For example, there's a lot of basic perceptual psychology regarding response times and color built into many GUI toolkits in the form of GUI widgets (buttons, scrollbars, checkboxes, etc). Change blindness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_blindness) is also a known problem for error messages and can be easily avoided with good design. There's also a lot of perceptual psychology research in AR and VR too.
With respect to cognitive psychology, there's extensive work in information foraging (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_foraging) which has been distilled down as heuristics for information scent.
With respect to social psychology, there are hundreds of scientific papers about collective intelligence, how to make teams online more effective, how to socialize newcomers to online sites, how to motivate people to contribute more content and higher quality content, how and why people collaborate on Wikipedia and tools for making them more effective, and many, many more.
In past work, my colleagues and I also looked at understanding why people fall for phishing scams, and applying influence tactics to improve people's willingness to adopt better cybersecurity practices.
Basically, the author is right about his argument if you have a very narrow view of psychology, but there's a lot of really good work on applied (and practical!) psychology that's going on outside of traditional psychology journals.
Don't get me wrong, I think the modern HCI on mobile phones is remarkably good. But I haven't seen any improvement (except maybe the mouse scroll wheel and having a higher resolution screen) on real computer interfaces since the 90s.
And then you have some real useful psychological theories on attention and user-guiding that are used for evil to create antipatterns. I don't think we're making progress.
One of the challenges of psychology is individual variation. Humans have more in common with one another than we have differences, but individuality is a major factor that forces psychologists to look at things statistically unless they are specifically trying to understand or control for individual variance.
I bring this up because my personal subjective opinion is that HCI on modern mobile phones is absolutely atrocious and I don't use a smart phone as much as most people as a result.
I think that when it comes interacting with a tool, what you are accustomed to makes a huge world of difference. I grew up with Desktop computers and laptops. With keyboards, in other words. As a coder and a *nix "power user", I like command line interfaces. I like being able to tweak and customize and configure things to my liking. When I have to use Macbooks at work, it has been soul crushing to me while for others they absolutely love the UI of MacOS.
I also remember the shift of the mobile revolution. A lot of us at the time were starting to get very annoyed by the creep of mobile design conventions making their way into non-mobile contexts. At the time it was understood that those mobile design decisions were "forced" as a result of the limitations of a mobile device, and it was clear that applying them to non-mobile contexts was a cost-cutting measure (mobile first, in other words).
Although well designed iconography can transcend language barriers and facilitate communication, I find that the limited resolution of a smart phone screen forcing designers to use glyphs instead of written text is very confusing to me. I mean, don't get me wrong, I would love to learn ancient Egyptian, but it is often far from intuitive or obvious what these hieroglyphs on the screen are meant to communicate to me. In other words, the iconography is not well designed IMO. At least not in a way that creates an intuitive experience FOR ME.
But a kid who grew up in a world of smart phones is going to be able to navigate them intuitively because they have years of learning what those esoteric glyphs on the touch screen are. They've had years of "typing" out text messages on a tiny touch screens.
On a good mechanical keyboard I can type upwards of 117wpm before I start making mistakes. When trying to text my wife one sentence I need to put aside an afternoon out of my day to get it written correctly. I could get started on how awful auto-correct is but everyone knows this to the point where it's become a cultural meme. Sorry, auto-correct turned "Can you grab me some milk while you're there?" into "fyi the police are here with a search warrant."
So yeah, big tangent off of "HCI on mobile phones is remarkably good." Maybe it is in a relative sense and is as good as it can get... I mean we've had years to iterate and make improvements. But I suspect that a lot of it has to do with people just learning and getting used to haphazard design decisions that just became the defacto for mobile because the tech industry (and business at large if we're being honest) loves to copy.
IMO, OSX is the perfect platform for a keyboard-driven power user. It's unix/BSD based, so software works mostly the way you want it to, but unlike Linux it "just works" without endless fiddling. I don't use the OS UI much at all: Spotlight lets me open any app with a few keystrokes. All my time is spent in the terminal or the browser.
Some time ago I found a really nice presentation about the ISA 101 standard covering this topic. The basic idea is: The HMI looks boring everthing is okay, if something goes into a dangerous direction colors and other elements are used to draw your attention.
I'm curious what research there is about how to create better-socialized groups of people in general; obviously some cultures are more successful in certain areas than others, despite starting with basically the same human genetics--is there any evidence that a culture can learn/adapt in intentional pro-social ways? How does a society learn to be less corrupt over time? How do people decide to stop littering/speeding/parking illegally? How does a society develop a respect for their environment, for their neighbors, for future generations, etc.?
https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/2912/Building-Success...
You might also look into research on pro-social behaviors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosocial_behavior
One of my favorite books that I learned about from my colleagues is Influence by Robert Cialdini. It looks at how to use known social influence tactics to change people's behaviors. Ideally, these would be used for things that society widely regards as positive (e.g. less littering), though these have also been used for phishing attacks and other dark patterns.
That sounds interesting, would you mind sharing where would you point me if I wanted to follow up with latest research?
Something like arxiv but for psychology? Unless it' only in the magazines ("Psychology today")? I'd be happy to hear the magazines names too, if you'd be so keen to share.
Thank you very much!
David Lindlbauer is a faculty at CMU who applies a lot of perceptual psych to his research on VR. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39&q=dav...
Roberta Klatzky is a perceptual psychologist that has done a lot of work on haptics. One of her ongoing projects is augmented cognition through wearables, e.g. giving people instructions in heads up displays based on the current state of things (e.g. it looks like you successfully removed the lug nuts, here's your next step in changing the car tire). https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39&q=rob...
Also progress in any science is contingent on progress in technology. There's only so much you can figure out before you'll need new, more precise way of measuring things to go on any further.
But I feel that anyone that think psychology will be fully predictable, or even up to the standards of medicine today will be for a disappointment
(but oh well, they can still run their experiments on Grad Students or Amazon MK workers and get another grant)
One HUGE thing it's missing, though, is the deliberate hacking of results to reach statistical significance. I'm willing to bet that the results of a majority of psychology studies are not reproducible.
In another lifetime, I worked as a research assistant at a very large, well-funded, Ivy League psychology lab. Talk about p-hacking. Our PI would go so far as to deny potential candidates entry into our study, as well as the therapy, simply because the PI thought these candidates wouldn't help the therapy our PI developed look good in our study. Note, these candidates did meet all our OFFICIAL study criteria for entry into the study.
Indeed
> Study replication rates were 23% for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 48% for Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, and 38% for Psychological Science. Studies in the field of cognitive psychology had a higher replication rate (50%) than studies in the field of social psychology (25%).
Unfortunately as the movement from History, Philosophy, and the other liberal arts disciplines became 'sciencified', the ability to deliberate on something rigorous but still with enough room to explore has been sacrificed in favor of trying to be more like the physical sciences.
Here's an infamous example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment#Validity
Honestly after reading that it seems impossible to really conclude anything...as it's just full of conflicting results...is that innately fraud? No but certainly careers/$ have been made from biased/agenda-driven interpretations which seems fraudulent.
If someone collects data and the study outcome is not preregistered, you can assume p-hacking. It would be implausible not to. And in most fields, preregistration is not common. (And even if there's preregistration, regularly people just switch their outcomes, and nobody cares.)
And to play the devil's advocate: psychology is probably doing better these days than most other fields, because it's been the posterchild example of the replication crisis.
before darwin, you had to have linneaus just describing and cataloging animals.; before {astronomy theory guy}, you had to have {people just tracking and observing stars}.
psychology may have tried to jump the gun a bit by attempting to become theoretical before there were a few generations of folks sitting around quantifying and classifying human behavior.
this was definitely true in cognitive neuroscience. once folks got their hands on fMRI, this entire genre of research popped up that was "replicate an existing psychology study in the scanner to confirm that they used their brain". imo, a lot more was learned by groups that stepped back from theory and just started collecting data and discovering "resting state networks" in the brain.
Modern industry would not exist without it.
The problem with psychology experiments is that the mind has many hidden variables which cannot be easily accounted for.
The issue is that the mind is by nature subjective and wholly private, inaccessible to outside observers. Further, whereas when conducting an experiment in physics where it becomes possible to separate the experimenter from the experiment (to an extent, observer effect and quantum mechanics notwithstanding), as regards matters of the mind the observer and the observed are one and the same of necessity; you are in fact part of the experiment yourself.
> The problem with psychology experiments is that the mind has many hidden variables which cannot be easily accounted for.
This is where the pillar of quantifiability breaks down, and barring advances in techniques for inspecting the brain with greater spatial and temporal resolution it's hard to see how one can quantify what cannot be directly observed.
