3 ms·

> It's cargo-cult science. Yep. Some younger readers may not know what this refers to, so here's a quote from the original Feynman paper "Cargo Cult Science":

by lutusp 12y ago

> It's cargo-cult science. Yep. Some younger readers may not know what this refers to, so here's a quote from the original Feynman paper "Cargo Cult Science": "I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas — he's the controller — and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land." Full text: http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm

vacri 12y ago
If you loathe psychology so much, why do you hang around on a site where (until fairly recently) about a third of articles were about psychology in some form? A/B testing, effective advertising, staff morale, avoiding burnout... all these sorts of things are psychology, and plenty of them have metrics.
- lutusp 12y ago
  > If you loathe psychology so much, why do you hang around on a site where (until fairly recently) about a third of articles were about psychology in some form? Easily answered. The air where I live isn't clean, but I breathe it anyway, hoping that my natural defenses will filter out the pollutants. This approach has it all over holding my breath until the air becomes clean. > all these sorts of things are psychology, and plenty of them have metrics. Metrics without an accompanying explanation. Science requires explanations, empirical, testable, falsifiable explanations. Here's how the chairman of the NIMH explains this issue, as he moved to abandon the DSM: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-diagnosis.shtml http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia...
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  I guess he (like myself) cares more about the other two thirds of articles. Also good you mention that, because there's a lot of cargo-culting and serious-sounding nonsense in the A/B testing/advertisement/metrics articles. The point is, one has to be precise in what one's claiming. There's a lot of good psychology out there; you can recognize it by being littered with caveats, "maybes", and definitely not full of numbers. My personal opinion on the field (based on articles I read, books citing many a psychological paper, and on talking and observing psychologists and psychology students I know) is that there's a lot of hard work being done to run in circles, thanks mostly to not grokking statistics and not caring about rigour. And pop-psychology industry, business consultants repeating everything they read without giving it a second thought, and journalists overexaggerating claims are not helping.
  - vacri 12y ago
    There is a definite irony in demanding that one has to be precise in what one's claiming... right after dismissing an entire, very broad field as cargo-culting. "Exactly. It's cargo-cult science" in reference to a comment that classifies psychology as just the poorly-done parts of psychiatry? Terrible precision.
    - lutusp 12y ago
      > ... in reference to a comment that classifies psychology as just the poorly-done parts of psychiatry? In sciences, because of the unifying nature of theory, there are no poorly done parts. Both cosmology and particle physics would be independently weak were it not for the other, and what unites them is ... scientific theory. Psychiatrists don't listen to psychologists, who don't listen to clinical psychologists, who don't listed to social psychologists. They're independent entities. If psychology were a science, that would all change, as physics is changed, as biology is changed -- all by tested, falsifiable, scientific theories.

by lutusp 12y ago

vacri 12y ago

If you loathe psychology so much, why do you hang around on a site where (until fairly recently) about a third of articles were about psychology in some form? A/B testing, effective advertising, staff morale, avoiding burnout... all these sorts of things are psychology, and plenty of them have metrics.

lutusp 12y ago
> If you loathe psychology so much, why do you hang around on a site where (until fairly recently) about a third of articles were about psychology in some form? Easily answered. The air where I live isn't clean, but I breathe it anyway, hoping that my natural defenses will filter out the pollutants. This approach has it all over holding my breath until the air becomes clean. > all these sorts of things are psychology, and plenty of them have metrics. Metrics without an accompanying explanation. Science requires explanations, empirical, testable, falsifiable explanations. Here's how the chairman of the NIMH explains this issue, as he moved to abandon the DSM: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-diagnosis.shtml http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia...
TeMPOraL 12y ago
I guess he (like myself) cares more about the other two thirds of articles. Also good you mention that, because there's a lot of cargo-culting and serious-sounding nonsense in the A/B testing/advertisement/metrics articles. The point is, one has to be precise in what one's claiming. There's a lot of good psychology out there; you can recognize it by being littered with caveats, "maybes", and definitely not full of numbers. My personal opinion on the field (based on articles I read, books citing many a psychological paper, and on talking and observing psychologists and psychology students I know) is that there's a lot of hard work being done to run in circles, thanks mostly to not grokking statistics and not caring about rigour. And pop-psychology industry, business consultants repeating everything they read without giving it a second thought, and journalists overexaggerating claims are not helping.
- vacri 12y ago
  There is a definite irony in demanding that one has to be precise in what one's claiming... right after dismissing an entire, very broad field as cargo-culting. "Exactly. It's cargo-cult science" in reference to a comment that classifies psychology as just the poorly-done parts of psychiatry? Terrible precision.
  - lutusp 12y ago
    > ... in reference to a comment that classifies psychology as just the poorly-done parts of psychiatry? In sciences, because of the unifying nature of theory, there are no poorly done parts. Both cosmology and particle physics would be independently weak were it not for the other, and what unites them is ... scientific theory. Psychiatrists don't listen to psychologists, who don't listen to clinical psychologists, who don't listed to social psychologists. They're independent entities. If psychology were a science, that would all change, as physics is changed, as biology is changed -- all by tested, falsifiable, scientific theories.