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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

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.
    - llamaimperative 2y ago
      As in… what methods?
      - mistermann 2y ago
        Psychological studies have to adhere to various controls and what not. "The method". Put some smart people in charge of an ambitious psychedelic powered initiative...but they have no controls. Not science? Cannot be science? It's somewhat like how hip hop influences and accelerates white cultural evolution. Do this idea, see what happens when I do it.
        alwa 2y ago
        Can be science! Doesn’t have to be science! Science folks do exploratory studies all the time to get a sense of whether the tree is worth barking up before they do the hard work of proving it. Psychedelic studies might not suit themselves to FDA gold standard double-blind clinical trial science, but science overall involves a really broad toolkit. Psychedelics aren’t the only kind of intervention that can’t be safely or effectively blinded, and there are methods that attempt to demonstrate an effect anyway. It seems to be thanks to people trying stuff as well as rigorous scientific studies that psychedelics are having their present-day moment in the sun (thanks, MAPS et al!). (My favorite part was that time Alexandria Ocasio Cortez cosponsored a psychedelics bill with arch-conservative, retired Navy SEAL Dan Crenshaw) Things can be valuable without science proving it—nobody’s coming after the local preacher or imam or rabbi or shaman demanding that they scientifically prove their ministerial insights. And lord help the busybody who comes at a retired Navy SEAL trying psychedelic therapy for their post-traumatic stress… I wonder, though—does it seem to you that psychedelics should be industrialized? There’s a fine line between “legal” and “aggressively marketed by drug companies.”
- BobaFloutist 2y ago
  Anyone is free to learn therapy skills and use them in their own lives, you're just not allowed to call it therapy.
currymj 2y ago
partially disagree with this, every proto-science historically had a bunch of wrong but highly sophisticated theories. medicine, alchemy (as mentioned in the article), physics, biology (Aristotle), astronomy. for some reason it seems you need the wrong theories to organize the empirical data. I actually think Freud’s elaborate mental structures have some of this feeling to them.
- godelski 2y ago
  > for some reason it seems you need the wrong theories to organize the empirical data There's a somewhat well known article on this by Isaac Asimov: the Relativity of Wrong The scientific process is really misunderstood. People think you use it to find truth, but actually you use it to reject falsehoods. The consequence of this is that you narrow in on the truth so your goals look identical, but the distinction does matter (at least if you want to understand why that happens and why it's okay that science is wrong many times -- in fact, it's always wrong, but it gets less wrong (I'm certain there's a connection to that website and this well known saying). He's well known for his Sci-Fi but he got a PhD in chemistry, taught himself astrophysics, and even published in the area. He even had written physics texts. I found Understanding Physics quite enjoyable when I was younger but yeah, it isn't the same level of complexity I saw while getting my degree, but it's not aimed at University students. Anyways, I'm just saying, he's speaking as an insider and I do think this is something a lot more people should read. https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html I believe there's a copy of Understanding Physics here but currently offline: https://archive.org/details/asimov-understanding-physics https://archive.org/details/asimov-understanding-physics
  - currymj 2y ago
    i think that astronomy/physics/gravitation is actually a pretty weird case in the history of science and most things don’t go that cleanly. better examples might be medicine, where people just bounced around from one insane wrong theoretical system to another (humors to “empiricism” to bad air to Paracelsus to Avicenna and round and round and round). but somehow progress happened anyway. actual steady scientific progress only took off in the 19th century. or chemistry, where alchemical theories were also completely bizarre, mostly mysticism and poetry. but despite being “not even wrong”, people following them became pretty good at laboratory skills After many centuries, this laid the ground for empirical chemistry, and after a few more centuries, a theoretical system emerged that is close to right. But there was a lot of progress even under the “not even wrong” theories.
godelski 2y ago
> 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. I think you misunderstand science. > before darwin And this strengthens my confidence. There was an understanding of natural selection even back to antiquity. How could there not be? Did people not tame the animals and plants? These are experiments, and they saw the results. There were great contributions to astronomy long before Kepler. There were many experiments that influenced the whole field. There was a lot of important chemistry that happened long before Lavoisier (conservation of mass) and Dalton (atomic model). The proto-sciences are nothing to scoff at. They aren't useless and they weren't ill-founded. They were just... noisy (and science is naturally a noisy process, so I mean *NOISY*). There's nothing inheriently wrong with that. The only thing wrong is not recognizing the noise and placing unfounded confidence in results. That famous conversation between Dyson and Fermi discussing von Neumann's elephant wasn't saying that Dyson didn't do hard work or that the work he did had no utility, it was that you can't place confidence in a model derived from empirical results without a strong underlying theory. You'd never get to that if you only observed because you'd only end up making the same error Dyson did. Science, in