Empiricism is the only aspect of the three aforementioned that can still hold up within this domain, and there is a large centuries' long tradition of studying the mind subjectively, qualitatively (as opposed to quantitatively), and yet in a still empirical fashion with falsifiable hypotheses; various mystical and meditative practices exist in this space, such as the fire kasina practice, especially as formulated by a trauma physician [0] complete with falsifiable hypotheses and steps for independent reproduction. What distinguishes practices in this space from harder sciences is that the phenomena observed are subjective, not "out in the physical world," and there does not exist any instrumentation for measuring them apart from that of your own faculties of perception.
As an aside I found the comparison to shamans and spiritual teachers in TFA interesting, since I have always considered psychology and spirituality to concern themselves with the same subject matter and problem domain of minds; one could say that they are both proto-sciences of mind, and psychology is the latest iteration of this tradition (though as TFA states somewhat misguided and out of touch with its roots in mysticism; on this latter point see Jung's Psychology and Alchemy for a discussion of where analytical psychology connects with the older esoteric traditions).
[0] https://firekasina.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/the-fire-k...
Not by nature, it's not. Unless you define it to have some immeasurable spiritual quality to it which is obviously not experimentally discoverable and so of little use discussing here.
> This is where the pillar of quantifiability breaks down, and barring advances in techniques for inspecting the brain with greater spatial and temporal resolution it's hard to see how one can quantify what cannot be directly observed.
Pretty much every experiment has a massive amount of relevant states which we cannot quantify.
There's a whole lot of quarks in 1 kg of steel but we don't need to know all of their states to measure macro quantities like its temperature and strength.
The mind has proven very reluctant to this sort of useful and measurable macro properties.
It's a typical case of a chaotic system. Perhaps innovations in the modeling of such complex systems (not too different from the advancements we're seeing in ML) will be the key to better insights into the mind.
There is no need to bring in "spirituality" (at least, as commonly and colloquially understood) or "souls" into the picture - see for instance qualia, whose existence is self-evident, and yet are also not amenable to examination by external observers. Irrespective of how much you can pick and probe at the brain and measure wavelengths of light, there is "something it is like" to actually experience the phenomenon of "red", and this experience itself is not readily accessible to objective/quantitative methods.
> It's a typical case of a chaotic system. Perhaps innovations in the modeling of such complex systems (not too different from the advancements we're seeing in ML) will be the key to better insights into the mind.
I could be convinced that minds are ultimately emergent phenomena of plain physical and mechanical processes which are too frighteningly complicated for us to analyze with contemporary methods.
Just because the mind is not readily quantifiable with current technology doesn't mean that it's subjective "by nature".
> for instance qualia, whose existence is self-evident,
No, it isn't and I see no way to test for "qualia" so, applying Newton's flaming laser sword, it's not worthy of debate.
It's a very dangerous thing to draw conclusions about empirical phenomenon from metaphysics. I suggest you stick to the scientific method when trying to understand the empirical world, it has been far more successful than philosophical rambling.
You are verifying the existence of qualia every instant of your existence. It's the most immediately apparent empirical fact conceivable, since it is sensory experience itself, and you are testing its presence by the mere fact of being alive (philosophical zombies [0] notwithstanding).
> Before she left her room, she only knew the objective, physical basis of those subjective qualities, their causes and effects, and various relations of similarity and difference. She had no knowledge of the subjective qualities in themselves. [0]
I suggest you confirm the definitions and senses of terms you criticize before being so dismissive of them.
We have not devised a test for others' qualia, and the only evidence we have of qualia is our own experience, which is a model of objective reality and not reality itself.
Bringing up philosophical zombies: we can't know if everyone inhabits their own universe, independent of each other, filled with zombie replicas. From anyone's perspective: that scenario would be 100% indistinguishable from what Occom's razor suggests. It therefore follows the qualia do not exert any sort of physical presence.
There are nonphysical things that we consider to exist. Numbers being the prime example (har de har har). Numbers do not physically exist, but are a property we impose on various groups (of which we distinguish in our own mind). Similar processes like experience do not 'physically exist' but is a property of physical existence (of which, we politely assume of other people to possess, and not call them zombies).
I actually think Freud’s elaborate mental structures have some of this feeling to them.
> for some reason it seems you need the wrong theories to organize the empirical data
The scientific process is really misunderstood. People think you use it to find truth, but actually you use it to reject falsehoods. The consequence of this is that you narrow in on the truth so your goals look identical, but the distinction does matter (at least if you want to understand why that happens and why it's okay that science is wrong many times -- in fact, it's always wrong, but it gets less wrong (I'm certain there's a connection to that website and this well known saying).
He's well known for his Sci-Fi but he got a PhD in chemistry, taught himself astrophysics, and even published in the area. He even had written physics texts. I found Understanding Physics quite enjoyable when I was younger but yeah, it isn't the same level of complexity I saw while getting my degree, but it's not aimed at University students.
Anyways, I'm just saying, he's speaking as an insider and I do think this is something a lot more people should read.
https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
I believe there's a copy of Understanding Physics here but currently offline: https://archive.org/details/asimov-understanding-physics
better examples might be medicine, where people just bounced around from one insane wrong theoretical system to another (humors to “empiricism” to bad air to Paracelsus to Avicenna and round and round and round). but somehow progress happened anyway. actual steady scientific progress only took off in the 19th century.
or chemistry, where alchemical theories were also completely bizarre, mostly mysticism and poetry. but despite being “not even wrong”, people following them became pretty good at laboratory skills
After many centuries, this laid the ground for empirical chemistry, and after a few more centuries, a theoretical system emerged that is close to right. But there was a lot of progress even under the “not even wrong” theories.
My history of chemistry is a bit better than medicine, but I think you have to be careful with chemistry because much of the mysticism was coded language to guard their secrets. Maybe it shouldn't be as surprising that chemists are still a bit more secretive of their work than say physicists. And also we need to make sure we disassociate modern alchemy from classic alchemy, just like we would need to do with astrology with respect to astronomy. When there is a branching and one branch has the legitimate work it should be no surprise that the other branch becomes even crazier.
We also have the benefit of distance with physics and astronomy because not nearly as much was recorded, especially with respect to what everyday people believed. There were far fewer professionals in those fields (almost exclusively the rich, because you had to be rich to spend your time studying).
For medicine, I think you are being a bit too critical. Yes, "bad air" (miasma) was a bad theory, but did that theory lead to improved outcomes? Yes! While the underlying mechanism was incorrect, but that model caused people to clean up the cities to smell better and I'm sure you can see how that would result in decreased illnesses. It caused hospitals to be well ventilated, and in some cases it even caused doctors to clean their hands (when they smelled). Many parts of the belief were testable and could be confirmed through experiments because smell is a confounding variable. It led to some doctors wearing masks because they wanted to put better smelling things in front of their faces and well... the mask helped even if the herbs didn't (some even did). But it is also true that there were falsifiable experiments, which people did perform, that did not fit the model. This is *exactly* what led to people discovering germ theory. There had to be an explanation for why those failed, right?
But it would be naive to ignore the fact that the reason this belief persisted for so long was not just due to lack of scientific experimentation or lack of observation (both happened) because odor is caused by particles. The problem is that odor particles are way smaller than germs and so you get a ton of false positives and that not all germs are associated with things that smell. But the two definitely correlate in many ways, including being able to pass through air and liquids.
You question "how progress happened anyways?" Well it happened because they were not too far off course. It is because our view of history is often very limited and for most people it is a brief summary of what we know, so we do not see how many people were pushing back against the status quo. But I promise you, it wasn't just Semmelweis vs the world (no matter how poorly he was mistreated). Our view of history is warped in ways that both over exaggerate things as well as gravely under represent. These are not in contention, they are just different forms of noisy and biased information.
So I do not think medicine or chemistry (which we could discuss similarly. And I will even mention that lead can be transmuted to gold, but to do that requires an understanding that wouldn't be discovered till Dalton and the actual capability to do so wouldn't until very recently) run counter to my point. I do also encourage you to read the wiki on the history of germ theory (it even quotes Martin Luther discussing washing his hands, a full 300 years before Semmelweis). While it is concise, I think you can see that there was lots of pushback to disease just being from bad air well back into history. Like many summaries, it captures the main events but misses much of the smaller progress in between. It shouldn't be surprising as you might guess that would require far more text.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_disease > there needs to be a long period of existing as a proto-science where people aren't doing experiments and are just observing and describing.
> before darwin
There was an understanding of natural selection even back to antiquity. How could there not be? Did people not tame the animals and plants? These are experiments, and they saw the results.
There were great contributions to astronomy long before Kepler. There were many experiments that influenced the whole field. There was a lot of important chemistry that happened long before Lavoisier (conservation of mass) and Dalton (atomic model).
The proto-sciences are nothing to scoff at. They aren't useless and they weren't ill-founded. They were just... noisy (and science is naturally a noisy process, so I mean *NOISY*). There's nothing inheriently wrong with that. The only thing wrong is not recognizing the noise and placing unfounded confidence in results. That famous conversation between Dyson and Fermi discussing von Neumann's elephant wasn't saying that Dyson didn't do hard work or that the work he did had no utility, it was that you can't place confidence in a model derived from empirical results without a strong underlying theory. You'd never get to that if you only observed because you'd only end up making the same error Dyson did.
