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I am a little surprised how much anti-Psychology sentiment there is on HN. I know it is typically viewed as a 'liberal' field, and perhaps has a harder time qu

I am a little surprised how much anti-Psychology sentiment there is on HN. I know it is typically viewed as a 'liberal' field, and perhaps has a harder time quantifying measurements. It is more difficult to measure a human trait, than to measure a temperature. I'm wondering what the options are? We can't just dismiss Psychology, cancel an entire field because it has difficulties. Why can't we study humans, what study of humans would take the place of Psychology? I'd say all those pointing to the successes of 'hard' sciences, have it easier. Isn't iterative improvement what all science is about?

Xcelerate 3y ago
> I am a little surprised how much anti-Psychology sentiment there is on HN. I know it is typically viewed as a 'liberal' field It has nothing to do with “liberal” or “conservative” fields of studies and everything to do with reproducibility and predictivity. If psychology could make predictions to the 13th decimal place like we are able to do for the gyromagnetic ratio of the electron (and confirm via experiment), there would be no complaints. There is also a tendency for the outcomes of psychology studies to be “oversold” in a sense. To be fair, this is more often due to the media sensationalizing the results or reading something into them that isn’t there, but you don’t see this as often in physics (well, maybe a bit with quantum mechanics and black holes).
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  I'd say a large part of the bias here is because the media over-hypes the results, which isn't necessarily the fault of the field. All fields are driven to hype results to get more research dollars. There does seem to be a bit more backlash when Psychology is over-hyped then when others do it. But we do need to study humans, and they are hard to quantify. It is very misleading to compare measuring electrons to measuring 'how do I feel'. It is difficult to measure. That doesn't mean not to. It seems like here the sentiment is strongly to go ahead and toss the baby out with the bath water.
  - plewd 3y ago
    But the media often picks up on over-hyped results from research studies that are either extremely biased or p-hacked. Also reminds me of that one psychology study where they made a total coincidence into a correlation which the media went crazy over (https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2015/05/29/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-chocolate-helps-weight-loss-heres-how/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2015/05/29/i-fooled-m...).
- canadiantim 3y ago
  economics is worse than psychology
  - Huralfool 3y ago
    [dead]
  - pc86 3y ago
    > > A is bad. > B is worse! What good is a comment like this, especially when B is completely unrelated to what anyone is talking about?
- wholinator2 3y ago
  Well, i don't know, i think lots of things in physics have been oversold. It's just that the requirements for sellability is that someone has translated it into lay speech, whether or not that speech is technically accurate. We had the "god particle", black hole hype, quantum computing mega-hype, "fusion within 10 years", etc. I think you might just be a little too high in the food chain to see the vast amounts of lay speculation about physics that goes on. Certainly less volume of speech than psychology but i think for the respective popularity of the fields, people find it _more engaging_ to do speculation of physical reality than just another psychological paper. The majority of journalists oversell everything. It's just that it's less often that physics makes it into regular magazines and publications, i think
  - willcipriano 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - psychphysic 3y ago
      I suspect your comment will be removed by mods but I wanted to take a shot at replying anyways. I'm not sure psychologists are the drivers of that. Psychologists perhaps to a fault hate medications and other external influences on a body. Just look at their fervent anti-antidepresssnt pushes and opposition to antipsychotics. It's true that supportive psychological therapies are taking over and even contaminating CBT to the point it can feel like professional gaslighting.
    - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
      Nuclear Weapons?
      - willcipriano 3y ago
        Politicians generally decide where weapons are deployed. The potential for them to exist isn't up to the physicists they are merely reporting accurately the state of the natural world. I can't find the quote but Eisenhower reportly met with a physicist after the bombing of Japan who was upset with his role in it and said something to the effect of "get this whiny guy out of here, I'm the one who gave the order".
- hammock 3y ago
  > It has nothing to do with “liberal” or “conservative” OP was probably referring to liberal as in liberal arts (in comparison to hard sciences and/or professional degree tracks like engineering)
- jghn 3y ago
  > If psychology could make predictions to the 13th decimal place like we are able to do for the gyromagnetic ratio of the electron (and confirm via experiment), there would be no complaints This is an issue in biology as well/in general, and it doesn't get near the amount of pushback here as psychology.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  > If psychology could make predictions to the 13th decimal place like we are able to do for the gyromagnetic ratio I think you are missing that you are being measured that accurately, by marketing departments using methods from psychology.
- dehrmann 3y ago
  > If psychology could make predictions to the 13th decimal place like we are able to do for the gyromagnetic ratio of the electron (and confirm via experiment), there would be no complaints. That's not a fair comparison. Medicine struggles to make vaccines that are more than 95% effective. HIV tests are 99.97% accurate. The mind is even squishier, psychology will always look amateurish compared to physics.
- oceanplexian 3y ago
  It's because psychology is speculative neuroscience. And speculation isn't science, it's bullshitting. As software engineers on HN, we don't debug a computer program by talking about why the program might be feeling bad because it sexualized its mother as an infant or some other insane nonsense. I suspect once neuroscience gets better, and we can simply load up all our neurons into a computer and run the equivalent of GDB on it, it'll be really obvious that humans are 100% deterministic, people with psych problems are deficient in X, Y, or Z chemical or the wiring was screwed up in some place or another, and we'll be able to fix it. Eventually we will look back on Psychologists the same as doctors that did Bloodletting and "Balancing the Humors"- complete crackpots that set science back a few hundred years.
  - TheCoelacanth 3y ago
    You could just as easily call medicine "speculative biochemistry" or call chemistry "speculative particle physics". Not being able to model something at the lowest possible level doesn't make something inherently unscientific. It certainly makes it harder to test hypotheses and harder to be certain of the results, but it can still be scientific.
  - kozd 3y ago
    We also don't debug computer programs by looking at logic gates. We have abstractions built on top of that.
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    Why do you think the Bloodletters set back science? As if there was anybody at that time that would have made more rapid progress if only they hadn't been held back. Science isn't a strait line of analytical progression, and when it does get side tracked, it isn't some nefarious group. I could just as easily say if only those stupid String Theorist had just stepped aside, we wouldn't have set Physics back a decade. It's human dynamics, hmmm, I wonder if there is someone studying why groups get stuck in these loops, hmmm, why do humans seem to get stuck at a plateau that is difficult to think beyond, hmmmm let me think now, hmmm. Psychologist?
  - ownlife 3y ago
armoredkitten 3y ago
