20 ms·

Research in psychology: are we learning anything?

182 points by ctoth 2y ago

MailleQuiMaille 2y ago
Oof. What was the point of that article ? It felt like an unnecessary tough read.
- toolz 2y ago
  I found it insightful and pleasant to see that there are people inside of a an important field being intellectually curious and honest about the direction of their field of study.
  - MailleQuiMaille 2y ago
    That’s the promise that initially brought me to the article, and I like the reason of the article. I’m just not sure I got more info from the title than the content of the article itself. But that is maybe just me, another fellow psychologist.
godelski 2y ago
I think one of the great ironies is that psychology is one of the hardest sciences but is treated so soft. I say this holding a degree in physics! (undergrad physics, grad CS/ML) By this I mean that to make confident predictions, you need some serious statistics, but psych is one of the least math heavy sciences (thankfully they recently learned about Bayes and there's a revolution going on). Unlike physics or chemistry, you have so little control over your experiments. There's also the problem of measurements. We stress in experimental physics that you can only measure things by proxy. This is like you measure distance by using a ruler, and you're not really measuring "a meter" but the ruler's approximation of a meter. This is why we care so much about calibration and uncertainty, making multiple measurements with different measuring devices (gets stats on that class of device) and from different measuring techniques (e.g. ruler, laser range finder, etc). But psych? What the fuck does it even mean "to measure attention"?! It's hard enough dealing with the fact that "a meter" is "a construct" but in psych your concepts are much less well defined (i.e. higher uncertainty). And then everything is just empirical?! No causal system even (barely) attempted?! (In case you've ever wondered, this is a glimpse of why physicists struggle in ML. Not because the work, but accepting the results. See also Dyson and von Neumann's Elephant) I've jokingly likened psych to alchemy, meaning proto-chemistry -- chemistry prior to the atomic model (chemistry is "the study of electrons") -- or to astrology (astronomy pre-Kepler, not astrology we see today). I do think that's where the field is at, because there is no fundamental laws. That doesn't mean it isn't useful. Copernicus, Brahe, Galileo (same time as Kepler; they fought), and many others did amazing work and are essential figures to astronomy and astrophysics today. But psych is in an interesting boat. There are many tools at their disposal that could really help them make major strides towards determining these "laws". But it'll take a serious revolution and some major push to have some extremely tough math chops to get there. It likely won't come from ML (who suffers similar issues of rigor), but maybe from neuroscience or plain old stats (econ surprisingly contributes, more to sociology though). My worry is that the slop has too much momentum and that criticism will be dismissed because it is viewed as saying that the researchers are lazy, dumb, or incompetent rather than the monumental difficulties that are natural to the field (though both may be true, and one can cause the other). But I do hope to see it. Especially as someone in ML. We can really see the need to pin down these concepts such as cognition, consciousness, intelligence, reasoning, emotions, desire, thinking, will, and so on. These are not remotely easy problems to solve. But it is easy to convince yourself that you do understand, as long as you stop asking why after a certain point. And I do hope these conversations continue. Light is the best disinfectant. Science is about seeking truth, not answers. That often requires a lot of nuance, unfortunately. I know it will cause some to distrust science more, but I have the feeling they were already looking for reasons to.
- matusp 2y ago
  The parallels to ML you drew are on point. ML has this tendency to oversimplify complex phenomena with a easy to produce datasets, because that's what ML folks do, they find a smart and easy way to create a dataset and then they focus on the models. But this falls apart pretty quickly when you go into societal problems, such as hate speech or misinformation. Maybe there it would be nice to have some rigor and theory behind the dataset instead of just winging it. I am working on societal biases in NLP and I feel confident that majority of the datasets used have practically no validity.
  - godelski 2y ago
    I love ML. I came over from physics because it is so cool. But what I found odd is that few people were as interested in the math as I was, and even moreso were dismissive of the utility of the math (even when demonstrated!). It's gotten less mathy by the year. My criticisms of ML aren't out of hate, but actually love. We've done great work and you need to be excited to do research -- and sometimes blind and sometimes going just on faith --, because it is grueling dealing with so much failure. Because it's so easy to mistake failure for success and success for failure. It's a worry that we'll be overtaken by conmen, that I have serious concerns that we are not moving towards building AGI. But it's difficult to criticize and receive criticism (many physics groups specifically train students to take it and deal with this seemingly harsh language. To separate your internal value from your idea). So I want to be clear that my criticism (which you can see in many of my posts) is not a call to stop ML or even slow it down, but a desire to sail in a different direction (or even allow others to sail in those directions as opposed to being on one big ship). I do know there are others in psych with similar stories and beliefs. But there's a whole conversation about the structure of academia if we're going to discuss how to stop building mega ships and allow people to truly explore (there will always be a big ship, and there always should! But it should never prevent those from venturing out to explore the unknown. (Obviously I'm a fan of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry lol ))
    - NalNezumi 2y ago
      A tangent but if you're frustrated with the dismissal of math in ML I think you would probably enjoy diving in the Reinforcement Learning subfield; although some people tend to call it experimental math ;] ML applied to robotics/embodiment is another fun topic, where physics is very relevant in every step of it. A bit harder to dataset-hack when a physical system is crumbling in front of you.
guerrilla 2y ago
This was awesome. Don't just read the comments. Spoiler: psychology is not stupid, it's just young. I completely agree. This is how I see psychiatry after having experienced it for decades: it's just slightly better than going to a shaman. It's witchcraft and it mostly doesn't work because, well, it's witchcraft. We just are not at a point in history where we can do much about these things and we have to be adults and accept that. It's okay, there was a time when we'd die of simple infections too. That's how psychology is now, very young and full of witchcraft. Also, the article was funny... And wtf is that cheeseboat?
- kranke155 2y ago
  I think this is very fair. Every science that was starting out was indistinguishable from nonsense when starting out. But to say we shouldn't have pursued alchemy, because we didn't understand chemistry? One likely led to the other.
- masfuerte 2y ago
  I had the same question. It's Cincinnati chili. Wikipedia has an article [1] and Serious Eats goes into way more detail [2]. It actually sounds pretty good. I'll give it a go but with much less cheese. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnati_chili https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnati_chili [2]: https://www.seriouseats.com/cincinnati-chili-recipe-8402230 https://www.seriouseats.com/cincinnati-chili-recipe-8402230
cheeseomlit 2y ago
I agree with the authors identification of the problems in the field, but I'm not sure about their conclusions, or 'ways forward', which are 1. Debunk 'folk' psychology, with comparisons to the illegitimacy of 'folk' biology and 'folk' physics 2. Shake things up- meaning don't be afraid to question established dogma regardless of reputational risks I, a completely unqualified internet commenter, will give number 2 a try. I'd argue that psychology is a folk science, which is to say its not a science at all, but an art. As we've recently discovered, a massive swath of psychological studies are non-reproducible. So maybe we shouldnt treat psychology as if it were a rigorous scientific pursuit, but a philosophical one, or even a therapeutic one (IE. make it synonymous with psychiatry). Leave the science to the neuroscientists, who can quantify and measure the things they're studying (I understand there is some overlap between these fields sometimes). If your study consists of asking people questions and treating their answers as quantitative measurements of anything, I don't know- it feels like something has been lost in the sauce there. Too many variables to draw any meaningful conclusions.
- lazyeye 2y ago
  In a similar way Im wondering what gender studies would be called?
- dudu24 2y ago
  What a stereotypical hackernews comment, wow. > I, a completely unqualified internet commenter, Just leave it there.
  - dartos 2y ago
    How would people learn if they don’t get feedback on their ideas? Why go out of your way to gatekeep random internet comments?
    - mrguyorama 2y ago
      Sometimes you should make the effort to learn before sharing your idea with other people. So many people will blindly walk forward in the dark, completely in ignorance, and then get upset that people ask them to light a candle first.
bbor 2y ago
Oo my favorite topic! Great writing and the right themes are there, but I think they’re missing a lot by not taking a more historically-holistic view. Aka wondering what all the people who’ve been criticizing psychology think, from Chomsky to Piaget to Lacan to Freud to Husserl to Hegel to Kant to Locke to Scotus to Ibin-Sinna all the way back to the OG, Aristotle. Obviously some were more empirical than others so you can’t believe them all, but without engaging with their works — even in a negative way - you’re forced to reinvent the wheel, like the bitcoin people did with banking regulations. For example, this quote makes me feel the author thinks psychology is more special/unusual than it is: We’re in good company here, because this is how other fields got their start. Galileo spent a lot of time trying to overturn folk physics: “I know it seems like the Earth is standing still, but it’s actually moving.” In what way has any natural science been anything other than overturning folk theories? What else could you possibly do with systematic thought other than contradict unsystematic thought? In this case, this whole article is written from the assumption that true, proper, scientific psychology is exclusively the domain of the Behaviorists. This is a popular view among people who run empirical studies all day for obvious reasons (it’s way cheaper and easier to study behavior reliably), but those aren’t the only psychologists. Clinical psychology (therapy) is usually based in cognitive frameworks or psychoanalytical, pedagogy is largely indebted to the structuralism of Piaget, and sociology/anthropology have their own set of postmodern, Marxist, and other oddball influences. All of those academies are definitely part of psychology IMO, and their achievements are undeniable! For anyone who finds this interesting and wants to dunk on behaviorists with me, just google “Chomsky behaviorism” and select your fave content medium — he’s been beating this drum for over half a century, lol.
Notatheist 2y ago
