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It's examples like this - particular to psychology - which always give me a chance to reflect and chuckle about how I believe the 'science' of psychology to be

It's examples like this - particular to psychology - which always give me a chance to reflect and chuckle about how I believe the 'science' of psychology to be academically pointless. Not to be confused with psychiatry, which I find to be a worthwhile medical, scientific pursuit (adding subtances/drugs does change the equation quite a bit). But real, authentic psychology is pretty much an observational writing exercise that, in my opinion, can't be broadly applied any more than general dietary advice. Each individual's physiological composition makes psychology nothing more than a practice bed for bored creative writers. Understanding the psyche is critically important to write convincing characters, absolutely, and that takes a lot of practice and thought to fashion into a functional perspective (or literary craft tool) that enables a person to write "believable" characters. Observation, not causation, as it were. It's not really a stretch to share this belief, if one were to be familiar with the origins of psychology that trace back to an esteemed writer and philosopher(and turn-of-the-century physician...) by the name of William James, brother of noteworty Henry James.

KingMob 11y ago
It's smug comments like this - particular to engineers - which always give me a chance to chuckle about how little computer programmers actually understand scientific practice. All the same problems happen in biological sciences, and are even worse in some cases, since there's more money at stake. Failures to replicate are rampant in medical/pharmaceutical studies. If you want to claim biology's not scientific either, go ahead. But science is about seeking knowledge, not having total agreement all the time.
- 6stringmerc 11y ago
  Well I'm not wrong that the origin of psychology is simply a blending of philosophy and writing, which are fundamentally outside the scope of the scientific method. I went out of my way to argue that biology-based science is truly science (e.g. psychiatry) but that didn't seem to register. Oh well, audiences miss the point all the time.
  - idm 11y ago
    Research psychologists are at the forefront of science, the scientific method, and statistical methods. Haven't you ever wondered why all of these articles by psychologists have been questing the very fundamentals of the way science is practiced? Psychology, as a field, is our day's premiere example of a science that examines itself. The issues with reproducibility are being illuminated and confronted by - who else? - psychologists. You're wrong on virtually every count. The scientific method is the primary philosophy practiced by psychologists. I would encourage you to read more before making easily falsified statements like "psychology is ... fundamentally outside the scope of the scientific method."
    - mattkrause 11y ago
      To add some specifics to this pile-on: - The classical example of a randomized experiment is a perception/psychophysics experiment: the Lady Tasting Tea. This introduced the idea of a null hypothesis as well as Fisher's exact test. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_tasting_tea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_tasting_tea - Visual and auditory experiments more or less invented signal detection theory and used it to probe visual and auditory processing. Those ROC curves everyone loves predate "machine learning" by decades. - A lot of the fancy hierarchical and Bayesian modeling work have come from psychologists and social scientists (e.g., Andrew Gelman)
  - entee 11y ago
    Nevermind that perhaps the most prescribed class of psychiatric drugs has been called into question: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/are-antidepressants-just-placebos-with-side-effects/ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/are-antidepr... Psychiatry is a really, really hard field for canonical drug research. Mechanisms of disease are for the most part completely unknown, the mechanism of action for the drugs is often unclear in the patient (why stimulants treat ADHD? it's complicated...) and you've got the additional complication that diagnosis for the disease is purely symptomatic (in fact, that diagnosis process is nearly identical to that of psychology) so two people with the same symptoms may have radically different diseases, but hey, they'll both be in your clinical trial! Drawing a difference between Psychology and Psychiatry doesn't really hold up. Doing research on people is extremely difficult to get right, all medical and psychology research is subject to these problems.