As someone who went through and got a PhD in psychology (I now work outside of the field, but that's neither here nor there)... There are definitely problems in the field, in some subareas more than others. I am pleased to see how much discussion in the field there has been regarding issues with replication, sample sizes, etc., and I do see improvements there. Quite honestly, the discussion about these things has instigated the same questions in other fields. The progress is slow, and it frustrates me that I don't feel like I can fully trust a lot of the older research in the field, but...there is progress. But I think you're right that it's a difficult field in general. Human minds are complicated -- possibly one of the most complex things in the universe to study. Human social interactions, relationships, group dynamics, identities, and start with those complex machines and now layer on top additional interdependent cause-effect relationships. The area of study is just, fundamentally, hard. The field has developed techniques to try to address this -- that's why psych surveys tend to ask the same question in multiple different ways. By triangulating in to a fuzzy concept from multiple angles, it at least gets us to the point where (hopefully) there's some systematic variance we can talk about and study. We're never going to get to the point where we can measure "agreeableness" or "prejudice" or "empathy" with as much precision as physicists can measure changes in an atom. But studying the human condition in as systematic a way as we can still feels incredibly important to me, to do what we can to improve human flourishing.
- ksey3 3y ago
  Progress in physics was/is also slow. People couldn't explain what the compass was doing for a few thousand years. Systematic futzing about and day dreaming was required over multiple centuries. That is the norm when you are given a 3 inch chimp brain to grok the universe. The history of science shows us how much luck and blundering about in the darkness is required. Wish it was taught more.
deleted 3y ago
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tourgen 3y ago
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unmole 3y ago
> We can't just dismiss Psychology, cancel an entire field because it has difficulties. We can stop pretending that the garbage currently produced has any value whatsoever.
p-e-w 3y ago
[flagged]
- omginternets 3y ago
  It might be useful for you to distinguish between the psychoanalytical tradition of psychology (which is not a science) from the more recent field of cognitive science. Lacan is nowhere to be found in the OP’s paper, for example, and by conflating the two, you’re throwing out a lot of very robust science. To be a bit more direct (though please be assured that I mean no disrespect): bringing up Lacan in this conversation tells me you don’t know psychological science very well. You’re missing out. :)
  - p-e-w 3y ago
    > bringing up Lacan in this conversation tells me you don’t know psychological science very well Lacan is one of the most famous psychologists of all time. Probably only Freud and Jung would rank above him in that regard. That in itself is a pretty big indictment of the field, since the latter two are not much better. But the problem is not that Lacan was spouting garbage while being a psychologist. The problem is that other psychologists were tolerating that garbage, instead of ostracizing him. That's as if an immunologist who spreads conspiracy theories about vaccines containing microchips somehow continued to be invited to conferences, and have his peers listen to him and discuss and debate his "theories". It's obvious that the field as a whole is incapable of cleanly separating itself from left-wing politics, philosophical intellectualism, and outright nonsense.
    - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
      Famous doesn't mean current. Don't think anybody is following Lacan, Freud, Jung today. They were earlier pioneers. Just like physicist don't believe in the 'ether' anymore. You are citing current physics and how great it is, but then cite old psychologist as if they are current.
      - p-e-w 3y ago
strogonoff 3y ago
It might seem as if the modern STEM crowd discounts psychology as nearly pseudoscience, perhaps only necessary as a workaround until they figure out how exactly those atoms cause our consciousness (at best; those who demote consciousness to the level of illusion would probably not grant even that). They forget that their “hard” natural sciences offer no proof of consciousness being caused by neurons and atoms, or them being somehow more “objectively real” than consciousness; indeed, this is not even a question physics et al. would have in their scope. If you think about it, your mind is the only thing you have direct unmediated access to—and in any science, even physics, it is always at the beginning and the end of any discovery: once you remove the intermediate steps, all discoveries and all their real-world applications and implications ultimately concern the state of human mind. However, shiny gains offered by physics and respective technological advances can be blinding enough that we forget what’s fundamental.
- snapcaster 3y ago
  it IS pseudoscience. Wake up! Every single thing laypeople learn about psychology and experiment results turns out to be made up! there is not a single piece of value in the existing field because even if there were you couldn't possibly separate it from the junk!
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    You said it > Every single thing laypeople learn about psychology and experiment Laypeople miss-understand something, then blame the psychologist for their own miss-understanding. Sounds like you and a lot of comments here.
    - snapcaster 3y ago
      Every single notable experiment I was taught about in Psychology class has shown to not be reproducible at all. What am I misunderstanding?
      - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
newaccount74 3y ago
I've done my degree in an obscure subfield of quantum mechanics, and after having read all those papers, I can tell you they are no more sound than the average psychology paper. The only difference is that everyone thinks they are specialists in human psychology, so they feel like they can dismiss everything that doesn't fit their prior assumptions. Papers on quantum mechanics start with so much math that noone outside the subfield has any idea what it says, so noone dares to dismiss it.
- kelipso 3y ago
  So you're familiar with both quantum mechanics papers and psychology papers? Give me a break...one comes across terrible papers in all fields but in psychology and sociology, you see terrible papers along with the science journalism that follows it, plus the whole replication crisis. Whole field looks like a mess.
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    He has a degree in the field, what do you have? Armchair anger at those nasty scientists. > my degree in an obscure subfield of quantum mechanics
    - kelipso 3y ago
      You can't read or what? He says he's familiar with quantum mechanics literature and psychology literature, not exactly common is it? I have a CS PhD, so I know enough about research thanks. What do you have? Some nonsensical crap about how psychology is growing or whatever so forgive them lol.
      - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
        Here is the quote so you can read it again. >"I've done my degree in an obscure subfield of quantum mechanics" Guess I'm wondering why his 'degree in un-related field and have read some psychology', is not as valid as your 'some degree in un-related field, and have read some psychology'. Or do you think your CS PhD came with more psychology course work than his quantum mechanics degree? You might need some Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. There are a lot of studies that show it works.
wrp 3y ago
For a criticism of Psychology from a giant in the quantitative approach try: Meehl, Paul E. 1990. "Why summaries of research on psychological theories are often uninterpretable." Psychological Reports 66:195-244. He gives a very detailed discussion of several factors that combine to make most psychology research (in his opinion) worthless. His takeaway quote: I think that for most faculty in soft psychology the full acceptance of my line of thought would involve a painful realization that one has achieved some notoriety, tenure, economic security and the like by engaging, to speak bluntly, in a bunch of nothing.