>epicycles all the way down I don't mind this idea at all! I'm the abyss staring into itself. That said I don't think digging into skulls until we identify the neurons that cause the big sad or teaching people ways to cope with their awful lives is worth much. I want psychology to help me understand (a maybe terrible) existence, not to solve it. Something like overturning our intuitions is perfect. If tomorrow they make a flawless anti-depressant that will let me endure misery I argue we'll be worse off.
inSenCite 2y ago
This was a great write up. One thing that struck me as to the difficulty / young-ness of this field is also the fact that it is the only science that is us studying our thinking selves. It's almost like trying to draw a picture of the exact spot you are standing on.
- parpfish 2y ago
  i think that that issue leads to particularly intense 'folk psychology' because everybody has experience with a mind which will lead to everybody having their own litle set of folk psychology beliefs that the scientists need to overturn. contrast that to something like... geology. i'm sure there was folk geology back in the day about where different types of rocks come from, but for 99% of people they weren't particularly invested in it. so when the scientists came out with empirical research, most people would be fine with it. but when psychologist confront folk psychology, people often take it as a personal affront. any comment section about psychology research (HN included) is filled with armchair experts contradicting researchers with their own pet theories
parpfish 2y ago
i think that before a science can be "a science" with powerful theories and universal laws, there needs to be a long period of existing as a proto-science where people aren't doing experiments and are just observing and describing. before darwin, you had to have linneaus just describing and cataloging animals.; before {astronomy theory guy}, you had to have {people just tracking and observing stars}. psychology may have tried to jump the gun a bit by attempting to become theoretical before there were a few generations of folks sitting around quantifying and classifying human behavior. this was definitely true in cognitive neuroscience. once folks got their hands on fMRI, this entire genre of research popped up that was "replicate an existing psychology study in the scanner to confirm that they used their brain". imo, a lot more was learned by groups that stepped back from theory and just started collecting data and discovering "resting state networks" in the brain.
- simonebrunozzi 2y ago
  Astronomy: you might go with Galileo Galilei, and you wouldn't be too wrong. [0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei
- mistermann 2y ago
  By forcing formal study of the mind into the constrained methods used for studying the physical world, it allows the government and profit/power seekers to be the only actors free to use the methods that work best. I wonder if this is purely a coincidence.
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    What methods are appropriate but forbidden by this “forcing” (and what’s causing the forcing exactly?)
    - mistermann 2y ago
      Methods that do not adhere to the scientific method. The forcing is performed by culture. Think back to COVID, the effect was on full display in various forms during that spectacle. Or, pick most any war that gets substantial coverage in the media. I'm unfairly picking on science here a bit, the problem is ideologies in general.
titanomachy 2y ago
I’m floored by the suggestion that professional training as a therapist does not produce a statistically significant improvement in ability to treat mental health conditions. It’s interesting that one comparison they offered was between advice from a random professor versus a session with a therapist. I can remember several helpful conversations with kind, older professors during difficult times. Maybe we should identify people whose life experiences naturally make them good counselors and encourage them to do more of it, instead of making young adults pay $200k for ineffective education and a stamp saying they can charge for therapy.
- thierrydamiba 2y ago
  I think a lot of people just never find the right therapist and then assume all therapists are terrible. It’s interesting because even the most staunch opponents of mental health talk therapy have people in their life they talk to, they just don’t consider them therapists.
  - lr4444lr 2y ago
    But this begs the same question: if mental illness really is what psychologists say it is, and if treatment is a learnable skill, then the practitioner shouldn't matter that much assuming his training was good. But most evidence suggests that some "je ne sais quoi" has to exist in the therapeutic relationship. In other words, Freud was right about Transference as a necessary ingredient to psychotherapy (and probably about a lot else that is still too controversial to talk about or pass IRB muster).
    - staticvoidstar 2y ago
      Isn't the "je ne sais quoi" just feeling safe to be themselves and open? Whatever that means for each person
  - wk_end 2y ago
    Well, sure, but "people in their life that they talk to" aren't really therapists. They're functioning quite differently - they can have a personal involvement that a therapist, ethically, isn't permitted to have. The sorts of things someone talks to with their friends overlaps with but is also often quite distinct from the sort of thing a therapist is probing for. There's no direct financial incentive to keep the "patient" coming. And they're making no claim to, broadly, help someone improve their overall mental health - people vent to their friends because it feels nice, not because it's necessarily constructive.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
> The best thing to do is forget all of it, estrange yourself from the word “creativity” entirely, and start with the extremely bizarre fact that humans write songs and novels and solve math problems, and we don't know how this happens. (Found in note [10] in the article.) This reads, very much in a positive way, like someone is describing the idea of "root cause analysis". That bodes well for this person to epistemicly "know" stuff like they write about. At least they'll be more likely to "know that they don't know" yet, which is a necessary step along the way. It reminds me of a saying I've heard: "Forget what you know." ("Forget" is even in the quote. I wouldn't be surprised if the author is familiar with the saying.) Perhaps more clearly, "Forget what you think you know." The idea being for one to identify and challenge their assumptions in order to work it out from "first principles".
lutusp 2y ago
A great article, particularly for its candor. As Neil DeGrasse Tyson and others have said, in the same way that chemistry replaced alchemy, neuroscience will replace psychology. But this isn't likely to happen soon -- the human brain is too complex for present-day efforts. But there's some progress. In a recent breakthrough, we fully mapped the brain of a fruit fly (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03190-y https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03190-y).
- SubiculumCode 2y ago
  Its a piss poor article that was written to vent, but it didn't try very hard to find good psychological research. Episodic memory psychological literature is very strong, IMO, yet never gets brought up in these kinds of articles. Its always the fluffy puffy research that fuels tabloid headlines, not the research that shows, for example, differential patterns of memory strategies over child development, or the contributions of context to recognition memory, the differences between recollection and familiarity processes supporting recognition memory..you know, all the stuff that is not flashy for tabloids, but is real psychological science. Dr. Charan Ranganath was a member of my dissertation committee who recently wrote a wonderful book about memory and gave some really fantastic interviews. For example, on Fresh Air: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1233900923 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1233900923 Now yes, some of this is informed by neuroimaging and neuroscience spanning human and animal models, but also lots and lots of behavioral memory research. And the findings that are discussed are pretty reliable, shown over and over again in different ways. So, no, this article is not great. It did not do diligent research. Its a rant that focuses on specific types of research that is a small majority of the REAL field.
  - lutusp 2y ago
    > ... all the stuff that is not flashy for tabloids, but is real psychological science. Real psychological science would produce falsifiable theories -- theories that in principle would be discarded after a conclusive failure in impartial empirical tests. Instead, landmark psychological theories that are discarded, result instead from public outcry, not falsification. Examples include Drapetomania, prefrontal lobotomy, recovered memory therapy, Asperger syndrome. Trained therapists do no better than properly motivated laypeople. This is not meant to disparage either group, some of whom are very effective, but no one knows why a particular person becomes an effective therapist. On leaving his position as NIMH director, psychiatrist Thomas Insel said, “I spent 13 years at NIMH really pushing on the neuroscience and genetics of mental disorders, and when I look back on that I realize that while I think I succeeded at getting lots of really cool papers published by cool scientists at fairly large costs—I think $20 billion—I don’t think we moved the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalizations, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who have mental illness.” (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-of-knowledge/201705/twenty-billion-fails-to-move-the-needle-on-mental-illness https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-of-knowledge/...) All this will be swept away by a future neuroscience that will shape testable, falsifiable theories about human behavior. Today's psychological alchemy will be replaced by tomorrow's neuroscience chemistry. But as the above Insel quote shows, we're nowhere near that goal.
randomNumber7 2y ago
Because you don't even know what Freud actually did. He assumed the human is a machine and used _analytical_ thinking trying to understand it. Yet you think the interpretation of dreams is just BS. Either you only read secondary literature or you have a deficiency in reasoning.
photochemsyn 2y ago
> "Another way of thinking about it: of the 298 mental disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, zero have been cured. That’s because we don’t really know what mental illness is..." I'm of the firm belief that today's understanding of psychological maladies is comparable to mid-19th century theories of the causes of disease - when doctors had little idea of the causality of infectious disease or cancer or heart disease (indeed they had no way of distinguishing between transmittable infectious diseases and other types of illness). Take the importance of insect control and water treatment and condoms in preventing infectious disease from bubonic plague to cholera to HIV and syphilis - they just had no idea until Koch and Pasteur came along. It's probably safe to compare this to our current advertising system, which deliberately makes people feel miserable about various aspects of their appearance and social status with the goal of convincing them that buying some product or other will fix their lives - and it's especially damaging when developing children and teenagers are the targets. The fact that capitalist consumer society norms are as much as source of mental illness in modern populations as the filthy open sewers of old European cities were of infectious disease is a concept I suspect today's corporatized academic institutions will have a hard time accepting. A further issue is that currently illegal psychedelic drugs show more potential for understanding and treating a wide variety of mental illness conditions under controlled conditions than any of the widely prescribed antidepressants do, and yet most governments are rigidly opposed to their legalization.
