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Care to enlighten me? It's not like I stated any of that as fact, it was qualified with an admission of my own ignorance- I'm open to being corrected. Or are yo

Care to enlighten me? It's not like I stated any of that as fact, it was qualified with an admission of my own ignorance- I'm open to being corrected. Or are you just demonstrating what happens when established dogma is questioned in this field? If so point taken, I can see why they're having problems

DinoDad13 2y ago
Which established dogma do you want to challenge and why?
- cheeseomlit 2y ago
  Moreso 'question' than 'challenge'- but it seems like the idea that psychology is a hard science at all is sort of a baseline assumption, or dogma. This article goes into great detail on all sorts of issues in the field, but stops short of questioning whether or not the whole thing could even be classified as scientific. I'd argue that the reproducibility crisis throws that into question to some degree (though that crisis apparently extends into 'harder' sciences as well, so maybe not?)- And intuitively, human psychology just doesn't seem like something you can quantify, at least not to the level of granularity required by the scientific method. That is, unless you're measuring the activity of neurons, synapses, hormone levels, any physical measurable phenomena, to draw your conclusions- and I'm not sure how much of that is done in psychology as opposed to neuroscience
  - DinoDad13 2y ago
    Psychology has always been considered a soft science.
feoren 2y ago
I think there's a common pattern on Hacker News that goes something like: A: Overly broad generalization of a huge body of work put together over 100 years by tens of thousands of professionals B: Ugh, hate this take from armchair experts A: Okay, then give me all the examples! Otherwise you're proving me right! I happen to think your overly broad generalization is more right than wrong, but I also recognize the silliness of asking to be "enlightened" on an entire branch of human endeavor via internet comments. This is a problematic argument form, and someone calling out this behavior does not prove you right. So let's be clear about what "enlightening you" means. If your argument is "psychology is based on a fundamentally flawed/useless study design (surveys) and we can never learn anything real from it", then a few examples of reproducible, interesting, not a-priori obvious results from surveys should be sufficient to show that we actually can learn real things from surveys. (And be careful not to fall into the "I could have told you that!" fallacy.) Luckily, this question was already asked on Reddit, and I think there are some strong examples: https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicPsychology/comments/qktt6h/what_are_the_most_robust_and_important_findings/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicPsychology/comments/qktt6h/... On the other hand, the field is absolutely rife with problematic study design and even some entire psychology departments (e.g. Stanford) seem to be completely rotten. The most salient example of this is the "implicit bias" studies that came out of Stanford. Their study design was something like: Task 1: Associate good words with white/Christian/American themes as fast as you can Task 2: Associate bad words with "foreign" themes Task 3: Associate good words with white/Christian/American themes again Task 4: Associate good words with "foreign" themes And the result is: you're racist because Task 4 takes you a few milliseconds longer. It never occurred to them (or it did and they intentionally forced the result) that in Task 4, you're literally unlearning what you've just practiced 3 times. It was one of the most blatantly bad studies I've ever seen in my life and I didn't see anyone else calling out how problematic it was, because Stanford. So in general I actually agree with your take: the field is rife with junk science, some of it obvious, and almost certainly some of it intentional. But please also recognize that "I'm an expert in tech and therefore everything, and if you can't prove me wrong in an internet comment then that proves me right!" is a very problematic argument style. It sounds like you're trying to prove yourself right, and a much more efficient way to get smarter is to habitually try to prove yourself wrong.
- SubiculumCode 2y ago
  To be fair, most studies of implicit bias are randomly ordered on a trial to trial basis.
- cheeseomlit 2y ago
  I appreciate the productive answer- You're right, re-reading it now my tone was more argumentative than inquisitive- Itd be foolish to dismiss such a large body of work as 'useless' and I hope it didn't come off that way- Of course understanding human psychology is immensely useful for all sorts of reasons
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  I agree with the overall thrust of your argument, but: > be careful not to fall into the "I could have told you that!" fallacy. That's not considered to be one of the standard logical fallacies as far as I know. Why would it be fallacious? Social studies are rife with findings that are either extremely obvious to everyone, extremely obvious to conservatives specifically (because psychologists are nearly always on the left), or extremely obvious to anyone who reads the study design. I recently wrote an essay about why replication studies can't fix science [1] and one of the problems cited is the prevalence of studies that aren't worth replicating because "I could have told you that". Examples include silly papers like [2], which is literally titled "People's clothing behaviour changes according to external weather and indoor environment" yet somehow manages to also say, "It is evident that further studies are needed in this field", or [3] saying that the average male student would like to be more muscular. But there are less silly examples which crop up due to the ideological bias in the field. Academics purge any conservatives they find, meaning that social studies spends a lot of time and money investigating things that are considered obvious outside of far left spaces. Jonathan Haidt is famous for arguing that this is a problem (albeit, not actually doing anything about it). As an example highly apropos to this thread, psychologists recently started discovering that stereotypes are usually accurate. Much other work in psychology is built on the suspiciously circular premise that stereotypes are either fictional and thus mere folk intuitions, as Mastroianni would put it, or are accurate only because people believe they are accurate (the field of "stereotype threat" is like this). On the left the idea that stereotypical achievement gaps are socially constructed is considered obvious and a matter of faith, to people on the right the opposite is true: idea that they reflect actual truths about reality is the obvious idea. So even if you set aside the offensively wasteful, there's still a lot of scope for study claims to be considered obvious by some and not by others. [1] https://blog.plan99.net/replication-studies-cant-fix-science-0e195234a280 https://blog.plan99.net/replication-studies-cant-fix-science... [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360132306003672 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03601... [3] https://openurl.ebsco.com/EPDB%3Agcd%3A4%3A12322516/detailv2?sid=ebsco%3Aplink%3Ascholar&id=ebsco%3Agcd%3A18009272&crl=c https://openurl.ebsco.com/EPDB%3Agcd%3A4%3A12322516/detailv2...