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Just realized the disconnect. HN is against Psychology mostly because of measurements and reproducibility. But they are only applying this standard to published scientific papers. When Really, Psychology is most used in -> MARKETTING. Marketing is all Psychology, and they definitely do form hypothesis, measure results, and iterate on that. They are measuring you all day. Everything you see, taste, feel, smell, is a Psychology Experiment done by Marketing departments in order to control your behavior. And by control your behavior, I mean, that is testing a hypothesis in the scientific method. So, if that entire field is included into the field of 'Psychology', then yes it has grown by leaps and bounds as a science. Just not benevolently, or published in a scientific journal.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  Is marketing getting good results from its research? As always, with private, closed-down research, you can't tell. The instances I notice do clearly lead to bad outcomes, but that's a highly biased sample. But anyway, I disagree that you can point to it as a counter-example. Not until you get some public data.
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    I think the argument in this thread is that Psychology is a completely invalid science, complete BS with no valid results. I am saying, even if results are private, and we don't have public data, you can still look at the world around you and see the results. I have read interviews with app developers that flat out say they have entire departments of psychologist dedicated to increasing screen time. Those are un-published, but that doesn't mean it isn't real and happening. Thus you can infer that the entire field of Psychology is not complete BS, since money is going into it for the results it provides. It isn't pretty, and it isn't fitting the high ideals of 'pure science". That doesn't mean we can ignore the entire field, call it fake, or say it is all BS.
    - marcosdumay 3y ago
      What I am saying is that even if you are in one of those companies hiring lots of psychologists, you don't have any idea if they add anything or if you just got lucky. > Those are un-published, but that doesn't mean it isn't real and happening. It means you don't know what is happening.
foolswisdom 3y ago
Yes, iterative improvement is the goal. But the problem is when everyone in the field believes X and must not challenge it else lost standing etc., then people don't actually delve into assumptions as much they should. A clip on the topic (from several years back) that I thought stated it well: https://youtu.be/Zj7OmxhHsZY https://youtu.be/Zj7OmxhHsZY
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  Good Video. Is he a Psychologist? I think something not discussed on this thread, is that Psychologist can study other Psychologist studies, study the results and how the biases are formed, and start to work on theories for better studies.
  - foolswisdom 3y ago
    He is a social psychologist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Haidt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Haidt
somenameforme 3y ago
In the movie "A Beautiful Mind" one scene, quite brief and irrelevant, was quite interesting. Our protagonist, genius beyond measure, was in a courtyard amongst a flock of pigeons. He was intently studying his subjects, implicitly determined to solve the riddle, crack the pattern, of their behaviors and movements. It leads to an interesting thought. Could you actually crack the riddle of pigeon movement given access to the entirety of humanity's resources? Be those resources manpower, computation, or funding? I really doubt it. It's going to be a chaotic interdependent system, rife with individual variation, and a good deal of randomness and chaos thrown in for good measure. All with no reason to expect any sort of remotely normal or measurable distribution. I really don't think my opinion there is especially controversial. Yet, if not - then how is it we might instead imagine we can delve into the patterns of the human mind and psyche? Where complexity, chaos, and interdependence is many orders of magnitude greater? It just doesn't really make any sense to me. We only take it as a given because we're born into a society where this is a given. From astrology to phrenology history is littered with examples of "science" that weren't really science at all, just fields perpetuated by bias confirmation, lack of falsifiability, and so on. I often think we're stuck with some 'arrogance of the present' where, due to our advanced knowledge, we imagine we could surely never repeat the same mistakes of the past. Of course people of the past thought the exact same as well.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  I think this is excellent example of the problem. Very complex, with some chaos thrown in. I disagree that is is impossible. We continue to chip away at the problem, at least to an extent that it seems worth continuing, not stopping. This thread is filled with people that think Psychology is akin to astrology. But will then happily click on their phones that psychology has helped dial in to produce a response in them.
  - s1artibartfast 3y ago
    The conclusion that I draw is slightly different. We might not ever be able to deterministically predict human behavior, but that doesn't mean it's useless too identify Trends and develop heuristics. The problem is entirely with people confusing and treating Trends or heuristics as deterministic facts when they are far from it
picometer 3y ago
While I’m not anti-psychology, I understand that perspective. It’s precisely when social sciences try to apply methods or standards from the natural/‘hard’ sciences that things go wrong. It is more difficult, as you said, and it’s also qualitatively different. We need different models. Human traits may be measurable, but as observable emergent properties of a many-layered complex system, they’re are not at all like temperature or any other physical property. It gets darker than that. The veneer of certainty, backed by the successes of hard sciences but ostensibly applied to humans, creates a ripe environment for pseudoscience and grifters to take advantage of others during their most vulnerable times. Yes - we should study humans, and iteratively get better at it. But we need to tread carefully.
lukeplato 3y ago
check out metarationality: https://metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-bridge https://metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-bridge
atypicaluser 3y ago
You wrote: > Isn't iterative improvement what all science is about? Yes and no. There's more to science, but iterative improvement is a large part of it. My issue with psychology (and other soft sciences, e.g. sociology, economics) isn't so much its striving to find answers, but its adopting a one-sided worldview before that striving, thereby coloring their findings with that one side. Look at what you wrote--'I know it [psychology] is typically viewed as a 'liberal' field'. That's because it IS a liberal (well, a politically Progressive) field--its instructors, its researchers, its practitioners largely are self-admittedly liberal (and further Left on the political spectrum.) And when they hire, they hire like-minds.[1] (Which is a thing humans do--no one wants to work with people they... dislike... for some reason.) And so, because they've no opposing worldview in their ranks to say 'no', well... can their findings be trusted? [2] [1] A commentary on the perceived political homogeneity at the University--https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/the_value_of_ideological_diversity_among_university_faculty_draft.pdf https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/the_value_... [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26785836/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26785836/
- waboremo 3y ago
