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> Book falls apart My claim: there is no psychiatric body of work that is impervious to criticism. Not a single piece of psychological science is 100% true. D

> Book falls apart My claim: there is no psychiatric body of work that is impervious to criticism. Not a single piece of psychological science is 100% true. Drugs work but often don't. Therapies work but often don't. Alice's research falls apart under Bob's scrutiny. It's a soft science, it is what it is.

luqtas 1y ago
we have trouble defining and detecting when someone is in a flow state. or what parts of the brain are involved in grit. heck we are even tipping the begginings on how chronic pain is processed in our brain. if some drug has a greater validity than a placebo, then it's something now a guy claiming direct correlation with trauma based on what you went through for some seconds/minutes right after you born? feels like some Freud and their charlatans type of shit not "soft science"
- davorak 1y ago
  > now a guy claiming direct correlation with trauma based on what you went through for some seconds/minutes right after you born? feels like some Freud and their charlatans type of shit not "soft science" Dave Asprey made the claim according to the article not the author of the book. The only evidence I see in the article linking the claim to the book is at the end: > Where then could Dave have gotten this idea that he has trauma from an experience he couldn’t possibly remember? Probably Bessel van der Kolk. Which is pretty much nothing. The article does not go into why I should care what Dave Asprey thinks or does not think on trauma. For all I know it is a cherry picked example of a bad opinion disconnected from the book and typical scientific opinion.
blobbers 1y ago
Usually if you have to add 'science' to a term its not science.
- jdiff 1y ago
  We do that incredibly often just to refer to only one part of an incredibly broad concept of "science." Sometimes they get unique terms like "physics" or "chemistry," but not always. This is not a rule that can accurately be applied to all terms matching the pattern "____ science."
  - ternaryoperator 1y ago
    Wait…so you’re saying computer science isn’t science? /s
- sapphicsnail 1y ago
  What we call science is short for natural science. Science just comes from the Latin word for knowledge. Different disciplines have different ways of building knowledge. That doesn't necessarily make one better or worse.
- iberator 1y ago
  Computer science?
AmbroseBierce 1y ago
There is also a strong likelihood that psychiatric findings get outdated quickly given the rapid evolution of culture, tech, communication and society in general, just 30 years ago internet was just for a few nerds and tech enthusiasts, just 3 years ago you couldn't make the computer realistically pretend to be your lover over chat messages, the landscape in which psychology has to exist that has little to do with it is so ever changing that maybe it was always bit silly to expect it to be a hard science.
shkkmo 1y ago
> there is no psychiatric body of work that is impervious to criticism. Not a single piece of psychological science is 100% true. The scientific process is rarely perfect and levels of average levels of rigour vary between disciplines. However, there are quite significantly varying levels of quality and rigour in psychological studies. Your criticism seems framed to ignore this and groups the charlatans in with the actuap scientists.
gr__or 1y ago
I'd say the article makes a pretty explicit case for why the general thesis of the book does not hold, which makes your comment stand out as comparatively superficial whataboutism
throw4847285 1y ago
There is always somebody, especially on HN, who will comment on an article debunking pop psychology, "Well that makes sense because it's all bullshit." I understand there is a bias towards the hard sciences here (which is somewhat odd, because the vast majority of commenters here do not practice any hard science). But I think there is extra skepticism of psychiatry and psychology (which get lumped together), and I wonder why that might be. Well, I have a theory, but it relies on psychology and it isn't very charitable.
- the_sleaze_ 1y ago
  All models are wrong. Some are useful.
- lotsofpulp 1y ago
  Science involves doing experiments, collecting data, and testing hypotheses, i.e. claims are falsifiable. We don't have the technology to collect the necessary data to be able to test hypotheses for psychiatric and psychological phenomenoms, and even many other non brain related medical claims about the human body. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis Seems pretty reasonable to take claims about unverifiable subjects with a grain of salt.
  - antisthenes 1y ago
    I only skimmed the wikipedia article, but it seems like it is missing emphasis on the biggest problem in soft sciences like psychology - the fact that a huge chunk of their data comes from self-reporting by subjects. It's the equivalent of basing nutrition science on a Pew poll where people self-report their favorite food. Sure, it's useful to know people's general preferences sometimes, but for science that data is junk.
    - josh-sematic 1y ago
      Self-reported data is subjective, but when the very thing you are studying is the self-reported subjective experiences of people then it is actually the only data you should care about. Yes “I don’t feel depressed anymore” is a subjective statement but so is “I feel depressed, can you help me?” That specific example is a caricature of course, the data are usually much more specific than “do you feel depressed?”
mbesto 1y ago
> My claim: there is no psychiatric body of work that is impervious to criticism. Which makes these books all the more dangerous because the authors are overly confident about their conclusions and hence the attraction (which leads to book sales). When the unexplainable suddenly becomes explainable, the money rolls in.
danaris 1y ago
It's not a soft science. The problem is that too many people believe you can do research on one group of people, and generalize that universally to all humans, when in fact, the variation in every population of humans is wide enough that you can't say for certain that a given treatment will work for a given set of symptoms—not because the treatments are bad, but because there are differences both in the causes of the same symptoms, and in the workings of the body & brain, between different people. This doesn't make psychology/psychiatry/psychopharmacology a "soft science"; it just makes it a science that is still in its infancy. Once we have a better understanding of both the various underlying neurological/physical (and, for some, even gastrointestinal, given recent research showing that gut microbiota can affect the mood and brain) causes of various psychological symptoms, and the physical and neurological variations between people, it will be much easier to see, for instance, "ah, we shouldn't use Lorazepam for this patient, because their anxiety is caused by this which is much better treated by CBT and CBD, rather than that which Lorazepam directly addresses".
the_af 1y ago
I think the critique is fundamentally different from saying "it's soft science". It's saying "it's bad research, misquoting experts and references, drawing sloppy conclusions aimed at a lay audience". You can do psychology and psychiatry better than that, even if acknowledging they are not hard science. There's no excuse for being sloppy or outright fraudulent.
DuperPower 1y ago
soft science you say but the person better not commit suicide or starts working soon and gets better soon. The problem with psiquiatra is that there is the real biological diagnosis, the pseudo diagnosis (neurotic versión of the biological og diagnosis), the intentional fake diagnosis and the not intentional but still fake diagnosis, thats why DSM is not for regular people even if they can read the words the real clinical meaning is almost always different from what non clinical people think It is
int_19h 1y ago
It might be a soft science but there's still a difference between that and pseudoscience, and "recovered memories" are pretty firmly in the latter bucket. https://greyfaction.org/wiki/bessel-van-der-kolk/ https://greyfaction.org/wiki/bessel-van-der-kolk/