gargalatas 2y ago
I have a solid example here that bogles my mind every now and them watching people killing other people especially in the US: I would expect after all those years mental health to be accounted in a serious criminal case like killing somebody. Meaning that a person who kills somebody else definitely has mental issues that come from their childhood. So what about parents in those cases, aren't they having their part on the sick mentality of their child? Why not pressing charges to them?
- nverno 2y ago
  > a person who kills somebody else definitely has mental issues that come from their childhood People that kill other people often function well in their society. It doesn't make sense to me to classify that as mental issues. People are inherently territorial, aggressive animals - at least to the extent being so doesn't make them much of an outlier.
- xboxnolifes 2y ago
  > Meaning that a person who kills somebody else definitely has mental issues that come from their childhood. So what about parents in those cases, aren't they having their part on the sick mentality of their child? Why not pressing charges to them? Even assuming the premise of killing someone implies mental illness, and assuming the mental illness stems from trauma, there's a pretty large leap in reasoning here. Why must the trauma come during childhood? Why not in adulthood? Even in childhood, why does it have to come from the parents? Then you have the idea of continuing up the causal chain. Why are we pressing charges to the parents? If the parent's traumatized their kids, there's good chance they did it due to their own mental illness/trauma, which means the parents themselves were abused in childhood. So we should go after their parents.... except that just means we should go after there parents.... ad infinitum.
- watwut 2y ago
  > Meaning that a person who kills somebody else definitely has mental issues that come from their childhood. Is that even true?
taurath 2y ago
> There’s a thought that’s haunted me for years: we’re doing all this research in psychology, but are we learning anything? Advancements in PTSD, dissociation, treatment resistant depression and attachment disorders is astounding. We know a lot more about how people work. Psychology has always been a person centered field - humans are complex, and what it does is more akin to QA than coding. It’s individualized. It doesn’t love studies because the underlying mechanism or traumas can be different even for people who went through the same things. Unfortunately advancements are not evenly distributed. There is an army of CBT therapists who work in one method that works for some but not the majority. Finding a practitioner is a crapshoot even when looking for specialists. The DSM is functionally treated as a billing manual, and to be paid practitioners need to jump through a long series of hoops. The medical billing side can’t deal with the complexity. All these aside, there are people who are really truly healing in ways they wouldn’t without the field. There are ideas that propagate through human culture make human behavior more understandable.
- acchow 2y ago
  Given that “humans are complex” and “it’s individualized”, would advancements be greater and faster by just allowing clinicians and scientists to just talk things out instead of coming up with “studies” which pretend to be “science” with a low reproducibility rate (and non-publishing on null results)?
  - taurath 2y ago
    You may be looking for qualitative data and reporting which is on the rise! The term "evidence based" is bandied about all the time because insurance companies don't want to cover treatments that aren't considered standard. The problem is everyone is different on some level, and we often don't have the resources to get to the root of any problems. So treatments that may work extremely effectively for some may be thrown out because they don't work effectively for everyone, and can be contraindicated. Somatic therapists especially have to deal with this. Effective treatments are often outside of the "evidence based" tests, which can be based entirely around showing symptom improvement. This creates a catch-22 where if you lessen the restrictions you get a lot of crackpot providers, where if you keep them tight you keep people from being able to access treatments that may work well for them. There's also competing models for mental problems and approaches - the psychiatric model is similar to a doctor giving treatment for an illness. They tend to have a belief in biological determinism, IE if a parent had an illness then its likely you will have one too. The Biopsychosocial model is a little bit more holistic around the experiences of people and their physical environment and upbringing. The Trauma model is one I personally ascribe more to which conceptualizes mental health problems as understandable reactions to traumatic events that are conditioned within us. There are a lot of people who get real relief from outside the mainstream providers, and there are a lot of people for whom the standard providers have not been able to help. I think that is part of why there's so much activity around finding better models right now.
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autoexec 2y ago
We've learned that it hasn't produced much research that holds up to replication, that the vast majority of research never gets properly replicated at all anyway, and that despite the endless meta-analysis of glorified internet surveys people's mental health hasn't been improving. We're certainly learning how to use psychology to manipulate people though. Advertising, dark patterns, propaganda, and behavioral conditioning just wouldn't be the same without psychology research. We're performing research on children to learn the youngest age they can recognize a brand name (age 3 last I checked) or how best to keep them hooked playing a video game/child casino though and that research is making companies money hand over fist.
antonkar 2y ago
I'm afraid that after reading this guy, people will just give up, thinking there is nothing that works. And this is not the case at all, depression and many other problems are curable. Mine got cured, in addition to anxiety, anger management problem and suicidality. You can get help or start by reading a workbook yourself. He links to a meta analysis* that says CBT does cure depression and does so consistently for many decades without any declines in effectiveness. Later for some reason, he says no single mental illness was ever cured. It seems the main point of the article is to say that nothing except "nudges" ever worked in psychology - this is nonsense that he himself contradicts as I mentioned above. Skip this sensationalist guy, use https://scholar.google.com https://scholar.google.com to do your own research * https://research.vu.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/26037670/2017_Cristea_Psychol_Bull_effects_of_CBT_are_not_falling.pdf https://research.vu.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/26037670/2017_C...
Michelangelo11 2y ago
> I recently read The Secrets of Alchemy by Lawrence Principe, which I loved, especially because he tries to replicate ancient alchemical recipes in his own lab. And sometimes he succeeds! For instance, he attempts to make the “sulfur of antimony” by following the instructions in The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony (Der Triumph-Wagen Antimonii), written by an alchemist named Basil Valentine sometime around the year 1600. At first, all Principe gets is a “dirty gray lump”. Then he realizes the recipe calls for “Hungarian antimony,” so instead of using pure lab-grade antimony, he literally orders some raw Eastern European ore, and suddenly the reaction works! It turns out the Hungarian dirt is special because it contains a bit of silicon dioxide, something Basil Valentine couldn’t have known. > No wonder alchemists thought they were dealing with mysterious forces beyond the realm of human understanding. To them, that’s exactly what they were doing! If you don’t realize that your ore is lacking silicon dioxide—because you don’t even have the concept of silicon dioxide—then a reaction that worked one time might not work a second time, you’ll have no idea why that happened, and you’ll go nuts looking for explanations. Maybe Venus was in the wrong position? Maybe I didn’t approach my work with a pure enough heart? Or maybe my antimony was poisoned by a demon! > An alchemist working in the year 1600 would have been justified in thinking that the physical world was too hopelessly complex to ever be understood—random, even. One day you get the sulfur of antimony, the next day you get a dirty gray lump, nobody knows why, and nobody will ever know why. And yet everything they did turned out to be governed by laws—laws that were discovered by humans, laws that are now taught in high school chemistry. Things seem random until you understand ‘em. Well, this example doesn't just fail to support the argument, but undercuts it. Basil successfully identified the kind of antimony that would work, -despite- having no concept of sulfur dioxide. He did not write down something like "not all kinds of antimony work for this recipe, so get a bunch of different kinds and try them all" -- that, or a stronger version ("sometimes the recipe fails, we don't know why"), would support the author's point. So we're left with the author trying to argue that this alchemist thought the world was "too hopelessly complex to ever be understood" on the basis of ... the alchemist correctly identifying the ingredient that would make the recipe work.
jasonhong 2y ago
One big area of psychology not mentioned in the article that has been seeing a good amount of success is applied psychology with respect to Human-Computer Interaction. For example, there's a lot of basic perceptual psychology regarding response times and color built into many GUI toolkits in the form of GUI widgets (buttons, scrollbars, checkboxes, etc). Change blindness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_blindness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_blindness) is also a known problem for error messages and can be easily avoided with good design. There's also a lot of perceptual psychology research in AR and VR too. With respect to cognitive psychology, there's extensive work in information foraging (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_foraging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_foraging) which has been distilled down as heuristics for information scent. With respect to social psychology, there are hundreds of scientific papers about collective intelligence, how to make teams online more effective, how to socialize newcomers to online sites, how to motivate people to contribute more content and higher quality content, how and why people collaborate on Wikipedia and tools for making them more effective, and many, many more. In past work, my colleagues and I also looked at understanding why people fall for phishing scams, and applying influence tactics to improve people's willingness to adopt better cybersecurity practices. Basically, the author is right about his argument if you have a very narrow view of psychology, but there's a lot of really good work on applied (and practical!) psychology that's going on outside of traditional psychology journals.
- hinkley 2y ago
  In the broader category of cognition, I think we understand a bit better how people rationalize their decisions. How many things we do almost entirely on pure reflex and then manufacture a story that explains it without sounding crazy or just saying “I don’t know.”
- katzenversteher 2y ago