  From your first link: >One study found, for example, that a third of social psychologists admitted that they would be unwilling to hire a known conservative to the faculty, and nearly half thought that their colleagues would be unwilling to hire such a person.33 Subsequent work suggests that those findings are not limited to psychology, and that conservative scholars might have a similar willingness to discriminate against liberals.34 On the whole, there does not appear to be a robust pipeline of conservatives desperate to get into academia. This is substantially different from what you are suggesting, this idea that there is a natural bias when it seems to be a supply problem (and a dismissal of academia entirely, as the article links together the larger conservative push against higher education). Can't hire that which does not exist or believes your field is a farce.
  - ToValueFunfetti 3y ago
    I don't think that's the takeaway at all. There's a supply problem for women in STEM and our response has been to investigate every potential cause while investing in scholarships and outreach. If we found out that 33% of STEM employers were unwilling to hire women, we'd say, "Aha, that explains the supply problem. Let's fix that." I can't fathom spending tens of thousands of dollars to enter a highly competitve field where a third of employers will rule you out outright (and presumably more will discount you against other candidates). Even if conservatives aren't interested for other reasons, the presence of a supply problem does not rule out bias. There is evidence of substantial self-reported bias, so there's probably bias.
throw_pm23 3y ago
I find psychology had deeper insight when it was _less_ hard-sciency. A lot of social sciences seem to have "math-envy", and try to fit a subject to a tool that is not well suited for it. If I read some early literature (not Freud though, he's a charlatan), I often find deep insight, and observations that get to the heart of some issue in a way that is only half science and half art, but revealing some knowledge in a way art can as well. Current psychology is quite different, mostly dry. In summary, my issue is not lack of rigor, but too much rigor and lack of deep insight.
- lanstin 3y ago
  Clear thinking at the semantic layer is a gift that the humanities offers, in distinction from the gift of mathematical rigor that the physical sciences offer. The challenge for psychology is to combine them - extremely precise conceptual frameworks with the unknowns clearly delineated, and as much experimental rigor as possible. And being ready to have the conceptual frameworks altered by the flood of new insights from neuroscience. The big five personality types discussed in TFA tho are on solid experimental footing (of being stable characteristics of humans that explain about half of what we label as personality) and a fit subject for other experimental investigations like this on changes over a lifetime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
SkyBelow 3y ago
>I am a little surprised how much anti-Psychology sentiment there is on HN. When you consider the extent it is trusted to produce truth and the extent that such 'truth' influences public policy and law, I think encouraging distrust of psychology is a social good. There is a difference between talking the details with the experts who recognize the limits of existing studies and talking about 'Psychology says we should do X' with the general population who aren't aware of the concept of reproducibility. It is much like discussing the possible uses of crypto. If another friend in tech is talking about some possible benefit of crypto, I take a completely different approach than if my gram calls me up asking if I heard about new crypto tech X that will double her retirement.
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
> I'm wondering what the options are? We can't just dismiss Psychology, cancel an entire field because it has difficulties. Why can't we study humans, what study of humans would take the place of Psychology? Imagined if we studied and tried to understand how CPUs work by endlessly clicking around in the interfaces of popular user software. "Oooh, look, this one has a 'file' menu too! I think file menus might be one of the universal traits of all computation!". We know that there is such a thing as psychology, and when we finally understand it that the psychologists will have had nothing to do with that. Their insights are minimal on the best days, and non-existent the rest of the time. They're off heading in their own pseudo-science direction, and it's doubtful that they'll disband even after someone else figures out their science for them. It will just limp onwards like phrenology.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  >We know that there is such a thing as psychology, and when we finally understand it that the psychologists will have had nothing to do with that. Guess, that is the problem. Seems like most of the thread doesn't seem to think it can be studied at all. You seem to acknowledge it can be, just not by 'Psychologist'. I think this is a case of changing the title. Everyone seems to have a pretty negative view of the field of Psychology, so there are now a lot of other fields off doing Psychology but they changed their names, thus 'psychologists will have had nothing to do with that'. But where did it start? Or maybe I'm not up on the times. What I'm calling Psychology has up and left and call themselves neuroscientist now, or 'cognitive neuroscience'.
kansface 3y ago
The standard isn’t who has it easier or ease of quantifying - that’s totally irrelevant. The only standard can be in generating predictive models.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  Then we should keep trying, and analyze why the predictions aren't working, create new hypothesis and test again. Not toss out the whole endeavor. This whole thread is defeatist, like 'wow, humans are difficult to predict, thus it is obviously junk science, and we shouldn't even try'.
oilchange 3y ago
> It is more difficult to measure a human trait, than to measure a temperature. You might want to read up on the history of thermodynamics. It took decades to figure out how to define and measure temperature. It's far more difficult to measure temperature than a human trait because one requires precise definition and modeling while the latter doesn't. > Why can't we study humans, what study of humans would take the place of Psychology? Neuroscience. Psychology is the easy way out to doing real science. > I'd say all those pointing to the successes of 'hard' sciences, have it easier. "Hard science" is more difficult because hard science has to testable via experiment. It isn't just a bunch of people agreeing to a consensus. > Isn't iterative improvement what all science is about? But psychology isn't iterative. It isn't improvement. 99% of psychology is not testable. The biggest critics of psychology are pyschologists themselves ( at least the honest ones ). Ask yourself why there are many competing schools of psychology. And then ask yourself why there is no scientific or experimental way to find the "right or correct school of psychology". Psychology today is as scientific as astrology was hundreds of years ago. Until telescopes and radio waves allowed us to peer into the cosmos and gave us astronomy. The lack of tools and modeling of the human brain is what's holding back the science of the brain ( neuroscience ). Psychology is just modern day voodoo not different than astrology.
faeriechangling 3y ago
Psychologists are non-empiricists with authority and impact upon people's lives. I'm constantly aghast at the general lack of scepticism of psychology.
snapplebobapple 3y ago
I think its because the field seems prone to making up wild theories and just rolling with it (i.e. learned helplessness that was recently debunked with brain scans, most of what Freud contributed). perhaps opinion will change as brainscans/mri improve and make more rigorous studies of actual processes going on in the brain possible and then the norm. When i read studies in the field it often feels like a less reputable macroeconomics, which in turn feels like a less reputable theoretical physics...

