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> If psychology were a science, I might take this claim more seriously. The problem is not that psychology is not a science. The problem is that psychology has

> If psychology were a science, I might take this claim more seriously. The problem is not that psychology is not a science. The problem is that psychology has not had its Einstein yet. Well, actually it has: Marvin Minsky and his Society of Mind. Unfortunately, not enough other psychologists have listened to him. Yet.

lutusp 14y ago
> The problem is not that psychology is not a science. The problem is that psychology has not had its Einstein yet. Not really. Remember that psychology's topic is the mind, not the brain (the latter is the province of neuroscience). Because the mind isn't a physical thing, it's not open to empirical science. This is why psychologists differ in diverse and fundamental ways -- there's no way to resolve disputes using objective evidence on which different observers can agree (the essence of experimental science). When a doctor wants to identify and treat a disease, she takes micrographs and DNA sequences, locates a treatment that has been proven to work, then exhaustively validates treatments in clinical trials -- all before declaring that a new disease has been identified and a meaningful treatment exists. When a psychologist wants to identify a disease, he gets together with other like-minded psychologists and they vote. It was not by clinical trials that grief at the passing of a loved one, and childhood tantrums, were recognized as diseases and entered into the forthcoming DSM-V, it was by secret votes. Asperger Syndrome was added to DSM-IV by voting, not by science, and it is being removed from DSM-V by (now-secret) votes after much public controversy over whether it's a disease at all. Homosexuality was added to an earlier DSM by votes, and removed later by votes -- no science was involved, but public opinion certainly played a part in both decisions. These examples show that psychology is more political than it is scientific. When a disease is entered into psychology's "bible", it is only after psychologists decide the public wants it that way. And the reverse -- when a disease is taken out of the DSM, it's because of public disapproval, not science or clinical trials. For these reasons we're witnessing a gradual move away from psychology toward neuroscience, where objective evidence can be acquired instead of the opinions of psychologists. The present director of the NIMH agrees with this view and is advocating it, recently saying, "In most areas of medicine, doctors have historically tried to glean something about the underlying cause of a patient's illness before figuring out a treatment that addresses the source of the problem. When it came to mental or behavioral disorders in the past, however, no physical cause was detectable so the problem was long assumed by doctors to be solely "mental," and psychological therapies followed suit. Today scientific approaches based on modern biology, neuroscience and genomics are replacing nearly a century of purely psychological theories, yielding new approaches to the treatment of mental illnesses." Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-circuits http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-circ... More here: http://arachnoid.com/trouble_with_psychology http://arachnoid.com/trouble_with_psychology
- nessus42 14y ago
  Much of clinical medicine is not done the way that you claim. E.g., when a surgeon wants to try out a new surgical technique, it doesn't go through clinical trials, etc. He just gets approval from the chief surgeon (or maybe not), and does it. Maybe someday, if the technique becomes popular enough, a statistical study is done to scientifically determine if the technique is as effective as the surgeons believe it to be. Another example is that plenty of drugs are prescribed off-label. Often the off-label prescriptions completely dwarf the on-label ones. And your description of psychology does not apply at all to Cognitive Psychology. Minsky, for instance, is a Cognitive Psychology theorist, though he is outside of the mainstream of the field. Neuroscience and Cognitive Psychology are the same department at MIT. This does not indicate a move away from Psychology, however. It indicates a commitment to pursuing Psychology more scientifically than it has sometimes been practiced. But Cognitive Psychology has been practiced in a scientific manner for at least 50 years now. The Behaviorists also pursued Psychology scientifically. Their theory was just wrong in many respects, and has been proven hopelessly over-simplified as an overarching theory of the mind. (I.e., they weren't particularly good scientists.) On the other hand, Behaviorism is still useful for some things. E.g., training your dog to perform tricks. "Purely psychological" causes of serious mental illness such as major depression and schizophrenia have not been the mainstream of Psychological belief since I was in junior high, and I was in junior high a long time ago. As to not being able to study the mind scientifically, that is patently false. The mind is a computer program running on the hardware of the brain, and just as any computer program can be reverse engineered scientifically, so can the human mind. Neuroscientists do "white box" reverse engineering and cognitive psychologists do "black box" reverse engineering. Both are productive approaches, and the two fields are in constant communication with each other. That's why, for instance, they are in the same department at MIT.
  - lutusp 14y ago
    > Much of clinical medicine is not done the way that you claim. It was only a comparison, not an absolute claim, and regardless of how sloppy medical research gets, its practitioners can be called out on the carpet if they violate scientific standards. There's no similar behavioral standard in psychology, where absolutely anything goes -- in Recovered Memory Therapy, for example, psychologists persuaded clients that their fantasies were recollections of real, suppressed events, and many innocent people were charged with imaginary crimes before the public and legal outcry forced psychologists to reconsider their own fantasies. The difference? Practices like Recovered Memory Therapy are the norm in psychology, and even though many such things been debunked, psychologists are free to practice them if they want. The reason is that psychological ideas are almost never proven to be bunk -- practices tend to be abandoned because of public skepticism rather then scientific study. > As to not being able to study the mind scientifically, that is patently false. Okay, fine. Post a link to a picture of PTSD. Or Asperger Syndrome. Or any of the other popular mental illnesses. When you do, I promise to send you a picture of cancer, or the structures responsible for Alzheimer's, or an electron micrograph of common cold viruses. We can take a picture of common cold viruses, but we can't offer a cure. The difference between the common cold and PTSD is that, even though we know what causes it, doctors freely acknowledge that we are unable to offer a treatment for the common cold. As to PTSD, no on knows what causes it, a sufficiently prepared person can pretend to be suffering from it (or the reverse), and there is no clinically validated treatment. But this doesn't prevent psychologists from offering treatments that have not been vetted by controlled clinical trials. > The mind is a computer program running on the hardware of the brain, and just as any computer program can be reverse engineered scientifically, so can the human mind. Nonsense. Absolute nonsense. We have no idea how the brain produces the results it does. We can't imitate it, describe it in a scientific way, or predict what it will do next. If what you said were true, experimental psychologists would be able to tell clinical psychologists what they can and cannot do, based on solid science. But this is a fantasy with no connection to reality. > ... On the other hand, Behaviorism is still useful for some things. E.g., training your dog to perform tricks. Yes, but that's not an explanation, it's a description. Descriptions aren't enough for science. I could say, "there are points of light in the night sky", but that's not science, it's accounting. If I dare to offer an explanation -- "those points of light are distant suns like our own" -- I have crossed the threshold of science, because my explanation can be tested and possibly falsified. Psychologists describe, they don't try to explain, and they don't craft testable theories. This is why there's no theoretical core that defines psychology (and on which different psychologists agree), and that could control the behavior of psychological practitioners. > Neuroscience and Cognitive Psychology are the same department at MIT. This does not indicate a move away from Psychology, however. Wake up and smell the coffee -- psychology is in the process of being abandoned as a serious approach to brain studies, gradually replaced by neuroscience and other quantitative approaches. Just look around with an open mind. In the final report at the end of the Stapel Affair: http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/11/final-report-stapel-affair-point.html http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/11/final-repo... The conclusion was "... three investigative panels today collectively find fault with the field itself. They paint an image of a "sloppy" research culture in which some scientists don't understand the essentials of statistics, journal-selected article reviewers encourage researchers to leave unwelcome data out of their papers, and even the most prestigious journals print results that are obviously too good to be true. The commissions—one for each of the universities where Stapel has worked—concluded that "from the bottom to the top there was a general neglect of fundamental scientific standards and methodological requirements." That climate made it possible for Stapel's fraud to go undetected for many years, the report says." Now think -- how do so many incompetents get away with so much for so long? The answer is that psychology is not a science.

