One big area of psychology not mentioned in the article that has been seeing a good amount of success is applied psychology with respect to Human-Computer Interaction.
For example, there's a lot of basic perceptual psychology regarding response times and color built into many GUI toolkits in the form of GUI widgets (buttons, scrollbars, checkboxes, etc). Change blindness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_blindness) is also a known problem for error messages and can be easily avoided with good design. There's also a lot of perceptual psychology research in AR and VR too.
With respect to cognitive psychology, there's extensive work in information foraging (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_foraging) which has been distilled down as heuristics for information scent.
With respect to social psychology, there are hundreds of scientific papers about collective intelligence, how to make teams online more effective, how to socialize newcomers to online sites, how to motivate people to contribute more content and higher quality content, how and why people collaborate on Wikipedia and tools for making them more effective, and many, many more.
In past work, my colleagues and I also looked at understanding why people fall for phishing scams, and applying influence tactics to improve people's willingness to adopt better cybersecurity practices.
Basically, the author is right about his argument if you have a very narrow view of psychology, but there's a lot of really good work on applied (and practical!) psychology that's going on outside of traditional psychology journals.
In the broader category of cognition, I think we understand a bit better how people rationalize their decisions. How many things we do almost entirely on pure reflex and then manufacture a story that explains it without sounding crazy or just saying “I don’t know.”
[delayed]
i think that before a science can be "a science" with powerful theories and universal laws, there needs to be a long period of existing as a proto-science where people aren't doing experiments and are just observing and describing.
before darwin, you had to have linneaus just describing and cataloging animals.; before {astronomy theory guy}, you had to have {people just tracking and observing stars}.
psychology may have tried to jump the gun a bit by attempting to become theoretical before there were a few generations of folks sitting around quantifying and classifying human behavior.
this was definitely true in cognitive neuroscience. once folks got their hands on fMRI, this entire genre of research popped up that was "replicate an existing psychology study in the scanner to confirm that they used their brain". imo, a lot more was learned by groups that stepped back from theory and just started collecting data and discovering "resting state networks" in the brain.
I suspect that after 400 years of the scientific method, that we may be reaching the limits of single variable experiments in a number of fields. Statistical methods can find those patterns, and as we advance in those areas I expect us to advance in messy sciences like psychology. We’ll be able to more reliably look at people or other chaotic systems and see how three inputs work together to create a single effect.
partially disagree with this, every proto-science historically had a bunch of wrong but highly sophisticated theories. medicine, alchemy (as mentioned in the article), physics, biology (Aristotle), astronomy. for some reason it seems you need the wrong theories to organize the empirical data.
I actually think Freud’s elaborate mental structures have some of this feeling to them.
> for some reason it seems you need the wrong theories to organize the empirical data
The scientific process is really misunderstood. People think you use it to find truth, but actually you use it to reject falsehoods. The consequence of this is that you narrow in on the truth so your goals look identical, but the distinction does matter (at least if you want to understand why that happens and why it's okay that science is wrong many times -- in fact, it's always wrong, but it gets less wrong (I'm certain there's a connection to that website and this well known saying).
He's well known for his Sci-Fi but he got a PhD in chemistry, taught himself astrophysics, and even published in the area. He even had written physics texts. I found Understanding Physics quite enjoyable when I was younger but yeah, it isn't the same level of complexity I saw while getting my degree, but it's not aimed at University students.
Anyways, I'm just saying, he's speaking as an insider and I do think this is something a lot more people should read.
https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
I believe there's a copy of Understanding Physics here but currently offline: https://archive.org/details/asimov-understanding-physics
Astronomy: you might go with Galileo Galilei, and you wouldn't be too wrong. [0]
By forcing formal study of the mind into the constrained methods used for studying the physical world, it allows the government and profit/power seekers to be the only actors free to use the methods that work best.
I wonder if this is purely a coincidence.
What methods are appropriate but forbidden by this “forcing” (and what’s causing the forcing exactly?)
Methods that do not adhere to the scientific method.
The forcing is performed by culture. Think back to COVID, the effect was on full display in various forms during that spectacle. Or, pick most any war that gets substantial coverage in the media.
I'm unfairly picking on science here a bit, the problem is ideologies in general.
As in… what methods?
Psychological studies have to adhere to various controls and what not. "The method".
Put some smart people in charge of an ambitious psychedelic powered initiative...but they have no controls. Not science? Cannot be science?
It's somewhat like how hip hop influences and accelerates white cultural evolution. Do this idea, see what happens when I do it.
Can be science! Doesn’t have to be science! Science folks do exploratory studies all the time to get a sense of whether the tree is worth barking up before they do the hard work of proving it.
Psychedelic studies might not suit themselves to FDA gold standard double-blind clinical trial science, but science overall involves a really broad toolkit. Psychedelics aren’t the only kind of intervention that can’t be safely or effectively blinded, and there are methods that attempt to demonstrate an effect anyway.
It seems to be thanks to people trying stuff as well as rigorous scientific studies that psychedelics are having their present-day moment in the sun (thanks, MAPS et al!). (My favorite part was that time Alexandria Ocasio Cortez cosponsored a psychedelics bill with arch-conservative, retired Navy SEAL Dan Crenshaw)
Things can be valuable without science proving it—nobody’s coming after the local preacher or imam or rabbi or shaman demanding that they scientifically prove their ministerial insights. And lord help the busybody who comes at a retired Navy SEAL trying psychedelic therapy for their post-traumatic stress…
I wonder, though—does it seem to you that psychedelics should be industrialized? There’s a fine line between “legal” and “aggressively marketed by drug companies.”
Anyone is free to learn therapy skills and use them in their own lives, you're just not allowed to call it therapy.
> there needs to be a long period of existing as a proto-science where people aren't doing experiments and are just observing and describing.
> before darwin
There was an understanding of natural selection even back to antiquity. How could there not be? Did people not tame the animals and plants? These are experiments, and they saw the results.
There were great contributions to astronomy long before Kepler. There were many experiments that influenced the whole field. There was a lot of important chemistry that happened long before Lavoisier (conservation of mass) and Dalton (atomic model).
