hard for me believe that you would infer anything statistically meaningful on population scale from that small of a sample, or am i missing something? is it common to work with so small sample sizes in psychology?
Yep, the article confirms: "Ninety-two studies satisfied the inclusion criteria. Because many of these studies reported data from several samples, the number of samples, 113, was greater than the total number of studies. The total number of participants for the 113 samples was 50,120. A total of 1,682 estimates of change were compiled."
Yes it is. There are quite some studies where the sample size is 20 or 30 people per group, and sometimes even 15-20 in total.
Combina that with the fact that they often use psychology students as experiment group and the fact that most research doesn’t go further than assume a normal distribution, and you might start to understand why more than 2/3rds of all psychology research cannot be reproduced.
I think what you're missing is that sample sizes for statistical significance do not depend on the population size. The big caveat is that the sample is random and representative, which you can't really verify beyond doubt. But if a sample is random and representative, you could estimate population statistics of millions (or even infinite) with a sample of just 30 or so.
As sibling posts mentioned, a much bigger issue than sample size is representativeness: college psychology study samples tend to be drawn disproportionately from college students. They might not generalize well to the general population even if you increase the sample size ten fold or a hundred fold.
> But if a sample is random and representative, you could estimate population statistics of millions (or even infinite) with a sample of just 30 or so.
While that statement is technically correct, it is useless in practice. In order to determine whether a sample is representative (of the trait you are trying to measure), you need to know what the true mean value of the trait is – but if you knew that, you wouldn't need to conduct the experiment in the first place.
That's why it is important to have a large sample size, because under some very general assumptions, the distortions caused by outliers become smaller the more samples you look at. In the limit (that is, when the sample size equals the population size) those distortions disappear entirely, and the sample mean becomes the true population mean.
To add to this, the assumptions behind any use of statistics here are wild when applied to pyschology.
1. We assume that people have stable measurable independent properties f1(x1.., t), f2(x1.., t), ...
2. We assume these are modelled by a linear model, f1(t) = ax + b, etc.
3. We assume the parameters (a, b) of this model causally determine `f1` st. each corresponds to an independent cause of `f1`
4. We assume that we have some reliable measurement process, say m, which measures each property producing samples of that a,b: m(f1) = random samples of a,b
5. Then we assume that these samples are representative of the true values, ie., that mean(a samples) = a + random_error
The problem with the field is that (1 - 4) are false -- arguing about 5 is a little like arguing what time a broken clock should be set to.
I remember a talk at NIPS, a number of years back, where a psychologist was criticizing statistical approaches used by ML practitioners. And telling us that unlike ML practitioners (who still live in the dark ages), modern psychology researchers had realized their wrongs ways of the past. And now they register their studies and the statistical methodology upfront. They review it, register the experiments and only then conduct these, publishing both positive and negative results of the registered study.
> > But if a sample is random and representative, you could estimate population statistics of millions (or even infinite) with a sample of just 30 or so.
> While that statement is technically correct, it is useless in practice.
I don't really follow your argument for small sample sizes being useless in practice.
Isn't the whole point of things like confidence/credible intervals, the bootstrap, and other common statistical methods, to quantify the uncertainty of estimates due to the sampling procedure, including sample size and the possibility of outliers? And, while we may not know that our sample is representative, isn't random sampling from the population of interest a method that will generate a sample that is representative with high probability?
That these methods are well known in statistical practice suggests that samples are generally useful, even when they are not large. The existence of pathological distributions where we might get misleading results (e.g., the classical "wealth over the people in a room if you throw Bill Gates in there") doesn't make these methods useless, does it?
> isn't random sampling from the population of interest a method that will generate a sample that is representative with high probability?
That depends on the sample size. The comment I replied to claimed that "you could estimate population statistics of millions (or even infinite) with a sample of just 30 or so".
Which is certainly not true if the sample is drawn randomly, except under very specific circumstances (such as population variance being extremely small). You don't need a billionaire in order for income distribution samples to be wildly misleading. It's enough for the variance to be high, so that very small samples are almost guaranteed to have a mean that differs substantially from that of the whole population.
Draw at random just six people from a population of millions. Take the min and max wealth of those six people. That procedure produces a confidence interval that contains the true median wealth of the population more than 95% of the time. Even if the population wealth variance is high.
How did I just produce a reliable estimate using a sample size of only six?
By quantifying the uncertainty of the estimate. There's a trade off between sample size and uncertainty, and that trade off allows small sample sizes to be useful for many practical applications, most of which can accommodate uncertainty.
Again, small samples are informative. Whether they are informative enough for a particular application doesn't determine whether they are informative enough for all applications in general. I certainly wouldn't call them "useless in practice."
good point! yes, agree with what you're saying, i think that was what i was alluding to. i didn't find the selection process in the article, but given that such a study takes a long time to carry through, isn't it absurdly risky to sample such a small group knowing that if it turns out decades later that the sample isn't really representative and you can't really infer anything about the general public?
What is the sample? Psychology students and people who want to be paid 10 dollars to fill out a survey? People who agree to have a long survey via telephone?
> is it common to work with so small sample sizes in psychology?
Yes. Even much smaller sample sizes are common. I've seen "results" published in supposedly reputable journals with sample sizes as small as 9. Not 9 other studies that were meta-analyzed, mind you. 9 individual people.
This is just one of several reasons why most of psychology is junk science, if not outright fraudulent. Statistical methods is usually a required course for students in such disciplines, so I do not buy the "they don't know better" excuse. Not that you need to know statistics in order to understand that you can't conclude anything from a sample size of 9.
Psychology isn't accepted as a hard science, perhaps an applied science. Since there really isn't a precise follow to the scientific method, hypothesis - inference - conclusion.
That is so completely false that I fear you are responding purely by a bias against psychology and have not read anything about it. Of course you can form a hypothesis, and test it on real live humans, gather data and check results.
I don't think a lot of people know this. The evidence required for a physiological intervention is lower than a surgical or pharmaceutical intervention. The AMA used to lump psychology with things like chiropractic, acupuncture and homeopathy until they were sued by chiropractors under antitrust law in 1987.
I wish there was a succinct way to communicate this. Lots of people I know revere psychologists' word as end-all be all, beyond doubt. To question it makes them think I'm questioning physics.
There are good ideas in the field, to be sure. But on the other hand...
For me the scariest part is its the only speciality that we allow to imprison people (involuntary holds) and they can keep people out of prison (not fit to stand trial). They also often influence public policy. That's a lot of power for people who can't do a double blind study most of the time.
It's even worse than that: Some jurisdictions (including California IIRC) allow involuntary psychiatric holds based on the assessment of people (like law enforcement officers) who have no psychological qualifications whatsoever.
This is without a doubt one of the worst and most normalized human rights violations happening in the world today, and the scale and impact of it is hard to imagine.
I have seen police arrest people under section 136 of the UK's Mental Health Act in circumstances where no expertise is needed to see that the person is a danger to themselves or others.
The police then take that person to a place of safety, usually a hospital.
People seem to be confusing clinical with academic psychology. While the former uses a lot of the more well-established concepts(like conditioning) from the latter, it's very much its own discipline, and it actually has much more rigorous research methods than academic psychology because treatments are subject to regulatory approval.
I can speak from a lot of experience when I say I would trust a clinical psychologist over a psychiatrist any day of the week. Psychiatrists are just doctors who learn to prescribe medication based on a simple set of rules and psychometry. There are psychiatrists who take their field very seriously, but that's the exception rather than the rule.
Here's the thing. There is a decent body of evidence for chiropractic and therapeutic touch if I'm honest. People find relief from pain by going to a chiropractor, but they also find similar results getting a massage.
It's basically impossible to separate the benefits of talk (social interaction, validation, etc) from the talk therapy. Lots of people whould probably be served just as well if they had someone much less trained, or not even trained at all to talk to in a similar manner.
Furthermore as the social bonds disintegrate studies suggest that individuals have less friends and less interpersonal interaction generally (social media use excluded) at the same time the need for psychologists has increased. In some demographics over half the members have been diagnosed with a mental illness. How can we be sure that all of the sudden lots of people have become mentally ill vs lots of people need someone to listen to them?
I generally agree with your point about the benefit of talking. I think there are many cases where someone would probably benefit as much from just talking to a close friend. But there are also many cases when a therapist can provide objectivity, discretion, insight and experience that friends just can't match.
This goes especially for actually severe mental disorder, because the thing there is, those patients have things going on in their head that most people can't relate to or understand(like irrational fears for instance). Psychologists however have a lot of experience talking with these people, reading and interpreting abnormal body language. And they know the sort of things you definitely don't want to say to a patient.
As for your point about social media, my personal view is that you're mostly right except I do think real mental illness is increasing, because loneliness is such a strong cause of depression especially, but also social phobia.
Throughout my childhood most of my interactions with people outside my family consisted or bullying by other kids and neglect by teachers. Because of this, it's deeply instilled in me that in any social interaction people are catalogueing my every mistake or negative attribute, or just ignoring me. No amount of conversation with other people(or medication btw) has helped me overcome this, but the only progress I have made was in therapy. What I really needed was help to understand why my brain works this way, and how I can be more aware of my own irrational thinking. This has helped me to obsess a lot less about social situations. Though I still have a deep mistrust of people at my core, I've at least been able to let some people in and learn to trust them. And accept that they really do like me for who I am.
While a bit rambling, I hope that provides some context on what a good therapist can do compared to speaking to friends and loved ones.
I'm not saying you shouldn't go to one on a personal level. If it helps you or improves your life it doesn't matter if scientific or not, it isn't anyone's business. I'm speaking more about it from a population level. I think we could probably come up with ways to more cheaply (read: increase access) to help people with moderate mental illness (that I suspect in some cases may be the brain working correctly and accurately finding it's environment to be unpleasant and lonely).
For young men without strong male influences in particular I think a kind person in some sort of big brother program is probably worth a team of psychological professionals in many cases.
I don't think you can blind it properly. Patients will probably report the care as more effective from therapists due to social conditioning and placebo effect. I recall a study where doctors in white coats were rated more effective than without by patients.
I definitely agree that we can do more to help moderate mental illness, and that a lot of things can be more communal than clinical. That's all great.
But we need to recognise that actually, there are people who can't be helped this way, who need more than just any talk at all, and that clinical psychologists have a lot of useful expertise on how to help these people, that can't simply be written off as unscientific or just a friendly conversation. There's a lot more to it than that.