Science, in its nature, is not about answers, it is about confidence in a model that approximates answers. These two things look identical but truth is unobtainable, there is always an epsilon bound. So it is about that epsilon! Your confidence! So experiments that don't yield high confidence results aren't useless, but they are rather just the beginning. They give direction to explore. Because hey, if I'm looking for elephants I'd rather start looking where someone says they saw a big crazy monster than randomly pick a point on the globe. But I'm also not going to claim elephants exist just because I heard someone talking about something vaguely matching the description. And this is naturally how it works. We're exploring into the unknown. You gotta follow hunches and rumors, because it is better than nothing. But you won't get anywhere from observation alone. Not to mention that it is incredibly easy to be deceived by your observations. You will find this story ring true countless times in the history of science. But better models always prevail because we challenge the status quo and we take risks. But the nature of it is that it is risky (noisy). There's nothing wrong with that. You just have to admit it.
> There was an understanding of natural selection even back to antiquity. How could there not be? Did people not tame the animals and plants? These are experiments, and they saw the results.
>>> there needs to be a long period ... where people aren't doing experiments and are just observing and describing.
Yes, it's fuzzy. But embrace the fuzziness. Acknowledge it. The truth is that observation isn't enough. You can NEVER discover truth from observation alone. Science doesn't work without interaction. There's three classes of casual structure: correlation, intervention, and counterfactual. We know the memes about the first, but the other two require participation. You'll get lucky and have some "natural experiments" but this is extremely limited. What I'm saying is that we can work with these issues without tying our hands behind our backs and shooting ourselves in the foot. Stuff being hard is no reason to handicap ourselves. I'm arguing that only makes it more difficult lol
I think one of the major issues is that we (scientists) fear that my openly discussing limitations and admitting that we don't have high (statistical) confidence will result in people not taking us seriously. And in many ways this is a reasonable response. I'm sure many scientists, myself included, have annoyingly found that an honest limitations section ends up just being ammunition for reviewers to reject the work. A criticism my advisor has given me is that I'm "too honest". Maybe he's right, but idk, I think that thinking is wrong. Because science is about ruling things out, not proving results (you can effectively achieve the latter by doing the former but you can't directly do the latter). And the younger the field is (e.g. my field of ML is VERY young), the noisier the results are.
Personally, I'd rather live in a world where we're overly open about limitations than not. We're adults and can recognize that's the reality, right? Because papers are communication from one expert to others? (And not to the general public, though they can see) Because as I see it, the openness is just letting others know what areas should be explored.
Don't fear the noise, embrace it. It's always there, you can't get rid of it, so trying to hide it only makes more.
tl;dr: you both are right, and are talking past each other.
> tl;dr: you both are right, and are talking past each other.
parpfish said
>>>> there needs to be a long period [...] where people aren't doing experiments and are just observing and describing.
Observation and experimentation are tightly coupled. They drive each other. You need not start with one and you can also perform them in parallel. I think observation driving experimentation is clearer, but the reverse happens too (coupled). But you need to intervene, because experimentation is much like bug hunting in software. You need to find out where things differ, and those are always in the rare and unexpected events. If you just observe, you wouldn't know what to observe. You'd have oodles of nominal data, and very little about the edges. This is why it will lead to wrong conclusions. Interventions is about making the black swans appear in a more timely manner. You say "okay, it works with this case, but what happens when I change this one variable?"
Every scientist is intimately familiar with this because when you begin to experiment, you find that you need to start observing different things than what you initially expected. We can draw parallels to coding, where you have likely experienced that you cannot formulate what the actual code will be until you start to get your hands dirty. Sometimes it is similar to what you expected and you only need minor changes, but many times you discover you had naive assumptions and things need to change drastically. It is easy to believe only minor changes happen because the drastic changes are composed of many minor ones. If you don't believe me, start documenting or go look at commit histories.
I'll give an example of a real life event: infrared radiation! Herschel had the belief that different colors were associated with different temperatures (which is true) and the experiment he devised was one thermometer to measure the colors and two for controls. The story goes that he decided to place one thermometer just beyond red and discovered that it was the highest of them all, but truth is he probably just put one of his controls there because it is a natural place to place them saw a higher temperature and said "what the fuck?" (doesn't really matter which is true). This, accident or intentional, was intervention. *It was experimentation that led to observation.* This led him to devise more experiments to determine what was actually going on. You would never get here from observation because you can't observe infrared without specialized equipment (e.g. thermometers). You also won't get the right conclusion if your observations are just that thermometers are warmer around dark objects (a known fact Herschel used!) nor by observing thermometers reading higher temperatures near glass (lenses explain this). What are you going to observe? It is invisible!
I should also mention that at least a decade earlier Pictet was experimenting with mirrors and was even able to demonstrate the transmission of heat without the transmission of light! Hershel was probably well aware of Pictet's work. But what Herschel's work did was narrow down what was actually happening in Pictet's experiment. Because he logically understood that the prism was separating the colors in light and that this is done so in a continuous manner, so is doesn't seem unreasonable to think there could be "unseen light" beyond the red (that does fade in intensity to the eye). It may also be unsurprising that a year after Herschel's work that Ritter discovered ultraviolet light, but for this to be confirmed a thermometer wasn't really sensitive enough, but he could use silver chloride, since it was known that violet light caused a faster reaction and after knowing about invisible light beyond red, why not search for invisible light beyond violet?
It may again be easy to frame these as "observation first" but that's not accurate, they are coupled. Most certainly Ritter went hunting, and hunting for something that had not been observed. Because frankly, the observation was the proof. You'd never get there "from observation alone" (or rather not until you have a huge population and there are just enough random events and you have enough time. But even then, many things probably would not happen within the lifetime of the sun).
No, people did not know natural selection before Darwin. He spent decades collecting and then analyzing data collected in Galapagos Islands before he made his breakthrough.
It's pure hindsight bias to think that you can go from "I bred the fattest chickens together, who made a fatter chicken" to "Humans evolved from apes who evolved from single-cellular organisms". For millennia, people from all cultures believed that God created humans from the void. In the absence of data, that's as good a guess as you can have. If Darwin concocted his theory of natural selection before he had his data, no one would have believed him. By dismissing the theory of natural selection as something that was "obvious" pre-Darwin you are dismissing his life's work.
> No, people did not know natural selection before Darwin
Read the history. The topics discussed were are not reminiscent of evolution because hindsight, they are similar because they are similar. Darwin himself references many of these. People knew of artificial selection because they did it. You don't breed animals and plants without some basic knowledge here.
I'm not saying Darwin's work wasn't important. It's critical. But this does not warrant dishonoring and forgetting all those who did work that led to that point. Their work wasn't as ground breaking and influential, but they still helped set the stage. Darwin's work didn't appear out of a vacuum.
Science doesn't happen in leaps and bounds.
> By dismissing the theory of natural selection as something that was "obvious" pre-Darwin you are dismissing his life's work.
Your basis of what the average person believes is also irrelevant. Even still many reject evolution and so many more did even just a decade or two ago. It was national debate not even a century ago.
I wonder if this is purely a coincidence.
The forcing is performed by culture. Think back to COVID, the effect was on full display in various forms during that spectacle. Or, pick most any war that gets substantial coverage in the media.
I'm unfairly picking on science here a bit, the problem is ideologies in general.
Put some smart people in charge of an ambitious psychedelic powered initiative...but they have no controls. Not science? Cannot be science?
It's somewhat like how hip hop influences and accelerates white cultural evolution. Do this idea, see what happens when I do it.
Psychedelic studies might not suit themselves to FDA gold standard double-blind clinical trial science, but science overall involves a really broad toolkit. Psychedelics aren’t the only kind of intervention that can’t be safely or effectively blinded, and there are methods that attempt to demonstrate an effect anyway.
It seems to be thanks to people trying stuff as well as rigorous scientific studies that psychedelics are having their present-day moment in the sun (thanks, MAPS et al!). (My favorite part was that time Alexandria Ocasio Cortez cosponsored a psychedelics bill with arch-conservative, retired Navy SEAL Dan Crenshaw)
Things can be valuable without science proving it—nobody’s coming after the local preacher or imam or rabbi or shaman demanding that they scientifically prove their ministerial insights. And lord help the busybody who comes at a retired Navy SEAL trying psychedelic therapy for their post-traumatic stress…
I wonder, though—does it seem to you that psychedelics should be industrialized? There’s a fine line between “legal” and “aggressively marketed by drug companies.”
