5 ms·

I'm curious why you say this. Note that they do not mean to imply that the participants actually believe they are out of their body. Just that the contrived sit

by scott_s 13y ago

I'm curious why you say this. Note that they do not mean to imply that the participants actually believe they are out of their body. Just that the contrived situation they were in induced that sensation. And if they are able to reliably induce that sensation in people through that situation, then I think it's worth investigating why.

oblique63 13y ago
It's a semantic nit-pick about the definition of 'science'. He seems to have written an article about it here if you're curious: http://www.arachnoid.com/psychology/index.html http://www.arachnoid.com/psychology/index.html Take it with a grain of salt though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6194296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6194296 Either way, this argument is rather orthogonal to whether-or-not the situation is actually 'worthy' of future investigation. So it could still be useful, however the relative maturity of the field limits how accurately we can assess that.
- lutusp 13y ago
  > It's a semantic nit-pick about the definition of 'science'. It's more substantial than semantics -- without theory shaping and testing, an activity is not science. But let's test this idea scientifically -- let's say this isn't true, that an activity that only describes, that doesn't make an effort to explain, counts as science. Let's see where this takes us. Here we go: Let's say I'm a doctor and I've created a revolutionary cure for the common cold. My cure is to shake a dried gourd over the cold sufferer until he gets better. The cure might take a week, but it always works. My method is repeatable and perfectly reliable, and I've published my cure in a refereed scientific journal (there are now any number of phony refereed scientific journals). And, because (in this thought experiment) science can get along without defining theories, I'm under no obligation to try to explain my cure, or consider alternative explanations for my breakthrough — I only have to describe it, just like a psychologist. Because I've cured the common cold, and because I've met all the requirements that psychology recognizes for science, I deserve a Nobel Prize. Yes or no? Ask yourself what's wrong with this picture, and notice that the same thing is wrong with psychology — all description, no explanation, no established principles on which different psychologists agree, no effort to build consensus, and no unifying theories.
  - oblique63 13y ago
    I don't entirely disagree, however the past thread I linked to makes me weary about pursuing this discussion further. The problem is that we are seriously limited in what we can actually do/use if we base psychology entirely on this premise. I mean this both conceptually and technologically. We haven't fully mapped out the brain, we don't know about all the neurotransmitters out there, and we don't even know what fMRI shows us exactly, so we gotta be realistic with our expectations given our current limitations. Likewise, we don't actually fully know how most psychoactive compounds work to produce the effects they do, much less 'designer medications'. This isn't a reason to dismiss their usefulness though. There's a difference between being 'limited', and being 'wrong'. You could've made a similar argument about physics back before we really understood the atom (again, due to limitations). Additionally, the notion of 'wrong' here is only relative to the philosophical theory of falsification, which is good, but has it's own set of gotchas and nuances that others have tried to address: http://www.loyno.edu/~folse/Lakatos.html http://www.loyno.edu/~folse/Lakatos.html http://philosophy.wisc.edu/forster/papers/Lakatos.htm http://philosophy.wisc.edu/forster/papers/Lakatos.htm http://coraifeartaigh.wordpress.com/2011/02/13/the-philosophy-of-paul-feyerabend/ http://coraifeartaigh.wordpress.com/2011/02/13/the-philosoph... http://andrewgelman.com/2004/10/14/bayes_and_poppe/ http://andrewgelman.com/2004/10/14/bayes_and_poppe/ So while good, this definition of science is still far from a stable building-block to deem all nonconforming studies unequivocally 'wrong'.