The proto-sciences are nothing to scoff at. They aren't useless and they weren't ill-founded. They were just... noisy (and science is naturally a noisy process, so I mean *NOISY*). There's nothing inheriently wrong with that. The only thing wrong is not recognizing the noise and placing unfounded confidence in results. That famous conversation between Dyson and Fermi discussing von Neumann's elephant wasn't saying that Dyson didn't do hard work or that the work he did had no utility, it was that you can't place confidence in a model derived from empirical results without a strong underlying theory. You'd never get to that if you only observed because you'd only end up making the same error Dyson did.
Science, in its nature, is not about answers, it is about confidence in a model that approximates answers. These two things look identical but truth is unobtainable, there is always an epsilon bound. So it is about that epsilon! Your confidence! So experiments that don't yield high confidence results aren't useless, but they are rather just the beginning. They give direction to explore. Because hey, if I'm looking for elephants I'd rather start looking where someone says they saw a big crazy monster than randomly pick a point on the globe. But I'm also not going to claim elephants exist just because I heard someone talking about something vaguely matching the description. And this is naturally how it works. We're exploring into the unknown. You gotta follow hunches and rumors, because it is better than nothing. But you won't get anywhere from observation alone. Not to mention that it is incredibly easy to be deceived by your observations. You will find this story ring true countless times in the history of science. But better models always prevail because we challenge the status quo and we take risks. But the nature of it is that it is risky (noisy). There's nothing wrong with that. You just have to admit it.
> There was an understanding of natural selection even back to antiquity. How could there not be? Did people not tame the animals and plants? These are experiments, and they saw the results.
In a way yes, but I'm saying their proposal of how to handle the situation is too strong: don't do experiments
>>> there needs to be a long period ... where people aren't doing experiments and are just observing and describing.
Yes, it's fuzzy. But embrace the fuzziness. Acknowledge it. The truth is that observation isn't enough. You can NEVER discover truth from observation alone. Science doesn't work without interaction. There's three classes of casual structure: correlation, intervention, and counterfactual. We know the memes about the first, but the other two require participation. You'll get lucky and have some "natural experiments" but this is extremely limited. What I'm saying is that we can work with these issues without tying our hands behind our backs and shooting ourselves in the foot. Stuff being hard is no reason to handicap ourselves. I'm arguing that only makes it more difficult lol
I think one of the major issues is that we (scientists) fear that my openly discussing limitations and admitting that we don't have high (statistical) confidence will result in people not taking us seriously. And in many ways this is a reasonable response. I'm sure many scientists, myself included, have annoyingly found that an honest limitations section ends up just being ammunition for reviewers to reject the work. A criticism my advisor has given me is that I'm "too honest". Maybe he's right, but idk, I think that thinking is wrong. Because science is about ruling things out, not proving results (you can effectively achieve the latter by doing the former but you can't directly do the latter). And the younger the field is (e.g. my field of ML is VERY young), the noisier the results are.
Personally, I'd rather live in a world where we're overly open about limitations than not. We're adults and can recognize that's the reality, right? Because papers are communication from one expert to others? (And not to the general public, though they can see) Because as I see it, the openness is just letting others know what areas should be explored.
Don't fear the noise, embrace it. It's always there, you can't get rid of it, so trying to hide it only makes more.
I’m floored by the suggestion that professional training as a therapist does not produce a statistically significant improvement in ability to treat mental health conditions.
It’s interesting that one comparison they offered was between advice from a random professor versus a session with a therapist. I can remember several helpful conversations with kind, older professors during difficult times. Maybe we should identify people whose life experiences naturally make them good counselors and encourage them to do more of it, instead of making young adults pay $200k for ineffective education and a stamp saying they can charge for therapy.
As much as that’s an eye-catching headline, even the author admits it was a bad study that hasn’t been reproduced.
If the author told you their psychology study was reproducible, not dismissing it would be the other category of error.
Which I think is a critical aspect of the author's argument: the lack of replication.
There's a lot of factors at play. As I mentioned in my main comment, the study naturally has a metric fuckton of variables and noise which makes even basic experiments extremely difficult, but there are other factors like willingness to close that gap (is it surprising few want to climb a treacherous mountain?), as well as the whole structure of academia and the way metrics are formed. How do you create a foundation when you're not only not incentivized to replicate but actively dis-incentivized? How do you explore that mountain which certainly has many pitfalls and uncertain paths when you must publish frequently?
Those problems are not remotely isolated to psychology, but they have a huge and crazy difficult mountain to climb and should we be surprised that few try to climb it when attempting to do so is far more likely to lead to academic success rather than helping the field make their way up? Even if you don't fall off? It can take a long time to actually capitalize on those gains. I do think this is a conversation academia needs to have. Everything in place is logical and makes sense, they were done for good reasons, but I think we need to be honest that exploration is just a highly risky business. You'll never make it across the ocean, to the moon, or to other worlds if you are unwilling to lose a few people (researchers who never make any impact) or risk a have a few conmen (researchers who make shit up).Ironically, if you try too hard to prevent these from happening, you'll be doomed to only have them (you'll only explore just beyond the fence and you'll hear stories of what is imagined far beyond; either identical to just outside the fence or wild stories. But you'll never know until you go). We can inch our way out or we can be brave. I think unfortunately it is only explorers who can tell the brave from imaginative. It sucks, but is this not the nature of it? A story as old as stories are. But we wouldn't be where we are if we didn't engage in risky business.
> professional training as a therapist does not produce a statistically significant improvement in ability to treat mental health conditions.
It produces a statistically significant improvement, just not with people who are already gifted at it. You can get not gifted people and teach them to be not worse than gifted. It is not much, but it is not nothing either.
Speaking as a tenured professor of clinical psychology, this part kind of irked me a bit. It's not exactly false but it's a little misleading (like some other parts of the essay).
Lots to say about it but this is a finding that has been reported intermittently for decades. However, it's being spun a little misleadingly.
Note that the author says that untrained professors were selected for their ability to be warm and empathetic. It's not everyone (we all know not everyone is warm and empathetic), and even trainees learn very very early (like immediately in their first term) the basics of therapy. Not everyone is warm and empathetic, and people going into clinical psychology are sort of self-selected in their empathy to start with.
