4 ms·

If anything, I find this to be a, perhaps unintentional, damning indictment of psychology and psychiatry in general. If your discipline cannot clearly define t

• lvass 4y ago
  The data is pretty clear that psychology and psychiatry sucks at doing it's job. But it's a hell of a tough job, and using more meaningful words probably doesn't hurt.
  • jrm4 4y ago
    Exactly: "Meaningful." Precisely, it feels like there's a lot of "activity" and "named ideas" chasing things that may not meaningfully exist? This is of course symptomatic of "publish or perish" et al, but I suppose one of the difficulties here is that the paper is like "here are some bad ideas and trends (fair) so here are some more to counteract that." It really just gives the impression of "wow, these people are wasting time if they can't even decide on what relatively accessible words even mean?" E.g. The bit on "symptoms" is crazy sounding.
• hunter2_ 4y ago
  I think all disciplines could have a damning list like this. For example, in software development, we could say "pull request" is to be avoided in favor of "merge request" (some progress has definitely been made toward this state, but there is more to do).
• 2devnull 4y ago
  It’s more common to hear these terms of misunderstanding in main stream medicine. Psychologists know there isn’t a “chemical imbalance” which “causes depression.” Overworked GPs and others without better training are the ideal audience for this piece.
• c7b 4y ago
  Frankly, if your standard for a good definition is that it is readily apparent to the public at large, then pretty much every academic discipline will fail your rigour test. Even (or especially) mathematics. Which should make it clear that this is an unfair and useless standard to hold psychology up to.
  • jrm4 4y ago
    Fair, "at large" is a bit extreme. This is a spectrum. But psychology appears to be far worse than the others, even reading from this paper. I'm a lawyer, and even law isn't this bad. "Symptoms are unobservable?"
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • lofatdairy 4y ago
      Actually symptoms being unobservable is not only not unique to psychology (the distinction is well known in medicine), it's a core challenge within the practice of medicine and one of its historic tensions. Yeah, a patient might be complaining of chest pain, but the reason for the complaint is going to be unknown to you until you start the process of diagnosis. Chest pain is a symptom of many conditions, and you can't even trust that there's an observable cause, you can only believe what the patient tells you. This was obviously even worse until modern developments of things like MRIs and X-rays. Compare that to signs, where you can see that a patient has say, a lesion or is clearly coughing.
    • amanaplanacanal 4y ago
      That sounds like a standard medical definition. I’m sure there are technical terms used in the law which differ from common usage.
    • c7b 4y ago
      Law, really? Aren't there a lot of legal terms (like 'ownership', 'possession' 'contract',...) that have precise legal definitions that may differ in crucial aspects from their colloquial usage? I think you're confusing a definition being easy to understand with it being well-defined. Mathematical definitions are often hard to grasp exactly because they are so well-defined. If you want something to be easily understandable by a lot of people (especially outside the discipline), you'll usually have to sacrifice rigor.
• bawolff 4y ago
  > I'm reminded of e.g. the term "neurodivergent." It's a good thing to look at, but how do you falsify it? Who can stand up and say "I'm definitely not neurodivergent?" If you can't do that, the term is not very helpful. I mean, that's not a diagnosis. If you mean just generally and not psychology specific then you are going to have to throw out most english adjectives. Like you can't falsify "im hungry", "im smart", "im dumb".
  • unsupp0rted 4y ago
    I can easily identify whether or not I'm hungry... and probably whether or not I'm smart. I can't easily identify whether or not I'm neurodivergent, because I'm not sure what it means or what the opposite would look like. Does anybody know?
    • bawolff 4y ago
      > I can't easily identify whether or not I'm neurodivergent, because I'm not sure what it means or what the opposite would look like. Does anybody know? The people who are claiming to be neruodivergent would say its quite obvious to themselves (FWIW, the general definition is roughly ADHD or Autism, both of which have more concrete definitions). I was assuming the statement was about other people verifying the veracity of the statement not yourself. Of course, i don't know how you can easily identify if you are actually hungry, when you can't even tell if you actually have a stomach or are just a brain in a vat/plugged into the matrix.
      • unsupp0rted 4y ago
        Even if I'm a brain in a vat, I'm a brain in a vat that thinks it's hungry. But I'm not a brain in a vat that thinks it's neurodivergent or not neurodivergent because it doesn't know what that would mean in the first place, and it's not sure anybody else (assuming other brains in other vats exist) does either.
