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We know the why is “because the antidepressants were taken”. But antidepressants only work sometimes – different antidepressants work for different people! We d

We know the why is “because the antidepressants were taken”. But antidepressants only work sometimes – different antidepressants work for different people! We don't know the true, fundamental reason, but at least we've pinned it down a bit. I call something pseudoscience when the “why” is “pinned down” as something wholly unrelated, and the people involved haven't noticed; if they were doing science instead of just theorising, they would've noticed. (We agree, but we're using different words.)

shkkmo 5y ago
> We know the why is “because the antidepressants were taken”. We don't know that. The best we know is that people who take antidepressants on average experience more improvement than a placebo. We actually don't know who got better from taking antidepressants due to the placebo effect. > I call something pseudoscience when the “why” is “pinned down” as something wholly unrelated, and the people involved haven't noticed; This is a good point and I would agree that pseudosciences are generally bad at uncovering bad explanations. I will point out that the "chemical imbalance" theory is still widely believed even though it has been pretty thoroughly debunked. I think the dichotomy science/pseudoscience if often applied to whole fields when there is often a mix of both within any given field. The prevelence can certainly be highly variable from field to field but it isn't as black and white as we like to suggest.