This research is kind of being taken out of context too. Wampold, one of the authors cited (who I have the greatest respect for) is very big on "nonspecific factors", meaning things like empathy, good social skills, and so forth. His studies in general tend to be focused not on "does training matter?" but "do specific therapy protocols matter, or is it about the clinician's social/relationship skills?"
If you want some kind of medical standards, you can't just say "oh it's ok, everyone can just be warm and empathetic". You have to train on it, grade it, hold it to some standard. Otherwise you get manipulative, self-serving therapists who do harm in the long run (the length of a study versus real settings is another issue).
Another issue is that many of these issues are not unique to psychology. In lots of medical scenarios it's been shown that the amount of training needed to competently do a wide variety of procedures is lower than current standards in the US require. Experienced clinicians in many fields have acquired biases that interfere with practice, young trainees are much more worried about performance and are more open-minded and so forth (on average a little; not trying to stereotype).
A huge, enormous volume of studies over many years have shown that therapy works compared to all sorts of placebos and controls; that some therapists are reliably better than others; but that what makes therapy "work" overall is not what protocol-driven therapies (CBT etc) assert. It's not so much that training isn't necessary, it's that the field has has been obsessed with scientific details that, although well-intended, don't matter, and healthcare in general is full of phenomena that we'd rather not admit.
Thanks for writing this, appreciate the point of view of someone who knows what they’re talking about. I guess my gripe is that the time-consuming and expensive training process isn’t able to reliably elevate a random young practitioner to the helpfulness level of “wise and patient professor who is offering their time to mentor and counsel even though it’s not in their job description”… but that is in fact a very high bar to hit.
It’s not surprising that some people are naturally good therapists just from a lifetime of observing people, and also not surprising that some of those people end up in teaching-focused academic jobs.
I guess you can train people to be empathetic if they’re motivated in the right ways but just lacking the skill. It makes sense that it’s a big part of counselor training.
Where did it say the education was ineffective? There are reasons to believe it is not the only path to being effective at helping others, but that does not invalidate that if you spend a few years learning tools and techniques and pattern matching to behaviors, you have a valid toolkit in front of you for being a therapist.
Now, it is a valid argument whether or not it should be required (and there is no requirement to label yourself as a "coach"), and the price tag on it is of course always a consideration. But being dismissive of higher education is just as silly as being overly dependent on it.
I think a lot of people just never find the right therapist and then assume all therapists are terrible.
It’s interesting because even the most staunch opponents of mental health talk therapy have people in their life they talk to, they just don’t consider them therapists.
Well, sure, but "people in their life that they talk to" aren't really therapists. They're functioning quite differently - they can have a personal involvement that a therapist, ethically, isn't permitted to have. The sorts of things someone talks to with their friends overlaps with but is also often quite distinct from the sort of thing a therapist is probing for. There's no direct financial incentive to keep the "patient" coming. And they're making no claim to, broadly, help someone improve their overall mental health - people vent to their friends because it feels nice, not because it's necessarily constructive.
But this begs the same question: if mental illness really is what psychologists say it is, and if treatment is a learnable skill, then the practitioner shouldn't matter that much assuming his training was good.
But most evidence suggests that some "je ne sais quoi" has to exist in the therapeutic relationship.
In other words, Freud was right about Transference as a necessary ingredient to psychotherapy (and probably about a lot else that is still too controversial to talk about or pass IRB muster).
Isn't the "je ne sais quoi" just feeling safe to be themselves and open? Whatever that means for each person
Although I agree it's a matter of finding the right therapist, I think that undersells the problem a fair bit.
There are large barriers to trialing a lot of therapists, and finding the right one can be like finding a needle in a haystack. Therapy is quite expensive, and many therapists already have a full caseload. And the pool of therapists is very homogeneous: essentially, a ton of well-off white women who might not have the tools or shared experiences to facilitate a helpful therapeutic alliance with individuals coming from a broader background than they're comfortable with.
So the patient is holding the therapist wrong?
Part of the problem is the therapists (and medical practitioners in general) are often forbidden from doing the thing they were trained to do for a variety of reasons: risk and liability, patient turnaround, standardization. These things can get in the way of doing the right thing in the times where that is known. That’s before considering the ambiguous cases.
> often forbidden from doing the thing they were trained to do for a variety of reasons
you forgot to add `insurance company rules` to your list.
Can you give some examples?
Want to prescribe medication because you think it is the best treatment -> insurance company says no
This happens literally millions of times per day.
>epicycles all the way down
I don't mind this idea at all! I'm the abyss staring into itself.
That said I don't think digging into skulls until we identify the neurons that cause the big sad or teaching people ways to cope with their awful lives is worth much. I want psychology to help me understand (a maybe terrible) existence, not to solve it. Something like overturning our intuitions is perfect. If tomorrow they make a flawless anti-depressant that will let me endure misery I argue we'll be worse off.
> I recently read The Secrets of Alchemy by Lawrence Principe, which I loved, especially because he tries to replicate ancient alchemical recipes in his own lab. And sometimes he succeeds! For instance, he attempts to make the “sulfur of antimony” by following the instructions in The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony (Der Triumph-Wagen Antimonii), written by an alchemist named Basil Valentine sometime around the year 1600. At first, all Principe gets is a “dirty gray lump”. Then he realizes the recipe calls for “Hungarian antimony,” so instead of using pure lab-grade antimony, he literally orders some raw Eastern European ore, and suddenly the reaction works! It turns out the Hungarian dirt is special because it contains a bit of silicon dioxide, something Basil Valentine couldn’t have known.
> No wonder alchemists thought they were dealing with mysterious forces beyond the realm of human understanding. To them, that’s exactly what they were doing! If you don’t realize that your ore is lacking silicon dioxide—because you don’t even have the concept of silicon dioxide—then a reaction that worked one time might not work a second time, you’ll have no idea why that happened, and you’ll go nuts looking for explanations. Maybe Venus was in the wrong position? Maybe I didn’t approach my work with a pure enough heart? Or maybe my antimony was poisoned by a demon!
> An alchemist working in the year 1600 would have been justified in thinking that the physical world was too hopelessly complex to ever be understood—random, even. One day you get the sulfur of antimony, the next day you get a dirty gray lump, nobody knows why, and nobody will ever know why. And yet everything they did turned out to be governed by laws—laws that were discovered by humans, laws that are now taught in high school chemistry. Things seem random until you understand ‘em.