- aidenn0 11y ago
  I think it is a problem endemic to all science that requires human experimentation. Human experimentation is extremely expensive in both time and money, and so often the power of experiments is quite low relative to the effect that one wishes to measure. Then, all of the original problems (expensive, ethical review board &ct.) still exist for those who might want to reproduce the effects, along with the fact that there is not only no incentive for researchers to reproduce an experiment, there are active disincentives.
- nsajko 11y ago
  If the parent mindlessly bashed psychology that doesn't mean you too need to go generalize and label all engineers (programmers).
  - KingMob 11y ago
    Fair point. I consider myself both. I'm currently a programmer, but at one point, I was working on a neuroscience PhD, so I've been on both sides of this. The messiness of the data was part of the reason I personally left academia, but I saw people doing good work and trying to sift truth from mud, so these sorts of comments irk me.
mattkrause 11y ago
"Authentic" psychology is definitely not just an "observational writing exercise." There's this weird…meme…that psychology is just sitting around nattering about feelings. Some psychology experiments are undoubtedly crap, but there are also a lot of carefully-designed and well-analyzed experiments, many of which actually are casual. Consider the vast amount of work that has gone into characterizing the visual or auditory system. In a typical experiment, subjects are shown a set of stimuli and asked to make judgements about them (e.g., "Is A brighter than B?" or "Have you seen C before?"). These results are then used to investigate the factors that affect these judgements. These experiments are definitely casual (the experimenter controls the stimulus). Empirically, these results do generalize across subjects and subpopulations and, in many cases, can be tied back to physical properties of the brain. For example, we knew that there were three color sensitive photoreceptors from behavioral data, long before the S, M, and L cones were actually identified. tl;dr: It hasn't been 1920 for a long time.
- DanBC 11y ago
  > There's this weird…meme…that psychology is just sitting around nattering about feelings. Look at the overwhelmingly rubbish depiction of psychology in movies. It's all people lying on couches; or tenacious psychologists breaking through with unwilling clients; or catharsis. And it's odd, because when programmers see programming in movies they see how bad that depiction is, so I'm not sure why the meme of "psychology is just sitting around nattering about feelings" is so strong.
  - Nadya 11y ago
    >And it's odd, because when programmers see programming in movies they see how bad that depiction is, so I'm not sure why the meme of "psychology is just sitting around nattering about feelings" is so strong. The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect probably best explains this. I think you might find it interesting: > Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. > In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” > — Michael Crichton Also I promise it is a coincidence I've responded to you twice in such rapid succession!
DanBC 11y ago
> Not to be confused with psychiatry, which I find to be a worthwhile medical, scientific pursuit (adding subtances/drugs does change the equation quite a bit) You'd be disturbed to find out just how weak some of that evidence is, especially since it's used to deprive people of their liberty and force them to take treatment against their will. There's a slew of medicine that has pretty weak evidence base. (eg knee arthroscopy)
dvt 11y ago
Logical positivism died about 100 years ago, you're late to the party.