We're certainly learning how to use psychology to manipulate people though. Advertising, dark patterns, propaganda, and behavioral conditioning just wouldn't be the same without psychology research. We're performing research on children to learn the youngest age they can recognize a brand name (age 3 last I checked) or how best to keep them hooked playing a video game/child casino though and that research is making companies money hand over fist.
I think it comes down to the fact that both disciplines work with people and behaviour, and people are not homogeneous nor are behaviours easily predicted. For that reason, I think that a distinction can be made between “hard sciences” and “soft sciences” - we just can’t get the same level of precision that the hard sciences can, but that doesn’t mean that Psychology isn’t scientific. We still apply the scientific method to discover phenomena and develop testable theories, just like other sciences. And meta-analyses allow for much greater certainty in findings..
Physics has in the past been a case study of how to successfully deploy the scientific method, but modern physics is often criticized from within for spending all its time on mathematical "theories" that can't actually be tested, something conventionally considered unscientific. Epidemiology was once built on basic scientific observation, it's now also disappeared down the drain-hole of endless mathematics without real world hypothesis testing.
Medicine in contrast spent a lot of time being unscientific in the past, and is now much more rigorous. The problems here are usually fraud done in aid of avoiding the scientific method without being detected, rather than the actual lack of a scientific method at all.
And some fields have got more scientific over time, or at least more quantitative. Economics and education are like this.
There is of course also a more practical side. For psych and med interventions, you don't need to know how it works. If method A works better than method B, it's a good idea to try A before trying B. However, that research is also difficult, and many papers have been found wrong afterwards. While that's the way to go, it shows that even when attempting to establish superficial effects, the disciplines are failing.
Both fields, scientific as they often try to be, are subject to the sway of funding and profits more-so than other sciences like physics (as an example). Vague and often unsupported claims sell medical and mental health products, making it a profitable venture whether the product actually works or not.
I say this as a former student of psych, degree and all. The mental health industry has exploded in the last ten years or so, yet not much new thinking has been brought to the table at all. It's a lot of old standards being repackaged as a revolutionary solution (looking at you CBT) but being sold as mobile apps, hooking people with hope for relief in the form of a convenient, easy-to-use package, the same way medicine does when they add a bit of caffeine to acetaminophen and call it a solution for migraines that you don't have to visit a doctor to obtain. Once a field is driven by profit growth, it becomes this twisted, ersatz version of it's former self and this works because people are so desperate, they'll buy into just about anything you offer that might make them feel slightly better.
Medicine is the practice of healing sick people, and (even if they wanted to, which most do not) it is very, very hard for doctors to convince an IRB that it's a good idea to give sick people a placebo. Also, despite some attempts to perform placebo knee surgeries [0], there are many medical interventions where it is simply impossible to do things like a basic RCT.
I think that depends on whether those people believe that evidence-based medicine is scientific.
Just look at decades of research into nutrition, and note that we haven't moved very far beyond "vitamin c prevents scurvy" and "too much of anything is bad". Even identifying at what point the amount of things like "too much" of salt or cholesterol crosses the line of "too much" remains contentious.
Certain diagnostic fields have obviously grown leaps and bounds, as have certain categories of medicines. On the other hand, there are counter examples aplenty.
I understand the premise of the idea and that more scientists in the field are trying to make their research more rigorous. But, this also indicates that the research that has been done until recently was NOT "evidence-based", hence not very credible and reproducible.
Yes, I would. If one looked closely at it it's got the trappings of religion. To give you a guesstimate I'd say 3/4 of medicine is pseudoscience. either completely useless or actively harmful.
Now, we come to the root of the failure. God’s Word tells us to test the source and the content of a message. Certain sources are all about ego, money, or pleasure. They’re willing to manipulate others for selfish gain. Simultaneously, God’s Word teaches habits and traits that honest people should possess. So, we look at their behavior to spot the warning signs that their content should be dismissed or simply reviewed more.
Applying the ancient wisdom to organized science, I found that this problem was pervasive. The institutions, both funding and research, had biases that caused more of specific types of work to be created. Then, there were biases at the individual and group level. These aren’t always bad but are rarely considered.
Further, there were three incentives driving lots of bad science: financial incentive called “publish or perish;” citation index or scores; sensational media. Two of those incentivized cranking out lots of low-quality papers that pressed the right buttons to get more money or citations. The third incentivizes specific claims that receive fame. All three usually penalize, by finance or fame, both steady, grunt work and replication of existing results.
So, rather than the scientific method, what’s happening is more like a game of TV show with winners and losers. It always looks like it uses the scientific method with some amount of real science in it. There’s also some portion of useless work, necessary work not happening, fraud, and censorship. These aren’t random: they’re baked right into the incentives and biases of the system.
Realizing this has made me wonder what I can trust or what I even know out of prior, scientific reporting. Fortunately, we’re blessed that most facts are so unimportant that being wrong doesn’t hurt us. The fields we depend on day to day are close enough to the truth that the products work acceptably well or don’t hurt us. Past that, I wonder what it will take to get to a point where organized science is actually doing science. Consistently.
I hope we achieve this. I worship Christ, not science. It is one of many forms of knowledge, many gifts, that make our lives better if used correctly. I thoroughly enjoy real science. I just think it’s in huge decline with society getting more and more dependent on the fake forms of it.
> No wonder alchemists thought they were dealing with mysterious forces beyond the realm of human understanding. To them, that’s exactly what they were doing! If you don’t realize that your ore is lacking silicon dioxide—because you don’t even have the concept of silicon dioxide—then a reaction that worked one time might not work a second time, you’ll have no idea why that happened, and you’ll go nuts looking for explanations. Maybe Venus was in the wrong position? Maybe I didn’t approach my work with a pure enough heart? Or maybe my antimony was poisoned by a demon!
> An alchemist working in the year 1600 would have been justified in thinking that the physical world was too hopelessly complex to ever be understood—random, even. One day you get the sulfur of antimony, the next day you get a dirty gray lump, nobody knows why, and nobody will ever know why. And yet everything they did turned out to be governed by laws—laws that were discovered by humans, laws that are now taught in high school chemistry. Things seem random until you understand ‘em.
Well, this example doesn't just fail to support the argument, but undercuts it. Basil successfully identified the kind of antimony that would work, -despite- having no concept of sulfur dioxide. He did not write down something like "not all kinds of antimony work for this recipe, so get a bunch of different kinds and try them all" -- that, or a stronger version ("sometimes the recipe fails, we don't know why"), would support the author's point.
So we're left with the author trying to argue that this alchemist thought the world was "too hopelessly complex to ever be understood" on the basis of ... the alchemist correctly identifying the ingredient that would make the recipe work.
It’s interesting that one comparison they offered was between advice from a random professor versus a session with a therapist. I can remember several helpful conversations with kind, older professors during difficult times. Maybe we should identify people whose life experiences naturally make them good counselors and encourage them to do more of it, instead of making young adults pay $200k for ineffective education and a stamp saying they can charge for therapy.
Lots to say about it but this is a finding that has been reported intermittently for decades. However, it's being spun a little misleadingly.
Note that the author says that untrained professors were selected for their ability to be warm and empathetic. It's not everyone (we all know not everyone is warm and empathetic), and even trainees learn very very early (like immediately in their first term) the basics of therapy. Not everyone is warm and empathetic, and people going into clinical psychology are sort of self-selected in their empathy to start with.
This research is kind of being taken out of context too. Wampold, one of the authors cited (who I have the greatest respect for) is very big on "nonspecific factors", meaning things like empathy, good social skills, and so forth. His studies in general tend to be focused not on "does training matter?" but "do specific therapy protocols matter, or is it about the clinician's social/relationship skills?"
If you want some kind of medical standards, you can't just say "oh it's ok, everyone can just be warm and empathetic". You have to train on it, grade it, hold it to some standard. Otherwise you get manipulative, self-serving therapists who do harm in the long run (the length of a study versus real settings is another issue).
Another issue is that many of these issues are not unique to psychology. In lots of medical scenarios it's been shown that the amount of training needed to competently do a wide variety of procedures is lower than current standards in the US require. Experienced clinicians in many fields have acquired biases that interfere with practice, young trainees are much more worried about performance and are more open-minded and so forth (on average a little; not trying to stereotype).
A huge, enormous volume of studies over many years have shown that therapy works compared to all sorts of placebos and controls; that some therapists are reliably better than others; but that what makes therapy "work" overall is not what protocol-driven therapies (CBT etc) assert. It's not so much that training isn't necessary, it's that the field has has been obsessed with scientific details that, although well-intended, don't matter, and healthcare in general is full of phenomena that we'd rather not admit.
It’s not surprising that some people are naturally good therapists just from a lifetime of observing people, and also not surprising that some of those people end up in teaching-focused academic jobs.
I guess you can train people to be empathetic if they’re motivated in the right ways but just lacking the skill. It makes sense that it’s a big part of counselor training.
What kind of things are you talking about?