Well, this example doesn't just fail to support the argument, but undercuts it. Basil successfully identified the kind of antimony that would work, -despite- having no concept of sulfur dioxide. He did not write down something like "not all kinds of antimony work for this recipe, so get a bunch of different kinds and try them all" -- that, or a stronger version ("sometimes the recipe fails, we don't know why"), would support the author's point.
So we're left with the author trying to argue that this alchemist thought the world was "too hopelessly complex to ever be understood" on the basis of ... the alchemist correctly identifying the ingredient that would make the recipe work.
> The best thing to do is forget all of it, estrange yourself from the word “creativity” entirely, and start with the extremely bizarre fact that humans write songs and novels and solve math problems, and we don't know how this happens.
(Found in note [10] in the article.)
This reads, very much in a positive way, like someone is describing the idea of "root cause analysis". That bodes well for this person to epistemicly "know" stuff like they write about. At least they'll be more likely to "know that they don't know" yet, which is a necessary step along the way.
It reminds me of a saying I've heard: "Forget what you know." ("Forget" is even in the quote. I wouldn't be surprised if the author is familiar with the saying.) Perhaps more clearly, "Forget what you think you know." The idea being for one to identify and challenge their assumptions in order to work it out from "first principles".
We've learned that it hasn't produced much research that holds up to replication, that the vast majority of research never gets properly replicated at all anyway, and that despite the endless meta-analysis of glorified internet surveys people's mental health hasn't been improving.
We're certainly learning how to use psychology to manipulate people though. Advertising, dark patterns, propaganda, and behavioral conditioning just wouldn't be the same without psychology research. We're performing research on children to learn the youngest age they can recognize a brand name (age 3 last I checked) or how best to keep them hooked playing a video game/child casino though and that research is making companies money hand over fist.
I have a solid example here that bogles my mind every now and them watching people killing other people especially in the US: I would expect after all those years mental health to be accounted in a serious criminal case like killing somebody. Meaning that a person who kills somebody else definitely has mental issues that come from their childhood. So what about parents in those cases, aren't they having their part on the sick mentality of their child? Why not pressing charges to them?
> Meaning that a person who kills somebody else definitely has mental issues that come from their childhood. So what about parents in those cases, aren't they having their part on the sick mentality of their child? Why not pressing charges to them?
Even assuming the premise of killing someone implies mental illness, and assuming the mental illness stems from trauma, there's a pretty large leap in reasoning here. Why must the trauma come during childhood? Why not in adulthood? Even in childhood, why does it have to come from the parents?
Then you have the idea of continuing up the causal chain. Why are we pressing charges to the parents? If the parent's traumatized their kids, there's good chance they did it due to their own mental illness/trauma, which means the parents themselves were abused in childhood. So we should go after their parents.... except that just means we should go after there parents.... ad infinitum.
> a person who kills somebody else definitely has mental issues that come from their childhood
People that kill other people often function well in their society. It doesn't make sense to me to classify that as mental issues. People are inherently territorial, aggressive animals - at least to the extent being so doesn't make them much of an outlier.
> There’s a thought that’s haunted me for years: we’re doing all this research in psychology, but are we learning anything?
Advancements in PTSD, dissociation, treatment resistant depression and attachment disorders is astounding. We know a lot more about how people work.
Psychology has always been a person centered field - humans are complex, and what it does is more akin to QA than coding. It’s individualized. It doesn’t love studies because the underlying mechanism or traumas can be different even for people who went through the same things.
Unfortunately advancements are not evenly distributed. There is an army of CBT therapists who work in one method that works for some but not the majority. Finding a practitioner is a crapshoot even when looking for specialists.
The DSM is functionally treated as a billing manual, and to be paid practitioners need to jump through a long series of hoops. The medical billing side can’t deal with the complexity.
All these aside, there are people who are really truly healing in ways they wouldn’t without the field. There are ideas that propagate through human culture make human behavior more understandable.
Given that “humans are complex” and “it’s individualized”, would advancements be greater and faster by just allowing clinicians and scientists to just talk things out instead of coming up with “studies” which pretend to be “science” with a low reproducibility rate (and non-publishing on null results)?
You may be looking for qualitative data and reporting which is on the rise!
The term "evidence based" is bandied about all the time because insurance companies don't want to cover treatments that aren't considered standard. The problem is everyone is different on some level, and we often don't have the resources to get to the root of any problems. So treatments that may work extremely effectively for some may be thrown out because they don't work effectively for everyone, and can be contraindicated. Somatic therapists especially have to deal with this. Effective treatments are often outside of the "evidence based" tests, which can be based entirely around showing symptom improvement. This creates a catch-22 where if you lessen the restrictions you get a lot of crackpot providers, where if you keep them tight you keep people from being able to access treatments that may work well for them.
There's also competing models for mental problems and approaches - the psychiatric model is similar to a doctor giving treatment for an illness. They tend to have a belief in biological determinism, IE if a parent had an illness then its likely you will have one too. The Biopsychosocial model is a little bit more holistic around the experiences of people and their physical environment and upbringing. The Trauma model is one I personally ascribe more to which conceptualizes mental health problems as understandable reactions to traumatic events that are conditioned within us.
There are a lot of people who get real relief from outside the mainstream providers, and there are a lot of people for whom the standard providers have not been able to help. I think that is part of why there's so much activity around finding better models right now.
I agree with the authors identification of the problems in the field, but I'm not sure about their conclusions, or 'ways forward', which are
1. Debunk 'folk' psychology, with comparisons to the illegitimacy of 'folk' biology and 'folk' physics
2. Shake things up- meaning don't be afraid to question established dogma regardless of reputational risks
I, a completely unqualified internet commenter, will give number 2 a try. I'd argue that psychology is a folk science, which is to say its not a science at all, but an art. As we've recently discovered, a massive swath of psychological studies are non-reproducible. So maybe we shouldnt treat psychology as if it were a rigorous scientific pursuit, but a philosophical one, or even a therapeutic one (IE. make it synonymous with psychiatry). Leave the science to the neuroscientists, who can quantify and measure the things they're studying (I understand there is some overlap between these fields sometimes). If your study consists of asking people questions and treating their answers as quantitative measurements of anything, I don't know- it feels like something has been lost in the sauce there. Too many variables to draw any meaningful conclusions.