Xcelerate 3y ago

> I am a little surprised how much anti-Psychology sentiment there is on HN. I know it is typically viewed as a 'liberal' field It has nothing to do with “liberal” or “conservative” fields of studies and everything to do with reproducibility and predictivity. If psychology could make predictions to the 13th decimal place like we are able to do for the gyromagnetic ratio of the electron (and confirm via experiment), there would be no complaints. There is also a tendency for the outcomes of psychology studies to be “oversold” in a sense. To be fair, this is more often due to the media sensationalizing the results or reading something into them that isn’t there, but you don’t see this as often in physics (well, maybe a bit with quantum mechanics and black holes).

FrustratedMonky 3y ago
I'd say a large part of the bias here is because the media over-hypes the results, which isn't necessarily the fault of the field. All fields are driven to hype results to get more research dollars. There does seem to be a bit more backlash when Psychology is over-hyped then when others do it. But we do need to study humans, and they are hard to quantify. It is very misleading to compare measuring electrons to measuring 'how do I feel'. It is difficult to measure. That doesn't mean not to. It seems like here the sentiment is strongly to go ahead and toss the baby out with the bath water.
- plewd 3y ago
  But the media often picks up on over-hyped results from research studies that are either extremely biased or p-hacked. Also reminds me of that one psychology study where they made a total coincidence into a correlation which the media went crazy over (https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2015/05/29/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-chocolate-helps-weight-loss-heres-how/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2015/05/29/i-fooled-m...).
canadiantim 3y ago
economics is worse than psychology
- Huralfool 3y ago
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- pc86 3y ago
  > > A is bad. > B is worse! What good is a comment like this, especially when B is completely unrelated to what anyone is talking about?
wholinator2 3y ago
Well, i don't know, i think lots of things in physics have been oversold. It's just that the requirements for sellability is that someone has translated it into lay speech, whether or not that speech is technically accurate. We had the "god particle", black hole hype, quantum computing mega-hype, "fusion within 10 years", etc. I think you might just be a little too high in the food chain to see the vast amounts of lay speculation about physics that goes on. Certainly less volume of speech than psychology but i think for the respective popularity of the fields, people find it _more engaging_ to do speculation of physical reality than just another psychological paper. The majority of journalists oversell everything. It's just that it's less often that physics makes it into regular magazines and publications, i think
- willcipriano 3y ago
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  - psychphysic 3y ago
    I suspect your comment will be removed by mods but I wanted to take a shot at replying anyways. I'm not sure psychologists are the drivers of that. Psychologists perhaps to a fault hate medications and other external influences on a body. Just look at their fervent anti-antidepresssnt pushes and opposition to antipsychotics. It's true that supportive psychological therapies are taking over and even contaminating CBT to the point it can feel like professional gaslighting.
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    Nuclear Weapons?
    - willcipriano 3y ago
      Politicians generally decide where weapons are deployed. The potential for them to exist isn't up to the physicists they are merely reporting accurately the state of the natural world. I can't find the quote but Eisenhower reportly met with a physicist after the bombing of Japan who was upset with his role in it and said something to the effect of "get this whiny guy out of here, I'm the one who gave the order".
hammock 3y ago
> It has nothing to do with “liberal” or “conservative” OP was probably referring to liberal as in liberal arts (in comparison to hard sciences and/or professional degree tracks like engineering)
jghn 3y ago
> If psychology could make predictions to the 13th decimal place like we are able to do for the gyromagnetic ratio of the electron (and confirm via experiment), there would be no complaints This is an issue in biology as well/in general, and it doesn't get near the amount of pushback here as psychology.
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
> If psychology could make predictions to the 13th decimal place like we are able to do for the gyromagnetic ratio I think you are missing that you are being measured that accurately, by marketing departments using methods from psychology.
dehrmann 3y ago
> If psychology could make predictions to the 13th decimal place like we are able to do for the gyromagnetic ratio of the electron (and confirm via experiment), there would be no complaints. That's not a fair comparison. Medicine struggles to make vaccines that are more than 95% effective. HIV tests are 99.97% accurate. The mind is even squishier, psychology will always look amateurish compared to physics.
oceanplexian 3y ago
It's because psychology is speculative neuroscience. And speculation isn't science, it's bullshitting. As software engineers on HN, we don't debug a computer program by talking about why the program might be feeling bad because it sexualized its mother as an infant or some other insane nonsense. I suspect once neuroscience gets better, and we can simply load up all our neurons into a computer and run the equivalent of GDB on it, it'll be really obvious that humans are 100% deterministic, people with psych problems are deficient in X, Y, or Z chemical or the wiring was screwed up in some place or another, and we'll be able to fix it. Eventually we will look back on Psychologists the same as doctors that did Bloodletting and "Balancing the Humors"- complete crackpots that set science back a few hundred years.
- TheCoelacanth 3y ago
  You could just as easily call medicine "speculative biochemistry" or call chemistry "speculative particle physics". Not being able to model something at the lowest possible level doesn't make something inherently unscientific. It certainly makes it harder to test hypotheses and harder to be certain of the results, but it can still be scientific.
- kozd 3y ago
  We also don't debug computer programs by looking at logic gates. We have abstractions built on top of that.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  Why do you think the Bloodletters set back science? As if there was anybody at that time that would have made more rapid progress if only they hadn't been held back. Science isn't a strait line of analytical progression, and when it does get side tracked, it isn't some nefarious group. I could just as easily say if only those stupid String Theorist had just stepped aside, we wouldn't have set Physics back a decade. It's human dynamics, hmmm, I wonder if there is someone studying why groups get stuck in these loops, hmmm, why do humans seem to get stuck at a plateau that is difficult to think beyond, hmmmm let me think now, hmmm. Psychologist?
- ownlife 3y ago