KingMob 11y ago

It's smug comments like this - particular to engineers - which always give me a chance to chuckle about how little computer programmers actually understand scientific practice. All the same problems happen in biological sciences, and are even worse in some cases, since there's more money at stake. Failures to replicate are rampant in medical/pharmaceutical studies. If you want to claim biology's not scientific either, go ahead. But science is about seeking knowledge, not having total agreement all the time.

6stringmerc 11y ago
Well I'm not wrong that the origin of psychology is simply a blending of philosophy and writing, which are fundamentally outside the scope of the scientific method. I went out of my way to argue that biology-based science is truly science (e.g. psychiatry) but that didn't seem to register. Oh well, audiences miss the point all the time.
- idm 11y ago
  Research psychologists are at the forefront of science, the scientific method, and statistical methods. Haven't you ever wondered why all of these articles by psychologists have been questing the very fundamentals of the way science is practiced? Psychology, as a field, is our day's premiere example of a science that examines itself. The issues with reproducibility are being illuminated and confronted by - who else? - psychologists. You're wrong on virtually every count. The scientific method is the primary philosophy practiced by psychologists. I would encourage you to read more before making easily falsified statements like "psychology is ... fundamentally outside the scope of the scientific method."
  - mattkrause 11y ago
    To add some specifics to this pile-on: - The classical example of a randomized experiment is a perception/psychophysics experiment: the Lady Tasting Tea. This introduced the idea of a null hypothesis as well as Fisher's exact test. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_tasting_tea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_tasting_tea - Visual and auditory experiments more or less invented signal detection theory and used it to probe visual and auditory processing. Those ROC curves everyone loves predate "machine learning" by decades. - A lot of the fancy hierarchical and Bayesian modeling work have come from psychologists and social scientists (e.g., Andrew Gelman)
- entee 11y ago
  Nevermind that perhaps the most prescribed class of psychiatric drugs has been called into question: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/are-antidepressants-just-placebos-with-side-effects/ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/are-antidepr... Psychiatry is a really, really hard field for canonical drug research. Mechanisms of disease are for the most part completely unknown, the mechanism of action for the drugs is often unclear in the patient (why stimulants treat ADHD? it's complicated...) and you've got the additional complication that diagnosis for the disease is purely symptomatic (in fact, that diagnosis process is nearly identical to that of psychology) so two people with the same symptoms may have radically different diseases, but hey, they'll both be in your clinical trial! Drawing a difference between Psychology and Psychiatry doesn't really hold up. Doing research on people is extremely difficult to get right, all medical and psychology research is subject to these problems.
aidenn0 11y ago
I think it is a problem endemic to all science that requires human experimentation. Human experimentation is extremely expensive in both time and money, and so often the power of experiments is quite low relative to the effect that one wishes to measure. Then, all of the original problems (expensive, ethical review board &ct.) still exist for those who might want to reproduce the effects, along with the fact that there is not only no incentive for researchers to reproduce an experiment, there are active disincentives.
nsajko 11y ago
If the parent mindlessly bashed psychology that doesn't mean you too need to go generalize and label all engineers (programmers).
- KingMob 11y ago
  Fair point. I consider myself both. I'm currently a programmer, but at one point, I was working on a neuroscience PhD, so I've been on both sides of this. The messiness of the data was part of the reason I personally left academia, but I saw people doing good work and trying to sift truth from mud, so these sorts of comments irk me.

mattkrause 11y ago

"Authentic" psychology is definitely not just an "observational writing exercise." There's this weird…meme…that psychology is just sitting around nattering about feelings. Some psychology experiments are undoubtedly crap, but there are also a lot of carefully-designed and well-analyzed experiments, many of which actually are casual. Consider the vast amount of work that has gone into characterizing the visual or auditory system. In a typical experiment, subjects are shown a set of stimuli and asked to make judgements about them (e.g., "Is A brighter than B?" or "Have you seen C before?"). These results are then used to investigate the factors that affect these judgements. These experiments are definitely casual (the experimenter controls the stimulus). Empirically, these results do generalize across subjects and subpopulations and, in many cases, can be tied back to physical properties of the brain. For example, we knew that there were three color sensitive photoreceptors from behavioral data, long before the S, M, and L cones were actually identified. tl;dr: It hasn't been 1920 for a long time.

DanBC 11y ago
> There's this weird…meme…that psychology is just sitting around nattering about feelings. Look at the overwhelmingly rubbish depiction of psychology in movies. It's all people lying on couches; or tenacious psychologists breaking through with unwilling clients; or catharsis. And it's odd, because when programmers see programming in movies they see how bad that depiction is, so I'm not sure why the meme of "psychology is just sitting around nattering about feelings" is so strong.
- Nadya 11y ago
  >And it's odd, because when programmers see programming in movies they see how bad that depiction is, so I'm not sure why the meme of "psychology is just sitting around nattering about feelings" is so strong. The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect probably best explains this. I think you might find it interesting: > Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. > In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” > — Michael Crichton Also I promise it is a coincidence I've responded to you twice in such rapid succession!

DanBC 11y ago

> Not to be confused with psychiatry, which I find to be a worthwhile medical, scientific pursuit (adding subtances/drugs does change the equation quite a bit) You'd be disturbed to find out just how weak some of that evidence is, especially since it's used to deprive people of their liberty and force them to take treatment against their will. There's a slew of medicine that has pretty weak evidence base. (eg knee arthroscopy)

dvt 11y ago

Logical positivism died about 100 years ago, you're late to the party.