Philosophy is often very well grounded, often annoyingly so. We gave up on it because it turns out you can create iPhones if you ignore the philosophical problem of induction, go do science instead, and assume the laws of physics won’t try and conspire against you.
Rather, I wonder if Psychology would be better thought of as something even less grounded than science. Something where we’re just are happy with an accumulation of stuff that’s happened to work well enough, without pretending that we’re hunting fundamental principles. Something like a profession: Engineering, Doctoring, that sort of stuff.
Why would the problem of induction prevent one from inventing things?
Also, where did you learn it was given up on, and that is the reason why?
Neuroscience isn't immune from non-reproducibility, for example this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41672599 from just a couple of weeks ago
In a similar way Im wondering what gender studies would be called?
What a stereotypical hackernews comment, wow.
> I, a completely unqualified internet commenter,
Just leave it there.
How would people learn if they don’t get feedback on their ideas?
Why go out of your way to gatekeep random internet comments?
Sometimes you should make the effort to learn before sharing your idea with other people.
So many people will blindly walk forward in the dark, completely in ignorance, and then get upset that people ask them to light a candle first.
Care to enlighten me? It's not like I stated any of that as fact, it was qualified with an admission of my own ignorance- I'm open to being corrected. Or are you just demonstrating what happens when established dogma is questioned in this field? If so point taken, I can see why they're having problems
Which established dogma do you want to challenge and why?
Moreso 'question' than 'challenge'- but it seems like the idea that psychology is a hard science at all is sort of a baseline assumption, or dogma. This article goes into great detail on all sorts of issues in the field, but stops short of questioning whether or not the whole thing could even be classified as scientific. I'd argue that the reproducibility crisis throws that into question to some degree (though that crisis apparently extends into 'harder' sciences as well, so maybe not?)- And intuitively, human psychology just doesn't seem like something you can quantify, at least not to the level of granularity required by the scientific method. That is, unless you're measuring the activity of neurons, synapses, hormone levels, any physical measurable phenomena, to draw your conclusions- and I'm not sure how much of that is done in psychology as opposed to neuroscience
I think there's a common pattern on Hacker News that goes something like:
A: Overly broad generalization of a huge body of work put together over 100 years by tens of thousands of professionals
B: Ugh, hate this take from armchair experts
A: Okay, then give me all the examples! Otherwise you're proving me right!
I happen to think your overly broad generalization is more right than wrong, but I also recognize the silliness of asking to be "enlightened" on an entire branch of human endeavor via internet comments. This is a problematic argument form, and someone calling out this behavior does not prove you right.
So let's be clear about what "enlightening you" means. If your argument is "psychology is based on a fundamentally flawed/useless study design (surveys) and we can never learn anything real from it", then a few examples of reproducible, interesting, not a-priori obvious results from surveys should be sufficient to show that we actually can learn real things from surveys. (And be careful not to fall into the "I could have told you that!" fallacy.) Luckily, this question was already asked on Reddit, and I think there are some strong examples:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicPsychology/comments/qktt6h/...
On the other hand, the field is absolutely rife with problematic study design and even some entire psychology departments (e.g. Stanford) seem to be completely rotten. The most salient example of this is the "implicit bias" studies that came out of Stanford. Their study design was something like:
Task 1: Associate good words with white/Christian/American themes as fast as you can
Task 2: Associate bad words with "foreign" themes
Task 3: Associate good words with white/Christian/American themes again
Task 4: Associate good words with "foreign" themes
And the result is: you're racist because Task 4 takes you a few milliseconds longer. It never occurred to them (or it did and they intentionally forced the result) that in Task 4, you're literally unlearning what you've just practiced 3 times. It was one of the most blatantly bad studies I've ever seen in my life and I didn't see anyone else calling out how problematic it was, because Stanford.
So in general I actually agree with your take: the field is rife with junk science, some of it obvious, and almost certainly some of it intentional. But please also recognize that "I'm an expert in tech and therefore everything, and if you can't prove me wrong in an internet comment then that proves me right!" is a very problematic argument style. It sounds like you're trying to prove yourself right, and a much more efficient way to get smarter is to habitually try to prove yourself wrong.
I appreciate the productive answer- You're right, re-reading it now my tone was more argumentative than inquisitive- Itd be foolish to dismiss such a large body of work as 'useless' and I hope it didn't come off that way- Of course understanding human psychology is immensely useful for all sorts of reasons
To be fair, most studies of implicit bias are randomly ordered on a trial to trial basis.
This was a great write up.
One thing that struck me as to the difficulty / young-ness of this field is also the fact that it is the only science that is us studying our thinking selves. It's almost like trying to draw a picture of the exact spot you are standing on.
i think that that issue leads to particularly intense 'folk psychology' because everybody has experience with a mind which will lead to everybody having their own litle set of folk psychology beliefs that the scientists need to overturn.
contrast that to something like... geology. i'm sure there was folk geology back in the day about where different types of rocks come from, but for 99% of people they weren't particularly invested in it. so when the scientists came out with empirical research, most people would be fine with it.
but when psychologist confront folk psychology, people often take it as a personal affront. any comment section about psychology research (HN included) is filled with armchair experts contradicting researchers with their own pet theories
A great article, particularly for its candor.
As Neil DeGrasse Tyson and others have said, in the same way that chemistry replaced alchemy, neuroscience will replace psychology. But this isn't likely to happen soon -- the human brain is too complex for present-day efforts.
But there's some progress. In a recent breakthrough, we fully mapped the brain of a fruit fly (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03190-y).
I think neuroscience will not replace psychology for the same reasons physics doesn't replace chemistry. In theory it might encompass it, but in practice it's a difficult way to get there, and therefore not the effective path.
> neuroscience will replace psychology
That seems like say that hardware engineers should be the ones debugging software.
