4 ms·

This is common enough that it seems psychology as a whole is more art than science. It's like alchemy - they noticed some patterns and have some success exploi

by ajuc 8y ago

This is common enough that it seems psychology as a whole is more art than science. It's like alchemy - they noticed some patterns and have some success exploiting them, but the abstractions and explanations they provide are mostly bullshit, so the predictive power is basically 0.

anvandare 8y ago
The problem is the Universe of which it speaks can not be reduced to a handful of beautiful and concise mathematical formulae. A group of humans (or even a single human) is more chaotic and complex in their behavior than a group of atoms ever could be. All Carbon-14 atoms are the same. No two humans, however, are.
- ajuc 8y ago
  A group of humans is a group of atoms. Even a simple double pendulum is chaotic, yet we can describe its movement quantitatively. For me the failure of psychology are very similar to the failures of pre-enlightenment physics, chemistry, biology. Wrong abstractions, storytelling instead of formal models, unfalsifiable claims. My girlfriend was seeing a therapist, and the methods used were basically clairvoyance. Telling the patient "draw a tree", then interpreting the kind of tree as an indication of inherent characteristics of the patient. When she told me that - I've drawn a tree as well, and it turned out my tree was basically the same (the most common kind in our climate, in the most traditional drawing possible). I'm nothing like the description she got from the therapist and neither is she (but in a different way). Of course - she accepts the interpretation of that picture the same way people find matching details in their horoscopes. Psychology sounds to me a lot like bloodletting or voodoo programming, and scientific community should distance itself from people claiming its discoveries to be scientific, and its therapies to be scientifically-proven.

4 ms·

This is common enough that it seems psychology as a whole is more art than science. It's like alchemy - they noticed some patterns and have some success exploi

by ajuc 8y ago

anvandare 8y ago
The problem is the Universe of which it speaks can not be reduced to a handful of beautiful and concise mathematical formulae. A group of humans (or even a single human) is more chaotic and complex in their behavior than a group of atoms ever could be. All Carbon-14 atoms are the same. No two humans, however, are.
- ajuc 8y ago
  A group of humans is a group of atoms. Even a simple double pendulum is chaotic, yet we can describe its movement quantitatively. For me the failure of psychology are very similar to the failures of pre-enlightenment physics, chemistry, biology. Wrong abstractions, storytelling instead of formal models, unfalsifiable claims. My girlfriend was seeing a therapist, and the methods used were basically clairvoyance. Telling the patient "draw a tree", then interpreting the kind of tree as an indication of inherent characteristics of the patient. When she told me that - I've drawn a tree as well, and it turned out my tree was basically the same (the most common kind in our climate, in the most traditional drawing possible). I'm nothing like the description she got from the therapist and neither is she (but in a different way). Of course - she accepts the interpretation of that picture the same way people find matching details in their horoscopes. Psychology sounds to me a lot like bloodletting or voodoo programming, and scientific community should distance itself from people claiming its discoveries to be scientific, and its therapies to be scientifically-proven.