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Statistical research based psychology is hardly a real science. It has no feedback from reality. It has nothing whose success in the real world depends on the a

Statistical research based psychology is hardly a real science. It has no feedback from reality. It has nothing whose success in the real world depends on the accuracy of the research. Clinical psychology is still useful in my opinion. It still helps people. There's a real feedback loop where understanding can change outcomes. I dislike the falsifiability approach (if its falsifiable it's science) and the peer review attitude (the peer review process and scientific consensus is what defines science). My approach is that you need to close a loop. You need to do something useful whose success depended on the truthfulness of the research, and only to the extent of this dependence was anything proved.

barry-cotter 4y ago
> Clinical psychology is still useful in my opinion. It still helps people. There's a real feedback loop where understanding can change outcomes. Things psychological research has taught us about clinical psychology; the therapeutic relationship is the only thing that reliably predicts helping the client. Not the school of thought, not training, whether you vibe with the therapist.
bonoboTP 4y ago
In fundamental research you don't typically know the potential applications where it will be useful. In fact I dislike the current overfocus on applicability, your research can't get media-boosted unless you somehow say it's a step in curing cancer or solving climate change. Similarly, pure math is valuable even without foreseeable uses (if pressed, they will say cryptography etc. but they shouldn't have to). Curiosity to understand how the world works is enough as motivation in science. Applications can also provide ideas but then you can also diverge from them and follow directions that look intrinsically interesting or perplexing. What you note is not addressing the core problem, namely that academia selects for certain non-diverse personality traits, like very high conscientious ess, wanting to please authority, tolerance of monotony etc which all lead to it becoming an inside baseball, working to scratch each other's backs. You want to force them to turn away from their navel gazing by orienting them to concrete useful applications but what you really should incentivize is research whose main characteristic isn't that it's useful or all the current trendy hivemind consensus thinks it's what you're supposed to do, but the pursuit of understanding, the desire to see clearly and get closer to truth. And this doesn't just depend on what you incentivize with metrics but also what personalities are allowed in in the first place.
- machina_ex_deus 4y ago
  It's not the real world applicability that I care about, it's about verifying your understanding beyond just passive observation. It's very easy to give the wrong story about something true, but much harder to use wrong story to build something. I hardly care if nobody will gain anything from what you built - I only care that in building it, you proved your understanding. It doesn't even have to be building something useful. Even mathematical proofs count. It wasn't enough to hold a nice story in your head about the behavior of mathematical objects to get a proof - you had to use that understanding to write the mathematical proof. You did something that would fail if your understanding was incorrect - and everyone can objectively judge your success.
mettamage 4y ago
IMO, this is why game-designers, sales people, actors, anthropologists (to some extent) are IMO much closer to understanding human behavior than social psychologists.
analog31 4y ago
In my view, clinical psychology, like medical practice, is likely to be an art and not a science, for a long time. The reason is we can't wait for the science to come up to speed. People are suffering, and need relief, right now. My view is that replication is just one safeguard within science, but is not the only thing needed. Confirming or refuting isolated factoids doesn't tell us much more than the factoids themselves. I think a science needs to develop towards theories that connect those factoids into a framework. Psychology has not reached that stage yet. Compare to physics or chemistry. Some commentary has suggested that the replication crisis extends to those fields too. My graduate research project in physics was never replicated. But physics has a framework of theory that remains strong by connecting studies to one another, so that if one or more isolated studies fail on replication, the whole framework remains strong. In some sense, "useful" could include merely "useful to science."
- siva7 4y ago
  I don't think this could work out in medical practice or psychology. There are simply too many variables that influence the outcome in those disciplines and too many unknowns how those things work in detail that can't be expressed in a formula. The brain still remains a mistery
dan_mctree 4y ago
Strongly agree. The main reason we got so much out of physics and chemistry has little to do with the statistical methods and peer review they employed, and much more with how obviously some things were repeatable when found. You need basically 100% reproduction rates to be able to do something truly useful and that's a bar you just can't hit with some fields
mattkrause 4y ago
That's not fair--or true. Work on perception and memory has held up astonishingly well. Behavioral experiments from the 1800s and 1900s basically nailed down the properties of the retina, a hundred years before we had the techniques to measure it physiologically. It's also integrated in a lot of "real world" applications: a lot of work has gone into building psychoacoustic models for audio codecs, color spaces for image reproduction, etc. Findings about attention and eye movements influence UX, and all sorts of products exploit behavioral biases (often for nefarious ends).

