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Comment Re:Rosenham Experiment (Score 2) 124

The conclusion you have drawn from this study is an extreme overreaction. It does not follow from this single study of how psychiatric staff in the 1970s responded to malingering patients that any attempt at quantifying human behavior objectively is flawed.

The main issue with this study is that psychiatric diagnosis relies heavily on self report, and the actors in this study created the illusion of a psychiatric disorder by lying about their hallucinations. How the staff responds once the patient no longer reports symptoms is interesting and revealing, but this is no indictment of the entirety of behavioral or psychological research.

There is a legitimate science of emotion, and we know quite a bit about emotion from studying it objectively. I think the issue with the theory in the OP is that it relied on a complex field of mathematics which emotion researchers were not in a position to understand or critique. This is more an issue with cross-disciplinary work than it is with behavioral science.

Comment Re:second hand e-smoke (Score 2, Informative) 314

If completely safe, I wouldn't mind this coming into general use for people who wish to smoke.

It's probably not completely safe for the smoker. A recent (just last month) study found that e-cigarettes do indeed contain carcinogens, in some cases showing similar levels of formaldehyde and acrolein as regular cigarettes.

Article about the study.

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