9 ms·

I hold the prejudiced opinion that most, if not all, psychology research is bogus. It's the one field with the most abuse of statistics and a crisis of reproduc

I hold the prejudiced opinion that most, if not all, psychology research is bogus. It's the one field with the most abuse of statistics and a crisis of reproducibility that dates back to the last century.

mindfulplay 7y ago
Agreed! Asking people how they feel and jotting that down on a piece of paper isn't science. Similar to social and nutrition "sciences" that gear more toward PR angle and "number of news outlets talking about my paper" than legit science. They should all be relegated back to the arts and crafts.
solinent 7y ago
It's all based on self-reports, it's very hard to account for individual differences in how people answer the questions and to control for those factors. I agree wholeheartedly. However, certain types of severe depression seem to have a biological basis. Inflammatory cytokines may play a role. The "leaky gut" theory seems to be what's helped me personally.
- victorbojica 7y ago
  Did it help with your depression ? Can you give more details into your issue ? Thx.
  - solinent 7y ago
    I had severe depression, almost unable to move, complete anhedonia. I was still doing well at work (until the unable to move part got worse), but literally nothing made me happy. There was nothing about my life situation that could have caused it. The doctors would tell me that I'm completely fine, except my optometrist, who found that my dry eye might have been caused by auto-immune issues. I followed up with a ER doctor (I'm in Canada, very hard to find a good GP) and he ordered a newer test which determined I have anti-ccp antibodies, which signal inflammatory cytokines. I was having stomach issues at the time, but I thought it was the depression, the primary symptom of depression is felt in the gut, or so I was told. I found the auto-immune protocol after talking with an elderly woman who had RA. I had to cut out quite a bit of food, and found it very difficult. Finally, I tried a ketogenic diet. Surprisingly, after one week I was feeling better! My depression lifted, though all my physical symptoms remained, I found myself running for 30 minutes or exercising without even willing it. I then switched to a pure carnivore diet, which is a subset of the ketogenic diet. I felt even better. I've heard the Wahl's protocol is another similar method to solve this problem. Right now, every time I eat too many vegetables, sugars, or anything high in fibre I have an issue. I think my issue was a combination of very high insulin resistance (I ate tons of pizza in my uni days) and some allergy. I think I'm allergic to dioxin and glyphosate which is sprayed on all vegetables these days. An alternative to the carnivore diet which seems to work anecdotally is the Wahl's protocol, it's just very difficult to procure and find that much variety of vegetables. There's this MD on youtube, Ken Berry. I've found the advice he gives to be tremendously helpful. Liver is a wonderful health food.
threatofrain 7y ago
This is psychiatry. Psychiatry certainly respects its sister field but takes an independent look at the brain. We could always go back to the wild wild west with no psychologists or psychiatrists. I mean, does depression even exist, or is it a psychiatric scam?
- collyw 7y ago
  Where exactly is the line between the two drawn. I always got the impression that Psychiatry needed a medical degree while Psychology was similar but without one. I am pretty sure depression exists.
  - jonathanlydall 7y ago
    My mother is a psychologist (not in US though). Psychologists treat just by talking through problems while pschiatrists treat with the help of drugs (as well as also talking). While my mother has PhD, psychiatrists require a medical degree.
  - bloak 7y ago
    I'm not so sure. It depends what you mean by "depression". If you mean exactly what's written in the DSM then you should be sceptical. See "Crazy like us" by Ethan Watters: a great book, only part of it about depression. Remember that when Freud was active the main psychiatric ailment was "hysteria". Did hysteria exist? Does it still exist? To what extent is mental illness socially determined?
- fao_ 7y ago
  > I mean, does depression even exist, or is it a psychiatric scam? I don't think anyone who's experienced it would be asking this question.
  - lidHanteyk 7y ago
    Hi! Lifelong experiencer of depression and several mental disorders. Am I mentally ill, or is the world really actually a horrible and callous place where most humans spend their time being negligent and abusive towards each other? At very best, psychiatrists might claim to be able to open up a wider perspective, which is why they used to be called "head-shrinkers", for their ability to humble and to remove egoist barriers, but a bit of meditation will do that too. So, is psychiatry's ability to give perspective worth the pathologizing effect that it has on people?
throwaway5752 7y ago
I think that is grossly unfair, and honestly a really condescending thing to say about a legitimate area of research. It is a messy area of work. Brains work differently between people, they work differently over time, among different groups of people, and they can rarely (outside of functional MRIs where you have structural factors) have anything but self reported outcomes. You have the privilege of saying that because people post their research and their numbers, which is all you can ask from any field of science.
- olooney 7y ago