That is not the reason it is junk. Typically the reason to call something junk is that designing the study itself is difficult, not sample size. There are analysis of small to large groups to determine how small a group can be that will still reflect the whole. 9 does seem on low end, but I think the typically accepted size is something in the 20's of individuals.
I'm guessing that if 9 is enough to call it junk, then 20 would not sway your opinion. What is a good number then? 100? 1000?. Guess could do identical study on groups of 10,100,1000, and show that the results replicate across the size. Of course, this has been done, hence why they get away with smaller sizes.
This isn't a guessing game, really. You have some prior knowledge of the expected effect size - that allows you to calculate the sample size required for your statistical test to have a certain power. That is an essential and very simple part of a good experimental design which, unfortunately, is very often ignored.
There is no fixed size of samples that guarantees a result is statistically significant. How many samples are needed depends on the desired p-value among other things, which in turn depends on prior assumptions, and on the quantities being measured. "Typically accepted sizes" are nothing but cargo cult science.
That's precisely why psychologists take statistics classes as part of their education. I get that those aren't everyone's cup of tea, but people who don't even understand the basics have no business conducting and publishing studies. In fact, well-designed scientific studies typically start with a discussion of p-values, sample sizes, possible sources of biases, etc. If you don't see any mention of those in a study, you know you're looking at junk.
Psychology gets a bad reputation because it is still new. Remember, Astrology turned into Astronomy, Alchemy became Chemistry, and Philosophy (old) became Math and Physics.
Psychology is still a newcomer, and study of the mind and the human animal is difficult because it is complex and hard to measure. That doesn’t mean you can’t start somewhere.
You are to quick to blame bad actors. I don't think that the typical student or professor has so much evil intention for negligence and fraud.
These are examples of a 'new' science. Humans are complex and hard to measure, so yes, there are problems with study design, and re-producibility. Because they are working it out. That is because of the field of study, not evil intent, some dark cabal of researchers putting out false data on purpose. If there is some obvious way to solve these problems, then those people should do it.
I was going to throw out some sarcastic example from another field. But guess, when I think about it, maybe it does happen. String Theory in Physics is an example of "group think" leading an entire field down the wrong rabbit hole of stuff that is faulty and can't be measured. So guess it can happen anywhere.
For what it's worth, during my psychology courses in university, I witnessed professors lie to the class, sometimes in response to direct questions. The topics were things that psychology professors would surely know, so I don't think they were simply misinformed.
Being new is not an excuse for producing meaningless garbage.
It's okay to not know. It's not okay to claim results when there aren't any to be drawn from the available data.
And astrology did not "turn into" astronomy. Astronomy developed (in part) as a result of astrologers trying to predict the motion of celestial objects. But astrology is not at all the forerunner of scientific astronomy, since its main concern (how celestial movements influence human lives) lacks any factual underpinnings. It's not that astrology produced incorrect results; the entire endeavor is fundamentally wrong.
You are only looking at other fields successes and only Psychology's failures. Quick to forget all the false starts and wrong directions in other fields.
Might need to do some history readying. Of course the study of celestial movements eventually became astronomy, who do you think was looking at the stars before astronomy existed. All of history isn't some nice linear line of analytic reasoning. I wonder if HN also has a general bias against history, since it is a non-technical field with a lot of interpretations.
> Of course the study of celestial movements eventually became astronomy
Astrology is not "the study of celestial movements". It's the utterly baseless claim that those movements have a high-level influence on human lives. That's not proto-science, it's pseudoscience. And it's not at all comparable to incorrect theories in other fields (like phlogiston or the luminiferous aether). There is no reason to expect that astrology works, and its claims are made without any supporting evidence. That has nothing to do with science.
You are making my argument for me. Do you not see it? Make the leap.
I am NOT saying Astrology is true. I'm saying that a lot of people over history, long before astronomy exited, observed the stars, and traced their movement, and yes, some of them attributed their movements to 'gods', or did what today we called 'Astrology'. Then eventually, someone was like, man, these celestial bodies seem to follow some patterns, and drifted away from thinking it was 'the gods', and started putting math to it, and boom, we look back on it and call it 'Astronomy'.
But Astronomy did not pop into existence fully formed as a science.
I wonder if we have any historical studies or evidence to prove either of these views. Seems if it did or didn't "turn in to" there should have been someone writing about it at the time
Guess that is why I'm surprised this is even an argument. Can do quick search and find many papers and books related to historical developments of the sciences and how in early times they were related. But that would take reading and then trusting historians, which I'm not sure is allowed either these days. In post-truth world, can't trust any studies, can't trust history, can't trust what we see.
Electrical engineering, aerospace engineering, nuclear physics, and many other difficult fields of study are far, far newer than psychology. And yet have no problems with reliably producing significant, real-world results.
You are only looking at other fields successes and only Psychology's failures. Quick to forget all the false starts and wrong directions in other fields.
I suggest, instead of bringing up how other science has failed too, you bring up the successes of psychology. Nobody here will be convinced by scientific whataboutism, however, if you were to compose a comment on the important successes of psychology with cited sources i think that would work much better
The antagonism is to great. You want me to cite sources to justify an entire field? Just go look. Why would I spend a lot of time on sources that nobody will read. It isn't my job to educate the world. Do your own research.
Big five personality types, fight or flight brain circuits, pause and plan brain circuits, fundamentals drive of brain to predict what happens next (externally and internally), lack of universal emotional responses. The existence of things going on in the brain that the mind has very limited awareness of (the “unconscious”).
One hallmark of actual sciences is that they notice their false starts and wrong directions, learn from them, improve fairly rapidly, and can ~reliably deliver complex things that actually work.
By that metric, Psychology seems profoundly lacking.
Do I really need to go through and trace the entire history of psychology and every false start and course correction in order to prove that they do it too?
Do you see the difference in the burden of proof.
You are starting from the position of 'Psychology' is all false, now proof everything by citing everything over again.
But, to do so, I would need to cite something in Psychology, and you can just deny it again. What evidence can be cited if all evidence is dismissed.
You will probably say something along the lines of 'what can be verified or repeated'. Ok, just go look. Why do I need to re-cite an entire discipline, just go read it.
I think they call themselves neuroscientist now. That seems more respectable, like a real science. I'm sure people will say "no, that is different". But that is what we are discussing, Psychology grows and branches and now there is something called "Neuroscience" that is more refined, and has narrowed the field to something measurable.
Almost. Specific sections of neuroscience, which are actually just cell bio or biochem applied to brain tissue, sure. Often behavioral neuroscience has much of the same problems of not really having good definitions that map to tangible observables. Once good definitions are made, only then can decent work be done.
I've seen similar sample sizes in medical journals, but I wouldn't necessarily call those junk.
From my personal experience, the problem is that people who study psychology are not interested or skilled in statistics. Unskilled professors teaching uninterested students perpetuates the cycle.
The field is slowly improving but still has a long way to go.
> I've seen similar sample sizes in medical journals, but I wouldn't necessarily call those junk.
Unless those small sample sizes are justified by rigorous statistical modeling, showing that the result is still significant even with the small sample size, such studies absolutely are junk.
The burden is on the researcher to demonstrate that their experimental design is suitable for obtaining meaningful results. Failing to do so is the definition of junk science.
And needless to say, lack of statistical knowledge is not an excuse for not doing this. If a medical scientist is unable to perform an accurate statistical analysis of their data, it means that they cannot publish – not that they can skip that part because it's too difficult for them. The entire study is meaningless without it.
Sample size is just one factor. For example, if you are interested in heights and you measure six people and they are all over 10 feet tall, you can go ahead and conclude they are from a group with different height distribution than the rest of humans.
Pretending that these papers of “wow, we found a substance that when given to ten people in a cancer group with a 99% six month lethality and three survived more than two years” contribute nothing is a weird belief. Penicillin was what n = 1.
Psychology attracts people who are interested in working with people than working with things. If you include the undergrads, psychology has a lower IQ (on average!) than say mathematics or engineering, or other soft sciences like economics or data science.
But you shouldn’t judge a group by its average. Also, it’s misogynistic in this case, obviously.
There are many reasons that qualitative research is better than quantitative research. Understanding context and nuance, exploratory studies, complex phenomena, and social dynamics and interactions are more often better served by having fewer subjects.
You think that’s small? Try reading a paper in education and learning. Some of the seminal papers have less than 30 subjects. And these papers have driven teaching policies for decades.
The impact of culture is another critical data-point. For example, in some cultures, elders are viewed as being kind, wise and important while in others, grumpy and useless.
I'm always curious as to how global these findings can be, the titles certainly don't narrow it down making it sound universal findings. Yet, could it be that these findings are universal and yet culture teaches us to ignore these changes?
I strongly suspect that there is, I've seen this effect in play so many times at smaller timescales, and you'd expect to be even stronger at longer ones
In primitive cultures, reaching old age could be seen as an achievement, given the difficulty of surviving without a healthcare system. In most modern societies, however, aging isn't as challenging and elderly individuals are often "locked away" in retirement homes. In other words, they essentially disappear, living a life of a ghost. Moreover, what kind of wisdom would you expect from someone who spent their years merely waiting for the day of their retirement?
Perhaps the wisdom of advising that is not a good idea. And also that young whippersnappers who think that that is what the majority of old people spend their time doing may not be paying much attention to the world.
Reaching old age is still an achievement, especially for young male motorcycle riders, and experience of society and its history always comes for free. The "locking away" stage is something old people generally try to actively avoid, and mostly generally for those with actual dementia in any case.
> Moreover, what kind of wisdom would you expect from someone who spent their years merely waiting for the day of their retirement?
The kind of wisdom that they have earned dealing with the daily practicalities of personal life, society, law, bureaucracy and in general the knowledge of navigating the winds of change for many decades. But in order to get the benefit of that wisdom, you have to value them as individuals with valuable experience instead of thinking of them as someone who spent their years merely waiting for the day of their retirement.
A lot of Western culture. The expression "ok boomer" being a prominent example. I'd say any place where "traditional family values" are being eroded, so mainly wealthy urban areas.
Interesting bit: "In contrast, people increase on measures of social vitality (a 2nd facet of extraversion) and openness in adolescence but then decrease in both of these domains in old age."
> social vitality: living or preferring to live in a community rather than alone.
Seems like you grow out of wanting to live in a community. I wonder if a aging population will cause cities to decline in population more rapidly than the raw numbers indicate it would.