its nature, is not about answers, it is about confidence in a model that approximates answers. These two things look identical but truth is unobtainable, there is always an epsilon bound. So it is about that epsilon! Your confidence! So experiments that don't yield high confidence results aren't useless, but they are rather just the beginning. They give direction to explore. Because hey, if I'm looking for elephants I'd rather start looking where someone says they saw a big crazy monster than randomly pick a point on the globe. But I'm also not going to claim elephants exist just because I heard someone talking about something vaguely matching the description. And this is naturally how it works. We're exploring into the unknown. You gotta follow hunches and rumors, because it is better than nothing. But you won't get anywhere from observation alone. Not to mention that it is incredibly easy to be deceived by your observations. You will find this story ring true countless times in the history of science. But better models always prevail because we challenge the status quo and we take risks. But the nature of it is that it is risky (noisy). There's nothing wrong with that. You just have to admit it.
- elmomle 2y ago
  > There was an understanding of natural selection even back to antiquity. How could there not be? Did people not tame the animals and plants? These are experiments, and they saw the results. Isn't this OP's point, though? People saw results, and even worked with what they saw, but underlying theories were all over the place and it wasn't until the time of Mendel that we started to have even the most rudimentary sense of rigor or scientific method when it came to the field that we now know as genetics. And the contention is that what came before Darwin and Mendel wouldn't stand up as rigorous science in our eyes, but was nevertheless the crucial foundation for what became the field of genetics.
hinkley 2y ago
I suspect that after 400 years of the scientific method, that we may be reaching the limits of single variable experiments in a number of fields. Statistical methods can find those patterns, and as we advance in those areas I expect us to advance in messy sciences like psychology. We’ll be able to more reliably look at people or other chaotic systems and see how three inputs work together to create a single effect.
- scotty79 2y ago
  There's a feedback loop between technology and science. Without progress in science there can't be progress in technology. But slso without progress in technology there can't be progress in science.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    In applied science they call this the ladder. It’s the same reason some people are desperate to keep certain sorts of manufacturing in country. Once you lose that mutualism you can’t just spin up a new factory. You have to do what every second world country on the road to being a first world manufacturing superpower has done: you make cheap shit until you can make mediocre products until you can make good ones until you can make high end items.
- KK7NIL 2y ago
  The math for multivariate experiments has been well understood and applied since the early 20th century. Modern industry would not exist without it. The problem with psychology experiments is that the mind has many hidden variables which cannot be easily accounted for.
  - ryandv 2y ago
    Moreover hard science is more or less based on at least three things: objectivity, quantifiability, and empiricism. We suppose that objective phenomena exist and can be independently verified and confirmed by other observers, using quantifiable measures to agree upon exactly what it is we are observing when conducting an experiment. The issue is that the mind is by nature subjective and wholly private, inaccessible to outside observers. Further, whereas when conducting an experiment in physics where it becomes possible to separate the experimenter from the experiment (to an extent, observer effect and quantum mechanics notwithstanding), as regards matters of the mind the observer and the observed are one and the same of necessity; you are in fact part of the experiment yourself. > The problem with psychology experiments is that the mind has many hidden variables which cannot be easily accounted for. This is where the pillar of quantifiability breaks down, and barring advances in techniques for inspecting the brain with greater spatial and temporal resolution it's hard to see how one can quantify what cannot be directly observed. Empiricism is the only aspect of the three aforementioned that can still hold up within this domain, and there is a large centuries' long tradition of studying the mind subjectively, qualitatively (as opposed to quantitatively), and yet in a still empirical fashion with falsifiable hypotheses; various mystical and meditative practices exist in this space, such as the fire kasina practice, especially as formulated by a trauma physician [0] complete with falsifiable hypotheses and steps for independent reproduction. What distinguishes practices in this space from harder sciences is that the phenomena observed are subjective, not "out in the physical world," and there does not exist any instrumentation for measuring them apart from that of your own faculties of perception. As an aside I found the comparison to shamans and spiritual teachers in TFA interesting, since I have always considered psychology and spirituality to concern themselves with the same subject matter and problem domain of minds; one could say that they are both proto-sciences of mind, and psychology is the latest iteration of this tradition (though as TFA states somewhat misguided and out of touch with its roots in mysticism; on this latter point see Jung's Psychology and Alchemy for a discussion of where analytical psychology connects with the older esoteric traditions). [0] https://firekasina.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/the-fire-kasina.pdf https://firekasina.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/the-fire-k...