    - lutusp 13y ago
      > The problem is that we are seriously limited in what we can actually do/use if we base psychology entirely on this premise. Yes, that's true, but current events suggest that the remedy is not to claim that psychology is scientific on dubious grounds, but instead to shift focus to neuroscience, see where a more biological approach will take us. This happens to be the NIMH director's view as well. > We haven't fully mapped out the brain, we don't know about all the neurotransmitters out there, and we don't even know what fMRI shows us exactly, so we gotta be realistic with our expectations given our current limitations. But that's not psychology, that's neuroscience. Psychology is the study of the mind, not the brain, and the mind is not accessible to brain scanners. > ... however the past thread I linked to makes me weary about pursuing this discussion further. Perfectly understandable. In any case, recent events like the NIMH director's decision to phase out the DSM make anything we choose to say rather unimportant.
lutusp 13y ago
>> I wish they would stop calling this "science". It's embarrassing to real science and scientists. > I'm curious why you say this. Because it's not science? > And if they are able to reliably induce that sensation in people through that situation, then I think it's worth investigating why. Yes, but psychologists never seem to get around to asking "why", only "what". There's a bit more to science than observing interesting phenomena and publishing descriptions. Psychology is in the midst of a historical upheaval because they only describe things and don't try to shape theories -- explanations -- about what they describe. Scientists eventually get around to crafting theories about their observations -- theories that can be applied to new observations, that predict things not yet observed, and that can be falsified by new evidence. Psychologists don't do that -- over a period of decades, psychologists has given up on theory-shaping and now limit themselves to observing and reporting what they observed. And the chickens are coming home to roost. The director of the NIMH has recently decided to phase out the DSM, psychology's "bible" and a central authority for psychological clinical work, on the ground that it's not scientific: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-diagnosis.shtml http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia... A quote: "While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity." In the long term, neuroscience will produce the sorts of explanations -- theories -- that psychology seems unable to produce. That time hasn't arrived, but current events suggest it's not too soon to begin to phase out psychology's failed effort to craft a theory of mind.
- scott_s 13y ago
  But psychologist do have theories-of-the-mind to try to describe why we end up thinking the things that we do. They are not complete, but it's not like they're not trying at all. And while there is more to science than publishing descriptions, it is still part of science. I think that not limiting research to the DSM makes sense. The DSM is a clinical tool. It is necessarily a symptom-based descriptions of mental disorders. Steven Novella of Science Based Medicine explains this quite well: http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/dsm-5-and-the-fight-for-the-heart-of-psychiatry/ http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/dsm-5-and-the-fight-for-... (I actually heard this line of talk from him on the podcast The Skeptics Guide to the Universe, on which he is the host: http://www.theskepticsguide.org/ http://www.theskepticsguide.org/)