Its a piss poor article that was written to vent, but it didn't try very hard to find good psychological research. Episodic memory psychological literature is very strong, IMO, yet never gets brought up in these kinds of articles. Its always the fluffy puffy research that fuels tabloid headlines, not the research that shows, for example, differential patterns of memory strategies over child development, or the contributions of context to recognition memory, the differences between recollection and familiarity processes supporting recognition memory..you know, all the stuff that is not flashy for tabloids, but is real psychological science. Dr. Charan Ranganath was a member of my dissertation committee who recently wrote a wonderful book about memory and gave some really fantastic interviews. For example, on Fresh Air: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1233900923 Now yes, some of this is informed by neuroimaging and neuroscience spanning human and animal models, but also lots and lots of behavioral memory research. And the findings that are discussed are pretty reliable, shown over and over again in different ways. So, no, this article is not great. It did not do diligent research. Its a rant that focuses on specific types of research that is a small majority of the REAL field.
> ... all the stuff that is not flashy for tabloids, but is real psychological science.
Real psychological science would produce falsifiable theories -- theories that in principle would be discarded after a conclusive failure in impartial empirical tests. Instead, landmark psychological theories that are discarded, result instead from public outcry, not falsification. Examples include Drapetomania, prefrontal lobotomy, recovered memory therapy, Asperger syndrome.
Trained therapists do no better than properly motivated laypeople. This is not meant to disparage either group, some of whom are very effective, but no one knows why a particular person becomes an effective therapist.
On leaving his position as NIMH director, psychiatrist Thomas Insel said, “I spent 13 years at NIMH really pushing on the neuroscience and genetics of mental disorders, and when I look back on that I realize that while I think I succeeded at getting lots of really cool papers published by cool scientists at fairly large costs—I think $20 billion—I don’t think we moved the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalizations, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who have mental illness.” (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-of-knowledge/...)
All this will be swept away by a future neuroscience that will shape testable, falsifiable theories about human behavior. Today's psychological alchemy will be replaced by tomorrow's neuroscience chemistry. But as the above Insel quote shows, we're nowhere near that goal.
Why do you, just as the article, jump from one topic to another, acting like it is a logical progression and not a rant?
Drapetomania (1851), prefrontal lobotomy, recovered memory therapy, what the hell are you talking about? These are not scientific theories from the modern era.
Plenty of hypotheses have been left in the dust because they failed at explaining aspects of a phenomenon. Working memory research has some great, easy to understand progression of theories in the 70's and 80's. Your quote from the NIMH director jumps to a new topic, and is the expression of regret that more didn't get achieved in a very hard field, and the relationship between genes and mental health is not straightforward at all, and just like cancer research, it turned out the problems were much much harder than once thought.
Your response is as bad as the article: a rant that ignores the good work, hangs it's hat on the fringe or flashy work. Try again. Show your work.
Psychology is the study of the brain at its highest abstraction when we know very little about it at any level. If you believe in determinism then psychology is just voodoo bullshit. Everything should be able to eventually be explained by a pathology, physical processes. With each new scientific breakthrough psychology becomes more and more obsolete and irrelevant. How many counselors have already been replaced by a prescription to antidepressants?
I feel like that's saying weather forecasting is voodoo bullshit because it's all quantum mechanics deep down
What is a rain cloud?
Now what is consciousness?
I think one of the great ironies is that psychology is one of the hardest sciences but is treated so soft. I say this holding a degree in physics! (undergrad physics, grad CS/ML)
By this I mean that to make confident predictions, you need some serious statistics, but psych is one of the least math heavy sciences (thankfully they recently learned about Bayes and there's a revolution going on). Unlike physics or chemistry, you have so little control over your experiments.
There's also the problem of measurements. We stress in experimental physics that you can only measure things by proxy. This is like you measure distance by using a ruler, and you're not really measuring "a meter" but the ruler's approximation of a meter. This is why we care so much about calibration and uncertainty, making multiple measurements with different measuring devices (gets stats on that class of device) and from different measuring techniques (e.g. ruler, laser range finder, etc). But psych? What the fuck does it even mean "to measure attention"?! It's hard enough dealing with the fact that "a meter" is "a construct" but in psych your concepts are much less well defined (i.e. higher uncertainty). And then everything is just empirical?! No causal system even (barely) attempted?! (In case you've ever wondered, this is a glimpse of why physicists struggle in ML. Not because the work, but accepting the results. See also Dyson and von Neumann's Elephant)
I've jokingly likened psych to alchemy, meaning proto-chemistry -- chemistry prior to the atomic model (chemistry is "the study of electrons") -- or to astrology (astronomy pre-Kepler, not astrology we see today). I do think that's where the field is at, because there is no fundamental laws. That doesn't mean it isn't useful. Copernicus, Brahe, Galileo (same time as Kepler; they fought), and many others did amazing work and are essential figures to astronomy and astrophysics today. But psych is in an interesting boat. There are many tools at their disposal that could really help them make major strides towards determining these "laws". But it'll take a serious revolution and some major push to have some extremely tough math chops to get there. It likely won't come from ML (who suffers similar issues of rigor), but maybe from neuroscience or plain old stats (econ surprisingly contributes, more to sociology though). My worry is that the slop has too much momentum and that criticism will be dismissed because it is viewed as saying that the researchers are lazy, dumb, or incompetent rather than the monumental difficulties that are natural to the field (though both may be true, and one can cause the other). But I do hope to see it. Especially as someone in ML. We can really see the need to pin down these concepts such as cognition, consciousness, intelligence, reasoning, emotions, desire, thinking, will, and so on. These are not remotely easy problems to solve. But it is easy to convince yourself that you do understand, as long as you stop asking why after a certain point.
And I do hope these conversations continue. Light is the best disinfectant. Science is about seeking truth, not answers. That often requires a lot of nuance, unfortunately. I know it will cause some to distrust science more, but I have the feeling they were already looking for reasons to.
As someone who did statistics and psychology, I'm very surprised by this take, for a few reasons:
1. Many of the early pioneers in statistics were psychologists.
2. The econ x psych connection is strong (eg econometrics and psychometrics share a lot in common and know of each other)
3. Many of the people I see with math chops trying to do psychology are bad at the philosophy side (eg what is a construct; how do constructs like intelligence get established)
As in many fields, the strength of statistical practices continually improve. And the parent comment has it right about the difficulty. In physics its much easier to ensure your sample is representative (heterogeneity is huge), and you have no way of ensuring that last sample of 100 participants have the same characteristics as your next sample of 100.