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.
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    As in… what methods?
    - mistermann 2y ago
      Psychological studies have to adhere to various controls and what not. "The method". Put some smart people in charge of an ambitious psychedelic powered initiative...but they have no controls. Not science? Cannot be science? It's somewhat like how hip hop influences and accelerates white cultural evolution. Do this idea, see what happens when I do it.
      - alwa 2y ago
        Can be science! Doesn’t have to be science! Science folks do exploratory studies all the time to get a sense of whether the tree is worth barking up before they do the hard work of proving it. Psychedelic studies might not suit themselves to FDA gold standard double-blind clinical trial science, but science overall involves a really broad toolkit. Psychedelics aren’t the only kind of intervention that can’t be safely or effectively blinded, and there are methods that attempt to demonstrate an effect anyway. It seems to be thanks to people trying stuff as well as rigorous scientific studies that psychedelics are having their present-day moment in the sun (thanks, MAPS et al!). (My favorite part was that time Alexandria Ocasio Cortez cosponsored a psychedelics bill with arch-conservative, retired Navy SEAL Dan Crenshaw) Things can be valuable without science proving it—nobody’s coming after the local preacher or imam or rabbi or shaman demanding that they scientifically prove their ministerial insights. And lord help the busybody who comes at a retired Navy SEAL trying psychedelic therapy for their post-traumatic stress… I wonder, though—does it seem to you that psychedelics should be industrialized? There’s a fine line between “legal” and “aggressively marketed by drug companies.”
BobaFloutist 2y ago
Anyone is free to learn therapy skills and use them in their own lives, you're just not allowed to call it therapy.

currymj 2y ago

partially disagree with this, every proto-science historically had a bunch of wrong but highly sophisticated theories. medicine, alchemy (as mentioned in the article), physics, biology (Aristotle), astronomy. for some reason it seems you need the wrong theories to organize the empirical data. I actually think Freud’s elaborate mental structures have some of this feeling to them.

godelski 2y ago
> for some reason it seems you need the wrong theories to organize the empirical data There's a somewhat well known article on this by Isaac Asimov: the Relativity of Wrong The scientific process is really misunderstood. People think you use it to find truth, but actually you use it to reject falsehoods. The consequence of this is that you narrow in on the truth so your goals look identical, but the distinction does matter (at least if you want to understand why that happens and why it's okay that science is wrong many times -- in fact, it's always wrong, but it gets less wrong (I'm certain there's a connection to that website and this well known saying). He's well known for his Sci-Fi but he got a PhD in chemistry, taught himself astrophysics, and even published in the area. He even had written physics texts. I found Understanding Physics quite enjoyable when I was younger but yeah, it isn't the same level of complexity I saw while getting my degree, but it's not aimed at University students. Anyways, I'm just saying, he's speaking as an insider and I do think this is something a lot more people should read. https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html I believe there's a copy of Understanding Physics here but currently offline: https://archive.org/details/asimov-understanding-physics https://archive.org/details/asimov-understanding-physics
- currymj 2y ago
  i think that astronomy/physics/gravitation is actually a pretty weird case in the history of science and most things don’t go that cleanly. better examples might be medicine, where people just bounced around from one insane wrong theoretical system to another (humors to “empiricism” to bad air to Paracelsus to Avicenna and round and round and round). but somehow progress happened anyway. actual steady scientific progress only took off in the 19th century. or chemistry, where alchemical theories were also completely bizarre, mostly mysticism and poetry. but despite being “not even wrong”, people following them became pretty good at laboratory skills After many centuries, this laid the ground for empirical chemistry, and after a few more centuries, a theoretical system emerged that is close to right. But there was a lot of progress even under the “not even wrong” theories.