armoredkitten 3y ago

As someone who went through and got a PhD in psychology (I now work outside of the field, but that's neither here nor there)... There are definitely problems in the field, in some subareas more than others. I am pleased to see how much discussion in the field there has been regarding issues with replication, sample sizes, etc., and I do see improvements there. Quite honestly, the discussion about these things has instigated the same questions in other fields. The progress is slow, and it frustrates me that I don't feel like I can fully trust a lot of the older research in the field, but...there is progress. But I think you're right that it's a difficult field in general. Human minds are complicated -- possibly one of the most complex things in the universe to study. Human social interactions, relationships, group dynamics, identities, and start with those complex machines and now layer on top additional interdependent cause-effect relationships. The area of study is just, fundamentally, hard. The field has developed techniques to try to address this -- that's why psych surveys tend to ask the same question in multiple different ways. By triangulating in to a fuzzy concept from multiple angles, it at least gets us to the point where (hopefully) there's some systematic variance we can talk about and study. We're never going to get to the point where we can measure "agreeableness" or "prejudice" or "empathy" with as much precision as physicists can measure changes in an atom. But studying the human condition in as systematic a way as we can still feels incredibly important to me, to do what we can to improve human flourishing.

ksey3 3y ago
Progress in physics was/is also slow. People couldn't explain what the compass was doing for a few thousand years. Systematic futzing about and day dreaming was required over multiple centuries. That is the norm when you are given a 3 inch chimp brain to grok the universe. The history of science shows us how much luck and blundering about in the darkness is required. Wish it was taught more.

deleted 3y ago

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tourgen 3y ago

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unmole 3y ago

> We can't just dismiss Psychology, cancel an entire field because it has difficulties. We can stop pretending that the garbage currently produced has any value whatsoever.

p-e-w 3y ago

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omginternets 3y ago
It might be useful for you to distinguish between the psychoanalytical tradition of psychology (which is not a science) from the more recent field of cognitive science. Lacan is nowhere to be found in the OP’s paper, for example, and by conflating the two, you’re throwing out a lot of very robust science. To be a bit more direct (though please be assured that I mean no disrespect): bringing up Lacan in this conversation tells me you don’t know psychological science very well. You’re missing out. :)
- p-e-w 3y ago
  > bringing up Lacan in this conversation tells me you don’t know psychological science very well Lacan is one of the most famous psychologists of all time. Probably only Freud and Jung would rank above him in that regard. That in itself is a pretty big indictment of the field, since the latter two are not much better. But the problem is not that Lacan was spouting garbage while being a psychologist. The problem is that other psychologists were tolerating that garbage, instead of ostracizing him. That's as if an immunologist who spreads conspiracy theories about vaccines containing microchips somehow continued to be invited to conferences, and have his peers listen to him and discuss and debate his "theories". It's obvious that the field as a whole is incapable of cleanly separating itself from left-wing politics, philosophical intellectualism, and outright nonsense.
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    Famous doesn't mean current. Don't think anybody is following Lacan, Freud, Jung today. They were earlier pioneers. Just like physicist don't believe in the 'ether' anymore. You are citing current physics and how great it is, but then cite old psychologist as if they are current.
    - p-e-w 3y ago

strogonoff 3y ago

It might seem as if the modern STEM crowd discounts psychology as nearly pseudoscience, perhaps only necessary as a workaround until they figure out how exactly those atoms cause our consciousness (at best; those who demote consciousness to the level of illusion would probably not grant even that). They forget that their “hard” natural sciences offer no proof of consciousness being caused by neurons and atoms, or them being somehow more “objectively real” than consciousness; indeed, this is not even a question physics et al. would have in their scope. If you think about it, your mind is the only thing you have direct unmediated access to—and in any science, even physics, it is always at the beginning and the end of any discovery: once you remove the intermediate steps, all discoveries and all their real-world applications and implications ultimately concern the state of human mind. However, shiny gains offered by physics and respective technological advances can be blinding enough that we forget what’s fundamental.

snapcaster 3y ago
it IS pseudoscience. Wake up! Every single thing laypeople learn about psychology and experiment results turns out to be made up! there is not a single piece of value in the existing field because even if there were you couldn't possibly separate it from the junk!
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  You said it > Every single thing laypeople learn about psychology and experiment Laypeople miss-understand something, then blame the psychologist for their own miss-understanding. Sounds like you and a lot of comments here.
  - snapcaster 3y ago
    Every single notable experiment I was taught about in Psychology class has shown to not be reproducible at all. What am I misunderstanding?
    - FrustratedMonky 3y ago

newaccount74 3y ago

I've done my degree in an obscure subfield of quantum mechanics, and after having read all those papers, I can tell you they are no more sound than the average psychology paper. The only difference is that everyone thinks they are specialists in human psychology, so they feel like they can dismiss everything that doesn't fit their prior assumptions. Papers on quantum mechanics start with so much math that noone outside the subfield has any idea what it says, so noone dares to dismiss it.

kelipso 3y ago
So you're familiar with both quantum mechanics papers and psychology papers? Give me a break...one comes across terrible papers in all fields but in psychology and sociology, you see terrible papers along with the science journalism that follows it, plus the whole replication crisis. Whole field looks like a mess.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  He has a degree in the field, what do you have? Armchair anger at those nasty scientists. > my degree in an obscure subfield of quantum mechanics
  - kelipso 3y ago
    You can't read or what? He says he's familiar with quantum mechanics literature and psychology literature, not exactly common is it? I have a CS PhD, so I know enough about research thanks. What do you have? Some nonsensical crap about how psychology is growing or whatever so forgive them lol.
    - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
      Here is the quote so you can read it again. >"I've done my degree in an obscure subfield of quantum mechanics" Guess I'm wondering why his 'degree in un-related field and have read some psychology', is not as valid as your 'some degree in un-related field, and have read some psychology'. Or do you think your CS PhD came with more psychology course work than his quantum mechanics degree? You might need some Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. There are a lot of studies that show it works.