This regularly happens and nobody seems the slightest bit curious about why. That is, when you think about it, totally mad. I'd suggest it's got to be either:
1. The only psychology mystery worth investigating, or
2. A sign that clinical trials are actually mostly junk science
Either would be hard to admit.
Some people really do become spontaneously cured of diseases, yes - it happens all the time, and is something worth studying further. But the idea that the placebo effect is what causes it, is not really well-founded.
Somewhat notoriously some trials give patients a placebo that's actually another drug, as otherwise people could unblind themselves by not suffering side effects. The COVID vaccine trials did this. It doesn't make sense if you think the placebo effect only influences perception of pain, as otherwise you could lose the placebo entirely and double your statistical power (compare against a synthetic control group).
I think you are being very dismissive there.
After all, the placebo effect happens in your body, which your mind inhabits. These are not two separate systems interacting by some magical means. This is one system with various subsystems that interact all the time.
Concrete mechanism of the placebo effect is still unknown, but the observation that your immune system can be influenced by your mental state isn't in itself magical. Our bodies respond to all sorts of mental states. We get red in face when embarassed, and sometimes must run to the toilet when scared etc.
All this "psionic" "paranormal" label stuff would only apply if someone could do it to other people without them even knowing.
There's a lot of factors at play. As I mentioned in my main comment, the study naturally has a metric fuckton of variables and noise which makes even basic experiments extremely difficult, but there are other factors like willingness to close that gap (is it surprising few want to climb a treacherous mountain?), as well as the whole structure of academia and the way metrics are formed. How do you create a foundation when you're not only not incentivized to replicate but actively dis-incentivized? How do you explore that mountain which certainly has many pitfalls and uncertain paths when you must publish frequently?
Those problems are not remotely isolated to psychology, but they have a huge and crazy difficult mountain to climb and should we be surprised that few try to climb it when attempting to do so is far more likely to lead to academic success rather than helping the field make their way up? Even if you don't fall off? It can take a long time to actually capitalize on those gains. I do think this is a conversation academia needs to have. Everything in place is logical and makes sense, they were done for good reasons, but I think we need to be honest that exploration is just a highly risky business. You'll never make it across the ocean, to the moon, or to other worlds if you are unwilling to lose a few people (researchers who never make any impact) or risk a have a few conmen (researchers who make shit up).Ironically, if you try too hard to prevent these from happening, you'll be doomed to only have them (you'll only explore just beyond the fence and you'll hear stories of what is imagined far beyond; either identical to just outside the fence or wild stories. But you'll never know until you go). We can inch our way out or we can be brave. I think unfortunately it is only explorers who can tell the brave from imaginative. It sucks, but is this not the nature of it? A story as old as stories are. But we wouldn't be where we are if we didn't engage in risky business.
It produces a statistically significant improvement, just not with people who are already gifted at it. You can get not gifted people and teach them to be not worse than gifted. It is not much, but it is not nothing either.
Now, it is a valid argument whether or not it should be required (and there is no requirement to label yourself as a "coach"), and the price tag on it is of course always a consideration. But being dismissive of higher education is just as silly as being overly dependent on it.
you forgot to add `insurance company rules` to your list.
This happens literally millions of times per day.
It’s interesting because even the most staunch opponents of mental health talk therapy have people in their life they talk to, they just don’t consider them therapists.
There are large barriers to trialing a lot of therapists, and finding the right one can be like finding a needle in a haystack. Therapy is quite expensive, and many therapists already have a full caseload. And the pool of therapists is very homogeneous: essentially, a ton of well-off white women who might not have the tools or shared experiences to facilitate a helpful therapeutic alliance with individuals coming from a broader background than they're comfortable with.
But most evidence suggests that some "je ne sais quoi" has to exist in the therapeutic relationship.
In other words, Freud was right about Transference as a necessary ingredient to psychotherapy (and probably about a lot else that is still too controversial to talk about or pass IRB muster).
There is such a thing as being unhappy about actual therapy that did nothing or harmed you. But you see the staunch opponents who never been at therapy and have only movie understanding of it having tons of strong opinions or fear.
For a while in undergrad I was a double math and psychology major. I spent a semester doing undergraduate research in a psychology lab where I would take people in to do be subjects in the experiment and then write them a check afterwards for participating. During the experiment they'd listen to one syllable sounds some from a english and some not from english and the experiment tested whether the subjects were better at remembering the one syllable sounds from the english language when played one syllable sounds back after listening to the first set.
As I type this I think it's an interesting experiment, but it felt to me that the interesting questions in Psychology need to be so dumbed down to be able to run an experiment to test any hypothesis that what's actually interesting about Psychology get's lost in the weeds of trying to rigorously so the scientific method. I don't know a solution to this or whether it's even a problem, but it's problem endemic to the question of whether we're actually making progress in psychology. For the record, I do think we're making progress in Psychology.
I don't mind this idea at all! I'm the abyss staring into itself.
That said I don't think digging into skulls until we identify the neurons that cause the big sad or teaching people ways to cope with their awful lives is worth much. I want psychology to help me understand (a maybe terrible) existence, not to solve it. Something like overturning our intuitions is perfect. If tomorrow they make a flawless anti-depressant that will let me endure misery I argue we'll be worse off.
Advancements in PTSD, dissociation, treatment resistant depression and attachment disorders is astounding. We know a lot more about how people work.
Psychology has always been a person centered field - humans are complex, and what it does is more akin to QA than coding. It’s individualized. It doesn’t love studies because the underlying mechanism or traumas can be different even for people who went through the same things.
Unfortunately advancements are not evenly distributed. There is an army of CBT therapists who work in one method that works for some but not the majority. Finding a practitioner is a crapshoot even when looking for specialists.
The DSM is functionally treated as a billing manual, and to be paid practitioners need to jump through a long series of hoops. The medical billing side can’t deal with the complexity.
All these aside, there are people who are really truly healing in ways they wouldn’t without the field. There are ideas that propagate through human culture make human behavior more understandable.
The term "evidence based" is bandied about all the time because insurance companies don't want to cover treatments that aren't considered standard. The problem is everyone is different on some level, and we often don't have the resources to get to the root of any problems. So treatments that may work extremely effectively for some may be thrown out because they don't work effectively for everyone, and can be contraindicated. Somatic therapists especially have to deal with this. Effective treatments are often outside of the "evidence based" tests, which can be based entirely around showing symptom improvement. This creates a catch-22 where if you lessen the restrictions you get a lot of crackpot providers, where if you keep them tight you keep people from being able to access treatments that may work well for them.
There's also competing models for mental problems and approaches - the psychiatric model is similar to a doctor giving treatment for an illness. They tend to have a belief in biological determinism, IE if a parent had an illness then its likely you will have one too. The Biopsychosocial model is a little bit more holistic around the experiences of people and their physical environment and upbringing. The Trauma model is one I personally ascribe more to which conceptualizes mental health problems as understandable reactions to traumatic events that are conditioned within us.
There are a lot of people who get real relief from outside the mainstream providers, and there are a lot of people for whom the standard providers have not been able to help. I think that is part of why there's so much activity around finding better models right now.
To me psychology strikes me as more of a religion, albeit a type of secular religion. An inter-dialogue experiment most of us are doing all the time.
When the OP mentioned "folk" science, I thought he'd start talking about folk stories... which actually I think in the realm of psychology would start it getting closer to who we are and how we collectively participate in the world.
(Found in note [10] in the article.)
This reads, very much in a positive way, like someone is describing the idea of "root cause analysis". That bodes well for this person to epistemicly "know" stuff like they write about. At least they'll be more likely to "know that they don't know" yet, which is a necessary step along the way.
It reminds me of a saying I've heard: "Forget what you know." ("Forget" is even in the quote. I wouldn't be surprised if the author is familiar with the saying.) Perhaps more clearly, "Forget what you think you know." The idea being for one to identify and challenge their assumptions in order to work it out from "first principles".
David Bowie (as Nikola Tesla) in The Prestige
Even assuming the premise of killing someone implies mental illness, and assuming the mental illness stems from trauma, there's a pretty large leap in reasoning here. Why must the trauma come during childhood? Why not in adulthood? Even in childhood, why does it have to come from the parents?
Then you have the idea of continuing up the causal chain. Why are we pressing charges to the parents? If the parent's traumatized their kids, there's good chance they did it due to their own mental illness/trauma, which means the parents themselves were abused in childhood. So we should go after their parents.... except that just means we should go after there parents.... ad infinitum.
People that kill other people often function well in their society. It doesn't make sense to me to classify that as mental issues. People are inherently territorial, aggressive animals - at least to the extent being so doesn't make them much of an outlier.
Is that even true?
We know, but the know is bad news..
Maybe some people grow into that mindset naturally but it wasn't the case for me (even if there were no particular reason for the societal pressure to be super strong).