        • jrm4 4y ago
          Exactly. I'm thinking of other diseases and other conditions. Like "has covid" or "very likely does not have covid" are verifiable or falsifiable enough for the situation even if you occasionally get it wrong. Neurodivergent? Probably easy to find clear yeses, sure. But I'm guessing all of your clear yeses there have things that have other, clearer, names.
• Booktrope 4y ago
  So, for all the many things in the world that cannot be defined in "a reasonably concrete and provable way" or where a statement cannot be "falsified", no study is worthwhile. More or less this position: nothing worthwhile from Wittgenstein beyond the Tractatus and specifically, forget about the Philosophical Investigations. It's not an indictment of a field that the subject matter is not susceptible to description in terms that are definitely falsifiable. Of course, definite terminology can be very helpful where it does apply, but it can also be used to oversimplify complex questions in a way that obfuscates them. But there's no law that nature must always be subject to description in a "concrete and provable way", especially not by human languages. By not taking seriously anything but disciplines that can be boiled down to true-false propositions, we'd miss huge amounts of knowledge that are useful and helpful. Especially fields like psychology where so many important observations simply cannot be broken down into concrete statements or provable propositions in the way you seem to mean those words. On the other hand, it's also very important to be careful of misuse of terms such as "true" and "false", for example, they can have very different meanings when we're talking about logic or observation, answers to examination questions, romance or religion. In this particular exchange, by true do we mean scientifically true or logically true? Or, how indeed would anyone stand up and say whether something is "definitely not damning" or "definitely not unintentional" actually?
  • zwkrt 4y ago
    There’s a reason that traditionally in America psychology is taught in a research oriented way. This has the upside of at least ideally causing psychologist and psychiatrist to have a curious attitude toward their patients. In a field that is dealing with something so complicated as people’s brains and their social interactions and their self perceptions and their bodily health, it’s pretty much a necessary condition to begin from a standpoint of assuming that you don’t understand everything. I think it also has the unfortunate downside of producing a lot of questionable research though. The problem is that in a research paper you do have to have operational definitions, P values, etc. it’s not that these things are bad but they are not particularly well-suited to such an ambiguous problem as attempting to explore the human condition. To bring the point back to Wittgenstein, we are forcing students to talk about “the unspeakable” in scientific terminology. Bringing in his viewpoint from the investigations, it feels to me like in the mental health field we need to be playing a different game than the scientific research game. Professionals on-the-ground are doing this, but how to bring that back into the academic sphere, I don’t know what the best solution is.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• runarberg 4y ago
  This is not what the article concludes at all. Every item in this list is met with alternatives or justifications for careful considerations and nuance. If anything it celebrates psychology as a rich field while issuing a warning about specific problematic terms in use. This is no different from most other fields. Cosmology also has problematic terms such as Grand Unifying Theory, even the word planet has issues within the field of astronomy. This is not a damning indictment of respective fields, but a sign of maturity, growth, and healthy debate within the field. Your example of “neyrodivergent” is a really bad example for your case. This term is a laypeople term that captures the notion that there is a variety in the way people think and behave, and as a society we tend to accommodate only a subset of this variety, leaving the rest (the neurodiverce individuals) in a harder then necessary situations. You don’t need to falsify it because it is not a scientific term. But if you wanted to disproof it, you would need to show that cognitive behavior doesn’t vary nearly as much as observable behavior, the very fact that autism exists should be evidence enough to justify this term. I think you might be misunderstanding what falsifiability means for psychology or other social science (or any science that uses probability or population statistics in its theories for that matter). When you have a term that distinguishes a subgroup from a population, you don’t try to disprove it by looking at an individual, you look at the variance and compare it with the greater population. If there is no difference in the variance, then most likely you are using an unhelpful term.
• larve 4y ago
  I think of neurodivergence as having a cognitive style different than the commonly accepted cognitive style (the typical way of understanding things). It is not a diagnosis, but a way of framing differences in cognitive style and helping work out accomodations that might be necessary. This means that not only can "your neurodivergent status" change (say, a non-autistic person in a group of autistic people would be neurodivergent), but it is a spectrum. You might be divergent from the typical in certain domains (say, you are very sensitive to certain sounds), while being typical in others (say, your way of using body language matches the way most people use it around you). Bringing up neurodivergence makes only sense when you do notice that there is something different about how you perceive the world or act, vs what everybody else seems to be doing. Specific conditions lead to neurodivergence, say ADHD or neurological disorders or mood disorders, while others might be attributed to upbringing or nationality.