  This is especially important in industrial settings. If a machine operator makes a mistake it's not just expensive, it can cost lifes. There where instances where operators actively fed fuel into fires because they misunderstood the situation displayed on the HMI. Some time ago I found a really nice presentation about the ISA 101 standard covering this topic. The basic idea is: The HMI looks boring everthing is okay, if something goes into a dangerous direction colors and other elements are used to draw your attention.
fracus 2y ago
Psychology is the study of the brain at its highest abstraction when we know very little about it at any level. If you believe in determinism then psychology is just voodoo bullshit. Everything should be able to eventually be explained by a pathology, physical processes. With each new scientific breakthrough psychology becomes more and more obsolete and irrelevant. How many counselors have already been replaced by a prescription to antidepressants?
- zug_zug 2y ago
  I feel like that's saying weather forecasting is voodoo bullshit because it's all quantum mechanics deep down
  - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
    What is a rain cloud? Now what is consciousness?
carapace 2y ago
(I'm about to go to sleep, so I'm not going to stick around and argue. I've been on this site for --good god-- ten years next month, you can check my comment history and judge for yourself whether you think I'm full of baloney or not. This is just painful, I have to say something.) For the love of all that's good and noble please do science to Neurolinguistic Programming please.
scotty79 2y ago
> Scientific revolutions arise from crises—that moment when we’ve piled up too much stuff that doesn’t make sense and the dam finally breaks, washing away our old theories and giving us space to build new ones I can't wait for this to happen on our understanding of a Big Bang because status quo explanation relies on very precise math of things that are thought to happen microseconds after supposed start of existence while our earliest observation is (and can only be) from 380000 years later and new observations with new, more precise instruments seem often to rather contradict cosmological predictions than confirm them.
forgot-im-old 2y ago
Many people are pointing to the replication crisis as indicating that Psychology is not a science. However, Medicine is also facing a replication crisis to the same degree. Would people also suggest that Medicine is not a science? I think it comes down to the fact that both disciplines work with people and behaviour, and people are not homogeneous nor are behaviours easily predicted. For that reason, I think that a distinction can be made between “hard sciences” and “soft sciences” - we just can’t get the same level of precision that the hard sciences can, but that doesn’t mean that Psychology isn’t scientific. We still apply the scientific method to discover phenomena and develop testable theories, just like other sciences. And meta-analyses allow for much greater certainty in findings..
- tgv 2y ago
  It isn't very scientific if a discipline persists in bad research practices, and that's what psychology is still doing. Indeed, it's very hard to get experimental evidence for a theory by measuring people, but if you know you can't, then don't do it. Wait until the means to do so become available, and try to find those ways instead. Unfortunately, that's not the state of psych. research. There is of course also a more practical side. For psych and med interventions, you don't need to know how it works. If method A works better than method B, it's a good idea to try A before trying B. However, that research is also difficult, and many papers have been found wrong afterwards. While that's the way to go, it shows that even when attempting to establish superficial effects, the disciplines are failing.
- jimbob45 2y ago
  Would people also suggest that Medicine is not a science I think that depends on whether those people believe that evidence-based medicine is scientific.
  - throwing_away 2y ago
    I believe evidence-based medicine is possible, maybe, with enough practice.
  - zdragnar 2y ago
InDubioProRubio 2y ago
SELECT * FROM NSA.MetaConversationsOfAllMankind WHERE (psychology_hypothesis_applies(meta)) AND .. We know, but the know is bad news..
mettamage 2y ago
I've learned from psychology that meditation and exercise is helpful. So there's that.
- 331c8c71 2y ago
  That's very superficial imo. For me it is remembering that I am unique and being in tune with the inner voice which is really mine. Maybe some people grow into that mindset naturally but it wasn't the case for me (even if there were no particular reason for the societal pressure to be super strong).
mykowebhn 2y ago
Yes, I agree with the posts arguments. One HUGE thing it's missing, though, is the deliberate hacking of results to reach statistical significance. I'm willing to bet that the results of a majority of psychology studies are not reproducible. In another lifetime, I worked as a research assistant at a very large, well-funded, Ivy League psychology lab. Talk about p-hacking. Our PI would go so far as to deny potential candidates entry into our study, as well as the therapy, simply because the PI thought these candidates wouldn't help the therapy our PI developed look good in our study. Note, these candidates did meet all our OFFICIAL study criteria for entry into the study.
- kitsune_ 2y ago
  This is basically just scientific fraud, no?
  - hannob 2y ago
    It's also how most empirical science operates. If someone collects data and the study outcome is not preregistered, you can assume p-hacking. It would be implausible not to. And in most fields, preregistration is not common. (And even if there's preregistration, regularly people just switch their outcomes, and nobody cares.) And to play the devil's advocate: psychology is probably doing better these days than most other fields, because it's been the posterchild example of the replication crisis.
  - nervousvarun 2y ago
    I personally lean to yes, but that's more about what people do with the results than the results themselves. Here's an infamous example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment#Validity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment#Validity Honestly after reading that it seems impossible to really conclude anything...as it's just full of conflicting results...is that innately fraud? No but certainly careers/$ have been made from biased/agenda-driven interpretations which seems fraudulent.
  - AdamN 2y ago
    There probably should be room in some of the social sciences for flexibility like this as long as it's called out right at the top as part of the experiment design so that the reader knows this is exploratory initial research being done for directional purposes - and that's it. Unfortunately as the movement from History, Philosophy, and the other liberal arts disciplines became 'sciencified', the ability to deliberate on something rigorous but still with enough room to explore has been sacrificed in favor of trying to be more like the physical sciences.
feverzsj 2y ago
I remember some Discovery show called psychology a pseudoscience and fraud.
Joel_Mckay 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases I think the science allows people to see what the author is attempting fairly clearly. =3
yard2010 2y ago
"Exact science, Mr Angier, is not an exact science." David Bowie (as Nikola Tesla) in The Prestige
nickpsecurity 2y ago
Two factors are significant in the failure of psychology to deal with mental illness: cultural shift; political activism. In the U.S., many used to believe in God, his design, Righteousness, love, justice, strong, families, building on biological principles, like gender roles, and institutions reflecting these principles. Most believed we would be judged at the end of our life for how well we did those things. They believe we would be rewarded or punished. Building on these things kept paying off in spite of all the problems they came from the simple nature of humanity. Overtime, the culture shifted to be godless, subjective, individualist, money, focused, pleasure, focused, anti-family, go against biological design, and so on. Doing the opposite of God’s design, unraveled its advantages while leading all sorts of problems. Was subjectivism over objective truth, we also can’t agree on solutions. we also lost the supernatural advantage. If we repent and follow Jesus Christ, he puts the spirit of God in us. God spirit gives us an inner peace that persists even in bad circumstances. We learned that our suffering is constructive, if not caused by bad choices. We also learned to turn away from send which prevents much suffering in individuals and in society. God also hears our prayers whereby he may supernaturally change the circumstances of individual lives or the world itself. We call these events luck. Outside of Christian counseling, psychologists and society have given these things up. They’ve given up the power that Jesus Christ provides to overcome things we can’t ordinarily overcome. I also mentioned political activism. When liberal Atheist took over education, they started promoting ideas that are politically important to them, which didn’t have any science backing them up. If there’s a conflict, their politics always take priority over science. They tied their unproven solutions into those general concepts where you can’t argue with many of their methods more than the concept itself. So, they pick people who will promote these views, they’re baked into their “science,” and nobody sees contrary evidence. If the theories do damage, or are ineffective, the damage continues because their application is driven by political domination rather than the scientific method. Examples include evolution as the origin of life, specific theories of man-made global warming, feminism, pro-homosexuality, gender as a construct, subjectivism, intersectionality/C.R.T.) modern Marxism), and so on. So, psychology is failing because it’s built on the wrong foundations, powerless compared to having Christ plus counseling, and set up to fail by political activists whose desires come before the truth or others’ needs.
mharig 2y ago
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will-burner 2y ago
I think Psychology is really interesting - what could be more interesting than studying why humans behave the way we do. For a while in undergrad I was a double math and psychology major. I spent a semester doing undergraduate research in a psychology lab where I would take people in to do be subjects in the experiment and then write them a check afterwards for participating. During the experiment they'd listen to one syllable sounds some from a english and some not from english and the experiment tested whether the subjects were better at remembering the one syllable sounds from the english language when played one syllable sounds back after listening to the first set. As I type this I think it's an interesting experiment, but it felt to me that the interesting questions in Psychology need to be so dumbed down to be able to run an experiment to test any hypothesis that what's actually interesting about Psychology get's lost in the weeds of trying to rigorously so the scientific method. I don't know a solution to this or whether it's even a problem, but it's problem endemic to the question of whether we're actually making progress in psychology. For the record, I do think we're making progress in Psychology.
throw7 2y ago
I suppose that's why some categorize psychology as a "soft" science? To me psychology strikes me as more of a religion, albeit a type of secular religion. An inter-dialogue experiment most of us are doing all the time. When the OP mentioned "folk" science, I thought he'd start talking about folk stories... which actually I think in the realm of psychology would start it getting closer to who we are and how we collectively participate in the world.