barry-cotter 4y ago

> Clinical psychology is still useful in my opinion. It still helps people. There's a real feedback loop where understanding can change outcomes. Things psychological research has taught us about clinical psychology; the therapeutic relationship is the only thing that reliably predicts helping the client. Not the school of thought, not training, whether you vibe with the therapist.

bonoboTP 4y ago

In fundamental research you don't typically know the potential applications where it will be useful. In fact I dislike the current overfocus on applicability, your research can't get media-boosted unless you somehow say it's a step in curing cancer or solving climate change. Similarly, pure math is valuable even without foreseeable uses (if pressed, they will say cryptography etc. but they shouldn't have to). Curiosity to understand how the world works is enough as motivation in science. Applications can also provide ideas but then you can also diverge from them and follow directions that look intrinsically interesting or perplexing. What you note is not addressing the core problem, namely that academia selects for certain non-diverse personality traits, like very high conscientious ess, wanting to please authority, tolerance of monotony etc which all lead to it becoming an inside baseball, working to scratch each other's backs. You want to force them to turn away from their navel gazing by orienting them to concrete useful applications but what you really should incentivize is research whose main characteristic isn't that it's useful or all the current trendy hivemind consensus thinks it's what you're supposed to do, but the pursuit of understanding, the desire to see clearly and get closer to truth. And this doesn't just depend on what you incentivize with metrics but also what personalities are allowed in in the first place.

machina_ex_deus 4y ago
It's not the real world applicability that I care about, it's about verifying your understanding beyond just passive observation. It's very easy to give the wrong story about something true, but much harder to use wrong story to build something. I hardly care if nobody will gain anything from what you built - I only care that in building it, you proved your understanding. It doesn't even have to be building something useful. Even mathematical proofs count. It wasn't enough to hold a nice story in your head about the behavior of mathematical objects to get a proof - you had to use that understanding to write the mathematical proof. You did something that would fail if your understanding was incorrect - and everyone can objectively judge your success.

mettamage 4y ago

IMO, this is why game-designers, sales people, actors, anthropologists (to some extent) are IMO much closer to understanding human behavior than social psychologists.

analog31 4y ago

In my view, clinical psychology, like medical practice, is likely to be an art and not a science, for a long time. The reason is we can't wait for the science to come up to speed. People are suffering, and need relief, right now. My view is that replication is just one safeguard within science, but is not the only thing needed. Confirming or refuting isolated factoids doesn't tell us much more than the factoids themselves. I think a science needs to develop towards theories that connect those factoids into a framework. Psychology has not reached that stage yet. Compare to physics or chemistry. Some commentary has suggested that the replication crisis extends to those fields too. My graduate research project in physics was never replicated. But physics has a framework of theory that remains strong by connecting studies to one another, so that if one or more isolated studies fail on replication, the whole framework remains strong. In some sense, "useful" could include merely "useful to science."

siva7 4y ago
I don't think this could work out in medical practice or psychology. There are simply too many variables that influence the outcome in those disciplines and too many unknowns how those things work in detail that can't be expressed in a formula. The brain still remains a mistery

dan_mctree 4y ago

Strongly agree. The main reason we got so much out of physics and chemistry has little to do with the statistical methods and peer review they employed, and much more with how obviously some things were repeatable when found. You need basically 100% reproduction rates to be able to do something truly useful and that's a bar you just can't hit with some fields

mattkrause 4y ago

That's not fair--or true. Work on perception and memory has held up astonishingly well. Behavioral experiments from the 1800s and 1900s basically nailed down the properties of the retina, a hundred years before we had the techniques to measure it physiologically. It's also integrated in a lot of "real world" applications: a lot of work has gone into building psychoacoustic models for audio codecs, color spaces for image reproduction, etc. Findings about attention and eye movements influence UX, and all sorts of products exploit behavioral biases (often for nefarious ends).