DinoDad13 2y ago

Which established dogma do you want to challenge and why?

cheeseomlit 2y ago
Moreso 'question' than 'challenge'- but it seems like the idea that psychology is a hard science at all is sort of a baseline assumption, or dogma. This article goes into great detail on all sorts of issues in the field, but stops short of questioning whether or not the whole thing could even be classified as scientific. I'd argue that the reproducibility crisis throws that into question to some degree (though that crisis apparently extends into 'harder' sciences as well, so maybe not?)- And intuitively, human psychology just doesn't seem like something you can quantify, at least not to the level of granularity required by the scientific method. That is, unless you're measuring the activity of neurons, synapses, hormone levels, any physical measurable phenomena, to draw your conclusions- and I'm not sure how much of that is done in psychology as opposed to neuroscience
- DinoDad13 2y ago
  Psychology has always been considered a soft science.

feoren 2y ago

I think there's a common pattern on Hacker News that goes something like: A: Overly broad generalization of a huge body of work put together over 100 years by tens of thousands of professionals B: Ugh, hate this take from armchair experts A: Okay, then give me all the examples! Otherwise you're proving me right! I happen to think your overly broad generalization is more right than wrong, but I also recognize the silliness of asking to be "enlightened" on an entire branch of human endeavor via internet comments. This is a problematic argument form, and someone calling out this behavior does not prove you right. So let's be clear about what "enlightening you" means. If your argument is "psychology is based on a fundamentally flawed/useless study design (surveys) and we can never learn anything real from it", then a few examples of reproducible, interesting, not a-priori obvious results from surveys should be sufficient to show that we actually can learn real things from surveys. (And be careful not to fall into the "I could have told you that!" fallacy.) Luckily, this question was already asked on Reddit, and I think there are some strong examples: https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicPsychology/comments/qktt6h/what_are_the_most_robust_and_important_findings/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicPsychology/comments/qktt6h/... On the other hand, the field is absolutely rife with problematic study design and even some entire psychology departments (e.g. Stanford) seem to be completely rotten. The most salient example of this is the "implicit bias" studies that came out of Stanford. Their study design was something like: Task 1: Associate good words with white/Christian/American themes as fast as you can Task 2: Associate bad words with "foreign" themes Task 3: Associate good words with white/Christian/American themes again Task 4: Associate good words with "foreign" themes And the result is: you're racist because Task 4 takes you a few milliseconds longer. It never occurred to them (or it did and they intentionally forced the result) that in Task 4, you're literally unlearning what you've just practiced 3 times. It was one of the most blatantly bad studies I've ever seen in my life and I didn't see anyone else calling out how problematic it was, because Stanford. So in general I actually agree with your take: the field is rife with junk science, some of it obvious, and almost certainly some of it intentional. But please also recognize that "I'm an expert in tech and therefore everything, and if you can't prove me wrong in an internet comment then that proves me right!" is a very problematic argument style. It sounds like you're trying to prove yourself right, and a much more efficient way to get smarter is to habitually try to prove yourself wrong.

SubiculumCode 2y ago
To be fair, most studies of implicit bias are randomly ordered on a trial to trial basis.
cheeseomlit 2y ago
I appreciate the productive answer- You're right, re-reading it now my tone was more argumentative than inquisitive- Itd be foolish to dismiss such a large body of work as 'useless' and I hope it didn't come off that way- Of course understanding human psychology is immensely useful for all sorts of reasons
mike_hearn 2y ago
I agree with the overall thrust of your argument, but: > be careful not to fall into the "I could have told you that!" fallacy. That's not considered to be one of the standard logical fallacies as far as I know. Why would it be fallacious? Social studies are rife with findings that are either extremely obvious to everyone, extremely obvious to conservatives specifically (because psychologists are nearly always on the left), or extremely obvious to anyone who reads the study design. I recently wrote an essay about why replication studies can't fix science [1] and one of the problems cited is the prevalence of studies that aren't worth replicating because "I could have told you that". Examples include silly papers like [2], which is literally titled "People's clothing behaviour changes according to external weather and indoor environment" yet somehow manages to also say, "It is evident that further studies are needed in this field", or [3] saying that the average male student would like to be more muscular. But there are less silly examples which crop up due to the ideological bias in the field. Academics purge any conservatives they find, meaning that social studies spends a lot of time and money investigating things that are considered obvious outside of far left spaces. Jonathan Haidt is famous for arguing that this is a problem (albeit, not actually doing anything about it). As an example highly apropos to this thread, psychologists recently started discovering that stereotypes are usually accurate. Much other work in psychology is built on the suspiciously circular premise that stereotypes are either fictional and thus mere folk intuitions, as Mastroianni would put it, or are accurate only because people believe they are accurate (the field of "stereotype threat" is like this). On the left the idea that stereotypical achievement gaps are socially constructed is considered obvious and a matter of faith, to people on the right the opposite is true: idea that they reflect actual truths about reality is the obvious idea. So even if you set aside the offensively wasteful, there's still a lot of scope for study claims to be considered obvious by some and not by others. [1] https://blog.plan99.net/replication-studies-cant-fix-science-0e195234a280 https://blog.plan99.net/replication-studies-cant-fix-science... [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360132306003672 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03601... [3] https://openurl.ebsco.com/EPDB%3Agcd%3A4%3A12322516/detailv2?sid=ebsco%3Aplink%3Ascholar&id=ebsco%3Agcd%3A18009272&crl=c https://openurl.ebsco.com/EPDB%3Agcd%3A4%3A12322516/detailv2...