182 points by ctoth 2y ago

MailleQuiMaille 2y ago

Oof. What was the point of that article ? It felt like an unnecessary tough read.

toolz 2y ago
I found it insightful and pleasant to see that there are people inside of a an important field being intellectually curious and honest about the direction of their field of study.
- MailleQuiMaille 2y ago
  That’s the promise that initially brought me to the article, and I like the reason of the article. I’m just not sure I got more info from the title than the content of the article itself. But that is maybe just me, another fellow psychologist.

godelski 2y ago

I think one of the great ironies is that psychology is one of the hardest sciences but is treated so soft. I say this holding a degree in physics! (undergrad physics, grad CS/ML) By this I mean that to make confident predictions, you need some serious statistics, but psych is one of the least math heavy sciences (thankfully they recently learned about Bayes and there's a revolution going on). Unlike physics or chemistry, you have so little control over your experiments. There's also the problem of measurements. We stress in experimental physics that you can only measure things by proxy. This is like you measure distance by using a ruler, and you're not really measuring "a meter" but the ruler's approximation of a meter. This is why we care so much about calibration and uncertainty, making multiple measurements with different measuring devices (gets stats on that class of device) and from different measuring techniques (e.g. ruler, laser range finder, etc). But psych? What the fuck does it even mean "to measure attention"?! It's hard enough dealing with the fact that "a meter" is "a construct" but in psych your concepts are much less well defined (i.e. higher uncertainty). And then everything is just empirical?! No causal system even (barely) attempted?! (In case you've ever wondered, this is a glimpse of why physicists struggle in ML. Not because the work, but accepting the results. See also Dyson and von Neumann's Elephant) I've jokingly likened psych to alchemy, meaning proto-chemistry -- chemistry prior to the atomic model (chemistry is "the study of electrons") -- or to astrology (astronomy pre-Kepler, not astrology we see today). I do think that's where the field is at, because there is no fundamental laws. That doesn't mean it isn't useful. Copernicus, Brahe, Galileo (same time as Kepler; they fought), and many others did amazing work and are essential figures to astronomy and astrophysics today. But psych is in an interesting boat. There are many tools at their disposal that could really help them make major strides towards determining these "laws". But it'll take a serious revolution and some major push to have some extremely tough math chops to get there. It likely won't come from ML (who suffers similar issues of rigor), but maybe from neuroscience or plain old stats (econ surprisingly contributes, more to sociology though). My worry is that the slop has too much momentum and that criticism will be dismissed because it is viewed as saying that the researchers are lazy, dumb, or incompetent rather than the monumental difficulties that are natural to the field (though both may be true, and one can cause the other). But I do hope to see it. Especially as someone in ML. We can really see the need to pin down these concepts such as cognition, consciousness, intelligence, reasoning, emotions, desire, thinking, will, and so on. These are not remotely easy problems to solve. But it is easy to convince yourself that you do understand, as long as you stop asking why after a certain point. And I do hope these conversations continue. Light is the best disinfectant. Science is about seeking truth, not answers. That often requires a lot of nuance, unfortunately. I know it will cause some to distrust science more, but I have the feeling they were already looking for reasons to.

matusp 2y ago
The parallels to ML you drew are on point. ML has this tendency to oversimplify complex phenomena with a easy to produce datasets, because that's what ML folks do, they find a smart and easy way to create a dataset and then they focus on the models. But this falls apart pretty quickly when you go into societal problems, such as hate speech or misinformation. Maybe there it would be nice to have some rigor and theory behind the dataset instead of just winging it. I am working on societal biases in NLP and I feel confident that majority of the datasets used have practically no validity.
- godelski 2y ago
  I love ML. I came over from physics because it is so cool. But what I found odd is that few people were as interested in the math as I was, and even moreso were dismissive of the utility of the math (even when demonstrated!). It's gotten less mathy by the year. My criticisms of ML aren't out of hate, but actually love. We've done great work and you need to be excited to do research -- and sometimes blind and sometimes going just on faith --, because it is grueling dealing with so much failure. Because it's so easy to mistake failure for success and success for failure. It's a worry that we'll be overtaken by conmen, that I have serious concerns that we are not moving towards building AGI. But it's difficult to criticize and receive criticism (many physics groups specifically train students to take it and deal with this seemingly harsh language. To separate your internal value from your idea). So I want to be clear that my criticism (which you can see in many of my posts) is not a call to stop ML or even slow it down, but a desire to sail in a different direction (or even allow others to sail in those directions as opposed to being on one big ship). I do know there are others in psych with similar stories and beliefs. But there's a whole conversation about the structure of academia if we're going to discuss how to stop building mega ships and allow people to truly explore (there will always be a big ship, and there always should! But it should never prevent those from venturing out to explore the unknown. (Obviously I'm a fan of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry lol ))
  - NalNezumi 2y ago
    A tangent but if you're frustrated with the dismissal of math in ML I think you would probably enjoy diving in the Reinforcement Learning subfield; although some people tend to call it experimental math ;] ML applied to robotics/embodiment is another fun topic, where physics is very relevant in every step of it. A bit harder to dataset-hack when a physical system is crumbling in front of you.

guerrilla 2y ago

This was awesome. Don't just read the comments. Spoiler: psychology is not stupid, it's just young. I completely agree. This is how I see psychiatry after having experienced it for decades: it's just slightly better than going to a shaman. It's witchcraft and it mostly doesn't work because, well, it's witchcraft. We just are not at a point in history where we can do much about these things and we have to be adults and accept that. It's okay, there was a time when we'd die of simple infections too. That's how psychology is now, very young and full of witchcraft. Also, the article was funny... And wtf is that cheeseboat?

kranke155 2y ago
I think this is very fair. Every science that was starting out was indistinguishable from nonsense when starting out. But to say we shouldn't have pursued alchemy, because we didn't understand chemistry? One likely led to the other.
masfuerte 2y ago
I had the same question. It's Cincinnati chili. Wikipedia has an article [1] and Serious Eats goes into way more detail [2]. It actually sounds pretty good. I'll give it a go but with much less cheese. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnati_chili https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnati_chili [2]: https://www.seriouseats.com/cincinnati-chili-recipe-8402230 https://www.seriouseats.com/cincinnati-chili-recipe-8402230

cheeseomlit 2y ago

I agree with the authors identification of the problems in the field, but I'm not sure about their conclusions, or 'ways forward', which are 1. Debunk 'folk' psychology, with comparisons to the illegitimacy of 'folk' biology and 'folk' physics 2. Shake things up- meaning don't be afraid to question established dogma regardless of reputational risks I, a completely unqualified internet commenter, will give number 2 a try. I'd argue that psychology is a folk science, which is to say its not a science at all, but an art. As we've recently discovered, a massive swath of psychological studies are non-reproducible. So maybe we shouldnt treat psychology as if it were a rigorous scientific pursuit, but a philosophical one, or even a therapeutic one (IE. make it synonymous with psychiatry). Leave the science to the neuroscientists, who can quantify and measure the things they're studying (I understand there is some overlap between these fields sometimes). If your study consists of asking people questions and treating their answers as quantitative measurements of anything, I don't know- it feels like something has been lost in the sauce there. Too many variables to draw any meaningful conclusions.

lazyeye 2y ago
In a similar way Im wondering what gender studies would be called?
dudu24 2y ago
What a stereotypical hackernews comment, wow. > I, a completely unqualified internet commenter, Just leave it there.
- dartos 2y ago
  How would people learn if they don’t get feedback on their ideas? Why go out of your way to gatekeep random internet comments?
  - mrguyorama 2y ago
    Sometimes you should make the effort to learn before sharing your idea with other people. So many people will blindly walk forward in the dark, completely in ignorance, and then get upset that people ask them to light a candle first.

bbor 2y ago

Oo my favorite topic! Great writing and the right themes are there, but I think they’re missing a lot by not taking a more historically-holistic view. Aka wondering what all the people who’ve been criticizing psychology think, from Chomsky to Piaget to Lacan to Freud to Husserl to Hegel to Kant to Locke to Scotus to Ibin-Sinna all the way back to the OG, Aristotle. Obviously some were more empirical than others so you can’t believe them all, but without engaging with their works — even in a negative way - you’re forced to reinvent the wheel, like the bitcoin people did with banking regulations. For example, this quote makes me feel the author thinks psychology is more special/unusual than it is: We’re in good company here, because this is how other fields got their start. Galileo spent a lot of time trying to overturn folk physics: “I know it seems like the Earth is standing still, but it’s actually moving.” In what way has any natural science been anything other than overturning folk theories? What else could you possibly do with systematic thought other than contradict unsystematic thought? In this case, this whole article is written from the assumption that true, proper, scientific psychology is exclusively the domain of the Behaviorists. This is a popular view among people who run empirical studies all day for obvious reasons (it’s way cheaper and easier to study behavior reliably), but those aren’t the only psychologists. Clinical psychology (therapy) is usually based in cognitive frameworks or psychoanalytical, pedagogy is largely indebted to the structuralism of Piaget, and sociology/anthropology have their own set of postmodern, Marxist, and other oddball influences. All of those academies are definitely part of psychology IMO, and their achievements are undeniable! For anyone who finds this interesting and wants to dunk on behaviorists with me, just google “Chomsky behaviorism” and select your fave content medium — he’s been beating this drum for over half a century, lol.

