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Honestly, I'm a bit disappointed by the level of discourse this post has generated. I'm also an outspoken skeptic of findings in the field of psychology, but th

Honestly, I'm a bit disappointed by the level of discourse this post has generated. I'm also an outspoken skeptic of findings in the field of psychology, but the article is quite well formed and well argued. If anything, accepting the nitpicking from a lot of these comments would result in psychology being _less_ rigorous and precise. A lot of psychology's problems comes from how readily available it seems to be to everyday experience. We're only 100 years from Lewis Terman and H. H. Goddard thinking they could measure intelligence by having people circle a face judged to be "more attractive", it's a young science and improving the rigor of how things are expressed is essential to advancement. Not only are a lot of these terms being used incorrectly, hence why this paper was even published, but because they carry a colloquial and historic baggage that don't reflect academic understandings, or even philosophical understandings of the epistemological concept of science. Words have definitions, and if two people don't share the same definition, then communication breaks down, research is misunderstood, and the field is worse off. This is for people operating within the field to consolidate knowledge, I don't know why people insist that lay understandings of language and a field of study need to be reflected in the terms of art. To put it in terms that engineers are more likely to appreciate, a lot of these terms would be like "man-hours". Man-hours is obviously a useless term because it 1) implies that increasing workers scales production linearly, 2) implies each individual produces at the same rate, 3) inherits from a factory mode of production that engineers typically don't believe fits their situation, and 4) generally results in poor estimations of cost and delivery times. Obviously if you're trying to be productive as an engineer, your managers only using man-hours as a term invites ambiguity and worse working conditions. Same goes for things like the lay understanding of attention vs its specific meaning as an implementation template within deep learning, or even AI more broadly vs specific neural network techniques.

ttpphd 4y ago
I feel the same way and I think your comment hits it right on the head. We should always be curious about how our language misleads us.
0xedd 4y ago
What a load of nonsense. If one reads the article, one would find the absolute majority of the arguments are plain empty claims with little supporting evidence. Citing a single paper, usually over a decade old, is simply proving the opposite; as what they're saying is "out of the thousands of researches done on X (especially medicine), we only found one paper supporting our modern and liberal claim". And your example of manhours is utterly detached from reality. Only daft personnel think your points are axioms. Of course manhours are a rough estimate! Of course 9 women don't make a baby in a month. Unless you became an engineer last night, I can only assume you are a liberal warrior regurgitating favorable pieces. What's next, laws on how to think?
- xmddmx 4y ago
  "modern and liberal claim" It feels like you didn't read or understand the article. Techincal fields (other than yours) also have rules for how to use techincal terms. Arguing for clarity is not a "liberal" point of view (it's actually rather prescriptive, which is associated with more "convervative" viewpoints, but whatever).
johannbok 4y ago
As a psychiatrist, I'm just going to tip my toe into this conversation: I have not read the entire list. I read a good chunk of it. Almost everything on it is -not- stuff I see among my colleagues, and appears to be how psych stuff is presented /in popular media/ rather than in the profession. Which is fine if one targets this for the science media/science communication types, but it seems very odd to apparently have a target audience of psych professionals. So of course there's a list of 'inaccurate and misleading' terms - you can't simplify something without losing /something/ of its complexity, but it still needs to be communicated. The other thing to point out is that some of their criticisms are just ... well, outsiders commenting on things they don't know about. It's a team of academic psychologists. Psych PhDs generally don't do frontline stuff - they do targeted 1-on-1 therapy, or group therapy, but they tend to parachute in and out, they're not doing the days-long care-and-feeding of these patients where some of the terminology they're criticizing comes from. For instance, they take issue with the use of splitting, but ... clearly don't work on the unit. Splitting isn't just about wanting to avoid the thoughts of your loved ones being flawed beings; it's about the emotional hyper-sensitivity of a BPD patient resulting in them condemning as awful anyone that is less than entirely positively oriented towards them, because they can't take any negative interaction (see paragraph 1 about "I'm oversimplifying shit to communicate to people outside my profession", so don't come at me to pick nits. I know it's simplified-into-wrongness.) The result is that when they a unit staffer enforces boundaries, they're instantly terrible; as opposed to that "other" staffer that didn't have to enforce boundaries with them, who is wonderful, can I talk to them now please instead of you, you awful monster? And so the psychodynamic 'splitting' leads very quickly into 'pitting staff against each other'. It's not a mis-use of the term, it's a specific manifestation of the term that you deal with on the unit. Which the authors would know, if they were frontline workers rather than consulting therapists. And the section on pleonasms is just nit picking for the sake of nitpicking. This article doesn't do anything in the way of making psychology nor psychiatry more precise. This article is a lot of nit picking, in ways that look valid externally but would have anyone familiar with these things wondering why this was worth writing.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  << from article: Chemical imbalance I was curious about this one and wondered if you could based on your expertise shed some light on that section and whether it is also off. Human body is obviously a rather complex piece of machinery, but chemical imbalance can put things in a bad spot ( lets say too much vitamin D ). I get that 'chemical imbalance' is a very simplistic model, but I always thought it describes some of our bodies' interactions with the world rather well ( even if they are still not understood ). Would you be willing to elaborate on whether ( or maybe how ) chemical imbalance is used/described in psychiatry in your experience?
vorpalhex 4y ago
Accuracy vs speed. Yes we can deep into the weeds on how to best estimate a task.. or we can ask "How many man-hours is this going to take roughly?" and you give a number and then WE DO THE THING. The argument about "man-hours" is bikeshedding. Language is to be heard and understood. It carries both it's technical meaning and it's subjective meaning. If you're arguing, as the article argues, that words that are subjective have to be removed then you are left without any language at all.