Honest question: how do we know they are grouchy and instead we aren't just annoying. I have a kid but kids can get on my nerves, when I'm 90 I could imagine 40 year olds annoying me in a similar way.
My elderly mom can switch pretty quickly from easygoing and fun to grouchy when I inadvertently treat her like she's not quite capable of managing her own life. She'll be the first to admit that it's starting to become true, but it's a fine line. I think old people become more grouchy the more young people treat them like they're old and useless, or stupid.
It makes sense. Young people are willing to put up with the inconveniences of the city because they want all the things there are to do and want to be near all their friends/potential romantic partners and want all the job opportunities. Old people don't need the job opportunities (hopefully), most their friends and lovers are already dead, and they're too old and tired to run around doing all the things like they used to so moving away a bit seems more appealing.
Old people don't seem to mind community though, I think it's just that people who are often sick or hurting tend to be less social. Going blind and deaf doesn't help either. I imagine it's plain harder for old folks no matter what their preference for solitude.
I tend to find, if you want to be young, act like the young.
Famous Warren Buffet quote, "I looked up the actuarial tables, and I saw that 6 year olds had the longest life expectancy. So, I decided to eat exactly what a 6 year old would eat."
Seems silly to try to make any generalizations about this specific trait given how uniquely individualistic US culture is in human history. I'd say it's even hostile.
I watched a TED talk on the health benefits of living in cohousing and larger households once. Besides well proven increases in overall lifespans and decreases in almost all chronic diseases, there's also huge economic benefits. Building a saltwater pool for example makes a lot more sense to do for a community of 20 than for an individual nuclear family.
The comments were filled with straight up vitriol. It was as if people felt personally attacked and like they were being forced to live with other people. Everyone seemed to already have their minds set on "finally living on their own" and "having their own space" (neither of which, imo, are contradictory to cohousing).
Yet, around the world, large multigenerational households are and have been the norm. Nuclear families are a pretty recent concept that came with the rise of suburbia and the GI Bills
They have probably seen dozens of videos of elderly people living in the city getting knockout-gamed and felt frightened that this is what cohousing is supposed to mean.
This is a bloody brilliant and comprehensive meta-analysis that sheds some light on the patterns of personality change across the life course. It is remarkable how much variation and plasticity there is in human personality, and how different traits show different trajectories of change. I wonder what are the underlying mechanisms and influences that drive these changes, and what are the implications for well-being and social relationships.
I don’t understand the animosity to your comment except that perhaps the crowd does not agree with the power you have attributed to the analysis. In general, though, I would agree that the analysis does identify an interesting set of threads to consider when thinking about how we change as we age. Have a great day.
I am a little surprised how much anti-Psychology sentiment there is on HN. I know it is typically viewed as a 'liberal' field, and perhaps has a harder time quantifying measurements.
It is more difficult to measure a human trait, than to measure a temperature.
I'm wondering what the options are? We can't just dismiss Psychology, cancel an entire field because it has difficulties. Why can't we study humans, what study of humans would take the place of Psychology?
I'd say all those pointing to the successes of 'hard' sciences, have it easier.
Isn't iterative improvement what all science is about?
> I am a little surprised how much anti-Psychology sentiment there is on HN. I know it is typically viewed as a 'liberal' field
It has nothing to do with “liberal” or “conservative” fields of studies and everything to do with reproducibility and predictivity. If psychology could make predictions to the 13th decimal place like we are able to do for the gyromagnetic ratio of the electron (and confirm via experiment), there would be no complaints.
There is also a tendency for the outcomes of psychology studies to be “oversold” in a sense. To be fair, this is more often due to the media sensationalizing the results or reading something into them that isn’t there, but you don’t see this as often in physics (well, maybe a bit with quantum mechanics and black holes).
I'd say a large part of the bias here is because the media over-hypes the results, which isn't necessarily the fault of the field. All fields are driven to hype results to get more research dollars. There does seem to be a bit more backlash when Psychology is over-hyped then when others do it.
But we do need to study humans, and they are hard to quantify. It is very misleading to compare measuring electrons to measuring 'how do I feel'. It is difficult to measure. That doesn't mean not to.
It seems like here the sentiment is strongly to go ahead and toss the baby out with the bath water.
Well, i don't know, i think lots of things in physics have been oversold. It's just that the requirements for sellability is that someone has translated it into lay speech, whether or not that speech is technically accurate. We had the "god particle", black hole hype, quantum computing mega-hype, "fusion within 10 years", etc.
I think you might just be a little too high in the food chain to see the vast amounts of lay speculation about physics that goes on. Certainly less volume of speech than psychology but i think for the respective popularity of the fields, people find it _more engaging_ to do speculation of physical reality than just another psychological paper. The majority of journalists oversell everything. It's just that it's less often that physics makes it into regular magazines and publications, i think
I suspect your comment will be removed by mods but I wanted to take a shot at replying anyways.
I'm not sure psychologists are the drivers of that.
Psychologists perhaps to a fault hate medications and other external influences on a body. Just look at their fervent anti-antidepresssnt pushes and opposition to antipsychotics.
It's true that supportive psychological therapies are taking over and even contaminating CBT to the point it can feel like professional gaslighting.
Politicians generally decide where weapons are deployed. The potential for them to exist isn't up to the physicists they are merely reporting accurately the state of the natural world.
I can't find the quote but Eisenhower reportly met with a physicist after the bombing of Japan who was upset with his role in it and said something to the effect of "get this whiny guy out of here, I'm the one who gave the order".
You seem to think somehow Psychologist have a lot of control over their results, and blame them for 'doing things'.
But for physics, well, they are just un-earthing facts and its those politicians that pull the trigger.
More false dichotomy.
When anybody else (physicist) does something, its just benign, "I'm just doing science. WUT, nuclear weapons, cloning, bio-weapons. Not me".
When a psychologist does something, "they are trying to control us. they are forcing us to do things against our will".
I think it was Oppenheimer. It’s a bit of an arrogant statement on Eisenhower’s part if true. History is more likely to remember Oppenheimer’s contributions than some random politician of one of hundreds of countries throughout history.
It's not arrogance it's leadership. He is saying any blood is on his hands, he's taking responsibility. I'd demand the same from anyone trusted to order the use of these weapons.
what does being trans have to do with any of this? why bring that in here?
while we're off-topic, please also consider the "potential harm" of suicide within trans communities and compare how access to HRT influences that. most of my trans friends who have considered suicide recently have done so in part because of the increasing hatred & vilification of trans people. your words already have "potential harm."
I knew that comments would come that illustrate my point. Ultimately the urge to shut down reasonable concern about the long term impact of these interventions particularly when applied to young men and women and phrased respectfully is unscientific. Physicists would laugh anyone out of the room who attempted to control the discourse so tightly.
> If psychology could make predictions to the 13th decimal place like we are able to do for the gyromagnetic ratio of the electron (and confirm via experiment), there would be no complaints
This is an issue in biology as well/in general, and it doesn't get near the amount of pushback here as psychology.
> If psychology could make predictions to the 13th decimal place like we are able to do for the gyromagnetic ratio of the electron (and confirm via experiment), there would be no complaints.
That's not a fair comparison. Medicine struggles to make vaccines that are more than 95% effective. HIV tests are 99.97% accurate. The mind is even squishier, psychology will always look amateurish compared to physics.
It's because psychology is speculative neuroscience. And speculation isn't science, it's bullshitting.
As software engineers on HN, we don't debug a computer program by talking about why the program might be feeling bad because it sexualized its mother as an infant or some other insane nonsense. I suspect once neuroscience gets better, and we can simply load up all our neurons into a computer and run the equivalent of GDB on it, it'll be really obvious that humans are 100% deterministic, people with psych problems are deficient in X, Y, or Z chemical or the wiring was screwed up in some place or another, and we'll be able to fix it.
Eventually we will look back on Psychologists the same as doctors that did Bloodletting and "Balancing the Humors"- complete crackpots that set science back a few hundred years.
Why do you think the Bloodletters set back science? As if there was anybody at that time that would have made more rapid progress if only they hadn't been held back.
Science isn't a strait line of analytical progression, and when it does get side tracked, it isn't some nefarious group. I could just as easily say if only those stupid String Theorist had just stepped aside, we wouldn't have set Physics back a decade.
It's human dynamics, hmmm, I wonder if there is someone studying why groups get stuck in these loops, hmmm, why do humans seem to get stuck at a plateau that is difficult to think beyond, hmmmm let me think now, hmmm. Psychologist?
As someone who went through and got a PhD in psychology (I now work outside of the field, but that's neither here nor there)...
There are definitely problems in the field, in some subareas more than others. I am pleased to see how much discussion in the field there has been regarding issues with replication, sample sizes, etc., and I do see improvements there. Quite honestly, the discussion about these things has instigated the same questions in other fields. The progress is slow, and it frustrates me that I don't feel like I can fully trust a lot of the older research in the field, but...there is progress.
But I think you're right that it's a difficult field in general. Human minds are complicated -- possibly one of the most complex things in the universe to study. Human social interactions, relationships, group dynamics, identities, and start with those complex machines and now layer on top additional interdependent cause-effect relationships. The area of study is just, fundamentally, hard.
The field has developed techniques to try to address this -- that's why psych surveys tend to ask the same question in multiple different ways. By triangulating in to a fuzzy concept from multiple angles, it at least gets us to the point where (hopefully) there's some systematic variance we can talk about and study. We're never going to get to the point where we can measure "agreeableness" or "prejudice" or "empathy" with as much precision as physicists can measure changes in an atom. But studying the human condition in as systematic a way as we can still feels incredibly important to me, to do what we can to improve human flourishing.
Progress in physics was/is also slow. People couldn't explain what the compass was doing for a few thousand years. Systematic futzing about and day dreaming was required over multiple centuries. That is the norm when you are given a 3 inch chimp brain to grok the universe. The history of science shows us how much luck and blundering about in the darkness is required. Wish it was taught more.
It might be useful for you to distinguish between the psychoanalytical tradition of psychology (which is not a science) from the more recent field of cognitive science. Lacan is nowhere to be found in the OP’s paper, for example, and by conflating the two, you’re throwing out a lot of very robust science.
To be a bit more direct (though please be assured that I mean no disrespect): bringing up Lacan in this conversation tells me you don’t know psychological science very well. You’re missing out. :)
> bringing up Lacan in this conversation tells me you don’t know psychological science very well
Lacan is one of the most famous psychologists of all time. Probably only Freud and Jung would rank above him in that regard. That in itself is a pretty big indictment of the field, since the latter two are not much better.