Notatheist 2y ago

>epicycles all the way down I don't mind this idea at all! I'm the abyss staring into itself. That said I don't think digging into skulls until we identify the neurons that cause the big sad or teaching people ways to cope with their awful lives is worth much. I want psychology to help me understand (a maybe terrible) existence, not to solve it. Something like overturning our intuitions is perfect. If tomorrow they make a flawless anti-depressant that will let me endure misery I argue we'll be worse off.

inSenCite 2y ago

This was a great write up. One thing that struck me as to the difficulty / young-ness of this field is also the fact that it is the only science that is us studying our thinking selves. It's almost like trying to draw a picture of the exact spot you are standing on.

parpfish 2y ago
i think that that issue leads to particularly intense 'folk psychology' because everybody has experience with a mind which will lead to everybody having their own litle set of folk psychology beliefs that the scientists need to overturn. contrast that to something like... geology. i'm sure there was folk geology back in the day about where different types of rocks come from, but for 99% of people they weren't particularly invested in it. so when the scientists came out with empirical research, most people would be fine with it. but when psychologist confront folk psychology, people often take it as a personal affront. any comment section about psychology research (HN included) is filled with armchair experts contradicting researchers with their own pet theories

parpfish 2y ago

i think that before a science can be "a science" with powerful theories and universal laws, there needs to be a long period of existing as a proto-science where people aren't doing experiments and are just observing and describing. before darwin, you had to have linneaus just describing and cataloging animals.; before {astronomy theory guy}, you had to have {people just tracking and observing stars}. psychology may have tried to jump the gun a bit by attempting to become theoretical before there were a few generations of folks sitting around quantifying and classifying human behavior. this was definitely true in cognitive neuroscience. once folks got their hands on fMRI, this entire genre of research popped up that was "replicate an existing psychology study in the scanner to confirm that they used their brain". imo, a lot more was learned by groups that stepped back from theory and just started collecting data and discovering "resting state networks" in the brain.

simonebrunozzi 2y ago
Astronomy: you might go with Galileo Galilei, and you wouldn't be too wrong. [0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei
mistermann 2y ago
By forcing formal study of the mind into the constrained methods used for studying the physical world, it allows the government and profit/power seekers to be the only actors free to use the methods that work best. I wonder if this is purely a coincidence.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  What methods are appropriate but forbidden by this “forcing” (and what’s causing the forcing exactly?)
  - mistermann 2y ago
    Methods that do not adhere to the scientific method. The forcing is performed by culture. Think back to COVID, the effect was on full display in various forms during that spectacle. Or, pick most any war that gets substantial coverage in the media. I'm unfairly picking on science here a bit, the problem is ideologies in general.

titanomachy 2y ago

I’m floored by the suggestion that professional training as a therapist does not produce a statistically significant improvement in ability to treat mental health conditions. It’s interesting that one comparison they offered was between advice from a random professor versus a session with a therapist. I can remember several helpful conversations with kind, older professors during difficult times. Maybe we should identify people whose life experiences naturally make them good counselors and encourage them to do more of it, instead of making young adults pay $200k for ineffective education and a stamp saying they can charge for therapy.

thierrydamiba 2y ago
I think a lot of people just never find the right therapist and then assume all therapists are terrible. It’s interesting because even the most staunch opponents of mental health talk therapy have people in their life they talk to, they just don’t consider them therapists.
- lr4444lr 2y ago
  But this begs the same question: if mental illness really is what psychologists say it is, and if treatment is a learnable skill, then the practitioner shouldn't matter that much assuming his training was good. But most evidence suggests that some "je ne sais quoi" has to exist in the therapeutic relationship. In other words, Freud was right about Transference as a necessary ingredient to psychotherapy (and probably about a lot else that is still too controversial to talk about or pass IRB muster).
  - staticvoidstar 2y ago
    Isn't the "je ne sais quoi" just feeling safe to be themselves and open? Whatever that means for each person
- wk_end 2y ago
  Well, sure, but "people in their life that they talk to" aren't really therapists. They're functioning quite differently - they can have a personal involvement that a therapist, ethically, isn't permitted to have. The sorts of things someone talks to with their friends overlaps with but is also often quite distinct from the sort of thing a therapist is probing for. There's no direct financial incentive to keep the "patient" coming. And they're making no claim to, broadly, help someone improve their overall mental health - people vent to their friends because it feels nice, not because it's necessarily constructive.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago

> The best thing to do is forget all of it, estrange yourself from the word “creativity” entirely, and start with the extremely bizarre fact that humans write songs and novels and solve math problems, and we don't know how this happens. (Found in note [10] in the article.) This reads, very much in a positive way, like someone is describing the idea of "root cause analysis". That bodes well for this person to epistemicly "know" stuff like they write about. At least they'll be more likely to "know that they don't know" yet, which is a necessary step along the way. It reminds me of a saying I've heard: "Forget what you know." ("Forget" is even in the quote. I wouldn't be surprised if the author is familiar with the saying.) Perhaps more clearly, "Forget what you think you know." The idea being for one to identify and challenge their assumptions in order to work it out from "first principles".

lutusp 2y ago

A great article, particularly for its candor. As Neil DeGrasse Tyson and others have said, in the same way that chemistry replaced alchemy, neuroscience will replace psychology. But this isn't likely to happen soon -- the human brain is too complex for present-day efforts. But there's some progress. In a recent breakthrough, we fully mapped the brain of a fruit fly (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03190-y https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03190-y).

SubiculumCode 2y ago
Its a piss poor article that was written to vent, but it didn't try very hard to find good psychological research. Episodic memory psychological literature is very strong, IMO, yet never gets brought up in these kinds of articles. Its always the fluffy puffy research that fuels tabloid headlines, not the research that shows, for example, differential patterns of memory strategies over child development, or the contributions of context to recognition memory, the differences between recollection and familiarity processes supporting recognition memory..you know, all the stuff that is not flashy for tabloids, but is real psychological science. Dr. Charan Ranganath was a member of my dissertation committee who recently wrote a wonderful book about memory and gave some really fantastic interviews. For example, on Fresh Air: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1233900923 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1233900923 Now yes, some of this is informed by neuroimaging and neuroscience spanning human and animal models, but also lots and lots of behavioral memory research. And the findings that are discussed are pretty reliable, shown over and over again in different ways. So, no, this article is not great. It did not do diligent research. Its a rant that focuses on specific types of research that is a small majority of the REAL field.
- lutusp 2y ago
  > ... all the stuff that is not flashy for tabloids, but is real psychological science. Real psychological science would produce falsifiable theories -- theories that in principle would be discarded after a conclusive failure in impartial empirical tests. Instead, landmark psychological theories that are discarded, result instead from public outcry, not falsification. Examples include Drapetomania, prefrontal lobotomy, recovered memory therapy, Asperger syndrome. Trained therapists do no better than properly motivated laypeople. This is not meant to disparage either group, some of whom are very effective, but no one knows why a particular person becomes an effective therapist. On leaving his position as NIMH director, psychiatrist Thomas Insel said, “I spent 13 years at NIMH really pushing on the neuroscience and genetics of mental disorders, and when I look back on that I realize that while I think I succeeded at getting lots of really cool papers published by cool scientists at fairly large costs—I think $20 billion—I don’t think we moved the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalizations, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who have mental illness.” (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-of-knowledge/201705/twenty-billion-fails-to-move-the-needle-on-mental-illness https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-of-knowledge/...) All this will be swept away by a future neuroscience that will shape testable, falsifiable theories about human behavior. Today's psychological alchemy will be replaced by tomorrow's neuroscience chemistry. But as the above Insel quote shows, we're nowhere near that goal.

randomNumber7 2y ago

Because you don't even know what Freud actually did. He assumed the human is a machine and used _analytical_ thinking trying to understand it. Yet you think the interpretation of dreams is just BS. Either you only read secondary literature or you have a deficiency in reasoning.

photochemsyn 2y ago

> "Another way of thinking about it: of the 298 mental disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, zero have been cured. That’s because we don’t really know what mental illness is..." I'm of the firm belief that today's understanding of psychological maladies is comparable to mid-19th century theories of the causes of disease - when doctors had little idea of the causality of infectious disease or cancer or heart disease (indeed they had no way of distinguishing between transmittable infectious diseases and other types of illness). Take the importance of insect control and water treatment and condoms in preventing infectious disease from bubonic plague to cholera to HIV and syphilis - they just had no idea until Koch and Pasteur came along. It's probably safe to compare this to our current advertising system, which deliberately makes people feel miserable about various aspects of their appearance and social status with the goal of convincing them that buying some product or other will fix their lives - and it's especially damaging when developing children and teenagers are the targets. The fact that capitalist consumer society norms are as much as source of mental illness in modern populations as the filthy open sewers of old European cities were of infectious disease is a concept I suspect today's corporatized academic institutions will have a hard time accepting. A further issue is that currently illegal psychedelic drugs show more potential for understanding and treating a wide variety of mental illness conditions under controlled conditions than any of the widely prescribed antidepressants do, and yet most governments are rigidly opposed to their legalization.