by scott_s 13y ago

oblique63 13y ago

It's a semantic nit-pick about the definition of 'science'. He seems to have written an article about it here if you're curious: http://www.arachnoid.com/psychology/index.html http://www.arachnoid.com/psychology/index.html Take it with a grain of salt though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6194296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6194296 Either way, this argument is rather orthogonal to whether-or-not the situation is actually 'worthy' of future investigation. So it could still be useful, however the relative maturity of the field limits how accurately we can assess that.

lutusp 13y ago
> It's a semantic nit-pick about the definition of 'science'. It's more substantial than semantics -- without theory shaping and testing, an activity is not science. But let's test this idea scientifically -- let's say this isn't true, that an activity that only describes, that doesn't make an effort to explain, counts as science. Let's see where this takes us. Here we go: Let's say I'm a doctor and I've created a revolutionary cure for the common cold. My cure is to shake a dried gourd over the cold sufferer until he gets better. The cure might take a week, but it always works. My method is repeatable and perfectly reliable, and I've published my cure in a refereed scientific journal (there are now any number of phony refereed scientific journals). And, because (in this thought experiment) science can get along without defining theories, I'm under no obligation to try to explain my cure, or consider alternative explanations for my breakthrough — I only have to describe it, just like a psychologist. Because I've cured the common cold, and because I've met all the requirements that psychology recognizes for science, I deserve a Nobel Prize. Yes or no? Ask yourself what's wrong with this picture, and notice that the same thing is wrong with psychology — all description, no explanation, no established principles on which different psychologists agree, no effort to build consensus, and no unifying theories.
- oblique63 13y ago
  I don't entirely disagree, however the past thread I linked to makes me weary about pursuing this discussion further. The problem is that we are seriously limited in what we can actually do/use if we base psychology entirely on this premise. I mean this both conceptually and technologically. We haven't fully mapped out the brain, we don't know about all the neurotransmitters out there, and we don't even know what fMRI shows us exactly, so we gotta be realistic with our expectations given our current limitations. Likewise, we don't actually fully know how most psychoactive compounds work to produce the effects they do, much less 'designer medications'. This isn't a reason to dismiss their usefulness though. There's a difference between being 'limited', and being 'wrong'. You could've made a similar argument about physics back before we really understood the atom (again, due to limitations). Additionally, the notion of 'wrong' here is only relative to the philosophical theory of falsification, which is good, but has it's own set of gotchas and nuances that others have tried to address: http://www.loyno.edu/~folse/Lakatos.html http://www.loyno.edu/~folse/Lakatos.html http://philosophy.wisc.edu/forster/papers/Lakatos.htm http://philosophy.wisc.edu/forster/papers/Lakatos.htm http://coraifeartaigh.wordpress.com/2011/02/13/the-philosophy-of-paul-feyerabend/ http://coraifeartaigh.wordpress.com/2011/02/13/the-philosoph... http://andrewgelman.com/2004/10/14/bayes_and_poppe/ http://andrewgelman.com/2004/10/14/bayes_and_poppe/ So while good, this definition of science is still far from a stable building-block to deem all nonconforming studies unequivocally 'wrong'.
  - lutusp 13y ago
    > The problem is that we are seriously limited in what we can actually do/use if we base psychology entirely on this premise. Yes, that's true, but current events suggest that the remedy is not to claim that psychology is scientific on dubious grounds, but instead to shift focus to neuroscience, see where a more biological approach will take us. This happens to be the NIMH director's view as well. > We haven't fully mapped out the brain, we don't know about all the neurotransmitters out there, and we don't even know what fMRI shows us exactly, so we gotta be realistic with our expectations given our current limitations. But that's not psychology, that's neuroscience. Psychology is the study of the mind, not the brain, and the mind is not accessible to brain scanners. > ... however the past thread I linked to makes me weary about pursuing this discussion further. Perfectly understandable. In any case, recent events like the NIMH director's decision to phase out the DSM make anything we choose to say rather unimportant.

lutusp 13y ago

>> I wish they would stop calling this "science". It's embarrassing to real science and scientists. > I'm curious why you say this. Because it's not science? > And if they are able to reliably induce that sensation in people through that situation, then I think it's worth investigating why. Yes, but psychologists never seem to get around to asking "why", only "what". There's a bit more to science than observing interesting phenomena and publishing descriptions. Psychology is in the midst of a historical upheaval because they only describe things and don't try to shape theories -- explanations -- about what they describe. Scientists eventually get around to crafting theories about their observations -- theories that can be applied to new observations, that predict things not yet observed, and that can be falsified by new evidence. Psychologists don't do that -- over a period of decades, psychologists has given up on theory-shaping and now limit themselves to observing and reporting what they observed. And the chickens are coming home to roost. The director of the NIMH has recently decided to phase out the DSM, psychology's "bible" and a central authority for psychological clinical work, on the ground that it's not scientific: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-diagnosis.shtml http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia... A quote: "While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity." In the long term, neuroscience will produce the sorts of explanations -- theories -- that psychology seems unable to produce. That time hasn't arrived, but current events suggest it's not too soon to begin to phase out psychology's failed effort to craft a theory of mind.

scott_s 13y ago
But psychologist do have theories-of-the-mind to try to describe why we end up thinking the things that we do. They are not complete, but it's not like they're not trying at all. And while there is more to science than publishing descriptions, it is still part of science. I think that not limiting research to the DSM makes sense. The DSM is a clinical tool. It is necessarily a symptom-based descriptions of mental disorders. Steven Novella of Science Based Medicine explains this quite well: http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/dsm-5-and-the-fight-for-the-heart-of-psychiatry/ http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/dsm-5-and-the-fight-for-... (I actually heard this line of talk from him on the podcast The Skeptics Guide to the Universe, on which he is the host: http://www.theskepticsguide.org/ http://www.theskepticsguide.org/)