too scoff at the validity of these so called Rorschach tests. Any Phrenologist will tell you the only thing that really matters is the shape of your head. For you see, the form of the cranium represents the form of the brain, and thus reflects the relative development of the brain organs.
The test is, and always has been, pop-psychology nonsense. It's a cold reading in a phony clinical setting. The diagnoses is always "more costly therapy sessions".
This is like the association of soothsayers trying to supress the "secret" of tarot or tea leave reading, because if everybody knows it wont be magic anymore.
You're wrong. The Rorschach test is not, nor has it ever been a tool for identifying what's wrong with you. It's a tool that allows the person administering it to better understand the mental state of the person they're dealing with in a way that doesn't allow them to employ the usual defensive responses. It further allows them to identify what major pathologies might be present, but does not provide a diagnosis. You're essentially implying that any tool which doesn't offer a full-blown diagnosis is akin to superstition and should be discarded.
By that logic, a stethoscope is a useless tool, since it never provides a complete diagnosis, but a set of data points that can be applied to one.
> > in order to interpret the results scientifically
> You have to be smoking dope.
> There is nothing scientific at all about this claptrap, and there never was.
Actually, speaking as someone who administered the Rorschach many times in a previous life (before turning to coding), I'd say you're wrong. It certainly doesn't have the psychometric characteristics of a good personality test, but it does have considerable empirical data to aid in its interpretation. It's nowhere near the validity and reliability of instruments like the MMPI or NEO PI-R, but it does have its uses --especially when assessing those who might try to fool a psychologist using these more face-valid psychological measures.
Ask me about my sig!
hmmm, I saw butterfly, red x, red x, red x, red x, red x, red x, butterfly, butterfly, red x
That _was_ funny ... and also true!
My mother is a retired school psychologist, so I got to be the guinea pig for all of the tests she was learning to administer. By the time she got around to learning Rorschach, I was in high school, so I tormented her by sneaking a peek at the scoring rubric before she gave me the test. The basic approach to being declared unstable was to simply obsess on any given concept - it didn't need to be anything particularly grisly or perverted. Butterflies would do just fine. I took my Mom three images to catch on to what I was doing, and we both had a good chuckle.
What a crock!
If humans are mostly water, and beer is mostly water, then humans must be mostly beer.
You sound angry. Tell me how you feel about this.
Does it please you to believe that I sound angry tell you how I feel about this?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
I don't think it's an issue of whether or not the tool provides a full-blown diagnosis. I think it has to do with what the tool measures.
A stethoscope doesn't provide a diagnosis...it just allows the user to hear things that normally can't be heard. It's not subjective at all. The effectiveness of the stethoscope can easily be measured and confirmed. The sounds the stethoscope pick up (typically heart beats/breathing - I'm guessing?) have been *proven* as a useful diagnostic tool.
That's to say, it is possible to hear an abnormal heart beat. Or to hear congestion in the lungs. We (as a scientific community) understand how sound works and we know that some things make sounds; and if we hear a certain type of sound, we know it must have a certain of cause. If the cause of the sound is in your lungs and it's a sound that shouldn't be, we know it's a problem.
The problem most people have with the Rorschach test or 'tool', however you want to word it - is that it doesn't measure anything. It's some pictures. They don't do ANYTHING.
You can show them to someone and then interpret their answers and use that to help show you the state of mind of the person answering. But, we (as a scientific community) still don't understand the inner workings of the mind. Someone's answers are highly open for interpretation. Even if we can agree that a certain type of answer or behavior while answering is 'abnormal', we don't know what causes it.
With a stethoscope - you can say, 'This sound....it's almost always the result of X'. With the Rorschach pictures...you can't.
So, a lot of people don't see the benefit. And if the benefit is something like, 'Well, the highly trained professions therapist can pick up on the subtle undertones of the patient and gain insight into the blah, blah, blah' it really seems like you could just say, 'We observe the patient and notice that he's crazy'.
Beyond that, if the test requires the patient not knowing about the test in advance or understanding the test; that's a good reason to question the validity of the test.
If someone has a heart condition that can be detected with a stethoscope - knowing how the stethoscope works - does not affect the results. But, apparently, looking at the pictures, in advance, diminishes their effectiveness.
I'm not saying a Rorschach test is crap. I'm just explaining why I think it's probably crap.
The Rorschach test is a holdover from the bad old days of psychology when it was little more scientific than alchemy was in its day.
There's this fascinating science called psychology that tells us why double-blind studies are valuable. I think you'd like it.
What the hell was this supposed to mean? His whole point was that there are no double-blind studies supporting your point. Turning around and saying double-blinds are important is not a retort.
Modern psychology is rather different from psychology in the first part of the 20th century. The Rorscach belongs firmly in the latter.
She'd say: "Oh God, he's never going to move out is he?"
No, you'd be showing contempt for the test due to a deep-seated fixation with test-avoidance, probably arising from a bad childhood experience with a psychoanalyst, causing you to try to make a fool out of people who want to help you, clearly an anti-social tendency.