ttpphd 4y ago

I feel the same way and I think your comment hits it right on the head. We should always be curious about how our language misleads us.

0xedd 4y ago

What a load of nonsense. If one reads the article, one would find the absolute majority of the arguments are plain empty claims with little supporting evidence. Citing a single paper, usually over a decade old, is simply proving the opposite; as what they're saying is "out of the thousands of researches done on X (especially medicine), we only found one paper supporting our modern and liberal claim". And your example of manhours is utterly detached from reality. Only daft personnel think your points are axioms. Of course manhours are a rough estimate! Of course 9 women don't make a baby in a month. Unless you became an engineer last night, I can only assume you are a liberal warrior regurgitating favorable pieces. What's next, laws on how to think?

xmddmx 4y ago
"modern and liberal claim" It feels like you didn't read or understand the article. Techincal fields (other than yours) also have rules for how to use techincal terms. Arguing for clarity is not a "liberal" point of view (it's actually rather prescriptive, which is associated with more "convervative" viewpoints, but whatever).

johannbok 4y ago

As a psychiatrist, I'm just going to tip my toe into this conversation: I have not read the entire list. I read a good chunk of it. Almost everything on it is -not- stuff I see among my colleagues, and appears to be how psych stuff is presented /in popular media/ rather than in the profession. Which is fine if one targets this for the science media/science communication types, but it seems very odd to apparently have a target audience of psych professionals. So of course there's a list of 'inaccurate and misleading' terms - you can't simplify something without losing /something/ of its complexity, but it still needs to be communicated. The other thing to point out is that some of their criticisms are just ... well, outsiders commenting on things they don't know about. It's a team of academic psychologists. Psych PhDs generally don't do frontline stuff - they do targeted 1-on-1 therapy, or group therapy, but they tend to parachute in and out, they're not doing the days-long care-and-feeding of these patients where some of the terminology they're criticizing comes from. For instance, they take issue with the use of splitting, but ... clearly don't work on the unit. Splitting isn't just about wanting to avoid the thoughts of your loved ones being flawed beings; it's about the emotional hyper-sensitivity of a BPD patient resulting in them condemning as awful anyone that is less than entirely positively oriented towards them, because they can't take any negative interaction (see paragraph 1 about "I'm oversimplifying shit to communicate to people outside my profession", so don't come at me to pick nits. I know it's simplified-into-wrongness.) The result is that when they a unit staffer enforces boundaries, they're instantly terrible; as opposed to that "other" staffer that didn't have to enforce boundaries with them, who is wonderful, can I talk to them now please instead of you, you awful monster? And so the psychodynamic 'splitting' leads very quickly into 'pitting staff against each other'. It's not a mis-use of the term, it's a specific manifestation of the term that you deal with on the unit. Which the authors would know, if they were frontline workers rather than consulting therapists. And the section on pleonasms is just nit picking for the sake of nitpicking. This article doesn't do anything in the way of making psychology nor psychiatry more precise. This article is a lot of nit picking, in ways that look valid externally but would have anyone familiar with these things wondering why this was worth writing.

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
<< from article: Chemical imbalance I was curious about this one and wondered if you could based on your expertise shed some light on that section and whether it is also off. Human body is obviously a rather complex piece of machinery, but chemical imbalance can put things in a bad spot ( lets say too much vitamin D ). I get that 'chemical imbalance' is a very simplistic model, but I always thought it describes some of our bodies' interactions with the world rather well ( even if they are still not understood ). Would you be willing to elaborate on whether ( or maybe how ) chemical imbalance is used/described in psychiatry in your experience?

vorpalhex 4y ago

Accuracy vs speed. Yes we can deep into the weeds on how to best estimate a task.. or we can ask "How many man-hours is this going to take roughly?" and you give a number and then WE DO THE THING. The argument about "man-hours" is bikeshedding. Language is to be heard and understood. It carries both it's technical meaning and it's subjective meaning. If you're arguing, as the article argues, that words that are subjective have to be removed then you are left without any language at all.