But the problem is not that Lacan was spouting garbage while being a psychologist. The problem is that other psychologists were tolerating that garbage, instead of ostracizing him. That's as if an immunologist who spreads conspiracy theories about vaccines containing microchips somehow continued to be invited to conferences, and have his peers listen to him and discuss and debate his "theories".
It's obvious that the field as a whole is incapable of cleanly separating itself from left-wing politics, philosophical intellectualism, and outright nonsense.
Famous doesn't mean current. Don't think anybody is following Lacan, Freud, Jung today. They were earlier pioneers. Just like physicist don't believe in the 'ether' anymore. You are citing current physics and how great it is, but then cite old psychologist as if they are current.
They weren't pioneers, they were bullshitters. Their claims had no basis whatsoever. They just made stuff up.
That's not comparable to the luminiferous aether, which was actually a reasonable assumption once the wave nature of light was recognized, because most waves need a medium to propagate through. Aether theory is wrong, but it's not nonsensical.
They're in the humanities. They deal in metaphors and archetypes. What you are somewhat correctly tracking is that psychology underwent a transition from the humanities to the sciences about 60 years ago.
Scientific psychology is a completely different animal.
The names you provide (Freud, Jung, Lacan) were trained in psychiatry or neurology and represent the psychoanalytical tradition in _psychiatry_. They've never been fundamental to _psychology_. Fundamental to psychology have been e.g. Watson, Skinner, Thorndike.
You are doing the equivalent of citing blood-letters to discredit the field of medicine. Or citing the four elements to discredit the field of physics.
Again, with all due respect, you very clearly do not know what you are talking about. Nobody takes Lacan seriously, even in the lowest tier of politicized social-science (which in turn is not taken terribly seriously by cognitive scientists).
If you're actually interested in human perception, cognition and behavior, I am happy to point you in the right direction.
You're talking about cognitive science, I am talking about psychology. The two are not the same thing, nor is one a subfield of the other. The papers you have linked are more closely related to neuroscience than to psychology. I'm well aware that neuroscience is a proper scientific discipline; I'm also well aware that psychology is something else entirely.
The psychoanalytic tradition, including Freud, is still a part of psych major curricula around the world. Therapists with psychology degrees still practice psychoanalysis, which, while not identical to what was happening 100 years ago, is still strongly influenced by Freud and Jung. Therefore, claims that the field has left its past behind just aren't credible. And I'm not even going to go into psychology's entanglement with postmodern intellectualism and the political left.
Cognitive science is the term I am using to distinguish from classical psychology. Cognitive science very much is psych.
Your argument hinges on out-of-date notions and false distinctions.
Again, if you were actually curious about psychology, you’d want to engage with the scientific psychology literature instead of putting on blinders and insisting that the psychoanalytic tradition is the only relevant one. I’m left to conclude that you’re more interested in looking down your nose at a field you don’t respect than actually understanding anything.
Let us know if that changes. I’m always happy to point you towards the interesting literature in whatever subfield you’re curious about.
Would you like to talk about some of the absurd contrarian opinions that we see from the field of software engineering or venture capital? How about Linus Pauling and Vitamin C?
The further one moves away from their field, the more we should disregard someone's opinions regardless of how smart or accomplished they are in their field.
Software engineering and venture capital aren't, and aren't claiming to be, sciences.
And Pauling lived a remarkably long life for someone who was hanging around in chemistry labs in the 1920s. Someone with that background dying at 93 is like a regular person dying at 113. So I would be careful to dismiss his ideas regarding health outright, even though most studies have been unable to confirm his claims. There is still plenty of serious research happening into Vitamin C megadoses, so clearly, not all scientists agree with the idea that this is quackery. And even if it indeed were completely and utterly wrong, it is still not even remotely comparable to the sheer audacity of Lacan's bullshit.
It might seem as if the modern STEM crowd discounts psychology as nearly pseudoscience, perhaps only necessary as a workaround until they figure out how exactly those atoms cause our consciousness (at best; those who demote consciousness to the level of illusion would probably not grant even that).
They forget that their “hard” natural sciences offer no proof of consciousness being caused by neurons and atoms, or them being somehow more “objectively real” than consciousness; indeed, this is not even a question physics et al. would have in their scope.
If you think about it, your mind is the only thing you have direct unmediated access to—and in any science, even physics, it is always at the beginning and the end of any discovery: once you remove the intermediate steps, all discoveries and all their real-world applications and implications ultimately concern the state of human mind. However, shiny gains offered by physics and respective technological advances can be blinding enough that we forget what’s fundamental.
it IS pseudoscience. Wake up! Every single thing laypeople learn about psychology and experiment results turns out to be made up! there is not a single piece of value in the existing field because even if there were you couldn't possibly separate it from the junk!
You're missing the part of science where you analyze the results, ask yourself why it isn't reproducible, maybe because of some other variables that changed, or variables that were unknown, then re-hypothesizing, creating new models, re-formulating the studies, and doing it all again until they are re-producible.
Since Psychology is about humans, and how they respond, then it is possible to have Psychology studies about Psychology studies, and study why humans are biased, why are studies biased, and control for those factors.
Because a subject is difficult doesn't mean toss it all out the window. "shucks this stuff is hard, darn, guess it's all BS".
It is going to sound a little weird, but compared to physics, psychology is closer to alchemy than chemistry. That does not mean it is not useful in making some predictions and that it does not offer an explanation, but obviously it does not offer the same level of predictions or explanations that post-alchemy psychology could offer.
How do you even begin to setup an experiment where you setup a real study of human interaction without breaking any ethical norms? Before you object to this line of thinking, consider that Milgram experiment would not be allowed today.
That is a good point. But human experiments are still allowed, just severely curtailed.
Seems like other fields are able to advance with observational studies, why is Psychology singled out as being impossible.
If studies can't be re-produced, then analyze why and try again until it can be. All the doomsayer arguments in this thread is weird. Who would ever say "man this double slit thing is tough to understand, maybe we shouldn't do physics anymore".
I've done my degree in an obscure subfield of quantum mechanics, and after having read all those papers, I can tell you they are no more sound than the average psychology paper.
The only difference is that everyone thinks they are specialists in human psychology, so they feel like they can dismiss everything that doesn't fit their prior assumptions.
Papers on quantum mechanics start with so much math that noone outside the subfield has any idea what it says, so noone dares to dismiss it.
So you're familiar with both quantum mechanics papers and psychology papers? Give me a break...one comes across terrible papers in all fields but in psychology and sociology, you see terrible papers along with the science journalism that follows it, plus the whole replication crisis. Whole field looks like a mess.
You can't read or what? He says he's familiar with quantum mechanics literature and psychology literature, not exactly common is it? I have a CS PhD, so I know enough about research thanks. What do you have? Some nonsensical crap about how psychology is growing or whatever so forgive them lol.
Here is the quote so you can read it again.
>"I've done my degree in an obscure subfield of quantum mechanics"
Guess I'm wondering why his 'degree in un-related field and have read some psychology', is not as valid as your 'some degree in un-related field, and have read some psychology'.
Or do you think your CS PhD came with more psychology course work than his quantum mechanics degree?
You might need some Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. There are a lot of studies that show it works.
Here we go, learn to read and understand before you make some useless reply buddy. Now I see why you think psychology isn't a complete mess of a field.
Sorry. I made the Cognitive Behavior comment because I thought it would be funny to reference 'studies' in a field you disagree with, to help you with your problems dealing with the same field.
Anyway, good luck on the anger issues. Not sure who you will see since Psychologist are off the table. Maybe meditation? Lot of good meditation studies coming out lately.
Yeah, this is my first time posting on any social media platform.
I've found subtle trolling to be fun.
But, also, addictive in an un-health way, which has given me some more perspective on why the country has gone a little crazy in last 5-10 years.
So, good to experience it, but will probably stop, maybe delete account altogether.
Hope you read rest of thread. I think a few people gave much better answers on the split between different Psychological fields, and why perceptions of the field are skewed.
I do think there is an argument that Psychology (as the study of the mind), can also study how humans respond, and are biased in Psychological studies, and how the people running a study can also be biased, hence the field as a whole can become better at performing studies.
Or another way, by studying why studies aren't replicating, we can also form better models to improve future studies. Basically, examine why measurements are wrong, form a new hypothesis, and measure again, and eventually form what this thread would call 'scientific' findings.
Basically follow the scientific process, and not just get angry that results are not replicating and toss out the whole field. When physics doesn't replicate, they figure out why, there are follow up studies, re-formulations. We don't just cancel all of physics.
For a criticism of Psychology from a giant in the quantitative approach try:
Meehl, Paul E. 1990. "Why summaries of research on psychological theories are often uninterpretable." Psychological Reports 66:195-244.
He gives a very detailed discussion of several factors that combine to make most psychology research (in his opinion) worthless.
His takeaway quote:
I think that for most faculty in soft psychology the full acceptance of my line of thought would involve a painful realization that one has achieved some notoriety, tenure, economic security and the like by engaging, to speak bluntly, in a bunch of nothing.
HN is against Psychology mostly because of measurements and reproducibility.
But they are only applying this standard to published scientific papers.
When Really, Psychology is most used in -> MARKETTING.
Marketing is all Psychology, and they definitely do form hypothesis, measure results, and iterate on that.
They are measuring you all day.
Everything you see, taste, feel, smell, is a Psychology Experiment done by Marketing departments in order to control your behavior. And by control your behavior, I mean, that is testing a hypothesis in the scientific method.
So, if that entire field is included into the field of 'Psychology', then yes it has grown by leaps and bounds as a science. Just not benevolently, or published in a scientific journal.
Is marketing getting good results from its research?
As always, with private, closed-down research, you can't tell. The instances I notice do clearly lead to bad outcomes, but that's a highly biased sample.
But anyway, I disagree that you can point to it as a counter-example. Not until you get some public data.
I think the argument in this thread is that Psychology is a completely invalid science, complete BS with no valid results.
I am saying, even if results are private, and we don't have public data, you can still look at the world around you and see the results. I have read interviews with app developers that flat out say they have entire departments of psychologist dedicated to increasing screen time. Those are un-published, but that doesn't mean it isn't real and happening. Thus you can infer that the entire field of Psychology is not complete BS, since money is going into it for the results it provides.
It isn't pretty, and it isn't fitting the high ideals of 'pure science". That doesn't mean we can ignore the entire field, call it fake, or say it is all BS.