As Neil DeGrasse Tyson and others have said, in the same way that chemistry replaced alchemy, neuroscience will replace psychology. But this isn't likely to happen soon -- the human brain is too complex for present-day efforts.
But there's some progress. In a recent breakthrough, we fully mapped the brain of a fruit fly (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03190-y).
It's true that physics didn't replace chemistry -- instead it explained it. Physics gave chemistry a theoretical foundation. In the same way, neuroscience will explain psychology. But not any time soon.
That seems like say that hardware engineers should be the ones debugging software.
Real psychological science would produce falsifiable theories -- theories that in principle would be discarded after a conclusive failure in impartial empirical tests. Instead, landmark psychological theories that are discarded, result instead from public outcry, not falsification. Examples include Drapetomania, prefrontal lobotomy, recovered memory therapy, Asperger syndrome.
Trained therapists do no better than properly motivated laypeople. This is not meant to disparage either group, some of whom are very effective, but no one knows why a particular person becomes an effective therapist.
On leaving his position as NIMH director, psychiatrist Thomas Insel said, “I spent 13 years at NIMH really pushing on the neuroscience and genetics of mental disorders, and when I look back on that I realize that while I think I succeeded at getting lots of really cool papers published by cool scientists at fairly large costs—I think $20 billion—I don’t think we moved the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalizations, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who have mental illness.” (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-of-knowledge/...)
All this will be swept away by a future neuroscience that will shape testable, falsifiable theories about human behavior. Today's psychological alchemy will be replaced by tomorrow's neuroscience chemistry. But as the above Insel quote shows, we're nowhere near that goal.
Drapetomania (1851), prefrontal lobotomy, recovered memory therapy, what the hell are you talking about? These are not scientific theories from the modern era.
Plenty of hypotheses have been left in the dust because they failed at explaining aspects of a phenomenon. Working memory research has some great, easy to understand progression of theories in the 70's and 80's. Your quote from the NIMH director jumps to a new topic, and is the expression of regret that more didn't get achieved in a very hard field, and the relationship between genes and mental health is not straightforward at all, and just like cancer research, it turned out the problems were much much harder than once thought.
Your response is as bad as the article: a rant that ignores the good work, hangs it's hat on the fringe or flashy work. Try again. Show your work.
Those are descriptions, not explanations. Science requires testable, falsifiable explanations -- theories, not anecdotes.
> Drapetomania (1851), prefrontal lobotomy, recovered memory therapy, what the hell are you talking about? These are not scientific theories from the modern era.
Yes, that's true. It's true because there are no scientific theories in psychology, past or present. Plenty of narratives, descriptions, but no explanations.
Psychology can describe behavior. Neuroscience will eventually explain behavior.
> Your response is as bad as the article ...
I suggest that you address the topic, not the participants.
One thing that struck me as to the difficulty / young-ness of this field is also the fact that it is the only science that is us studying our thinking selves. It's almost like trying to draw a picture of the exact spot you are standing on.
contrast that to something like... geology. i'm sure there was folk geology back in the day about where different types of rocks come from, but for 99% of people they weren't particularly invested in it. so when the scientists came out with empirical research, most people would be fine with it.
but when psychologist confront folk psychology, people often take it as a personal affront. any comment section about psychology research (HN included) is filled with armchair experts contradicting researchers with their own pet theories
By this I mean that to make confident predictions, you need some serious statistics, but psych is one of the least math heavy sciences (thankfully they recently learned about Bayes and there's a revolution going on). Unlike physics or chemistry, you have so little control over your experiments.
There's also the problem of measurements. We stress in experimental physics that you can only measure things by proxy. This is like you measure distance by using a ruler, and you're not really measuring "a meter" but the ruler's approximation of a meter. This is why we care so much about calibration and uncertainty, making multiple measurements with different measuring devices (gets stats on that class of device) and from different measuring techniques (e.g. ruler, laser range finder, etc). But psych? What the fuck does it even mean "to measure attention"?! It's hard enough dealing with the fact that "a meter" is "a construct" but in psych your concepts are much less well defined (i.e. higher uncertainty). And then everything is just empirical?! No causal system even (barely) attempted?! (In case you've ever wondered, this is a glimpse of why physicists struggle in ML. Not because the work, but accepting the results. See also Dyson and von Neumann's Elephant)
I've jokingly likened psych to alchemy, meaning proto-chemistry -- chemistry prior to the atomic model (chemistry is "the study of electrons") -- or to astrology (astronomy pre-Kepler, not astrology we see today). I do think that's where the field is at, because there is no fundamental laws. That doesn't mean it isn't useful. Copernicus, Brahe, Galileo (same time as Kepler; they fought), and many others did amazing work and are essential figures to astronomy and astrophysics today. But psych is in an interesting boat. There are many tools at their disposal that could really help them make major strides towards determining these "laws". But it'll take a serious revolution and some major push to have some extremely tough math chops to get there. It likely won't come from ML (who suffers similar issues of rigor), but maybe from neuroscience or plain old stats (econ surprisingly contributes, more to sociology though). My worry is that the slop has too much momentum and that criticism will be dismissed because it is viewed as saying that the researchers are lazy, dumb, or incompetent rather than the monumental difficulties that are natural to the field (though both may be true, and one can cause the other). But I do hope to see it. Especially as someone in ML. We can really see the need to pin down these concepts such as cognition, consciousness, intelligence, reasoning, emotions, desire, thinking, will, and so on. These are not remotely easy problems to solve. But it is easy to convince yourself that you do understand, as long as you stop asking why after a certain point.
And I do hope these conversations continue. Light is the best disinfectant. Science is about seeking truth, not answers. That often requires a lot of nuance, unfortunately. I know it will cause some to distrust science more, but I have the feeling they were already looking for reasons to.
1. Many of the early pioneers in statistics were psychologists.
2. The econ x psych connection is strong (eg econometrics and psychometrics share a lot in common and know of each other)
3. Many of the people I see with math chops trying to do psychology are bad at the philosophy side (eg what is a construct; how do constructs like intelligence get established)
1. Yes! But that's doesn't exactly change things, in fact, it's part of my point. A big part of why this happened (and still does!) is due to the inherent difficulties and the lack of existing tools. If you ever get a chance, go look at a university physics lab. Even Columbia's nuclear reactors (fusion or fission!) and I think many will be surprised how "janky" it looks. It's because they build the tools along the way, not because lack of monetary resources (well... That too...) but because the tools don't exist!
My critique about the psych field is that this is not more embraced. You have to embrace the fuzziness! The uncertainty. But the field is dominated by people publishing studies that use very simple statistical models, low sample sizes, and put a lot of faith in unreliable metrics with arbitrary cutoffs (most well known being the p-value). Many people will graduate grad school without a strong background in statistics and calculus (it's also easier to think this is stronger than it is. And of course, there are also plenty who would be indistinguishable from mathematicians. But on average?). There are rockstars in every field, even when not recognized as rockstars. But it matters who the field follows.
And I must be absolutely clear, this is not to say that work and those results are useless. Utility and confidence are orthogonal. You might need 5 sigma confidence verified by multiple teams and replicated on different machines to declare discovery of a particle but before that there's many works published with only a few sigma and plenty of purely theoretical works. (Note: in physics replication is highly valued. Most work is not novel and it is easy to climb the academic ladder without leading novel research. This is a whole other conversation though) This is why I discussed Copernicus and Brahe but would not call them astronomers. That's not devaluing them, but rather nothing a categorical difference due to the paradigm shift Kepler caused. Mind you, chemistry even later!
2. I specifically mention economists (my partner is one). I could highlight them more but I feel this would only add to confusion. I believe those close to the details will have no doubt to their role. I don't want to detract from their contribution but I also don't want to convolute my message which is already difficult to accurately convey.
3. I think this is orthogonal. I'm happy to bash on other fields if that makes my comment feel less like an attack rather than a critique (or wakeup call). I'm highly critical of my own community (ML) and believe it is important that we all are *most* critical of our own tribes, because even if we don't dictate where the ship goes we're not far removed from those that do. I'll rant all day if you want (or check my comment (recent) history if you want to know if I'm honest about this). I'll happily critique physicists who can solve high order PDEs in their sleep but struggle with for loops. Or the "retired engineer" trope that every physicist knows and most have experienced.
But it is hard to be critical while not offending (there's a few comments about this too). Maybe you disagree with my critique but I hope you can reread the end of comment as hopeful and encouraging. I want psychology to be taken more seriously. But if the field is unable to recognize why the other fields are dismissive of them, then this won't happen. Sure, there's silly reasons that aren't reasonable, but that doesn't mean there's no reason.
It is a matter of fact that the (statistical) confidence of studies in psychology is much lower than those of the "hard" sciences (physics, chemistry, and yes, even biology (the last part is a joke. Read how you will)). In part this is due to the studies and researchers themselves, but the truth is that the biggest contributing factor is the nature of the topic. That is not an easy thing to deal with and I have a lot of sympathy for it. But how to handle it is up to the field.