gargalatas 2y ago

I have a solid example here that bogles my mind every now and them watching people killing other people especially in the US: I would expect after all those years mental health to be accounted in a serious criminal case like killing somebody. Meaning that a person who kills somebody else definitely has mental issues that come from their childhood. So what about parents in those cases, aren't they having their part on the sick mentality of their child? Why not pressing charges to them?

nverno 2y ago
> a person who kills somebody else definitely has mental issues that come from their childhood People that kill other people often function well in their society. It doesn't make sense to me to classify that as mental issues. People are inherently territorial, aggressive animals - at least to the extent being so doesn't make them much of an outlier.
xboxnolifes 2y ago
> Meaning that a person who kills somebody else definitely has mental issues that come from their childhood. So what about parents in those cases, aren't they having their part on the sick mentality of their child? Why not pressing charges to them? Even assuming the premise of killing someone implies mental illness, and assuming the mental illness stems from trauma, there's a pretty large leap in reasoning here. Why must the trauma come during childhood? Why not in adulthood? Even in childhood, why does it have to come from the parents? Then you have the idea of continuing up the causal chain. Why are we pressing charges to the parents? If the parent's traumatized their kids, there's good chance they did it due to their own mental illness/trauma, which means the parents themselves were abused in childhood. So we should go after their parents.... except that just means we should go after there parents.... ad infinitum.
watwut 2y ago
> Meaning that a person who kills somebody else definitely has mental issues that come from their childhood. Is that even true?

taurath 2y ago

> There’s a thought that’s haunted me for years: we’re doing all this research in psychology, but are we learning anything? Advancements in PTSD, dissociation, treatment resistant depression and attachment disorders is astounding. We know a lot more about how people work. Psychology has always been a person centered field - humans are complex, and what it does is more akin to QA than coding. It’s individualized. It doesn’t love studies because the underlying mechanism or traumas can be different even for people who went through the same things. Unfortunately advancements are not evenly distributed. There is an army of CBT therapists who work in one method that works for some but not the majority. Finding a practitioner is a crapshoot even when looking for specialists. The DSM is functionally treated as a billing manual, and to be paid practitioners need to jump through a long series of hoops. The medical billing side can’t deal with the complexity. All these aside, there are people who are really truly healing in ways they wouldn’t without the field. There are ideas that propagate through human culture make human behavior more understandable.

acchow 2y ago
Given that “humans are complex” and “it’s individualized”, would advancements be greater and faster by just allowing clinicians and scientists to just talk things out instead of coming up with “studies” which pretend to be “science” with a low reproducibility rate (and non-publishing on null results)?
- taurath 2y ago
  You may be looking for qualitative data and reporting which is on the rise! The term "evidence based" is bandied about all the time because insurance companies don't want to cover treatments that aren't considered standard. The problem is everyone is different on some level, and we often don't have the resources to get to the root of any problems. So treatments that may work extremely effectively for some may be thrown out because they don't work effectively for everyone, and can be contraindicated. Somatic therapists especially have to deal with this. Effective treatments are often outside of the "evidence based" tests, which can be based entirely around showing symptom improvement. This creates a catch-22 where if you lessen the restrictions you get a lot of crackpot providers, where if you keep them tight you keep people from being able to access treatments that may work well for them. There's also competing models for mental problems and approaches - the psychiatric model is similar to a doctor giving treatment for an illness. They tend to have a belief in biological determinism, IE if a parent had an illness then its likely you will have one too. The Biopsychosocial model is a little bit more holistic around the experiences of people and their physical environment and upbringing. The Trauma model is one I personally ascribe more to which conceptualizes mental health problems as understandable reactions to traumatic events that are conditioned within us. There are a lot of people who get real relief from outside the mainstream providers, and there are a lot of people for whom the standard providers have not been able to help. I think that is part of why there's so much activity around finding better models right now.

deleted 2y ago

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autoexec 2y ago

We've learned that it hasn't produced much research that holds up to replication, that the vast majority of research never gets properly replicated at all anyway, and that despite the endless meta-analysis of glorified internet surveys people's mental health hasn't been improving. We're certainly learning how to use psychology to manipulate people though. Advertising, dark patterns, propaganda, and behavioral conditioning just wouldn't be the same without psychology research. We're performing research on children to learn the youngest age they can recognize a brand name (age 3 last I checked) or how best to keep them hooked playing a video game/child casino though and that research is making companies money hand over fist.

antonkar 2y ago

I'm afraid that after reading this guy, people will just give up, thinking there is nothing that works. And this is not the case at all, depression and many other problems are curable. Mine got cured, in addition to anxiety, anger management problem and suicidality. You can get help or start by reading a workbook yourself. He links to a meta analysis* that says CBT does cure depression and does so consistently for many decades without any declines in effectiveness. Later for some reason, he says no single mental illness was ever cured. It seems the main point of the article is to say that nothing except "nudges" ever worked in psychology - this is nonsense that he himself contradicts as I mentioned above. Skip this sensationalist guy, use https://scholar.google.com https://scholar.google.com to do your own research * https://research.vu.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/26037670/2017_Cristea_Psychol_Bull_effects_of_CBT_are_not_falling.pdf https://research.vu.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/26037670/2017_C...

Michelangelo11 2y ago

> I recently read The Secrets of Alchemy by Lawrence Principe, which I loved, especially because he tries to replicate ancient alchemical recipes in his own lab. And sometimes he succeeds! For instance, he attempts to make the “sulfur of antimony” by following the instructions in The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony (Der Triumph-Wagen Antimonii), written by an alchemist named Basil Valentine sometime around the year 1600. At first, all Principe gets is a “dirty gray lump”. Then he realizes the recipe calls for “Hungarian antimony,” so instead of using pure lab-grade antimony, he literally orders some raw Eastern European ore, and suddenly the reaction works! It turns out the Hungarian dirt is special because it contains a bit of silicon dioxide, something Basil Valentine couldn’t have known. > No wonder alchemists thought they were dealing with mysterious forces beyond the realm of human understanding. To them, that’s exactly what they were doing! If you don’t realize that your ore is lacking silicon dioxide—because you don’t even have the concept of silicon dioxide—then a reaction that worked one time might not work a second time, you’ll have no idea why that happened, and you’ll go nuts looking for explanations. Maybe Venus was in the wrong position? Maybe I didn’t approach my work with a pure enough heart? Or maybe my antimony was poisoned by a demon! > An alchemist working in the year 1600 would have been justified in thinking that the physical world was too hopelessly complex to ever be understood—random, even. One day you get the sulfur of antimony, the next day you get a dirty gray lump, nobody knows why, and nobody will ever know why. And yet everything they did turned out to be governed by laws—laws that were discovered by humans, laws that are now taught in high school chemistry. Things seem random until you understand ‘em. Well, this example doesn't just fail to support the argument, but undercuts it. Basil successfully identified the kind of antimony that would work, -despite- having no concept of sulfur dioxide. He did not write down something like "not all kinds of antimony work for this recipe, so get a bunch of different kinds and try them all" -- that, or a stronger version ("sometimes the recipe fails, we don't know why"), would support the author's point. So we're left with the author trying to argue that this alchemist thought the world was "too hopelessly complex to ever be understood" on the basis of ... the alchemist correctly identifying the ingredient that would make the recipe work.

jasonhong 2y ago

One big area of psychology not mentioned in the article that has been seeing a good amount of success is applied psychology with respect to Human-Computer Interaction. For example, there's a lot of basic perceptual psychology regarding response times and color built into many GUI toolkits in the form of GUI widgets (buttons, scrollbars, checkboxes, etc). Change blindness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_blindness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_blindness) is also a known problem for error messages and can be easily avoided with good design. There's also a lot of perceptual psychology research in AR and VR too. With respect to cognitive psychology, there's extensive work in information foraging (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_foraging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_foraging) which has been distilled down as heuristics for information scent. With respect to social psychology, there are hundreds of scientific papers about collective intelligence, how to make teams online more effective, how to socialize newcomers to online sites, how to motivate people to contribute more content and higher quality content, how and why people collaborate on Wikipedia and tools for making them more effective, and many, many more. In past work, my colleagues and I also looked at understanding why people fall for phishing scams, and applying influence tactics to improve people's willingness to adopt better cybersecurity practices. Basically, the author is right about his argument if you have a very narrow view of psychology, but there's a lot of really good work on applied (and practical!) psychology that's going on outside of traditional psychology journals.