I'm sorry, maybe a didn't communicate clearly. SubiculumCode commented the main part of what I wanted to convey, so I won't repeat.
1. Yes! But that's doesn't exactly change things, in fact, it's part of my point. A big part of why this happened (and still does!) is due to the inherent difficulties and the lack of existing tools. If you ever get a chance, go look at a university physics lab. Even Columbia's nuclear reactors (fusion or fission!) and I think many will be surprised how "janky" it looks. It's because they build the tools along the way, not because lack of monetary resources (well... That too...) but because the tools don't exist!
My critique about the psych field is that this is not more embraced. You have to embrace the fuzziness! The uncertainty. But the field is dominated by people publishing studies that use very simple statistical models, low sample sizes, and put a lot of faith in unreliable metrics with arbitrary cutoffs (most well known being the p-value). Many people will graduate grad school without a strong background in statistics and calculus (it's also easier to think this is stronger than it is. And of course, there are also plenty who would be indistinguishable from mathematicians. But on average?). There are rockstars in every field, even when not recognized as rockstars. But it matters who the field follows.
And I must be absolutely clear, this is not to say that work and those results are useless. Utility and confidence are orthogonal. You might need 5 sigma confidence verified by multiple teams and replicated on different machines to declare discovery of a particle but before that there's many works published with only a few sigma and plenty of purely theoretical works. (Note: in physics replication is highly valued. Most work is not novel and it is easy to climb the academic ladder without leading novel research. This is a whole other conversation though) This is why I discussed Copernicus and Brahe but would not call them astronomers. That's not devaluing them, but rather nothing a categorical difference due to the paradigm shift Kepler caused. Mind you, chemistry even later!
2. I specifically mention economists (my partner is one). I could highlight them more but I feel this would only add to confusion. I believe those close to the details will have no doubt to their role. I don't want to detract from their contribution but I also don't want to convolute my message which is already difficult to accurately convey.
3. I think this is orthogonal. I'm happy to bash on other fields if that makes my comment feel less like an attack rather than a critique (or wakeup call). I'm highly critical of my own community (ML) and believe it is important that we all are *most* critical of our own tribes, because even if we don't dictate where the ship goes we're not far removed from those that do. I'll rant all day if you want (or check my comment (recent) history if you want to know if I'm honest about this). I'll happily critique physicists who can solve high order PDEs in their sleep but struggle with for loops. Or the "retired engineer" trope that every physicist knows and most have experienced.
But it is hard to be critical while not offending (there's a few comments about this too). Maybe you disagree with my critique but I hope you can reread the end of comment as hopeful and encouraging. I want psychology to be taken more seriously. But if the field is unable to recognize why the other fields are dismissive of them, then this won't happen. Sure, there's silly reasons that aren't reasonable, but that doesn't mean there's no reason.
It is a matter of fact that the (statistical) confidence of studies in psychology is much lower than those of the "hard" sciences (physics, chemistry, and yes, even biology (the last part is a joke. Read how you will)). In part this is due to the studies and researchers themselves, but the truth is that the biggest contributing factor is the nature of the topic. That is not an easy thing to deal with and I have a lot of sympathy for it. But how to handle it is up to the field.
Not all psych is as jurasic as you describe. For example cofnitive psychology has better theorios with more predictive power than personal psychology that is often picked at. Sure journals are flooded with underpowered studies and studies with very little links to theory, and there is still massive gaps in scientific knowledge but core consturcts are solid.
> Not all psych is as jurasic as you describe.
> core consturcts are solid.
- which concepts?
- how solid?
- how do you know they're solid?
Psychology is not inherently treated as soft, it's jusst that its human element attracts intuitive people much more than rational ones. If nore rationally minded people took up the study and research of psychology fields, more hard stuff would come to the front, although soft stuff is hardly behind in intelligence.
> I do think that's where the field is at, because there is no fundamental laws
I think that there are some fundamental laws, which are based on perceptions and their interplay. Speaking very briefly, there are five classes of perceptions: emotions, wishes, thoughts, beliefs, and body sensations. The division of perceptions into these classes is not a result of purely intellectual exercise or idle theorizing. If one starts carefully and diligently observe contents of their mind, these contents will delaminate into such classes naturally. Try that yourself and you will see it as a fact.
Further introspection and assessment of arising perceptions would reveal some interesting patterns: there are two mutually incompatible kinds of emotions, and two mutually incompatible kinds of wishes, and so on.
One could make observations about the interplay of these perceptions and their dynamic. For example, if someone in some specific situation experiences an emotion X and a wish A (with some specific qualities), they can either realize that wish or choose not to do so. Each choice will lead to some changes in the contents of the mind: emotion X is replaced by emotion Y, and/or wish A is changed into wish B, and so on. Gather enough observations of that kind, and you could eventually formulate some hypotheses about possible general laws of perceptions (e.g. make a prediction that emotion X will change to emotion Y in specific set of circumstances).
These hypotheses could be verified by training several people to observe the same five classes of perceptions in the same manner. Arrange various test events for them, record their choices and outcomes of these choices (described in the same language of five classes of perceptions).
If most of them report more or less the same subjective outcomes (without being told about hypothesis and predictions, of course), that's the first step of verification for a possible general law of perceptions.
The second step of verification would be to apply brain imaging to those trained people, allowing us to map emotions X,Y,Z to some distinct patterns of the brain activity. After that do the same experiments with people who are untrained: arrange same test events for them while recording their brain activity. If changes in their brain patterns match for emotion X changed to emotion Y, that would be an objective confirmation of hypothesis formulated earlier.
The parallels to ML you drew are on point. ML has this tendency to oversimplify complex phenomena with a easy to produce datasets, because that's what ML folks do, they find a smart and easy way to create a dataset and then they focus on the models. But this falls apart pretty quickly when you go into societal problems, such as hate speech or misinformation. Maybe there it would be nice to have some rigor and theory behind the dataset instead of just winging it. I am working on societal biases in NLP and I feel confident that majority of the datasets used have practically no validity.