luqtas 1y ago

we have trouble defining and detecting when someone is in a flow state. or what parts of the brain are involved in grit. heck we are even tipping the begginings on how chronic pain is processed in our brain. if some drug has a greater validity than a placebo, then it's something now a guy claiming direct correlation with trauma based on what you went through for some seconds/minutes right after you born? feels like some Freud and their charlatans type of shit not "soft science"

davorak 1y ago
> now a guy claiming direct correlation with trauma based on what you went through for some seconds/minutes right after you born? feels like some Freud and their charlatans type of shit not "soft science" Dave Asprey made the claim according to the article not the author of the book. The only evidence I see in the article linking the claim to the book is at the end: > Where then could Dave have gotten this idea that he has trauma from an experience he couldn’t possibly remember? Probably Bessel van der Kolk. Which is pretty much nothing. The article does not go into why I should care what Dave Asprey thinks or does not think on trauma. For all I know it is a cherry picked example of a bad opinion disconnected from the book and typical scientific opinion.

blobbers 1y ago

Usually if you have to add 'science' to a term its not science.

jdiff 1y ago
We do that incredibly often just to refer to only one part of an incredibly broad concept of "science." Sometimes they get unique terms like "physics" or "chemistry," but not always. This is not a rule that can accurately be applied to all terms matching the pattern "____ science."
- ternaryoperator 1y ago
  Wait…so you’re saying computer science isn’t science? /s
sapphicsnail 1y ago
What we call science is short for natural science. Science just comes from the Latin word for knowledge. Different disciplines have different ways of building knowledge. That doesn't necessarily make one better or worse.
iberator 1y ago
Computer science?