> Not all psych is as jurasic as you describe.
> core consturcts are solid.
- which concepts?
- how solid?
- how do you know they're solid?
My criticisms of ML aren't out of hate, but actually love. We've done great work and you need to be excited to do research -- and sometimes blind and sometimes going just on faith --, because it is grueling dealing with so much failure. Because it's so easy to mistake failure for success and success for failure. It's a worry that we'll be overtaken by conmen, that I have serious concerns that we are not moving towards building AGI. But it's difficult to criticize and receive criticism (many physics groups specifically train students to take it and deal with this seemingly harsh language. To separate your internal value from your idea). So I want to be clear that my criticism (which you can see in many of my posts) is not a call to stop ML or even slow it down, but a desire to sail in a different direction (or even allow others to sail in those directions as opposed to being on one big ship).
I do know there are others in psych with similar stories and beliefs. But there's a whole conversation about the structure of academia if we're going to discuss how to stop building mega ships and allow people to truly explore (there will always be a big ship, and there always should! But it should never prevent those from venturing out to explore the unknown. (Obviously I'm a fan of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry lol ))
Epistemology is also useful, because it might allow one to wonder if the problem space is non-deterministic (or not discoverable as).
I think that there are some fundamental laws, which are based on perceptions and their interplay. Speaking very briefly, there are five classes of perceptions: emotions, wishes, thoughts, beliefs, and body sensations. The division of perceptions into these classes is not a result of purely intellectual exercise or idle theorizing. If one starts carefully and diligently observe contents of their mind, these contents will delaminate into such classes naturally. Try that yourself and you will see it as a fact.
Further introspection and assessment of arising perceptions would reveal some interesting patterns: there are two mutually incompatible kinds of emotions, and two mutually incompatible kinds of wishes, and so on.
One could make observations about the interplay of these perceptions and their dynamic. For example, if someone in some specific situation experiences an emotion X and a wish A (with some specific qualities), they can either realize that wish or choose not to do so. Each choice will lead to some changes in the contents of the mind: emotion X is replaced by emotion Y, and/or wish A is changed into wish B, and so on. Gather enough observations of that kind, and you could eventually formulate some hypotheses about possible general laws of perceptions (e.g. make a prediction that emotion X will change to emotion Y in specific set of circumstances).
These hypotheses could be verified by training several people to observe the same five classes of perceptions in the same manner. Arrange various test events for them, record their choices and outcomes of these choices (described in the same language of five classes of perceptions).
If most of them report more or less the same subjective outcomes (without being told about hypothesis and predictions, of course), that's the first step of verification for a possible general law of perceptions.
The second step of verification would be to apply brain imaging to those trained people, allowing us to map emotions X,Y,Z to some distinct patterns of the brain activity. After that do the same experiments with people who are untrained: arrange same test events for them while recording their brain activity. If changes in their brain patterns match for emotion X changed to emotion Y, that would be an objective confirmation of hypothesis formulated earlier.
I think the science allows people to see what the author is attempting fairly clearly. =3
He links to a meta analysis* that says CBT does cure depression and does so consistently for many decades without any declines in effectiveness. Later for some reason, he says no single mental illness was ever cured.
It seems the main point of the article is to say that nothing except "nudges" ever worked in psychology - this is nonsense that he himself contradicts as I mentioned above.
Skip this sensationalist guy, use https://scholar.google.com to do your own research
* https://research.vu.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/26037670/2017_C...
I can't wait for this to happen on our understanding of a Big Bang because status quo explanation relies on very precise math of things that are thought to happen microseconds after supposed start of existence while our earliest observation is (and can only be) from 380000 years later and new observations with new, more precise instruments seem often to rather contradict cosmological predictions than confirm them.
For the love of all that's good and noble please do science to Neurolinguistic Programming please.
Obviously some were more empirical than others so you can’t believe them all, but without engaging with their works — even in a negative way - you’re forced to reinvent the wheel, like the bitcoin people did with banking regulations.
For example, this quote makes me feel the author thinks psychology is more special/unusual than it is:
We’re in good company here, because this is how other fields got their start. Galileo spent a lot of time trying to overturn folk physics: “I know it seems like the Earth is standing still, but it’s actually moving.”
In this case, this whole article is written from the assumption that true, proper, scientific psychology is exclusively the domain of the Behaviorists. This is a popular view among people who run empirical studies all day for obvious reasons (it’s way cheaper and easier to study behavior reliably), but those aren’t the only psychologists. Clinical psychology (therapy) is usually based in cognitive frameworks or psychoanalytical, pedagogy is largely indebted to the structuralism of Piaget, and sociology/anthropology have their own set of postmodern, Marxist, and other oddball influences.
All of those academies are definitely part of psychology IMO, and their achievements are undeniable!
For anyone who finds this interesting and wants to dunk on behaviorists with me, just google “Chomsky behaviorism” and select your fave content medium — he’s been beating this drum for over half a century, lol.
I completely agree. This is how I see psychiatry after having experienced it for decades: it's just slightly better than going to a shaman. It's witchcraft and it mostly doesn't work because, well, it's witchcraft. We just are not at a point in history where we can do much about these things and we have to be adults and accept that. It's okay, there was a time when we'd die of simple infections too. That's how psychology is now, very young and full of witchcraft.
Also, the article was funny... And wtf is that cheeseboat?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnati_chili
[2]: https://www.seriouseats.com/cincinnati-chili-recipe-8402230
In the U.S., many used to believe in God, his design, Righteousness, love, justice, strong, families, building on biological principles, like gender roles, and institutions reflecting these principles. Most believed we would be judged at the end of our life for how well we did those things. They believe we would be rewarded or punished. Building on these things kept paying off in spite of all the problems they came from the simple nature of humanity.
Overtime, the culture shifted to be godless, subjective, individualist, money, focused, pleasure, focused, anti-family, go against biological design, and so on. Doing the opposite of God’s design, unraveled its advantages while leading all sorts of problems. Was subjectivism over objective truth, we also can’t agree on solutions.
we also lost the supernatural advantage. If we repent and follow Jesus Christ, he puts the spirit of God in us. God spirit gives us an inner peace that persists even in bad circumstances. We learned that our suffering is constructive, if not caused by bad choices. We also learned to turn away from send which prevents much suffering in individuals and in society. God also hears our prayers whereby he may supernaturally change the circumstances of individual lives or the world itself. We call these events luck.
Outside of Christian counseling, psychologists and society have given these things up. They’ve given up the power that Jesus Christ provides to overcome things we can’t ordinarily overcome.
I also mentioned political activism. When liberal Atheist took over education, they started promoting ideas that are politically important to them, which didn’t have any science backing them up. If there’s a conflict, their politics always take priority over science. They tied their unproven solutions into those general concepts where you can’t argue with many of their methods more than the concept itself. So, they pick people who will promote these views, they’re baked into their “science,” and nobody sees contrary evidence. If the theories do damage, or are ineffective, the damage continues because their application is driven by political domination rather than the scientific method.
Examples include evolution as the origin of life, specific theories of man-made global warming, feminism, pro-homosexuality, gender as a construct, subjectivism, intersectionality/C.R.T.) modern Marxism), and so on.
So, psychology is failing because it’s built on the wrong foundations, powerless compared to having Christ plus counseling, and set up to fail by political activists whose desires come before the truth or others’ needs.
I'm of the firm belief that today's understanding of psychological maladies is comparable to mid-19th century theories of the causes of disease - when doctors had little idea of the causality of infectious disease or cancer or heart disease (indeed they had no way of distinguishing between transmittable infectious diseases and other types of illness).
Take the importance of insect control and water treatment and condoms in preventing infectious disease from bubonic plague to cholera to HIV and syphilis - they just had no idea until Koch and Pasteur came along. It's probably safe to compare this to our current advertising system, which deliberately makes people feel miserable about various aspects of their appearance and social status with the goal of convincing them that buying some product or other will fix their lives - and it's especially damaging when developing children and teenagers are the targets.
The fact that capitalist consumer society norms are as much as source of mental illness in modern populations as the filthy open sewers of old European cities were of infectious disease is a concept I suspect today's corporatized academic institutions will have a hard time accepting.
A further issue is that currently illegal psychedelic drugs show more potential for understanding and treating a wide variety of mental illness conditions under controlled conditions than any of the widely prescribed antidepressants do, and yet most governments are rigidly opposed to their legalization.
He assumed the human is a machine and used _analytical_ thinking trying to understand it.
Yet you think the interpretation of dreams is just BS. Either you only read secondary literature or you have a deficiency in reasoning.
