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While most modern psychology seems to be, well, kind of bullshit, the problem isn't with the idea of observing behavior and trying to deduce underlying principl

While most modern psychology seems to be, well, kind of bullshit, the problem isn't with the idea of observing behavior and trying to deduce underlying principles from that. How do you think that we arrived on those lower-level phenomena that you're lauding? It wasn't by getting an electron microscope and a particle collider from God and starting from there. And we disproved phlogisten without use of lower-level principles either -- just better measurement.

colemannugent 9y ago
Phlogiston was actually disproved by applying the lower level principle of weight to the supposed phlogiston reaction. The idea was that phlogiston was released when things burned. This was disproved when it was observed that some things gained weight when burned. Either the concept of weight was wrong, or the concept of phlogiston was wrong. The scientific method requires you to reduce your reasoning into the lowest-level possible discrete arguments. In this case, scientists were forced to abandon phlogiston as it worked on a very high level, but did not integrate with lower level observations. My gripe boils down to a desire of psychologists to provide sweeping high-level conclusions without even being able to describe possible lower-level phenomena.
- canjobear 9y ago
  Sometimes you don't need knowledge of the lower-level phenomena. Darwin's arguments for evolution by natural selection were persuasive even though neither he nor contemporaries could conceive of what the chemical basis of gene transmission would look like.
  - colemannugent 9y ago
    But they did know that genes were transferred. Modern psychology feels to me like researchers all want to be the one who gets to the big revelation first and so they abandon the typical scientific pursuit of building a standard model. Newton came up with classical mechanics by simply observing mechanical systems. Darwin and friends came up with the idea of gene transmission by observing the offspring of plants and animals. The difference between them and modern psychologists is that psychologists make very little attempt to explain the underlying phenomena. Without any explanations, modern psychology is little more than a series of observations. Science is a process, and I feel like that you can't claim real knowledge of things if you can't explain them.
forapurpose 9y ago
> most modern psychology seems to be, well, kind of bullshit Based on what? What better source do we have that contradicts it? Identifying, defining, and measuring psychological phenomena is much more difficult than doing the same with physical phenomena, for obvious reasons. That leads to lower accuracy. Should humanity not even try, leave these questions unanswered, and suffer the consequences? While there are many failures and there are the flaws associated with every human endeavor (and that applies to other fields too - computer security comes to mind), modern psychology successfully treats many conditions and helps a very large number of people. Consider the world before it, when we didn't understand depression ('stop being lazy!' 'just buck up!'), schizophrenia (demonic possession), bi-polar disorder, anxiety, PTSD (General Patton assaulting a hospitalized soldier), etc. Is all that knowledge and treatment just "bullshit"? It's sort of common on HN to toss off derisive remarks about psychology - or any field besides what HN readers personally know well, such as computers, math, and natural sciences - but let's hold ourselves to a higher standard: What do we really know?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- traverseda 9y ago
  >Based on what? What better source do we have that contradicts it? Based on the "psychology replication crisis" obviously. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_psychology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_psycholo... Psychology is a big field, and often when you hear that claim it's complaining about social psychology, not clinical psychology.

colemannugent 9y ago

Phlogiston was actually disproved by applying the lower level principle of weight to the supposed phlogiston reaction. The idea was that phlogiston was released when things burned. This was disproved when it was observed that some things gained weight when burned. Either the concept of weight was wrong, or the concept of phlogiston was wrong. The scientific method requires you to reduce your reasoning into the lowest-level possible discrete arguments. In this case, scientists were forced to abandon phlogiston as it worked on a very high level, but did not integrate with lower level observations. My gripe boils down to a desire of psychologists to provide sweeping high-level conclusions without even being able to describe possible lower-level phenomena.

canjobear 9y ago
Sometimes you don't need knowledge of the lower-level phenomena. Darwin's arguments for evolution by natural selection were persuasive even though neither he nor contemporaries could conceive of what the chemical basis of gene transmission would look like.
- colemannugent 9y ago
  But they did know that genes were transferred. Modern psychology feels to me like researchers all want to be the one who gets to the big revelation first and so they abandon the typical scientific pursuit of building a standard model. Newton came up with classical mechanics by simply observing mechanical systems. Darwin and friends came up with the idea of gene transmission by observing the offspring of plants and animals. The difference between them and modern psychologists is that psychologists make very little attempt to explain the underlying phenomena. Without any explanations, modern psychology is little more than a series of observations. Science is a process, and I feel like that you can't claim real knowledge of things if you can't explain them.

forapurpose 9y ago

> most modern psychology seems to be, well, kind of bullshit Based on what? What better source do we have that contradicts it? Identifying, defining, and measuring psychological phenomena is much more difficult than doing the same with physical phenomena, for obvious reasons. That leads to lower accuracy. Should humanity not even try, leave these questions unanswered, and suffer the consequences? While there are many failures and there are the flaws associated with every human endeavor (and that applies to other fields too - computer security comes to mind), modern psychology successfully treats many conditions and helps a very large number of people. Consider the world before it, when we didn't understand depression ('stop being lazy!' 'just buck up!'), schizophrenia (demonic possession), bi-polar disorder, anxiety, PTSD (General Patton assaulting a hospitalized soldier), etc. Is all that knowledge and treatment just "bullshit"? It's sort of common on HN to toss off derisive remarks about psychology - or any field besides what HN readers personally know well, such as computers, math, and natural sciences - but let's hold ourselves to a higher standard: What do we really know?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
traverseda 9y ago
>Based on what? What better source do we have that contradicts it? Based on the "psychology replication crisis" obviously. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_psychology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_psycholo... Psychology is a big field, and often when you hear that claim it's complaining about social psychology, not clinical psychology.