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I talk a lot to people who are training to become therapist, to PhD's in psychology, and read a lot of psychology papers. If there is one thing it's time for th

I talk a lot to people who are training to become therapist, to PhD's in psychology, and read a lot of psychology papers. If there is one thing it's time for then it's for academia to get out of their ivory tower and face the real world. As Taleb puts it: “I will repeat the following until I am hoarse: it is contagion that determines the fate of a theory in social science, not its validity.” Or as Yarkoni & Westfall put it: "psychology's near-total focus on explaining the causes of behavior has led much of the field to be populated by research programs that provide intricate theories of psychological mechanism but that have little (or unknown) ability to predict future behaviors with any appreciable accuracy." [1] I personally think it's fair to compare social science research with monks researching a religious text. They can work hard for years without ever coming up with a new idea. So what's the solution? Somehow dogmatism should be reduced. This will probably happen once the government figures out how to align incentives better. Currently, peer review and grant proposals are largely done by academic peers. These peers can strengthen dogmatic ideas. Somehow, there should be a mechanism introduced that counters this. [1]: https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691617693393 https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691617693393

zer00eyz 2y ago
> If there is one thing it's time for then it's for academia to get out of their ivory tower and face the real world. I dont disagree but there is a deeper issue with the academic side of things. > Currently, peer review and grant proposals are largely done by academic peers. These peers can strengthen dogmatic ideas. Somehow, there should be a mechanism introduced that counters this. Psych in general is where the whole reproducibility crisis bubble up from. We're paying attention to it everywhere else but the work here is just rotten to the core. If no one replicates, and especially here, we have major issues because everything is fuzzy.
- somenameforme 2y ago
  While indirectly equivalent, I think the far worse side of the coin than "strengthening dogmatic ideas" is shooting down ideas that run contrary to dogma, precisely because they run contrary to dogma. There are some great examples in science, like relativity, where basically everybody just tossed aside the old and embraced the new. But those are absolutely the exception, rather than the rule. There's a reason no less than Max Planck remarked that, "Science progresses one funeral at a time."
kombookcha 2y ago
"I personally think it's fair to compare social science research with monks researching a religious text. They can work hard for years without ever coming up with a new idea." Based on my own experiences, I really don't think this applies to other social sciences very well at all. I'm not particularly familiar with psych papers, which may well be mostly based on text-on-text, but in all the social science disciplines I am familiar with there's a great deal of focus on fieldwork and diving into the messy nitty-gritty of the actual world. Is psych uniquely constrained from doing this somehow (patient ethics?), or is it a particular culture in the psych departments causing this?
- huijzer 2y ago
  > but in all the social science disciplines I am familiar with there's a great deal of focus on fieldwork and diving into the messy nitty-gritty of the actual world. Can you give examples? What I've seen is that questionnaires with high "validity" and "reliability" are put out to participants and then statistical tests are conducted to re-confirm significant results. However, these significant results typically do not mean that the results are practically useful. Maybe on average the results are significant, but the effect is too small to really be able to pick out individuals.
  - kombookcha 2y ago
    Certainly. I'm an anthropologist by training, where extensive fieldwork is the gold standard. Second to this comes a great deal of methodological nerd stuff (IE how to make sure you get good data from all that fieldwork). 'Theory' is mostly subsumed into this, and essentially comes in the form of securing the epistemic quality of the method. I'm passingly familiar with sociology, area studies, cultural studies and linguistics - all of which seem to me, like they also value real world observations in their respective areas much more highly than it sounds like psych does. From your description of these questionaires, it sounds like a methodology issue to me. If your baseline is a questionaire, then the questions you would think to ask are going to be informed by your preconceived notions of the issue, and you're forcing the raw data out there to conform to these formats you've set for it. If your chosen method for collecting the data is already distorting the field, then you're injecting a major risk of just confirming your own bias. I appreciate that psych is trying to get at a different type of knowledge, but from where I'm at this sounds like an "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" type of problem. I'm very much not trained to do statistical analysis though, which I believe is part of the toolkit for psych phds - so maybe it actually is the best tool for what they're trying to do.
CuriouslyC 2y ago
Research has shown that there is very little difference between therapeutic protocols, and most of the difference between them can be explained by the degree of engagement of the therapist in the life and challenges of the patient. Basically, the value of therapy is a sympathetic, grounding person sitting down with you and helping you sort out your life. The therapeutic modalities matter vastly less than the interpersonal skills and "centeredness" of the person you're talking to.
Spod_Gaju 2y ago
I 100% agree that it is dogma that inhibits the understanding and progression of treating human disorders. Take a look at Alzheimer's for example. They are still droning on and on about plaques as being the cause and despite trial after trial failing. The same is true in mental health. They were treating me with essentially the same medication they treated my mother with 50 years ago. 50 YEARS! No change! And yet every idea I approach them with they dismissed. Glad to hear this voice from you.