hinkley 2y ago
In the broader category of cognition, I think we understand a bit better how people rationalize their decisions. How many things we do almost entirely on pure reflex and then manufacture a story that explains it without sounding crazy or just saying “I don’t know.”
katzenversteher 2y ago
This is especially important in industrial settings. If a machine operator makes a mistake it's not just expensive, it can cost lifes. There where instances where operators actively fed fuel into fires because they misunderstood the situation displayed on the HMI. Some time ago I found a really nice presentation about the ISA 101 standard covering this topic. The basic idea is: The HMI looks boring everthing is okay, if something goes into a dangerous direction colors and other elements are used to draw your attention.

fracus 2y ago

Psychology is the study of the brain at its highest abstraction when we know very little about it at any level. If you believe in determinism then psychology is just voodoo bullshit. Everything should be able to eventually be explained by a pathology, physical processes. With each new scientific breakthrough psychology becomes more and more obsolete and irrelevant. How many counselors have already been replaced by a prescription to antidepressants?

zug_zug 2y ago
I feel like that's saying weather forecasting is voodoo bullshit because it's all quantum mechanics deep down
- _DeadFred_ 2y ago
  What is a rain cloud? Now what is consciousness?

carapace 2y ago

(I'm about to go to sleep, so I'm not going to stick around and argue. I've been on this site for --good god-- ten years next month, you can check my comment history and judge for yourself whether you think I'm full of baloney or not. This is just painful, I have to say something.) For the love of all that's good and noble please do science to Neurolinguistic Programming please.

scotty79 2y ago

> Scientific revolutions arise from crises—that moment when we’ve piled up too much stuff that doesn’t make sense and the dam finally breaks, washing away our old theories and giving us space to build new ones I can't wait for this to happen on our understanding of a Big Bang because status quo explanation relies on very precise math of things that are thought to happen microseconds after supposed start of existence while our earliest observation is (and can only be) from 380000 years later and new observations with new, more precise instruments seem often to rather contradict cosmological predictions than confirm them.

forgot-im-old 2y ago

Many people are pointing to the replication crisis as indicating that Psychology is not a science. However, Medicine is also facing a replication crisis to the same degree. Would people also suggest that Medicine is not a science? I think it comes down to the fact that both disciplines work with people and behaviour, and people are not homogeneous nor are behaviours easily predicted. For that reason, I think that a distinction can be made between “hard sciences” and “soft sciences” - we just can’t get the same level of precision that the hard sciences can, but that doesn’t mean that Psychology isn’t scientific. We still apply the scientific method to discover phenomena and develop testable theories, just like other sciences. And meta-analyses allow for much greater certainty in findings..

tgv 2y ago
It isn't very scientific if a discipline persists in bad research practices, and that's what psychology is still doing. Indeed, it's very hard to get experimental evidence for a theory by measuring people, but if you know you can't, then don't do it. Wait until the means to do so become available, and try to find those ways instead. Unfortunately, that's not the state of psych. research. There is of course also a more practical side. For psych and med interventions, you don't need to know how it works. If method A works better than method B, it's a good idea to try A before trying B. However, that research is also difficult, and many papers have been found wrong afterwards. While that's the way to go, it shows that even when attempting to establish superficial effects, the disciplines are failing.
jimbob45 2y ago
Would people also suggest that Medicine is not a science I think that depends on whether those people believe that evidence-based medicine is scientific.
- throwing_away 2y ago
  I believe evidence-based medicine is possible, maybe, with enough practice.
- zdragnar 2y ago

InDubioProRubio 2y ago

SELECT * FROM NSA.MetaConversationsOfAllMankind WHERE (psychology_hypothesis_applies(meta)) AND .. We know, but the know is bad news..

mettamage 2y ago

I've learned from psychology that meditation and exercise is helpful. So there's that.

331c8c71 2y ago
That's very superficial imo. For me it is remembering that I am unique and being in tune with the inner voice which is really mine. Maybe some people grow into that mindset naturally but it wasn't the case for me (even if there were no particular reason for the societal pressure to be super strong).

mykowebhn 2y ago

Yes, I agree with the posts arguments. One HUGE thing it's missing, though, is the deliberate hacking of results to reach statistical significance. I'm willing to bet that the results of a majority of psychology studies are not reproducible. In another lifetime, I worked as a research assistant at a very large, well-funded, Ivy League psychology lab. Talk about p-hacking. Our PI would go so far as to deny potential candidates entry into our study, as well as the therapy, simply because the PI thought these candidates wouldn't help the therapy our PI developed look good in our study. Note, these candidates did meet all our OFFICIAL study criteria for entry into the study.

kitsune_ 2y ago
This is basically just scientific fraud, no?
- hannob 2y ago
  It's also how most empirical science operates. If someone collects data and the study outcome is not preregistered, you can assume p-hacking. It would be implausible not to. And in most fields, preregistration is not common. (And even if there's preregistration, regularly people just switch their outcomes, and nobody cares.) And to play the devil's advocate: psychology is probably doing better these days than most other fields, because it's been the posterchild example of the replication crisis.
- nervousvarun 2y ago
  I personally lean to yes, but that's more about what people do with the results than the results themselves. Here's an infamous example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment#Validity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment#Validity Honestly after reading that it seems impossible to really conclude anything...as it's just full of conflicting results...is that innately fraud? No but certainly careers/$ have been made from biased/agenda-driven interpretations which seems fraudulent.
- AdamN 2y ago
  There probably should be room in some of the social sciences for flexibility like this as long as it's called out right at the top as part of the experiment design so that the reader knows this is exploratory initial research being done for directional purposes - and that's it. Unfortunately as the movement from History, Philosophy, and the other liberal arts disciplines became 'sciencified', the ability to deliberate on something rigorous but still with enough room to explore has been sacrificed in favor of trying to be more like the physical sciences.

feverzsj 2y ago

I remember some Discovery show called psychology a pseudoscience and fraud.

Joel_Mckay 2y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases I think the science allows people to see what the author is attempting fairly clearly. =3

yard2010 2y ago

"Exact science, Mr Angier, is not an exact science." David Bowie (as Nikola Tesla) in The Prestige

nickpsecurity 2y ago

Two factors are significant in the failure of psychology to deal with mental illness: cultural shift; political activism. In the U.S., many used to believe in God, his design, Righteousness, love, justice, strong, families, building on biological principles, like gender roles, and institutions reflecting these principles. Most believed we would be judged at the end of our life for how well we did those things. They believe we would be rewarded or punished. Building on these things kept paying off in spite of all the problems they came from the simple nature of humanity. Overtime, the culture shifted to be godless, subjective, individualist, money, focused, pleasure, focused, anti-family, go against biological design, and so on. Doing the opposite of God’s design, unraveled its advantages while leading all sorts of problems. Was subjectivism over objective truth, we also can’t agree on solutions. we also lost the supernatural advantage. If we repent and follow Jesus Christ, he puts the spirit of God in us. God spirit gives us an inner peace that persists even in bad circumstances. We learned that our suffering is constructive, if not caused by bad choices. We also learned to turn away from send which prevents much suffering in individuals and in society. God also hears our prayers whereby he may supernaturally change the circumstances of individual lives or the world itself. We call these events luck. Outside of Christian counseling, psychologists and society have given these things up. They’ve given up the power that Jesus Christ provides to overcome things we can’t ordinarily overcome. I also mentioned political activism. When liberal Atheist took over education, they started promoting ideas that are politically important to them, which didn’t have any science backing them up. If there’s a conflict, their politics always take priority over science. They tied their unproven solutions into those general concepts where you can’t argue with many of their methods more than the concept itself. So, they pick people who will promote these views, they’re baked into their “science,” and nobody sees contrary evidence. If the theories do damage, or are ineffective, the damage continues because their application is driven by political domination rather than the scientific method. Examples include evolution as the origin of life, specific theories of man-made global warming, feminism, pro-homosexuality, gender as a construct, subjectivism, intersectionality/C.R.T.) modern Marxism), and so on. So, psychology is failing because it’s built on the wrong foundations, powerless compared to having Christ plus counseling, and set up to fail by political activists whose desires come before the truth or others’ needs.

mharig 2y ago

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will-burner 2y ago

I think Psychology is really interesting - what could be more interesting than studying why humans behave the way we do. For a while in undergrad I was a double math and psychology major. I spent a semester doing undergraduate research in a psychology lab where I would take people in to do be subjects in the experiment and then write them a check afterwards for participating. During the experiment they'd listen to one syllable sounds some from a english and some not from english and the experiment tested whether the subjects were better at remembering the one syllable sounds from the english language when played one syllable sounds back after listening to the first set. As I type this I think it's an interesting experiment, but it felt to me that the interesting questions in Psychology need to be so dumbed down to be able to run an experiment to test any hypothesis that what's actually interesting about Psychology get's lost in the weeds of trying to rigorously so the scientific method. I don't know a solution to this or whether it's even a problem, but it's problem endemic to the question of whether we're actually making progress in psychology. For the record, I do think we're making progress in Psychology.

throw7 2y ago

I suppose that's why some categorize psychology as a "soft" science? To me psychology strikes me as more of a religion, albeit a type of secular religion. An inter-dialogue experiment most of us are doing all the time. When the OP mentioned "folk" science, I thought he'd start talking about folk stories... which actually I think in the realm of psychology would start it getting closer to who we are and how we collectively participate in the world.