What I am saying is that even if you are in one of those companies hiring lots of psychologists, you don't have any idea if they add anything or if you just got lucky.
> Those are un-published, but that doesn't mean it isn't real and happening.
You cited your own self as a source here
>The instances I notice do clearly lead to bad outcomes
I'm just agreeing that there are instances. But also agree, in the private corporate world, they aren't good for us as a whole, for society or the field. And can't be verified in a 'scientific peer reviewed' way. We can only do second hand observations.
Yes, iterative improvement is the goal. But the problem is when everyone in the field believes X and must not challenge it else lost standing etc., then people don't actually delve into assumptions as much they should. A clip on the topic (from several years back) that I thought stated it well:
Good Video.
Is he a Psychologist? I think something not discussed on this thread, is that Psychologist can study other Psychologist studies, study the results and how the biases are formed, and start to work on theories for better studies.
In the movie "A Beautiful Mind" one scene, quite brief and irrelevant, was quite interesting. Our protagonist, genius beyond measure, was in a courtyard amongst a flock of pigeons. He was intently studying his subjects, implicitly determined to solve the riddle, crack the pattern, of their behaviors and movements.
It leads to an interesting thought. Could you actually crack the riddle of pigeon movement given access to the entirety of humanity's resources? Be those resources manpower, computation, or funding? I really doubt it. It's going to be a chaotic interdependent system, rife with individual variation, and a good deal of randomness and chaos thrown in for good measure. All with no reason to expect any sort of remotely normal or measurable distribution.
I really don't think my opinion there is especially controversial. Yet, if not - then how is it we might instead imagine we can delve into the patterns of the human mind and psyche? Where complexity, chaos, and interdependence is many orders of magnitude greater? It just doesn't really make any sense to me. We only take it as a given because we're born into a society where this is a given. From astrology to phrenology history is littered with examples of "science" that weren't really science at all, just fields perpetuated by bias confirmation, lack of falsifiability, and so on. I often think we're stuck with some 'arrogance of the present' where, due to our advanced knowledge, we imagine we could surely never repeat the same mistakes of the past. Of course people of the past thought the exact same as well.
I think this is excellent example of the problem. Very complex, with some chaos thrown in.
I disagree that is is impossible. We continue to chip away at the problem, at least to an extent that it seems worth continuing, not stopping.
This thread is filled with people that think Psychology is akin to astrology.
But will then happily click on their phones that psychology has helped dial in to produce a response in them.
The conclusion that I draw is slightly different. We might not ever be able to deterministically predict human behavior, but that doesn't mean it's useless too identify Trends and develop heuristics.
The problem is entirely with people confusing and treating Trends or heuristics as deterministic facts when they are far from it
I agree but also the opposite is happening. The ability to identify Trends and Heuristics is seen as 'not scientific, or exact enough', and thus tossed out as worthless. So trends/heuristics can be both, over-played, and under-appreciated.
So guess there are two camps in the thread:
Psychology is either over-stating its findings, 'trying to be too exact when exact is not possible', so it's bad science.
Or when it does find something, it's deemed not exact enough, 'how dare you report a simple heuristic', so it's bad science.
Even though the exact movement of the pigeons can't be calculated, you can extract patterns. They go towards food, they nest in cliffs and buildings, they sleep at night.
You can make very strong predictions about that stuff.
Like fluid mechanics. It may actually be impossible to analytically predict the motion of individual particles in a fluid. Numerically it is certainly difficult. Yet we've extracted patterns to the point that we can design jet engines, wings, we can quantify the change in fuel economy from changing the shape of a car headlight...
In an ideal world, psychology limits itself to attempting to look at these broad patterns and does so in a rigorous, reproducible way.
While I’m not anti-psychology, I understand that perspective.
It’s precisely when social sciences try to apply methods or standards from the natural/‘hard’ sciences that things go wrong. It is more difficult, as you said, and it’s also qualitatively different. We need different models. Human traits may be measurable, but as observable emergent properties of a many-layered complex system, they’re are not at all like temperature or any other physical property.
It gets darker than that. The veneer of certainty, backed by the successes of hard sciences but ostensibly applied to humans, creates a ripe environment for pseudoscience and grifters to take advantage of others during their most vulnerable times.
Yes - we should study humans, and iteratively get better at it. But we need to tread carefully.
> Isn't iterative improvement what all science is about?
Yes and no. There's more to science, but iterative improvement is a large part of it.
My issue with psychology (and other soft sciences, e.g. sociology, economics) isn't so much its striving to find answers, but its adopting a one-sided worldview before that striving, thereby coloring their findings with that one side.
Look at what you wrote--'I know it [psychology] is typically viewed as a 'liberal' field'. That's because it IS a liberal (well, a politically Progressive) field--its instructors, its researchers, its practitioners largely are self-admittedly liberal (and further Left on the political spectrum.) And when they hire, they hire like-minds.[1] (Which is a thing humans do--no one wants to work with people they... dislike... for some reason.)
And so, because they've no opposing worldview in their ranks to say 'no', well... can their findings be trusted? [2]
>One study found, for example, that a third of social psychologists admitted that they would be unwilling to hire a known conservative to the faculty, and nearly half thought that their colleagues would be unwilling to hire such a person.33 Subsequent work suggests that those findings are not limited to psychology, and that conservative scholars might have a similar willingness to discriminate against liberals.34 On the whole, there does not appear to be a robust pipeline of conservatives desperate to get into academia.
This is substantially different from what you are suggesting, this idea that there is a natural bias when it seems to be a supply problem (and a dismissal of academia entirely, as the article links together the larger conservative push against higher education). Can't hire that which does not exist or believes your field is a farce.
There's a supply problem for women in STEM and our response has been to investigate every potential cause while investing in scholarships and outreach. If we found out that 33% of STEM employers were unwilling to hire women, we'd say, "Aha, that explains the supply problem. Let's fix that." I can't fathom spending tens of thousands of dollars to enter a highly competitve field where a third of employers will rule you out outright (and presumably more will discount you against other candidates).
Even if conservatives aren't interested for other reasons, the presence of a supply problem does not rule out bias. There is evidence of substantial self-reported bias, so there's probably bias.
I find psychology had deeper insight when it was _less_ hard-sciency.
A lot of social sciences seem to have "math-envy", and try to fit a subject to a tool that is not well suited for it.
If I read some early literature (not Freud though, he's a charlatan), I often find deep insight, and observations that get to the heart of some issue in a way that is only half science and half art, but revealing some knowledge in a way art can as well.
Current psychology is quite different, mostly dry. In summary, my issue is not lack of rigor, but too much rigor and lack of deep insight.
Clear thinking at the semantic layer is a gift that the humanities offers, in distinction from the gift of mathematical rigor that the physical sciences offer. The challenge for psychology is to combine them - extremely precise conceptual frameworks with the unknowns clearly delineated, and as much experimental rigor as possible.
And being ready to have the conceptual frameworks altered by the flood of new insights from neuroscience.
The big five personality types discussed in TFA tho are on solid experimental footing (of being stable characteristics of humans that explain about half of what we label as personality) and a fit subject for other experimental investigations like this on changes over a lifetime.
>I am a little surprised how much anti-Psychology sentiment there is on HN.
When you consider the extent it is trusted to produce truth and the extent that such 'truth' influences public policy and law, I think encouraging distrust of psychology is a social good. There is a difference between talking the details with the experts who recognize the limits of existing studies and talking about 'Psychology says we should do X' with the general population who aren't aware of the concept of reproducibility.
It is much like discussing the possible uses of crypto. If another friend in tech is talking about some possible benefit of crypto, I take a completely different approach than if my gram calls me up asking if I heard about new crypto tech X that will double her retirement.
> I'm wondering what the options are? We can't just dismiss Psychology, cancel an entire field because it has difficulties. Why can't we study humans, what study of humans would take the place of Psychology?
Imagined if we studied and tried to understand how CPUs work by endlessly clicking around in the interfaces of popular user software. "Oooh, look, this one has a 'file' menu too! I think file menus might be one of the universal traits of all computation!".
We know that there is such a thing as psychology, and when we finally understand it that the psychologists will have had nothing to do with that. Their insights are minimal on the best days, and non-existent the rest of the time.
They're off heading in their own pseudo-science direction, and it's doubtful that they'll disband even after someone else figures out their science for them. It will just limp onwards like phrenology.
>We know that there is such a thing as psychology, and when we finally understand it that the psychologists will have had nothing to do with that.
Guess, that is the problem. Seems like most of the thread doesn't seem to think it can be studied at all. You seem to acknowledge it can be, just not by 'Psychologist'.
I think this is a case of changing the title. Everyone seems to have a pretty negative view of the field of Psychology, so there are now a lot of other fields off doing Psychology but they changed their names, thus 'psychologists will have had nothing to do with that'. But where did it start?
Or maybe I'm not up on the times. What I'm calling Psychology has up and left and call themselves neuroscientist now, or 'cognitive neuroscience'.
Then we should keep trying, and analyze why the predictions aren't working, create new hypothesis and test again. Not toss out the whole endeavor. This whole thread is defeatist, like 'wow, humans are difficult to predict, thus it is obviously junk science, and we shouldn't even try'.
> It is more difficult to measure a human trait, than to measure a temperature.
You might want to read up on the history of thermodynamics. It took decades to figure out how to define and measure temperature. It's far more difficult to measure temperature than a human trait because one requires precise definition and modeling while the latter doesn't.
> Why can't we study humans, what study of humans would take the place of Psychology?
Neuroscience. Psychology is the easy way out to doing real science.
> I'd say all those pointing to the successes of 'hard' sciences, have it easier.
"Hard science" is more difficult because hard science has to testable via experiment. It isn't just a bunch of people agreeing to a consensus.
> Isn't iterative improvement what all science is about?
But psychology isn't iterative. It isn't improvement. 99% of psychology is not testable. The biggest critics of psychology are pyschologists themselves ( at least the honest ones ). Ask yourself why there are many competing schools of psychology. And then ask yourself why there is no scientific or experimental way to find the "right or correct school of psychology".
Psychology today is as scientific as astrology was hundreds of years ago. Until telescopes and radio waves allowed us to peer into the cosmos and gave us astronomy. The lack of tools and modeling of the human brain is what's holding back the science of the brain ( neuroscience ). Psychology is just modern day voodoo not different than astrology.