godelski 2y ago

> 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. I think you misunderstand science. > before darwin And this strengthens my confidence. There was an understanding of natural selection even back to antiquity. How could there not be? Did people not tame the animals and plants? These are experiments, and they saw the results. There were great contributions to astronomy long before Kepler. There were many experiments that influenced the whole field. There was a lot of important chemistry that happened long before Lavoisier (conservation of mass) and Dalton (atomic model). The proto-sciences are nothing to scoff at. They aren't useless and they weren't ill-founded. They were just... noisy (and science is naturally a noisy process, so I mean *NOISY*). There's nothing inheriently wrong with that. The only thing wrong is not recognizing the noise and placing unfounded confidence in results. That famous conversation between Dyson and Fermi discussing von Neumann's elephant wasn't saying that Dyson didn't do hard work or that the work he did had no utility, it was that you can't place confidence in a model derived from empirical results without a strong underlying theory. You'd never get to that if you only observed because you'd only end up making the same error Dyson did. Science, in its nature, is not about answers, it is about confidence in a model that approximates answers. These two things look identical but truth is unobtainable, there is always an epsilon bound. So it is about that epsilon! Your confidence! So experiments that don't yield high confidence results aren't useless, but they are rather just the beginning. They give direction to explore. Because hey, if I'm looking for elephants I'd rather start looking where someone says they saw a big crazy monster than randomly pick a point on the globe. But I'm also not going to claim elephants exist just because I heard someone talking about something vaguely matching the description. And this is naturally how it works. We're exploring into the unknown. You gotta follow hunches and rumors, because it is better than nothing. But you won't get anywhere from observation alone. Not to mention that it is incredibly easy to be deceived by your observations. You will find this story ring true countless times in the history of science. But better models always prevail because we challenge the status quo and we take risks. But the nature of it is that it is risky (noisy). There's nothing wrong with that. You just have to admit it.

elmomle 2y ago
> There was an understanding of natural selection even back to antiquity. How could there not be? Did people not tame the animals and plants? These are experiments, and they saw the results. Isn't this OP's point, though? People saw results, and even worked with what they saw, but underlying theories were all over the place and it wasn't until the time of Mendel that we started to have even the most rudimentary sense of rigor or scientific method when it came to the field that we now know as genetics. And the contention is that what came before Darwin and Mendel wouldn't stand up as rigorous science in our eyes, but was nevertheless the crucial foundation for what became the field of genetics.

hinkley 2y ago

I suspect that after 400 years of the scientific method, that we may be reaching the limits of single variable experiments in a number of fields. Statistical methods can find those patterns, and as we advance in those areas I expect us to advance in messy sciences like psychology. We’ll be able to more reliably look at people or other chaotic systems and see how three inputs work together to create a single effect.

scotty79 2y ago
There's a feedback loop between technology and science. Without progress in science there can't be progress in technology. But slso without progress in technology there can't be progress in science.
- hinkley 2y ago
  In applied science they call this the ladder. It’s the same reason some people are desperate to keep certain sorts of manufacturing in country. Once you lose that mutualism you can’t just spin up a new factory. You have to do what every second world country on the road to being a first world manufacturing superpower has done: you make cheap shit until you can make mediocre products until you can make good ones until you can make high end items.
KK7NIL 2y ago
The math for multivariate experiments has been well understood and applied since the early 20th century. Modern industry would not exist without it. The problem with psychology experiments is that the mind has many hidden variables which cannot be easily accounted for.
- ryandv 2y ago
  Moreover hard science is more or less based on at least three things: objectivity, quantifiability, and empiricism. We suppose that objective phenomena exist and can be independently verified and confirmed by other observers, using quantifiable measures to agree upon exactly what it is we are observing when conducting an experiment. The issue is that the mind is by nature subjective and wholly private, inaccessible to outside observers. Further, whereas when conducting an experiment in physics where it becomes possible to separate the experimenter from the experiment (to an extent, observer effect and quantum mechanics notwithstanding), as regards matters of the mind the observer and the observed are one and the same of necessity; you are in fact part of the experiment yourself. > The problem with psychology experiments is that the mind has many hidden variables which cannot be easily accounted for. This is where the pillar of quantifiability breaks down, and barring advances in techniques for inspecting the brain with greater spatial and temporal resolution it's hard to see how one can quantify what cannot be directly observed. Empiricism is the only aspect of the three aforementioned that can still hold up within this domain, and there is a large centuries' long tradition of studying the mind subjectively, qualitatively (as opposed to quantitatively), and yet in a still empirical fashion with falsifiable hypotheses; various mystical and meditative practices exist in this space, such as the fire kasina practice, especially as formulated by a trauma physician [0] complete with falsifiable hypotheses and steps for independent reproduction. What distinguishes practices in this space from harder sciences is that the phenomena observed are subjective, not "out in the physical world," and there does not exist any instrumentation for measuring them apart from that of your own faculties of perception. As an aside I found the comparison to shamans and spiritual teachers in TFA interesting, since I have always considered psychology and spirituality to concern themselves with the same subject matter and problem domain of minds; one could say that they are both proto-sciences of mind, and psychology is the latest iteration of this tradition (though as TFA states somewhat misguided and out of touch with its roots in mysticism; on this latter point see Jung's Psychology and Alchemy for a discussion of where analytical psychology connects with the older esoteric traditions). [0] https://firekasina.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/the-fire-kasina.pdf https://firekasina.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/the-fire-k...