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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 tri

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.
- nessus42 14y ago
  > its practitioners can be called out on the carpet if they violate scientific standards. Says who? Doctors routinely prescribe drugs off-label. No one calls them out on it, unless they are doing something particularly dangerous. As to Recovered Memory Therapy: This has been reviled by cognitive psychologist for decades as the worst sort of pseudoscience. Apparently you don't know what cognitive psychology is, and you're not interested in learning. Nor does cognitive psychology particularly study mental illness, except for brain damage disorders, because (1) such disorders often are very strange, such as hemispatial neglect, and consequently extremely interesting, and (2) such disorders provide keen insights into what the damaged area of the brain is responsible for. And cognitive psychologist certainly don't treat mental illness. Cognitive psychology is pure research, and most of the experiments are done completely objectively. E.g., flash a word on a screen for a brief moment, then display a yes or no question on the screen, then measure how long it takes the subject to respond to the question. Analyze the data statistically. Here's an example result from cognitive psychology: Two groups were shown a collection of faces, and then a month later given a test on which faces they had been shown the prior month. The first group was asked to memorize the faces and were told that they would be quizzed on the faces in a few weeks. The second group was not told that they would be quizzed later. Instead they were just instructed to rate on a scale of 1-10 how likable each face was. The group that was given the surprise quiz the following month scored much better than the group who knew that they were going to be quizzed. And yes, cognitive psychology does aim to provide an explanation for this. Cognitive psychology is interested in mnemonics in general because it gives us evidence about how the brain works, can be studied quantitatively, and is also quite useful for education. > Nonsense. Absolute nonsense Okay, you go to the Department of Brain and Cognitive Science at MIT and tell them that they are all quacks. But if you ask me, it's you who are the quack, not they. As for us "having no idea how the brain works", we certainly know something about how it works. We don't know enough about it yet to give much direction to clinical psychologists at the moment, except that there are mnemonic techniques and the like that cognitive psychologists have given to those who treat people with certain kinds of brain damage. Clearly our understanding of the human mind scientifically is in its infancy. Re Behaviorism, the Behaviorist did have explanations. They just weren't very good explanations. For them the explanation of the mind is that it is nothing but a large collection of simple learned responses to external stimuli. But your requirement that science must provide explanation is not correct. That's certainly desirable, but if a theory makes accurate predictions and is useful, it's still a scientific theory, explanation or not. Not everything can be explained. Newton's theories didn't explain what mass is or why momentum is conserved. It just told us how to measure mass and noticed that certain conservation principles always applied. As to having an open mind, you apparently know nothing at all about cognitive psychology. Please follow your own advice.

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.

nessus42 14y ago
> its practitioners can be called out on the carpet if they violate scientific standards. Says who? Doctors routinely prescribe drugs off-label. No one calls them out on it, unless they are doing something particularly dangerous. As to Recovered Memory Therapy: This has been reviled by cognitive psychologist for decades as the worst sort of pseudoscience. Apparently you don't know what cognitive psychology is, and you're not interested in learning. Nor does cognitive psychology particularly study mental illness, except for brain damage disorders, because (1) such disorders often are very strange, such as hemispatial neglect, and consequently extremely interesting, and (2) such disorders provide keen insights into what the damaged area of the brain is responsible for. And cognitive psychologist certainly don't treat mental illness. Cognitive psychology is pure research, and most of the experiments are done completely objectively. E.g., flash a word on a screen for a brief moment, then display a yes or no question on the screen, then measure how long it takes the subject to respond to the question. Analyze the data statistically. Here's an example result from cognitive psychology: Two groups were shown a collection of faces, and then a month later given a test on which faces they had been shown the prior month. The first group was asked to memorize the faces and were told that they would be quizzed on the faces in a few weeks. The second group was not told that they would be quizzed later. Instead they were just instructed to rate on a scale of 1-10 how likable each face was. The group that was given the surprise quiz the following month scored much better than the group who knew that they were going to be quizzed. And yes, cognitive psychology does aim to provide an explanation for this. Cognitive psychology is interested in mnemonics in general because it gives us evidence about how the brain works, can be studied quantitatively, and is also quite useful for education. > Nonsense. Absolute nonsense Okay, you go to the Department of Brain and Cognitive Science at MIT and tell them that they are all quacks. But if you ask me, it's you who are the quack, not they. As for us "having no idea how the brain works", we certainly know something about how it works. We don't know enough about it yet to give much direction to clinical psychologists at the moment, except that there are mnemonic techniques and the like that cognitive psychologists have given to those who treat people with certain kinds of brain damage. Clearly our understanding of the human mind scientifically is in its infancy. Re Behaviorism, the Behaviorist did have explanations. They just weren't very good explanations. For them the explanation of the mind is that it is nothing but a large collection of simple learned responses to external stimuli. But your requirement that science must provide explanation is not correct. That's certainly desirable, but if a theory makes accurate predictions and is useful, it's still a scientific theory, explanation or not. Not everything can be explained. Newton's theories didn't explain what mass is or why momentum is conserved. It just told us how to measure mass and noticed that certain conservation principles always applied. As to having an open mind, you apparently know nothing at all about cognitive psychology. Please follow your own advice.