Psychologists are non-empiricists with authority and impact upon people's lives. I'm constantly aghast at the general lack of scepticism of psychology.
I think its because the field seems prone to making up wild theories and just rolling with it (i.e. learned helplessness that was recently debunked with brain scans, most of what Freud contributed). perhaps opinion will change as brainscans/mri improve and make more rigorous studies of actual processes going on in the brain possible and then the norm.
When i read studies in the field it often feels like a less reputable macroeconomics, which in turn feels like a less reputable theoretical physics...
Nir Barzilai, a researcher of aging, tells a great story about a very nice 100 year old man. When Nir comments on how nice the man is to his 80yo son, the son says: "well, he was a real jerk when he was my age."
It's interesting they found minimal gender differentiation.
As I've aged and observed myself and my cohort through teens/20s/30s/40s some into 50s.. the effect of men mellowing out is quite strong. Women do not have nearly as strong of an effect, nor necessarily in the same direction.
This shouldn't be too shocking due to the effects of reduce testosterone over time in men, and starting from such a higher level of aggressiveness.
People do be living, a consequence far removed from most individual’s lives these days. I even had to look up how to spell individual; that's how foreign of a word it is in present times.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 245 ms ] threadhard for me believe that you would infer anything statistically meaningful on population scale from that small of a sample, or am i missing something? is it common to work with so small sample sizes in psychology?
Combina that with the fact that they often use psychology students as experiment group and the fact that most research doesn’t go further than assume a normal distribution, and you might start to understand why more than 2/3rds of all psychology research cannot be reproduced.
As sibling posts mentioned, a much bigger issue than sample size is representativeness: college psychology study samples tend to be drawn disproportionately from college students. They might not generalize well to the general population even if you increase the sample size ten fold or a hundred fold.
While that statement is technically correct, it is useless in practice. In order to determine whether a sample is representative (of the trait you are trying to measure), you need to know what the true mean value of the trait is – but if you knew that, you wouldn't need to conduct the experiment in the first place.
That's why it is important to have a large sample size, because under some very general assumptions, the distortions caused by outliers become smaller the more samples you look at. In the limit (that is, when the sample size equals the population size) those distortions disappear entirely, and the sample mean becomes the true population mean.
1. We assume that people have stable measurable independent properties f1(x1.., t), f2(x1.., t), ...
2. We assume these are modelled by a linear model, f1(t) = ax + b, etc.
3. We assume the parameters (a, b) of this model causally determine `f1` st. each corresponds to an independent cause of `f1`
4. We assume that we have some reliable measurement process, say m, which measures each property producing samples of that a,b: m(f1) = random samples of a,b
5. Then we assume that these samples are representative of the true values, ie., that mean(a samples) = a + random_error
The problem with the field is that (1 - 4) are false -- arguing about 5 is a little like arguing what time a broken clock should be set to.
The physicist replies, "At the atomic level I did not, technically, touch it."
Without a causal model of a human mind (and its relationship to the world) -- what exactly is there a "statistics" of?
You cannot really have a scientific psychology; the necessary experiments are impossible or unethical.
> While that statement is technically correct, it is useless in practice.
I don't really follow your argument for small sample sizes being useless in practice.
Isn't the whole point of things like confidence/credible intervals, the bootstrap, and other common statistical methods, to quantify the uncertainty of estimates due to the sampling procedure, including sample size and the possibility of outliers? And, while we may not know that our sample is representative, isn't random sampling from the population of interest a method that will generate a sample that is representative with high probability?
That these methods are well known in statistical practice suggests that samples are generally useful, even when they are not large. The existence of pathological distributions where we might get misleading results (e.g., the classical "wealth over the people in a room if you throw Bill Gates in there") doesn't make these methods useless, does it?
That depends on the sample size. The comment I replied to claimed that "you could estimate population statistics of millions (or even infinite) with a sample of just 30 or so".
Which is certainly not true if the sample is drawn randomly, except under very specific circumstances (such as population variance being extremely small). You don't need a billionaire in order for income distribution samples to be wildly misleading. It's enough for the variance to be high, so that very small samples are almost guaranteed to have a mean that differs substantially from that of the whole population.
How did I just produce a reliable estimate using a sample size of only six?
By quantifying the uncertainty of the estimate. There's a trade off between sample size and uncertainty, and that trade off allows small sample sizes to be useful for many practical applications, most of which can accommodate uncertainty.
Again, small samples are informative. Whether they are informative enough for a particular application doesn't determine whether they are informative enough for all applications in general. I certainly wouldn't call them "useless in practice."
Doesnt sound representative for me at all
Yes. Even much smaller sample sizes are common. I've seen "results" published in supposedly reputable journals with sample sizes as small as 9. Not 9 other studies that were meta-analyzed, mind you. 9 individual people.
This is just one of several reasons why most of psychology is junk science, if not outright fraudulent. Statistical methods is usually a required course for students in such disciplines, so I do not buy the "they don't know better" excuse. Not that you need to know statistics in order to understand that you can't conclude anything from a sample size of 9.
There are good ideas in the field, to be sure. But on the other hand...
This is without a doubt one of the worst and most normalized human rights violations happening in the world today, and the scale and impact of it is hard to imagine.
The police then take that person to a place of safety, usually a hospital.
I can speak from a lot of experience when I say I would trust a clinical psychologist over a psychiatrist any day of the week. Psychiatrists are just doctors who learn to prescribe medication based on a simple set of rules and psychometry. There are psychiatrists who take their field very seriously, but that's the exception rather than the rule.
It's basically impossible to separate the benefits of talk (social interaction, validation, etc) from the talk therapy. Lots of people whould probably be served just as well if they had someone much less trained, or not even trained at all to talk to in a similar manner.
Furthermore as the social bonds disintegrate studies suggest that individuals have less friends and less interpersonal interaction generally (social media use excluded) at the same time the need for psychologists has increased. In some demographics over half the members have been diagnosed with a mental illness. How can we be sure that all of the sudden lots of people have become mentally ill vs lots of people need someone to listen to them?
This goes especially for actually severe mental disorder, because the thing there is, those patients have things going on in their head that most people can't relate to or understand(like irrational fears for instance). Psychologists however have a lot of experience talking with these people, reading and interpreting abnormal body language. And they know the sort of things you definitely don't want to say to a patient.
As for your point about social media, my personal view is that you're mostly right except I do think real mental illness is increasing, because loneliness is such a strong cause of depression especially, but also social phobia.
Throughout my childhood most of my interactions with people outside my family consisted or bullying by other kids and neglect by teachers. Because of this, it's deeply instilled in me that in any social interaction people are catalogueing my every mistake or negative attribute, or just ignoring me. No amount of conversation with other people(or medication btw) has helped me overcome this, but the only progress I have made was in therapy. What I really needed was help to understand why my brain works this way, and how I can be more aware of my own irrational thinking. This has helped me to obsess a lot less about social situations. Though I still have a deep mistrust of people at my core, I've at least been able to let some people in and learn to trust them. And accept that they really do like me for who I am.
While a bit rambling, I hope that provides some context on what a good therapist can do compared to speaking to friends and loved ones.
For young men without strong male influences in particular I think a kind person in some sort of big brother program is probably worth a team of psychological professionals in many cases.
But we need to recognise that actually, there are people who can't be helped this way, who need more than just any talk at all, and that clinical psychologists have a lot of useful expertise on how to help these people, that can't simply be written off as unscientific or just a friendly conversation. There's a lot more to it than that.
I'm guessing that if 9 is enough to call it junk, then 20 would not sway your opinion. What is a good number then? 100? 1000?. Guess could do identical study on groups of 10,100,1000, and show that the results replicate across the size. Of course, this has been done, hence why they get away with smaller sizes.
That's precisely why psychologists take statistics classes as part of their education. I get that those aren't everyone's cup of tea, but people who don't even understand the basics have no business conducting and publishing studies. In fact, well-designed scientific studies typically start with a discussion of p-values, sample sizes, possible sources of biases, etc. If you don't see any mention of those in a study, you know you're looking at junk.
Psychology is still a newcomer, and study of the mind and the human animal is difficult because it is complex and hard to measure. That doesn’t mean you can’t start somewhere.
These are structural and methodical issues which are not at all related to it’s age. In many cases it is simply bias, negligence or pure fraud.
These are examples of a 'new' science. Humans are complex and hard to measure, so yes, there are problems with study design, and re-producibility. Because they are working it out. That is because of the field of study, not evil intent, some dark cabal of researchers putting out false data on purpose. If there is some obvious way to solve these problems, then those people should do it.
I was going to throw out some sarcastic example from another field. But guess, when I think about it, maybe it does happen. String Theory in Physics is an example of "group think" leading an entire field down the wrong rabbit hole of stuff that is faulty and can't be measured. So guess it can happen anywhere.
It's okay to not know. It's not okay to claim results when there aren't any to be drawn from the available data.
And astrology did not "turn into" astronomy. Astronomy developed (in part) as a result of astrologers trying to predict the motion of celestial objects. But astrology is not at all the forerunner of scientific astronomy, since its main concern (how celestial movements influence human lives) lacks any factual underpinnings. It's not that astrology produced incorrect results; the entire endeavor is fundamentally wrong.
Might need to do some history readying. Of course the study of celestial movements eventually became astronomy, who do you think was looking at the stars before astronomy existed. All of history isn't some nice linear line of analytic reasoning. I wonder if HN also has a general bias against history, since it is a non-technical field with a lot of interpretations.
Astrology is not "the study of celestial movements". It's the utterly baseless claim that those movements have a high-level influence on human lives. That's not proto-science, it's pseudoscience. And it's not at all comparable to incorrect theories in other fields (like phlogiston or the luminiferous aether). There is no reason to expect that astrology works, and its claims are made without any supporting evidence. That has nothing to do with science.
I am NOT saying Astrology is true. I'm saying that a lot of people over history, long before astronomy exited, observed the stars, and traced their movement, and yes, some of them attributed their movements to 'gods', or did what today we called 'Astrology'. Then eventually, someone was like, man, these celestial bodies seem to follow some patterns, and drifted away from thinking it was 'the gods', and started putting math to it, and boom, we look back on it and call it 'Astronomy'.
But Astronomy did not pop into existence fully formed as a science.
Electrical engineering, aerospace engineering, nuclear physics, and many other difficult fields of study are far, far newer than psychology. And yet have no problems with reliably producing significant, real-world results.
By that metric, Psychology seems profoundly lacking.
