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Psychology is the study of the most complex machine in existence, a machine smart enough to do psychology. Of course it's really difficult to test it compared t

Psychology is the study of the most complex machine in existence, a machine smart enough to do psychology. Of course it's really difficult to test it compared to simpler sciences. But if the author is trying to insinuate no meaningful progress in psychology was made in the last X years because of some twitter poll then that's doubtful -- scientists getting to the point they can scan neurons and reconstruct what you see through the activations. I do agree that you could generate endless reams of pseudo-data about the human behavior by labeling and classifying tiny patterns, and that that's not very practical. But that doesn't invalidate the rest. Perhaps one way to operationalize psychology would be to take a huge dataset, e.g. 1 million tinder profiles, and have a contest to identify the .1% that got married or something (and how long they stayed married for).

barrysteve 3y ago
The idea that you can read minds or reconstruct 'thought pictures', as if that's something everybody has, is going to require a lot of evidence. How about we don't "operationalize psychology". And how about we don't "operationalize psychology" by using an app meant to hook up singles and build chance encounters for love. The mere knowledge that some of "us" will go to any lengths to manipulate psychology and make hidden adjustments "for our own benefit" smacks of the British Empire we left behind. Or at least, that's a polite way to hint that "operationalizing psychology" is starting to sound like the 1940s, and the last resort is to link your 'psycho' thinking to the British Empire as a saving grace, as if that dead tree could cast a blanket over this 'lab monkey' nonsense. Scanning neurons is neuroscience, not psychology. Given that pop psychology is pushing Jung around like he's still a recent discovery, then yeah, it hasn't progressed much.

barrysteve 3y ago

The idea that you can read minds or reconstruct 'thought pictures', as if that's something everybody has, is going to require a lot of evidence. How about we don't "operationalize psychology". And how about we don't "operationalize psychology" by using an app meant to hook up singles and build chance encounters for love. The mere knowledge that some of "us" will go to any lengths to manipulate psychology and make hidden adjustments "for our own benefit" smacks of the British Empire we left behind. Or at least, that's a polite way to hint that "operationalizing psychology" is starting to sound like the 1940s, and the last resort is to link your 'psycho' thinking to the British Empire as a saving grace, as if that dead tree could cast a blanket over this 'lab monkey' nonsense. Scanning neurons is neuroscience, not psychology. Given that pop psychology is pushing Jung around like he's still a recent discovery, then yeah, it hasn't progressed much.