lutusp 14y ago

> The problem is not that psychology is not a science. The problem is that psychology has not had its Einstein yet. Not really. Remember that psychology's topic is the mind, not the brain (the latter is the province of neuroscience). Because the mind isn't a physical thing, it's not open to empirical science. This is why psychologists differ in diverse and fundamental ways -- there's no way to resolve disputes using objective evidence on which different observers can agree (the essence of experimental science). When a doctor wants to identify and treat a disease, she takes micrographs and DNA sequences, locates a treatment that has been proven to work, then exhaustively validates treatments in clinical trials -- all before declaring that a new disease has been identified and a meaningful treatment exists. When a psychologist wants to identify a disease, he gets together with other like-minded psychologists and they vote. It was not by clinical trials that grief at the passing of a loved one, and childhood tantrums, were recognized as diseases and entered into the forthcoming DSM-V, it was by secret votes. Asperger Syndrome was added to DSM-IV by voting, not by science, and it is being removed from DSM-V by (now-secret) votes after much public controversy over whether it's a disease at all. Homosexuality was added to an earlier DSM by votes, and removed later by votes -- no science was involved, but public opinion certainly played a part in both decisions. These examples show that psychology is more political than it is scientific. When a disease is entered into psychology's "bible", it is only after psychologists decide the public wants it that way. And the reverse -- when a disease is taken out of the DSM, it's because of public disapproval, not science or clinical trials. For these reasons we're witnessing a gradual move away from psychology toward neuroscience, where objective evidence can be acquired instead of the opinions of psychologists. The present director of the NIMH agrees with this view and is advocating it, recently saying, "In most areas of medicine, doctors have historically tried to glean something about the underlying cause of a patient's illness before figuring out a treatment that addresses the source of the problem. When it came to mental or behavioral disorders in the past, however, no physical cause was detectable so the problem was long assumed by doctors to be solely "mental," and psychological therapies followed suit. Today scientific approaches based on modern biology, neuroscience and genomics are replacing nearly a century of purely psychological theories, yielding new approaches to the treatment of mental illnesses." Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-circuits http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-circ... More here: http://arachnoid.com/trouble_with_psychology http://arachnoid.com/trouble_with_psychology