But, to do so, I would need to cite something in Psychology, and you can just deny it again. What evidence can be cited if all evidence is dismissed.
You will probably say something along the lines of 'what can be verified or repeated'. Ok, just go look. Why do I need to re-cite an entire discipline, just go read it.
From my personal experience, the problem is that people who study psychology are not interested or skilled in statistics. Unskilled professors teaching uninterested students perpetuates the cycle.
The field is slowly improving but still has a long way to go.
Unless those small sample sizes are justified by rigorous statistical modeling, showing that the result is still significant even with the small sample size, such studies absolutely are junk.
The burden is on the researcher to demonstrate that their experimental design is suitable for obtaining meaningful results. Failing to do so is the definition of junk science.
And needless to say, lack of statistical knowledge is not an excuse for not doing this. If a medical scientist is unable to perform an accurate statistical analysis of their data, it means that they cannot publish – not that they can skip that part because it's too difficult for them. The entire study is meaningless without it.
Pretending that these papers of “wow, we found a substance that when given to ten people in a cancer group with a 99% six month lethality and three survived more than two years” contribute nothing is a weird belief. Penicillin was what n = 1.
But you shouldn’t judge a group by its average. Also, it’s misogynistic in this case, obviously.
Something can be statistically meaningful with a small sample size if the effect size is large for instance.
Reaching old age is still an achievement, especially for young male motorcycle riders, and experience of society and its history always comes for free. The "locking away" stage is something old people generally try to actively avoid, and mostly generally for those with actual dementia in any case.
The kind of wisdom that they have earned dealing with the daily practicalities of personal life, society, law, bureaucracy and in general the knowledge of navigating the winds of change for many decades. But in order to get the benefit of that wisdom, you have to value them as individuals with valuable experience instead of thinking of them as someone who spent their years merely waiting for the day of their retirement.
> social vitality: living or preferring to live in a community rather than alone.
Seems like you grow out of wanting to live in a community. I wonder if a aging population will cause cities to decline in population more rapidly than the raw numbers indicate it would.
Old people don't seem to mind community though, I think it's just that people who are often sick or hurting tend to be less social. Going blind and deaf doesn't help either. I imagine it's plain harder for old folks no matter what their preference for solitude.
I tend to find, if you want to be young, act like the young.
Famous Warren Buffet quote, "I looked up the actuarial tables, and I saw that 6 year olds had the longest life expectancy. So, I decided to eat exactly what a 6 year old would eat."
Seemingly, it works.
I watched a TED talk on the health benefits of living in cohousing and larger households once. Besides well proven increases in overall lifespans and decreases in almost all chronic diseases, there's also huge economic benefits. Building a saltwater pool for example makes a lot more sense to do for a community of 20 than for an individual nuclear family.
The comments were filled with straight up vitriol. It was as if people felt personally attacked and like they were being forced to live with other people. Everyone seemed to already have their minds set on "finally living on their own" and "having their own space" (neither of which, imo, are contradictory to cohousing).
Yet, around the world, large multigenerational households are and have been the norm. Nuclear families are a pretty recent concept that came with the rise of suburbia and the GI Bills
It is more difficult to measure a human trait, than to measure a temperature.
I'm wondering what the options are? We can't just dismiss Psychology, cancel an entire field because it has difficulties. Why can't we study humans, what study of humans would take the place of Psychology?
I'd say all those pointing to the successes of 'hard' sciences, have it easier.
Isn't iterative improvement what all science is about?
It has nothing to do with “liberal” or “conservative” fields of studies and everything to do with reproducibility and predictivity. If psychology could make predictions to the 13th decimal place like we are able to do for the gyromagnetic ratio of the electron (and confirm via experiment), there would be no complaints.
There is also a tendency for the outcomes of psychology studies to be “oversold” in a sense. To be fair, this is more often due to the media sensationalizing the results or reading something into them that isn’t there, but you don’t see this as often in physics (well, maybe a bit with quantum mechanics and black holes).
But we do need to study humans, and they are hard to quantify. It is very misleading to compare measuring electrons to measuring 'how do I feel'. It is difficult to measure. That doesn't mean not to.
It seems like here the sentiment is strongly to go ahead and toss the baby out with the bath water.
Also reminds me of that one psychology study where they made a total coincidence into a correlation which the media went crazy over (https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2015/05/29/i-fooled-m...).
> B is worse!
What good is a comment like this, especially when B is completely unrelated to what anyone is talking about?
I think you might just be a little too high in the food chain to see the vast amounts of lay speculation about physics that goes on. Certainly less volume of speech than psychology but i think for the respective popularity of the fields, people find it _more engaging_ to do speculation of physical reality than just another psychological paper. The majority of journalists oversell everything. It's just that it's less often that physics makes it into regular magazines and publications, i think
I'm not sure psychologists are the drivers of that.
Psychologists perhaps to a fault hate medications and other external influences on a body. Just look at their fervent anti-antidepresssnt pushes and opposition to antipsychotics.
It's true that supportive psychological therapies are taking over and even contaminating CBT to the point it can feel like professional gaslighting.
I can't find the quote but Eisenhower reportly met with a physicist after the bombing of Japan who was upset with his role in it and said something to the effect of "get this whiny guy out of here, I'm the one who gave the order".
More false dichotomy.
When anybody else (physicist) does something, its just benign, "I'm just doing science. WUT, nuclear weapons, cloning, bio-weapons. Not me".
When a psychologist does something, "they are trying to control us. they are forcing us to do things against our will".
while we're off-topic, please also consider the "potential harm" of suicide within trans communities and compare how access to HRT influences that. most of my trans friends who have considered suicide recently have done so in part because of the increasing hatred & vilification of trans people. your words already have "potential harm."
OP was probably referring to liberal as in liberal arts (in comparison to hard sciences and/or professional degree tracks like engineering)
This is an issue in biology as well/in general, and it doesn't get near the amount of pushback here as psychology.
I think you are missing that you are being measured that accurately, by marketing departments using methods from psychology.
That's not a fair comparison. Medicine struggles to make vaccines that are more than 95% effective. HIV tests are 99.97% accurate. The mind is even squishier, psychology will always look amateurish compared to physics.
As software engineers on HN, we don't debug a computer program by talking about why the program might be feeling bad because it sexualized its mother as an infant or some other insane nonsense. I suspect once neuroscience gets better, and we can simply load up all our neurons into a computer and run the equivalent of GDB on it, it'll be really obvious that humans are 100% deterministic, people with psych problems are deficient in X, Y, or Z chemical or the wiring was screwed up in some place or another, and we'll be able to fix it.
Eventually we will look back on Psychologists the same as doctors that did Bloodletting and "Balancing the Humors"- complete crackpots that set science back a few hundred years.
Not being able to model something at the lowest possible level doesn't make something inherently unscientific.
It certainly makes it harder to test hypotheses and harder to be certain of the results, but it can still be scientific.
Science isn't a strait line of analytical progression, and when it does get side tracked, it isn't some nefarious group. I could just as easily say if only those stupid String Theorist had just stepped aside, we wouldn't have set Physics back a decade.
It's human dynamics, hmmm, I wonder if there is someone studying why groups get stuck in these loops, hmmm, why do humans seem to get stuck at a plateau that is difficult to think beyond, hmmmm let me think now, hmmm. Psychologist?
There are definitely problems in the field, in some subareas more than others. I am pleased to see how much discussion in the field there has been regarding issues with replication, sample sizes, etc., and I do see improvements there. Quite honestly, the discussion about these things has instigated the same questions in other fields. The progress is slow, and it frustrates me that I don't feel like I can fully trust a lot of the older research in the field, but...there is progress.
But I think you're right that it's a difficult field in general. Human minds are complicated -- possibly one of the most complex things in the universe to study. Human social interactions, relationships, group dynamics, identities, and start with those complex machines and now layer on top additional interdependent cause-effect relationships. The area of study is just, fundamentally, hard.
The field has developed techniques to try to address this -- that's why psych surveys tend to ask the same question in multiple different ways. By triangulating in to a fuzzy concept from multiple angles, it at least gets us to the point where (hopefully) there's some systematic variance we can talk about and study. We're never going to get to the point where we can measure "agreeableness" or "prejudice" or "empathy" with as much precision as physicists can measure changes in an atom. But studying the human condition in as systematic a way as we can still feels incredibly important to me, to do what we can to improve human flourishing.
We can stop pretending that the garbage currently produced has any value whatsoever.
To be a bit more direct (though please be assured that I mean no disrespect): bringing up Lacan in this conversation tells me you don’t know psychological science very well. You’re missing out. :)
Lacan is one of the most famous psychologists of all time. Probably only Freud and Jung would rank above him in that regard. That in itself is a pretty big indictment of the field, since the latter two are not much better.
But the problem is not that Lacan was spouting garbage while being a psychologist. The problem is that other psychologists were tolerating that garbage, instead of ostracizing him. That's as if an immunologist who spreads conspiracy theories about vaccines containing microchips somehow continued to be invited to conferences, and have his peers listen to him and discuss and debate his "theories".
It's obvious that the field as a whole is incapable of cleanly separating itself from left-wing politics, philosophical intellectualism, and outright nonsense.
That's not comparable to the luminiferous aether, which was actually a reasonable assumption once the wave nature of light was recognized, because most waves need a medium to propagate through. Aether theory is wrong, but it's not nonsensical.
But a psychologist makes some assumptions, later to be found wrong, it is complete bullshit, con artists, the entire field is corrupt.
Do you see the false dichotomy here? You are so biased you can't even see the problem.
Scientific psychology is a completely different animal.
Modern cognitive science looks like this:
- https://opg.optica.org/abstract.cfm?uri=oam-1987-TUB2
- https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/001002...
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00100...
Again, with all due respect, you very clearly do not know what you are talking about. Nobody takes Lacan seriously, even in the lowest tier of politicized social-science (which in turn is not taken terribly seriously by cognitive scientists).
If you're actually interested in human perception, cognition and behavior, I am happy to point you in the right direction.
The psychoanalytic tradition, including Freud, is still a part of psych major curricula around the world. Therapists with psychology degrees still practice psychoanalysis, which, while not identical to what was happening 100 years ago, is still strongly influenced by Freud and Jung. Therefore, claims that the field has left its past behind just aren't credible. And I'm not even going to go into psychology's entanglement with postmodern intellectualism and the political left.
Your argument hinges on out-of-date notions and false distinctions.