I love ML. I came over from physics because it is so cool. But what I found odd is that few people were as interested in the math as I was, and even moreso were dismissive of the utility of the math (even when demonstrated!). It's gotten less mathy by the year.
My criticisms of ML aren't out of hate, but actually love. We've done great work and you need to be excited to do research -- and sometimes blind and sometimes going just on faith --, because it is grueling dealing with so much failure. Because it's so easy to mistake failure for success and success for failure. It's a worry that we'll be overtaken by conmen, that I have serious concerns that we are not moving towards building AGI. But it's difficult to criticize and receive criticism (many physics groups specifically train students to take it and deal with this seemingly harsh language. To separate your internal value from your idea). So I want to be clear that my criticism (which you can see in many of my posts) is not a call to stop ML or even slow it down, but a desire to sail in a different direction (or even allow others to sail in those directions as opposed to being on one big ship).
I do know there are others in psych with similar stories and beliefs. But there's a whole conversation about the structure of academia if we're going to discuss how to stop building mega ships and allow people to truly explore (there will always be a big ship, and there always should! But it should never prevent those from venturing out to explore the unknown. (Obviously I'm a fan of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry lol ))
Lots of great points. I would start with semiotics, including during the problem definition phase, otherwise you could easily end up lost in language without the slightest clue of the predicament you're in.
Epistemology is also useful, because it might allow one to wonder if the problem space is non-deterministic (or not discoverable as).
I'm afraid that after reading this guy, people will just give up, thinking there is nothing that works. And this is not the case at all, depression and many other problems are curable. Mine got cured, in addition to anxiety, anger management problem and suicidality. You can get help or start by reading a workbook yourself.
He links to a meta analysis* that says CBT does cure depression and does so consistently for many decades without any declines in effectiveness. Later for some reason, he says no single mental illness was ever cured.
It seems the main point of the article is to say that nothing except "nudges" ever worked in psychology - this is nonsense that he himself contradicts as I mentioned above.
Skip this sensationalist guy, use https://scholar.google.com to do your own research
* https://research.vu.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/26037670/2017_C...
Because you don't even know what Freud actually did.
He assumed the human is a machine and used _analytical_ thinking trying to understand it.
Yet you think the interpretation of dreams is just BS. Either you only read secondary literature or you have a deficiency in reasoning.
Oo my favorite topic! Great writing and the right themes are there, but I think they’re missing a lot by not taking a more historically-holistic view. Aka wondering what all the people who’ve been criticizing psychology think, from Chomsky to Piaget to Lacan to Freud to Husserl to Hegel to Kant to Locke to Scotus to Ibin-Sinna all the way back to the OG, Aristotle.
Obviously some were more empirical than others so you can’t believe them all, but without engaging with their works — even in a negative way - you’re forced to reinvent the wheel, like the bitcoin people did with banking regulations.
For example, this quote makes me feel the author thinks psychology is more special/unusual than it is:
We’re in good company here, because this is how other fields got their start. Galileo spent a lot of time trying to overturn folk physics: “I know it seems like the Earth is standing still, but it’s actually moving.”
In this case, this whole article is written from the assumption that true, proper, scientific psychology is exclusively the domain of the Behaviorists. This is a popular view among people who run empirical studies all day for obvious reasons (it’s way cheaper and easier to study behavior reliably), but those aren’t the only psychologists. Clinical psychology (therapy) is usually based in cognitive frameworks or psychoanalytical, pedagogy is largely indebted to the structuralism of Piaget, and sociology/anthropology have their own set of postmodern, Marxist, and other oddball influences.
All of those academies are definitely part of psychology IMO, and their achievements are undeniable!
For anyone who finds this interesting and wants to dunk on behaviorists with me, just google “Chomsky behaviorism” and select your fave content medium — he’s been beating this drum for over half a century, lol.
This was awesome. Don't just read the comments. Spoiler: psychology is not stupid, it's just young.
I completely agree. This is how I see psychiatry after having experienced it for decades: it's just slightly better than going to a shaman. It's witchcraft and it mostly doesn't work because, well, it's witchcraft. We just are not at a point in history where we can do much about these things and we have to be adults and accept that. It's okay, there was a time when we'd die of simple infections too. That's how psychology is now, very young and full of witchcraft.
Also, the article was funny... And wtf is that cheeseboat?
I had the same question. It's Cincinnati chili. Wikipedia has an article [1] and Serious Eats goes into way more detail [2]. It actually sounds pretty good. I'll give it a go but with much less cheese.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnati_chili
[2]: https://www.seriouseats.com/cincinnati-chili-recipe-8402230
I think this is very fair. Every science that was starting out was indistinguishable from nonsense when starting out. But to say we shouldn't have pursued alchemy, because we didn't understand chemistry? One likely led to the other.
> "Another way of thinking about it: of the 298 mental disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, zero have been cured. That’s because we don’t really know what mental illness is..."
I'm of the firm belief that today's understanding of psychological maladies is comparable to mid-19th century theories of the causes of disease - when doctors had little idea of the causality of infectious disease or cancer or heart disease (indeed they had no way of distinguishing between transmittable infectious diseases and other types of illness).
Take the importance of insect control and water treatment and condoms in preventing infectious disease from bubonic plague to cholera to HIV and syphilis - they just had no idea until Koch and Pasteur came along. It's probably safe to compare this to our current advertising system, which deliberately makes people feel miserable about various aspects of their appearance and social status with the goal of convincing them that buying some product or other will fix their lives - and it's especially damaging when developing children and teenagers are the targets.
The fact that capitalist consumer society norms are as much as source of mental illness in modern populations as the filthy open sewers of old European cities were of infectious disease is a concept I suspect today's corporatized academic institutions will have a hard time accepting.
A further issue is that currently illegal psychedelic drugs show more potential for understanding and treating a wide variety of mental illness conditions under controlled conditions than any of the widely prescribed antidepressants do, and yet most governments are rigidly opposed to their legalization.
Oof. What was the point of that article ? It felt like an unnecessary tough read.
I found it insightful and pleasant to see that there are people inside of a an important field being intellectually curious and honest about the direction of their field of study.
That’s the promise that initially brought me to the article, and I like the reason of the article. I’m just not sure I got more info from the title than the content of the article itself. But that is maybe just me, another fellow psychologist.