nessus42 14y ago
Much of clinical medicine is not done the way that you claim. E.g., when a surgeon wants to try out a new surgical technique, it doesn't go through clinical trials, etc. He just gets approval from the chief surgeon (or maybe not), and does it. Maybe someday, if the technique becomes popular enough, a statistical study is done to scientifically determine if the technique is as effective as the surgeons believe it to be. Another example is that plenty of drugs are prescribed off-label. Often the off-label prescriptions completely dwarf the on-label ones. And your description of psychology does not apply at all to Cognitive Psychology. Minsky, for instance, is a Cognitive Psychology theorist, though he is outside of the mainstream of the field. Neuroscience and Cognitive Psychology are the same department at MIT. This does not indicate a move away from Psychology, however. It indicates a commitment to pursuing Psychology more scientifically than it has sometimes been practiced. But Cognitive Psychology has been practiced in a scientific manner for at least 50 years now. The Behaviorists also pursued Psychology scientifically. Their theory was just wrong in many respects, and has been proven hopelessly over-simplified as an overarching theory of the mind. (I.e., they weren't particularly good scientists.) On the other hand, Behaviorism is still useful for some things. E.g., training your dog to perform tricks. "Purely psychological" causes of serious mental illness such as major depression and schizophrenia have not been the mainstream of Psychological belief since I was in junior high, and I was in junior high a long time ago. As to not being able to study the mind scientifically, that is patently false. The mind is a computer program running on the hardware of the brain, and just as any computer program can be reverse engineered scientifically, so can the human mind. Neuroscientists do "white box" reverse engineering and cognitive psychologists do "black box" reverse engineering. Both are productive approaches, and the two fields are in constant communication with each other. That's why, for instance, they are in the same department at MIT.
- lutusp 14y ago
  > Much of clinical medicine is not done the way that you claim. It was only a comparison, not an absolute claim, and regardless of how sloppy medical research gets, its practitioners can be called out on the carpet if they violate scientific standards. There's no similar behavioral standard in psychology, where absolutely anything goes -- in Recovered Memory Therapy, for example, psychologists persuaded clients that their fantasies were recollections of real, suppressed events, and many innocent people were charged with imaginary crimes before the public and legal outcry forced psychologists to reconsider their own fantasies. The difference? Practices like Recovered Memory Therapy are the norm in psychology, and even though many such things been debunked, psychologists are free to practice them if they want. The reason is that psychological ideas are almost never proven to be bunk -- practices tend to be abandoned because of public skepticism rather then scientific study. > As to not being able to study the mind scientifically, that is patently false. Okay, fine. Post a link to a picture of PTSD. Or Asperger Syndrome. Or any of the other popular mental illnesses. When you do, I promise to send you a picture of cancer, or the structures responsible for Alzheimer's, or an electron micrograph of common cold viruses. We can take a picture of common cold viruses, but we can't offer a cure. The difference between the common cold and PTSD is that, even though we know what causes it, doctors freely acknowledge that we are unable to offer a treatment for the common cold. As to PTSD, no on knows what causes it, a sufficiently prepared person can pretend to be suffering from it (or the reverse), and there is no clinically validated treatment. But this doesn't prevent psychologists from offering treatments that have not been vetted by controlled clinical trials. > The mind is a computer program running on the hardware of the brain, and just as any computer program can be reverse engineered scientifically, so can the human mind. Nonsense. Absolute nonsense. We have no idea how the brain produces the results it does. We can't imitate it, describe it in a scientific way, or predict what it will do next. If what you said were true, experimental psychologists would be able to tell clinical psychologists what they can and cannot do, based on solid science. But this is a fantasy with no connection to reality. > ... On the other hand, Behaviorism is still useful for some things. E.g., training your dog to perform tricks. Yes, but that's not an explanation, it's a description. Descriptions aren't enough for science. I could say, "there are points of light in the night sky", but that's not science, it's accounting. If I dare to offer an explanation -- "those points of light are distant suns like our own" -- I have crossed the threshold of science, because my explanation can be tested and possibly falsified. Psychologists describe, they don't try to explain, and they don't craft testable theories. This is why there's no theoretical core that defines psychology (and on which different psychologists agree), and that could control the behavior of psychological practitioners. > Neuroscience and Cognitive Psychology are the same department at MIT. This does not indicate a move away from Psychology, however. Wake up and smell the coffee -- psychology is in the process of being abandoned as a serious approach to brain studies, gradually replaced by neuroscience and other quantitative approaches. Just look around with an open mind. In the final report at the end of the Stapel Affair: http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/11/final-report-stapel-affair-point.html http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/11/final-repo... The conclusion was "... three investigative panels today collectively find fault with the field itself. They paint an image of a "sloppy" research culture in which some scientists don't understand the essentials of statistics, journal-selected article reviewers encourage researchers to leave unwelcome data out of their papers, and even the most prestigious journals print results that are obviously too good to be true. The commissions—one for each of the universities where Stapel has worked—concluded that "from the bottom to the top there was a general neglect of fundamental scientific standards and methodological requirements." That climate made it possible for Stapel's fraud to go undetected for many years, the report says." Now think -- how do so many incompetents get away with so much for so long? The answer is that psychology is not a science.