wrp 3y ago

For a criticism of Psychology from a giant in the quantitative approach try: Meehl, Paul E. 1990. "Why summaries of research on psychological theories are often uninterpretable." Psychological Reports 66:195-244. He gives a very detailed discussion of several factors that combine to make most psychology research (in his opinion) worthless. His takeaway quote: I think that for most faculty in soft psychology the full acceptance of my line of thought would involve a painful realization that one has achieved some notoriety, tenure, economic security and the like by engaging, to speak bluntly, in a bunch of nothing.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

Just realized the disconnect. HN is against Psychology mostly because of measurements and reproducibility. But they are only applying this standard to published scientific papers. When Really, Psychology is most used in -> MARKETTING. Marketing is all Psychology, and they definitely do form hypothesis, measure results, and iterate on that. They are measuring you all day. Everything you see, taste, feel, smell, is a Psychology Experiment done by Marketing departments in order to control your behavior. And by control your behavior, I mean, that is testing a hypothesis in the scientific method. So, if that entire field is included into the field of 'Psychology', then yes it has grown by leaps and bounds as a science. Just not benevolently, or published in a scientific journal.

marcosdumay 3y ago
Is marketing getting good results from its research? As always, with private, closed-down research, you can't tell. The instances I notice do clearly lead to bad outcomes, but that's a highly biased sample. But anyway, I disagree that you can point to it as a counter-example. Not until you get some public data.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  I think the argument in this thread is that Psychology is a completely invalid science, complete BS with no valid results. I am saying, even if results are private, and we don't have public data, you can still look at the world around you and see the results. I have read interviews with app developers that flat out say they have entire departments of psychologist dedicated to increasing screen time. Those are un-published, but that doesn't mean it isn't real and happening. Thus you can infer that the entire field of Psychology is not complete BS, since money is going into it for the results it provides. It isn't pretty, and it isn't fitting the high ideals of 'pure science". That doesn't mean we can ignore the entire field, call it fake, or say it is all BS.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    What I am saying is that even if you are in one of those companies hiring lots of psychologists, you don't have any idea if they add anything or if you just got lucky. > Those are un-published, but that doesn't mean it isn't real and happening. It means you don't know what is happening.

foolswisdom 3y ago

Yes, iterative improvement is the goal. But the problem is when everyone in the field believes X and must not challenge it else lost standing etc., then people don't actually delve into assumptions as much they should. A clip on the topic (from several years back) that I thought stated it well: https://youtu.be/Zj7OmxhHsZY https://youtu.be/Zj7OmxhHsZY

FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Good Video. Is he a Psychologist? I think something not discussed on this thread, is that Psychologist can study other Psychologist studies, study the results and how the biases are formed, and start to work on theories for better studies.
- foolswisdom 3y ago
  He is a social psychologist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Haidt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Haidt

somenameforme 3y ago

In the movie "A Beautiful Mind" one scene, quite brief and irrelevant, was quite interesting. Our protagonist, genius beyond measure, was in a courtyard amongst a flock of pigeons. He was intently studying his subjects, implicitly determined to solve the riddle, crack the pattern, of their behaviors and movements. It leads to an interesting thought. Could you actually crack the riddle of pigeon movement given access to the entirety of humanity's resources? Be those resources manpower, computation, or funding? I really doubt it. It's going to be a chaotic interdependent system, rife with individual variation, and a good deal of randomness and chaos thrown in for good measure. All with no reason to expect any sort of remotely normal or measurable distribution. I really don't think my opinion there is especially controversial. Yet, if not - then how is it we might instead imagine we can delve into the patterns of the human mind and psyche? Where complexity, chaos, and interdependence is many orders of magnitude greater? It just doesn't really make any sense to me. We only take it as a given because we're born into a society where this is a given. From astrology to phrenology history is littered with examples of "science" that weren't really science at all, just fields perpetuated by bias confirmation, lack of falsifiability, and so on. I often think we're stuck with some 'arrogance of the present' where, due to our advanced knowledge, we imagine we could surely never repeat the same mistakes of the past. Of course people of the past thought the exact same as well.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago
I think this is excellent example of the problem. Very complex, with some chaos thrown in. I disagree that is is impossible. We continue to chip away at the problem, at least to an extent that it seems worth continuing, not stopping. This thread is filled with people that think Psychology is akin to astrology. But will then happily click on their phones that psychology has helped dial in to produce a response in them.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  The conclusion that I draw is slightly different. We might not ever be able to deterministically predict human behavior, but that doesn't mean it's useless too identify Trends and develop heuristics. The problem is entirely with people confusing and treating Trends or heuristics as deterministic facts when they are far from it

picometer 3y ago

While I’m not anti-psychology, I understand that perspective. It’s precisely when social sciences try to apply methods or standards from the natural/‘hard’ sciences that things go wrong. It is more difficult, as you said, and it’s also qualitatively different. We need different models. Human traits may be measurable, but as observable emergent properties of a many-layered complex system, they’re are not at all like temperature or any other physical property. It gets darker than that. The veneer of certainty, backed by the successes of hard sciences but ostensibly applied to humans, creates a ripe environment for pseudoscience and grifters to take advantage of others during their most vulnerable times. Yes - we should study humans, and iteratively get better at it. But we need to tread carefully.

lukeplato 3y ago

check out metarationality: https://metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-bridge https://metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-bridge

atypicaluser 3y ago

You wrote: > Isn't iterative improvement what all science is about? Yes and no. There's more to science, but iterative improvement is a large part of it. My issue with psychology (and other soft sciences, e.g. sociology, economics) isn't so much its striving to find answers, but its adopting a one-sided worldview before that striving, thereby coloring their findings with that one side. Look at what you wrote--'I know it [psychology] is typically viewed as a 'liberal' field'. That's because it IS a liberal (well, a politically Progressive) field--its instructors, its researchers, its practitioners largely are self-admittedly liberal (and further Left on the political spectrum.) And when they hire, they hire like-minds.[1] (Which is a thing humans do--no one wants to work with people they... dislike... for some reason.) And so, because they've no opposing worldview in their ranks to say 'no', well... can their findings be trusted? [2] [1] A commentary on the perceived political homogeneity at the University--https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/the_value_of_ideological_diversity_among_university_faculty_draft.pdf https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/the_value_... [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26785836/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26785836/