AmbroseBierce 1y ago

There is also a strong likelihood that psychiatric findings get outdated quickly given the rapid evolution of culture, tech, communication and society in general, just 30 years ago internet was just for a few nerds and tech enthusiasts, just 3 years ago you couldn't make the computer realistically pretend to be your lover over chat messages, the landscape in which psychology has to exist that has little to do with it is so ever changing that maybe it was always bit silly to expect it to be a hard science.

shkkmo 1y ago

> there is no psychiatric body of work that is impervious to criticism. Not a single piece of psychological science is 100% true. The scientific process is rarely perfect and levels of average levels of rigour vary between disciplines. However, there are quite significantly varying levels of quality and rigour in psychological studies. Your criticism seems framed to ignore this and groups the charlatans in with the actuap scientists.

gr__or 1y ago

I'd say the article makes a pretty explicit case for why the general thesis of the book does not hold, which makes your comment stand out as comparatively superficial whataboutism

throw4847285 1y ago

There is always somebody, especially on HN, who will comment on an article debunking pop psychology, "Well that makes sense because it's all bullshit." I understand there is a bias towards the hard sciences here (which is somewhat odd, because the vast majority of commenters here do not practice any hard science). But I think there is extra skepticism of psychiatry and psychology (which get lumped together), and I wonder why that might be. Well, I have a theory, but it relies on psychology and it isn't very charitable.

the_sleaze_ 1y ago
All models are wrong. Some are useful.
lotsofpulp 1y ago
Science involves doing experiments, collecting data, and testing hypotheses, i.e. claims are falsifiable. We don't have the technology to collect the necessary data to be able to test hypotheses for psychiatric and psychological phenomenoms, and even many other non brain related medical claims about the human body. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis Seems pretty reasonable to take claims about unverifiable subjects with a grain of salt.
- antisthenes 1y ago
  I only skimmed the wikipedia article, but it seems like it is missing emphasis on the biggest problem in soft sciences like psychology - the fact that a huge chunk of their data comes from self-reporting by subjects. It's the equivalent of basing nutrition science on a Pew poll where people self-report their favorite food. Sure, it's useful to know people's general preferences sometimes, but for science that data is junk.
  - josh-sematic 1y ago
    Self-reported data is subjective, but when the very thing you are studying is the self-reported subjective experiences of people then it is actually the only data you should care about. Yes “I don’t feel depressed anymore” is a subjective statement but so is “I feel depressed, can you help me?” That specific example is a caricature of course, the data are usually much more specific than “do you feel depressed?”

mbesto 1y ago

> My claim: there is no psychiatric body of work that is impervious to criticism. Which makes these books all the more dangerous because the authors are overly confident about their conclusions and hence the attraction (which leads to book sales). When the unexplainable suddenly becomes explainable, the money rolls in.

danaris 1y ago

It's not a soft science. The problem is that too many people believe you can do research on one group of people, and generalize that universally to all humans, when in fact, the variation in every population of humans is wide enough that you can't say for certain that a given treatment will work for a given set of symptoms—not because the treatments are bad, but because there are differences both in the causes of the same symptoms, and in the workings of the body & brain, between different people. This doesn't make psychology/psychiatry/psychopharmacology a "soft science"; it just makes it a science that is still in its infancy. Once we have a better understanding of both the various underlying neurological/physical (and, for some, even gastrointestinal, given recent research showing that gut microbiota can affect the mood and brain) causes of various psychological symptoms, and the physical and neurological variations between people, it will be much easier to see, for instance, "ah, we shouldn't use Lorazepam for this patient, because their anxiety is caused by this which is much better treated by CBT and CBD, rather than that which Lorazepam directly addresses".

the_af 1y ago

I think the critique is fundamentally different from saying "it's soft science". It's saying "it's bad research, misquoting experts and references, drawing sloppy conclusions aimed at a lay audience". You can do psychology and psychiatry better than that, even if acknowledging they are not hard science. There's no excuse for being sloppy or outright fraudulent.

DuperPower 1y ago

soft science you say but the person better not commit suicide or starts working soon and gets better soon. The problem with psiquiatra is that there is the real biological diagnosis, the pseudo diagnosis (neurotic versión of the biological og diagnosis), the intentional fake diagnosis and the not intentional but still fake diagnosis, thats why DSM is not for regular people even if they can read the words the real clinical meaning is almost always different from what non clinical people think It is

int_19h 1y ago

It might be a soft science but there's still a difference between that and pseudoscience, and "recovered memories" are pretty firmly in the latter bucket. https://greyfaction.org/wiki/bessel-van-der-kolk/ https://greyfaction.org/wiki/bessel-van-der-kolk/