zer00eyz 2y ago

> If there is one thing it's time for then it's for academia to get out of their ivory tower and face the real world. I dont disagree but there is a deeper issue with the academic side of things. > Currently, peer review and grant proposals are largely done by academic peers. These peers can strengthen dogmatic ideas. Somehow, there should be a mechanism introduced that counters this. Psych in general is where the whole reproducibility crisis bubble up from. We're paying attention to it everywhere else but the work here is just rotten to the core. If no one replicates, and especially here, we have major issues because everything is fuzzy.

somenameforme 2y ago
While indirectly equivalent, I think the far worse side of the coin than "strengthening dogmatic ideas" is shooting down ideas that run contrary to dogma, precisely because they run contrary to dogma. There are some great examples in science, like relativity, where basically everybody just tossed aside the old and embraced the new. But those are absolutely the exception, rather than the rule. There's a reason no less than Max Planck remarked that, "Science progresses one funeral at a time."

kombookcha 2y ago

"I personally think it's fair to compare social science research with monks researching a religious text. They can work hard for years without ever coming up with a new idea." Based on my own experiences, I really don't think this applies to other social sciences very well at all. I'm not particularly familiar with psych papers, which may well be mostly based on text-on-text, but in all the social science disciplines I am familiar with there's a great deal of focus on fieldwork and diving into the messy nitty-gritty of the actual world. Is psych uniquely constrained from doing this somehow (patient ethics?), or is it a particular culture in the psych departments causing this?

huijzer 2y ago
> but in all the social science disciplines I am familiar with there's a great deal of focus on fieldwork and diving into the messy nitty-gritty of the actual world. Can you give examples? What I've seen is that questionnaires with high "validity" and "reliability" are put out to participants and then statistical tests are conducted to re-confirm significant results. However, these significant results typically do not mean that the results are practically useful. Maybe on average the results are significant, but the effect is too small to really be able to pick out individuals.
- kombookcha 2y ago
  Certainly. I'm an anthropologist by training, where extensive fieldwork is the gold standard. Second to this comes a great deal of methodological nerd stuff (IE how to make sure you get good data from all that fieldwork). 'Theory' is mostly subsumed into this, and essentially comes in the form of securing the epistemic quality of the method. I'm passingly familiar with sociology, area studies, cultural studies and linguistics - all of which seem to me, like they also value real world observations in their respective areas much more highly than it sounds like psych does. From your description of these questionaires, it sounds like a methodology issue to me. If your baseline is a questionaire, then the questions you would think to ask are going to be informed by your preconceived notions of the issue, and you're forcing the raw data out there to conform to these formats you've set for it. If your chosen method for collecting the data is already distorting the field, then you're injecting a major risk of just confirming your own bias. I appreciate that psych is trying to get at a different type of knowledge, but from where I'm at this sounds like an "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" type of problem. I'm very much not trained to do statistical analysis though, which I believe is part of the toolkit for psych phds - so maybe it actually is the best tool for what they're trying to do.

CuriouslyC 2y ago

Research has shown that there is very little difference between therapeutic protocols, and most of the difference between them can be explained by the degree of engagement of the therapist in the life and challenges of the patient. Basically, the value of therapy is a sympathetic, grounding person sitting down with you and helping you sort out your life. The therapeutic modalities matter vastly less than the interpersonal skills and "centeredness" of the person you're talking to.

Spod_Gaju 2y ago

I 100% agree that it is dogma that inhibits the understanding and progression of treating human disorders. Take a look at Alzheimer's for example. They are still droning on and on about plaques as being the cause and despite trial after trial failing. The same is true in mental health. They were treating me with essentially the same medication they treated my mother with 50 years ago. 50 YEARS! No change! And yet every idea I approach them with they dismissed. Glad to hear this voice from you.