  Other sciences are also "messy" but that hasn't stalled progress. It may be objectively quite difficult to conduct psychology experiments, it's hard to believe that it's any harder to do psychology experiments than in other fields, mainly because I know how hard it is to actually do experiments. On the far extreme, you have stuff like the Hubble telescope[1], LHC[2], or LIGO[3], all of which faced and overcame extreme technical challenges. Do you know how much work it took to get LIGO isolated from outside vibrations? Literally a decade. [1]: https://www.nasa.gov/content/hubbles-mirror-flaw https://www.nasa.gov/content/hubbles-mirror-flaw [2]: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsta.2014.0045 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsta.2014... [3]: https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/vibration-isolation https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/vibration-isolation Or consider this XKCD comic[4] about geology. "We study what's on the other side of a 20 mile thick rock wall." Similar problems exist for cosmologists and astronomers, but somehow scientists are taking pictures of black holes[5] and finding exoplanets[6]. [4]: https://xkcd.com/2058/ https://xkcd.com/2058/ [5]: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2019/4/19/how-scientists-captured-the-first-image-of-a-black-hole/ https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2019/4/19/how-scientists-c... [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet What psychology experiments face the same kind of obstacles as these? Your subjects are not billions of light years away, nor smaller than an electron, nor whizzing by at just under the speed of light, or behind 20 miles of rock. Yet the current state of psychology research[7] is that maybe 1/3 or 1/4 of papers can be replicated. When researchers start to explore why, they find that QRPs (questionable research practices) are common, sample sizes are small, and statistical analyses are often misused, and so on. In other words, they find the methodology is at fault, not the fundamental difficulty of the subject matter. [7]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
blablabla123 7y ago
I don't think there is such a thing as abuse of statistics as long as the methodology is published. In this case, N=21 and no control group shows that there isn't much useful data present in the first place...
- beerandt 7y ago
  Isn't publishing anything with N<30 that presumes a random distribution straight-up wrong? (I don't know if that's presumed here or not, but without greater detail, it's something most people [who have a basic understanding] will assume.)
  - renewiltord 7y ago
    You have 29 people in a room. The people are healthy and well. You give them a pill containing a chemical you want to test. They all die seconds after consuming the pill. The autopsy reveals they did not choke. What is the N you choose before you conclude that chemical is toxic in that dose at some p?
    - beerandt 7y ago
      That's not what I said- you can still make claims against the data. But when people are looking at N=x, most don't realize that N<30 is usually in a completely different category than N>=30. You almost shouldn't look at it as "N". Novice "statisticians" are just (very) limited in the tools/formulas/methods available to use, because so many (entry level/basic/standard) statistical methods are only valid for normal distributions (or other constraints on data, that people typically don't check for). Without details stated up-front, most people will (wrongly) assume that a normal distribution automatically applies, even if they don't know what that means. Similar to situations where people ask for the average/mean when they should be asking for the median. The data isn't useless, but needs strong context and disclaimers.
      - IAmEveryone 7y ago
        I have no idea what you’re getting at here. The parent pointed out, accurately, that for large effect sizes, N=30 is plenty. I’m also fairly certain you don’t understand what a “random distribution” is yourself. That’s because there’s no such thing. There’s a normal distribution, binomial distribution, Poisson distribution etc, and they all involve randomness. But there’s no “random distribution”. So maybe you shouldn’t be quite so quick to judge “novice statisticians”, and what those imaginary people you mention a total of five times may or may not “wrongly assume”, or “don’t know”, or “are limited in”, or “don’t check for”.
riyadparvez 7y ago
Not to mention lots of psychology research has been done using affluent white college undergrads as research population. If you take lots of these therapy approaches outside of this demographic, they simply don't hold upto the claims made in original research papers.
wolco 7y ago
Most if not all? That's an interesting statement. If you said all I would assume you do not swe pjsychology as a testable science. What kind of studies do you approve?
steve76 7y ago
Brain damage from car wrecks and strokes. End of life hospice. Things really need to be addressed if you do not want to live in a cruel nightmare of a world. Will and self-determination is a luxury some don't have. They take care of elderly patients, the sick, poor, veterans of horrible wars. On admission for behavioral care, first thing they do is give you two weeks to rule out street drugs. Habits for eating, sleeping, dealing with stress and even thinking can lead to a series of bad actions and similar behavior to being drunk or high on amphetamines. If you're drinking or done drugs likely in the past year, no doctor will really talk to you. Too much to rule out. For childhood trauma, it's not like you are scarred for life and cannot get over it. It's more like the iceberg under the surface. Odds are you are living a high risk high stress life today. One last stage of treatment is showing the patient the door. Saying something happened, you needed help, you're on medicine that works, and now you're over it. That last part is not bogus. It's really hard to do and involves a lot of suffering, like convincing someone on crutches to get up and work each day.