1. Debunk 'folk' psychology, with comparisons to the illegitimacy of 'folk' biology and 'folk' physics
2. Shake things up- meaning don't be afraid to question established dogma regardless of reputational risks
I, a completely unqualified internet commenter, will give number 2 a try. I'd argue that psychology is a folk science, which is to say its not a science at all, but an art. As we've recently discovered, a massive swath of psychological studies are non-reproducible. So maybe we shouldnt treat psychology as if it were a rigorous scientific pursuit, but a philosophical one, or even a therapeutic one (IE. make it synonymous with psychiatry). Leave the science to the neuroscientists, who can quantify and measure the things they're studying (I understand there is some overlap between these fields sometimes). If your study consists of asking people questions and treating their answers as quantitative measurements of anything, I don't know- it feels like something has been lost in the sauce there. Too many variables to draw any meaningful conclusions.
Rather, I wonder if Psychology would be better thought of as something even less grounded than science. Something where we’re just are happy with an accumulation of stuff that’s happened to work well enough, without pretending that we’re hunting fundamental principles. Something like a profession: Engineering, Doctoring, that sort of stuff.
Also, where did you learn it was given up on, and that is the reason why?
> I, a completely unqualified internet commenter,
Just leave it there.
Why go out of your way to gatekeep random internet comments?
So many people will blindly walk forward in the dark, completely in ignorance, and then get upset that people ask them to light a candle first.
A: Overly broad generalization of a huge body of work put together over 100 years by tens of thousands of professionals
B: Ugh, hate this take from armchair experts
A: Okay, then give me all the examples! Otherwise you're proving me right!
I happen to think your overly broad generalization is more right than wrong, but I also recognize the silliness of asking to be "enlightened" on an entire branch of human endeavor via internet comments. This is a problematic argument form, and someone calling out this behavior does not prove you right.
So let's be clear about what "enlightening you" means. If your argument is "psychology is based on a fundamentally flawed/useless study design (surveys) and we can never learn anything real from it", then a few examples of reproducible, interesting, not a-priori obvious results from surveys should be sufficient to show that we actually can learn real things from surveys. (And be careful not to fall into the "I could have told you that!" fallacy.) Luckily, this question was already asked on Reddit, and I think there are some strong examples:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicPsychology/comments/qktt6h/...
On the other hand, the field is absolutely rife with problematic study design and even some entire psychology departments (e.g. Stanford) seem to be completely rotten. The most salient example of this is the "implicit bias" studies that came out of Stanford. Their study design was something like:
Task 1: Associate good words with white/Christian/American themes as fast as you can
Task 2: Associate bad words with "foreign" themes
Task 3: Associate good words with white/Christian/American themes again
Task 4: Associate good words with "foreign" themes
And the result is: you're racist because Task 4 takes you a few milliseconds longer. It never occurred to them (or it did and they intentionally forced the result) that in Task 4, you're literally unlearning what you've just practiced 3 times. It was one of the most blatantly bad studies I've ever seen in my life and I didn't see anyone else calling out how problematic it was, because Stanford.
So in general I actually agree with your take: the field is rife with junk science, some of it obvious, and almost certainly some of it intentional. But please also recognize that "I'm an expert in tech and therefore everything, and if you can't prove me wrong in an internet comment then that proves me right!" is a very problematic argument style. It sounds like you're trying to prove yourself right, and a much more efficient way to get smarter is to habitually try to prove yourself wrong.
> be careful not to fall into the "I could have told you that!" fallacy.
That's not considered to be one of the standard logical fallacies as far as I know. Why would it be fallacious? Social studies are rife with findings that are either extremely obvious to everyone, extremely obvious to conservatives specifically (because psychologists are nearly always on the left), or extremely obvious to anyone who reads the study design.
I recently wrote an essay about why replication studies can't fix science [1] and one of the problems cited is the prevalence of studies that aren't worth replicating because "I could have told you that". Examples include silly papers like [2], which is literally titled "People's clothing behaviour changes according to external weather and indoor environment" yet somehow manages to also say, "It is evident that further studies are needed in this field", or [3] saying that the average male student would like to be more muscular.
But there are less silly examples which crop up due to the ideological bias in the field. Academics purge any conservatives they find, meaning that social studies spends a lot of time and money investigating things that are considered obvious outside of far left spaces. Jonathan Haidt is famous for arguing that this is a problem (albeit, not actually doing anything about it). As an example highly apropos to this thread, psychologists recently started discovering that stereotypes are usually accurate. Much other work in psychology is built on the suspiciously circular premise that stereotypes are either fictional and thus mere folk intuitions, as Mastroianni would put it, or are accurate only because people believe they are accurate (the field of "stereotype threat" is like this). On the left the idea that stereotypical achievement gaps are socially constructed is considered obvious and a matter of faith, to people on the right the opposite is true: idea that they reflect actual truths about reality is the obvious idea.
So even if you set aside the offensively wasteful, there's still a lot of scope for study claims to be considered obvious by some and not by others.
[1] https://blog.plan99.net/replication-studies-cant-fix-science...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03601...
[3] https://openurl.ebsco.com/EPDB%3Agcd%3A4%3A12322516/detailv2...
I don't really care whether it's on The Official List of Logical Fallacies™ or not, and in fact caring too much about this list is itself a bit of a fallacy. Nor do I necessarily consider "I could have told you that!" necessarily a logical fallacy; more like an emotional fallacy. (But humans use emotions when trying to understand things!) I consider a fallacy to be something which is an "attractive but wrong" step in an argument or rationale. There are two reasons why I consider it a "fallacy" by that definition:
1. Humans dramatically over-estimate the obviousness of an idea after they've already heard it. Once you know the answer, you basically become immediately unable to estimate how obvious that answer was beforehand. This is highly evident in mathematical proofs, e.g. when "obviously right" things turn out to be wrong, often with an "obvious counterexample". Both sure feel completely obvious, depending on what you know!
2. Even obvious things are worth testing. Plenty of things that seemed obvious have turned out to be wrong. This is not evidence of wasted funding. Obvious things can also be related to less obvious things. Your 3rd example shows this: there's a 2nd related hypothesis they're testing: "men would believe that women would find a more muscular shape more attractive than women actually report". So men tend to want to be more muscular, and also men tend to think women find high muscularity more attractive than they actually do (or they think women's "ideal muscularity" is higher than it actually is). This may be an example of "overturning our intuitions" whose understanding could improve outcomes -- if it replicates, anyway. Hardly an example of a pointless study.
That being said, humans actually do seem pretty good at being able to "tell you that" beforehand. There are some fun quizzes you can take [1, 2] to see if a study replicates beforehand, and you'll probably do pretty well on them. But that doesn't necessarily mean that we shouldn't do the tests anyway! We can still be surprised.
> Academics purge any conservatives they find
This is extremely dependent on the department and institution, and in general is way overblown. Yes, this can be a problem in some departments in some of the social sciences. On the other hand, in economics departments, it can be liberal ideas that are verboten. There are fads and politics everywhere, but mostly science is doing OK at considering ideas on their actual merits -- eventually. Meanwhile a lot of people lob angry criticisms at academia for rejecting their bad ideas because they're bad and wrong, assuming
> psychologists recently started discovering that stereotypes are usually accurate
I suspect this is way too strongly worded for what's actually being found (and replicated). Citations would be very much appreciated. Be wary that slight changes in the mean of a population can be detected in tests with p < whatever epsilon you, and also have oversized effects on the tail ends (e.g. professional sports), but give you almost no predictive power for individuals you meet on the street. If "stereotypes are usually accurate" means "population X is slightly more likely to do Y with near-certainty", that does not mean "most X do Y" nor even "a random member of X is significantly more likely to do Y than a random member of not-X". One of the reasons these kinds of studies are considered problematic is in how easily they can be misconstrued to justify racism.
[1] https://mru.org/teacher-resources/active-learning/will-it-re...
https://spsp.org/news-center/character-context-blog/stereoty...
Note the reference to over 50 studies, and stereotype accuracy being amongst the most replicable of findings in social psychology. Not very surprising given they're literally asking "are things most people believe to be true actually true" - this is a question that's going to obviously yield a lot of big effect sizes and high levels of replicability, but it's also trivial by definition.
> in economics departments, it can be liberal ideas that are verboten
That seems doubtful, depending on how you define "liberal". Academic economics still has a notable left leaning bent. If we check out the last two issues of QJE, one of the best known economics journals, we see a large number of papers on typical liberal fascinations that have little to do with conventional economics, things like gender pay gaps, domestic violence against women, how to socially engineer people into taking vaccines etc:
https://academic.oup.com/qje/issue/139/3
https://academic.oup.com/qje/issue/139/4
Also, the basic premise of academic economics is that you can treat the economy as something knowable and controllable from the outside, whereas a more libertarian take would be that the economy is the process of everyone collectively figuring out what's both true and desirable, thus you cannot "step outside" the system in any meaningful way by definition. So the very nature of studying economics in a university is to some extent a left wing starting point.