waboremo 3y ago
From your first link: >One study found, for example, that a third of social psychologists admitted that they would be unwilling to hire a known conservative to the faculty, and nearly half thought that their colleagues would be unwilling to hire such a person.33 Subsequent work suggests that those findings are not limited to psychology, and that conservative scholars might have a similar willingness to discriminate against liberals.34 On the whole, there does not appear to be a robust pipeline of conservatives desperate to get into academia. This is substantially different from what you are suggesting, this idea that there is a natural bias when it seems to be a supply problem (and a dismissal of academia entirely, as the article links together the larger conservative push against higher education). Can't hire that which does not exist or believes your field is a farce.
- ToValueFunfetti 3y ago
  I don't think that's the takeaway at all. There's a supply problem for women in STEM and our response has been to investigate every potential cause while investing in scholarships and outreach. If we found out that 33% of STEM employers were unwilling to hire women, we'd say, "Aha, that explains the supply problem. Let's fix that." I can't fathom spending tens of thousands of dollars to enter a highly competitve field where a third of employers will rule you out outright (and presumably more will discount you against other candidates). Even if conservatives aren't interested for other reasons, the presence of a supply problem does not rule out bias. There is evidence of substantial self-reported bias, so there's probably bias.

throw_pm23 3y ago

I find psychology had deeper insight when it was _less_ hard-sciency. A lot of social sciences seem to have "math-envy", and try to fit a subject to a tool that is not well suited for it. If I read some early literature (not Freud though, he's a charlatan), I often find deep insight, and observations that get to the heart of some issue in a way that is only half science and half art, but revealing some knowledge in a way art can as well. Current psychology is quite different, mostly dry. In summary, my issue is not lack of rigor, but too much rigor and lack of deep insight.

lanstin 3y ago
Clear thinking at the semantic layer is a gift that the humanities offers, in distinction from the gift of mathematical rigor that the physical sciences offer. The challenge for psychology is to combine them - extremely precise conceptual frameworks with the unknowns clearly delineated, and as much experimental rigor as possible. And being ready to have the conceptual frameworks altered by the flood of new insights from neuroscience. The big five personality types discussed in TFA tho are on solid experimental footing (of being stable characteristics of humans that explain about half of what we label as personality) and a fit subject for other experimental investigations like this on changes over a lifetime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

SkyBelow 3y ago

>I am a little surprised how much anti-Psychology sentiment there is on HN. When you consider the extent it is trusted to produce truth and the extent that such 'truth' influences public policy and law, I think encouraging distrust of psychology is a social good. There is a difference between talking the details with the experts who recognize the limits of existing studies and talking about 'Psychology says we should do X' with the general population who aren't aware of the concept of reproducibility. It is much like discussing the possible uses of crypto. If another friend in tech is talking about some possible benefit of crypto, I take a completely different approach than if my gram calls me up asking if I heard about new crypto tech X that will double her retirement.

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago

> I'm wondering what the options are? We can't just dismiss Psychology, cancel an entire field because it has difficulties. Why can't we study humans, what study of humans would take the place of Psychology? Imagined if we studied and tried to understand how CPUs work by endlessly clicking around in the interfaces of popular user software. "Oooh, look, this one has a 'file' menu too! I think file menus might be one of the universal traits of all computation!". We know that there is such a thing as psychology, and when we finally understand it that the psychologists will have had nothing to do with that. Their insights are minimal on the best days, and non-existent the rest of the time. They're off heading in their own pseudo-science direction, and it's doubtful that they'll disband even after someone else figures out their science for them. It will just limp onwards like phrenology.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago
>We know that there is such a thing as psychology, and when we finally understand it that the psychologists will have had nothing to do with that. Guess, that is the problem. Seems like most of the thread doesn't seem to think it can be studied at all. You seem to acknowledge it can be, just not by 'Psychologist'. I think this is a case of changing the title. Everyone seems to have a pretty negative view of the field of Psychology, so there are now a lot of other fields off doing Psychology but they changed their names, thus 'psychologists will have had nothing to do with that'. But where did it start? Or maybe I'm not up on the times. What I'm calling Psychology has up and left and call themselves neuroscientist now, or 'cognitive neuroscience'.

kansface 3y ago

The standard isn’t who has it easier or ease of quantifying - that’s totally irrelevant. The only standard can be in generating predictive models.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Then we should keep trying, and analyze why the predictions aren't working, create new hypothesis and test again. Not toss out the whole endeavor. This whole thread is defeatist, like 'wow, humans are difficult to predict, thus it is obviously junk science, and we shouldn't even try'.

oilchange 3y ago

> It is more difficult to measure a human trait, than to measure a temperature. You might want to read up on the history of thermodynamics. It took decades to figure out how to define and measure temperature. It's far more difficult to measure temperature than a human trait because one requires precise definition and modeling while the latter doesn't. > Why can't we study humans, what study of humans would take the place of Psychology? Neuroscience. Psychology is the easy way out to doing real science. > I'd say all those pointing to the successes of 'hard' sciences, have it easier. "Hard science" is more difficult because hard science has to testable via experiment. It isn't just a bunch of people agreeing to a consensus. > Isn't iterative improvement what all science is about? But psychology isn't iterative. It isn't improvement. 99% of psychology is not testable. The biggest critics of psychology are pyschologists themselves ( at least the honest ones ). Ask yourself why there are many competing schools of psychology. And then ask yourself why there is no scientific or experimental way to find the "right or correct school of psychology". Psychology today is as scientific as astrology was hundreds of years ago. Until telescopes and radio waves allowed us to peer into the cosmos and gave us astronomy. The lack of tools and modeling of the human brain is what's holding back the science of the brain ( neuroscience ). Psychology is just modern day voodoo not different than astrology.

faeriechangling 3y ago

Psychologists are non-empiricists with authority and impact upon people's lives. I'm constantly aghast at the general lack of scepticism of psychology.

snapplebobapple 3y ago

I think its because the field seems prone to making up wild theories and just rolling with it (i.e. learned helplessness that was recently debunked with brain scans, most of what Freud contributed). perhaps opinion will change as brainscans/mri improve and make more rigorous studies of actual processes going on in the brain possible and then the norm. When i read studies in the field it often feels like a less reputable macroeconomics, which in turn feels like a less reputable theoretical physics...