mindfulplay 7y ago

Agreed! Asking people how they feel and jotting that down on a piece of paper isn't science. Similar to social and nutrition "sciences" that gear more toward PR angle and "number of news outlets talking about my paper" than legit science. They should all be relegated back to the arts and crafts.

solinent 7y ago

It's all based on self-reports, it's very hard to account for individual differences in how people answer the questions and to control for those factors. I agree wholeheartedly. However, certain types of severe depression seem to have a biological basis. Inflammatory cytokines may play a role. The "leaky gut" theory seems to be what's helped me personally.

victorbojica 7y ago
Did it help with your depression ? Can you give more details into your issue ? Thx.
- solinent 7y ago
  I had severe depression, almost unable to move, complete anhedonia. I was still doing well at work (until the unable to move part got worse), but literally nothing made me happy. There was nothing about my life situation that could have caused it. The doctors would tell me that I'm completely fine, except my optometrist, who found that my dry eye might have been caused by auto-immune issues. I followed up with a ER doctor (I'm in Canada, very hard to find a good GP) and he ordered a newer test which determined I have anti-ccp antibodies, which signal inflammatory cytokines. I was having stomach issues at the time, but I thought it was the depression, the primary symptom of depression is felt in the gut, or so I was told. I found the auto-immune protocol after talking with an elderly woman who had RA. I had to cut out quite a bit of food, and found it very difficult. Finally, I tried a ketogenic diet. Surprisingly, after one week I was feeling better! My depression lifted, though all my physical symptoms remained, I found myself running for 30 minutes or exercising without even willing it. I then switched to a pure carnivore diet, which is a subset of the ketogenic diet. I felt even better. I've heard the Wahl's protocol is another similar method to solve this problem. Right now, every time I eat too many vegetables, sugars, or anything high in fibre I have an issue. I think my issue was a combination of very high insulin resistance (I ate tons of pizza in my uni days) and some allergy. I think I'm allergic to dioxin and glyphosate which is sprayed on all vegetables these days. An alternative to the carnivore diet which seems to work anecdotally is the Wahl's protocol, it's just very difficult to procure and find that much variety of vegetables. There's this MD on youtube, Ken Berry. I've found the advice he gives to be tremendously helpful. Liver is a wonderful health food.

threatofrain 7y ago

This is psychiatry. Psychiatry certainly respects its sister field but takes an independent look at the brain. We could always go back to the wild wild west with no psychologists or psychiatrists. I mean, does depression even exist, or is it a psychiatric scam?

collyw 7y ago
Where exactly is the line between the two drawn. I always got the impression that Psychiatry needed a medical degree while Psychology was similar but without one. I am pretty sure depression exists.
- jonathanlydall 7y ago
  My mother is a psychologist (not in US though). Psychologists treat just by talking through problems while pschiatrists treat with the help of drugs (as well as also talking). While my mother has PhD, psychiatrists require a medical degree.
- bloak 7y ago
  I'm not so sure. It depends what you mean by "depression". If you mean exactly what's written in the DSM then you should be sceptical. See "Crazy like us" by Ethan Watters: a great book, only part of it about depression. Remember that when Freud was active the main psychiatric ailment was "hysteria". Did hysteria exist? Does it still exist? To what extent is mental illness socially determined?
fao_ 7y ago
> I mean, does depression even exist, or is it a psychiatric scam? I don't think anyone who's experienced it would be asking this question.
- lidHanteyk 7y ago
  Hi! Lifelong experiencer of depression and several mental disorders. Am I mentally ill, or is the world really actually a horrible and callous place where most humans spend their time being negligent and abusive towards each other? At very best, psychiatrists might claim to be able to open up a wider perspective, which is why they used to be called "head-shrinkers", for their ability to humble and to remove egoist barriers, but a bit of meditation will do that too. So, is psychiatry's ability to give perspective worth the pathologizing effect that it has on people?

throwaway5752 7y ago

I think that is grossly unfair, and honestly a really condescending thing to say about a legitimate area of research. It is a messy area of work. Brains work differently between people, they work differently over time, among different groups of people, and they can rarely (outside of functional MRIs where you have structural factors) have anything but self reported outcomes. You have the privilege of saying that because people post their research and their numbers, which is all you can ask from any field of science.

olooney 7y ago
Other sciences are also "messy" but that hasn't stalled progress. It may be objectively quite difficult to conduct psychology experiments, it's hard to believe that it's any harder to do psychology experiments than in other fields, mainly because I know how hard it is to actually do experiments. On the far extreme, you have stuff like the Hubble telescope[1], LHC[2], or LIGO[3], all of which faced and overcame extreme technical challenges. Do you know how much work it took to get LIGO isolated from outside vibrations? Literally a decade. [1]: https://www.nasa.gov/content/hubbles-mirror-flaw https://www.nasa.gov/content/hubbles-mirror-flaw [2]: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsta.2014.0045 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsta.2014... [3]: https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/vibration-isolation https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/vibration-isolation Or consider this XKCD comic[4] about geology. "We study what's on the other side of a 20 mile thick rock wall." Similar problems exist for cosmologists and astronomers, but somehow scientists are taking pictures of black holes[5] and finding exoplanets[6]. [4]: https://xkcd.com/2058/ https://xkcd.com/2058/ [5]: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2019/4/19/how-scientists-captured-the-first-image-of-a-black-hole/ https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2019/4/19/how-scientists-c... [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet What psychology experiments face the same kind of obstacles as these? Your subjects are not billions of light years away, nor smaller than an electron, nor whizzing by at just under the speed of light, or behind 20 miles of rock. Yet the current state of psychology research[7] is that maybe 1/3 or 1/4 of papers can be replicated. When researchers start to explore why, they find that QRPs (questionable research practices) are common, sample sizes are small, and statistical analyses are often misused, and so on. In other words, they find the methodology is at fault, not the fundamental difficulty of the subject matter. [7]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

blablabla123 7y ago

I don't think there is such a thing as abuse of statistics as long as the methodology is published. In this case, N=21 and no control group shows that there isn't much useful data present in the first place...

beerandt 7y ago
Isn't publishing anything with N<30 that presumes a random distribution straight-up wrong? (I don't know if that's presumed here or not, but without greater detail, it's something most people [who have a basic understanding] will assume.)
- renewiltord 7y ago
  You have 29 people in a room. The people are healthy and well. You give them a pill containing a chemical you want to test. They all die seconds after consuming the pill. The autopsy reveals they did not choke. What is the N you choose before you conclude that chemical is toxic in that dose at some p?
  - beerandt 7y ago
    That's not what I said- you can still make claims against the data. But when people are looking at N=x, most don't realize that N<30 is usually in a completely different category than N>=30. You almost shouldn't look at it as "N". Novice "statisticians" are just (very) limited in the tools/formulas/methods available to use, because so many (entry level/basic/standard) statistical methods are only valid for normal distributions (or other constraints on data, that people typically don't check for). Without details stated up-front, most people will (wrongly) assume that a normal distribution automatically applies, even if they don't know what that means. Similar to situations where people ask for the average/mean when they should be asking for the median. The data isn't useless, but needs strong context and disclaimers.
    - IAmEveryone 7y ago
      I have no idea what you’re getting at here. The parent pointed out, accurately, that for large effect sizes, N=30 is plenty. I’m also fairly certain you don’t understand what a “random distribution” is yourself. That’s because there’s no such thing. There’s a normal distribution, binomial distribution, Poisson distribution etc, and they all involve randomness. But there’s no “random distribution”. So maybe you shouldn’t be quite so quick to judge “novice statisticians”, and what those imaginary people you mention a total of five times may or may not “wrongly assume”, or “don’t know”, or “are limited in”, or “don’t check for”.

riyadparvez 7y ago

Not to mention lots of psychology research has been done using affluent white college undergrads as research population. If you take lots of these therapy approaches outside of this demographic, they simply don't hold upto the claims made in original research papers.

wolco 7y ago

Most if not all? That's an interesting statement. If you said all I would assume you do not swe pjsychology as a testable science. What kind of studies do you approve?

steve76 7y ago

Brain damage from car wrecks and strokes. End of life hospice. Things really need to be addressed if you do not want to live in a cruel nightmare of a world. Will and self-determination is a luxury some don't have. They take care of elderly patients, the sick, poor, veterans of horrible wars. On admission for behavioral care, first thing they do is give you two weeks to rule out street drugs. Habits for eating, sleeping, dealing with stress and even thinking can lead to a series of bad actions and similar behavior to being drunk or high on amphetamines. If you're drinking or done drugs likely in the past year, no doctor will really talk to you. Too much to rule out. For childhood trauma, it's not like you are scarred for life and cannot get over it. It's more like the iceberg under the surface. Odds are you are living a high risk high stress life today. One last stage of treatment is showing the patient the door. Saying something happened, you needed help, you're on medicine that works, and now you're over it. That last part is not bogus. It's really hard to do and involves a lot of suffering, like convincing someone on crutches to get up and work each day.