Again, if you were actually curious about psychology, you’d want to engage with the scientific psychology literature instead of putting on blinders and insisting that the psychoanalytic tradition is the only relevant one. I’m left to conclude that you’re more interested in looking down your nose at a field you don’t respect than actually understanding anything.
Let us know if that changes. I’m always happy to point you towards the interesting literature in whatever subfield you’re curious about.
The further one moves away from their field, the more we should disregard someone's opinions regardless of how smart or accomplished they are in their field.
And Pauling lived a remarkably long life for someone who was hanging around in chemistry labs in the 1920s. Someone with that background dying at 93 is like a regular person dying at 113. So I would be careful to dismiss his ideas regarding health outright, even though most studies have been unable to confirm his claims. There is still plenty of serious research happening into Vitamin C megadoses, so clearly, not all scientists agree with the idea that this is quackery. And even if it indeed were completely and utterly wrong, it is still not even remotely comparable to the sheer audacity of Lacan's bullshit.
There's lots of fault to go around, everyone is doing their best!
The Motte and Bailey (which I do not happen to believe is intentional fwiw) is that "physics" is implicit to the assertion.
They forget that their “hard” natural sciences offer no proof of consciousness being caused by neurons and atoms, or them being somehow more “objectively real” than consciousness; indeed, this is not even a question physics et al. would have in their scope.
If you think about it, your mind is the only thing you have direct unmediated access to—and in any science, even physics, it is always at the beginning and the end of any discovery: once you remove the intermediate steps, all discoveries and all their real-world applications and implications ultimately concern the state of human mind. However, shiny gains offered by physics and respective technological advances can be blinding enough that we forget what’s fundamental.
> Every single thing laypeople learn about psychology and experiment
Laypeople miss-understand something, then blame the psychologist for their own miss-understanding.
Sounds like you and a lot of comments here.
Since Psychology is about humans, and how they respond, then it is possible to have Psychology studies about Psychology studies, and study why humans are biased, why are studies biased, and control for those factors.
Because a subject is difficult doesn't mean toss it all out the window. "shucks this stuff is hard, darn, guess it's all BS".
How do you even begin to setup an experiment where you setup a real study of human interaction without breaking any ethical norms? Before you object to this line of thinking, consider that Milgram experiment would not be allowed today.
If so, how can the field advance?
Seems like other fields are able to advance with observational studies, why is Psychology singled out as being impossible.
If studies can't be re-produced, then analyze why and try again until it can be. All the doomsayer arguments in this thread is weird. Who would ever say "man this double slit thing is tough to understand, maybe we shouldn't do physics anymore".
The only difference is that everyone thinks they are specialists in human psychology, so they feel like they can dismiss everything that doesn't fit their prior assumptions.
Papers on quantum mechanics start with so much math that noone outside the subfield has any idea what it says, so noone dares to dismiss it.
> my degree in an obscure subfield of quantum mechanics
Guess I'm wondering why his 'degree in un-related field and have read some psychology', is not as valid as your 'some degree in un-related field, and have read some psychology'.
Or do you think your CS PhD came with more psychology course work than his quantum mechanics degree?
You might need some Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. There are a lot of studies that show it works.
Anyway, good luck on the anger issues. Not sure who you will see since Psychologist are off the table. Maybe meditation? Lot of good meditation studies coming out lately.
Hope you read rest of thread. I think a few people gave much better answers on the split between different Psychological fields, and why perceptions of the field are skewed.
I do think there is an argument that Psychology (as the study of the mind), can also study how humans respond, and are biased in Psychological studies, and how the people running a study can also be biased, hence the field as a whole can become better at performing studies.
Or another way, by studying why studies aren't replicating, we can also form better models to improve future studies. Basically, examine why measurements are wrong, form a new hypothesis, and measure again, and eventually form what this thread would call 'scientific' findings.
Basically follow the scientific process, and not just get angry that results are not replicating and toss out the whole field. When physics doesn't replicate, they figure out why, there are follow up studies, re-formulations. We don't just cancel all of physics.
Meehl, Paul E. 1990. "Why summaries of research on psychological theories are often uninterpretable." Psychological Reports 66:195-244.
He gives a very detailed discussion of several factors that combine to make most psychology research (in his opinion) worthless.
His takeaway quote:
I think that for most faculty in soft psychology the full acceptance of my line of thought would involve a painful realization that one has achieved some notoriety, tenure, economic security and the like by engaging, to speak bluntly, in a bunch of nothing.
HN is against Psychology mostly because of measurements and reproducibility. But they are only applying this standard to published scientific papers.
When Really, Psychology is most used in -> MARKETTING.
Marketing is all Psychology, and they definitely do form hypothesis, measure results, and iterate on that.
They are measuring you all day. Everything you see, taste, feel, smell, is a Psychology Experiment done by Marketing departments in order to control your behavior. And by control your behavior, I mean, that is testing a hypothesis in the scientific method.
So, if that entire field is included into the field of 'Psychology', then yes it has grown by leaps and bounds as a science. Just not benevolently, or published in a scientific journal.
As always, with private, closed-down research, you can't tell. The instances I notice do clearly lead to bad outcomes, but that's a highly biased sample.
But anyway, I disagree that you can point to it as a counter-example. Not until you get some public data.
I am saying, even if results are private, and we don't have public data, you can still look at the world around you and see the results. I have read interviews with app developers that flat out say they have entire departments of psychologist dedicated to increasing screen time. Those are un-published, but that doesn't mean it isn't real and happening. Thus you can infer that the entire field of Psychology is not complete BS, since money is going into it for the results it provides.
It isn't pretty, and it isn't fitting the high ideals of 'pure science". That doesn't mean we can ignore the entire field, call it fake, or say it is all BS.
> Those are un-published, but that doesn't mean it isn't real and happening.
It means you don't know what is happening.
I'm just agreeing that there are instances. But also agree, in the private corporate world, they aren't good for us as a whole, for society or the field. And can't be verified in a 'scientific peer reviewed' way. We can only do second hand observations.
But, they are impactful. Just negatively.
I see them being impactful. I have no idea what they really are.
https://youtu.be/Zj7OmxhHsZY
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Haidt
It leads to an interesting thought. Could you actually crack the riddle of pigeon movement given access to the entirety of humanity's resources? Be those resources manpower, computation, or funding? I really doubt it. It's going to be a chaotic interdependent system, rife with individual variation, and a good deal of randomness and chaos thrown in for good measure. All with no reason to expect any sort of remotely normal or measurable distribution.
I really don't think my opinion there is especially controversial. Yet, if not - then how is it we might instead imagine we can delve into the patterns of the human mind and psyche? Where complexity, chaos, and interdependence is many orders of magnitude greater? It just doesn't really make any sense to me. We only take it as a given because we're born into a society where this is a given. From astrology to phrenology history is littered with examples of "science" that weren't really science at all, just fields perpetuated by bias confirmation, lack of falsifiability, and so on. I often think we're stuck with some 'arrogance of the present' where, due to our advanced knowledge, we imagine we could surely never repeat the same mistakes of the past. Of course people of the past thought the exact same as well.
I disagree that is is impossible. We continue to chip away at the problem, at least to an extent that it seems worth continuing, not stopping.
This thread is filled with people that think Psychology is akin to astrology. But will then happily click on their phones that psychology has helped dial in to produce a response in them.
The problem is entirely with people confusing and treating Trends or heuristics as deterministic facts when they are far from it
So guess there are two camps in the thread:
Psychology is either over-stating its findings, 'trying to be too exact when exact is not possible', so it's bad science.
Or when it does find something, it's deemed not exact enough, 'how dare you report a simple heuristic', so it's bad science.
Damned either way.
You can make very strong predictions about that stuff.
Like fluid mechanics. It may actually be impossible to analytically predict the motion of individual particles in a fluid. Numerically it is certainly difficult. Yet we've extracted patterns to the point that we can design jet engines, wings, we can quantify the change in fuel economy from changing the shape of a car headlight...
In an ideal world, psychology limits itself to attempting to look at these broad patterns and does so in a rigorous, reproducible way.
It’s precisely when social sciences try to apply methods or standards from the natural/‘hard’ sciences that things go wrong. It is more difficult, as you said, and it’s also qualitatively different. We need different models. Human traits may be measurable, but as observable emergent properties of a many-layered complex system, they’re are not at all like temperature or any other physical property.
It gets darker than that. The veneer of certainty, backed by the successes of hard sciences but ostensibly applied to humans, creates a ripe environment for pseudoscience and grifters to take advantage of others during their most vulnerable times.
Yes - we should study humans, and iteratively get better at it. But we need to tread carefully.
> Isn't iterative improvement what all science is about?
Yes and no. There's more to science, but iterative improvement is a large part of it.
My issue with psychology (and other soft sciences, e.g. sociology, economics) isn't so much its striving to find answers, but its adopting a one-sided worldview before that striving, thereby coloring their findings with that one side.
Look at what you wrote--'I know it [psychology] is typically viewed as a 'liberal' field'. That's because it IS a liberal (well, a politically Progressive) field--its instructors, its researchers, its practitioners largely are self-admittedly liberal (and further Left on the political spectrum.) And when they hire, they hire like-minds.[1] (Which is a thing humans do--no one wants to work with people they... dislike... for some reason.)
And so, because they've no opposing worldview in their ranks to say 'no', well... can their findings be trusted? [2]
[1] A commentary on the perceived political homogeneity at the University--https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/the_value_...
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26785836/
>One study found, for example, that a third of social psychologists admitted that they would be unwilling to hire a known conservative to the faculty, and nearly half thought that their colleagues would be unwilling to hire such a person.33 Subsequent work suggests that those findings are not limited to psychology, and that conservative scholars might have a similar willingness to discriminate against liberals.34 On the whole, there does not appear to be a robust pipeline of conservatives desperate to get into academia.
This is substantially different from what you are suggesting, this idea that there is a natural bias when it seems to be a supply problem (and a dismissal of academia entirely, as the article links together the larger conservative push against higher education). Can't hire that which does not exist or believes your field is a farce.
There's a supply problem for women in STEM and our response has been to investigate every potential cause while investing in scholarships and outreach. If we found out that 33% of STEM employers were unwilling to hire women, we'd say, "Aha, that explains the supply problem. Let's fix that." I can't fathom spending tens of thousands of dollars to enter a highly competitve field where a third of employers will rule you out outright (and presumably more will discount you against other candidates).
Even if conservatives aren't interested for other reasons, the presence of a supply problem does not rule out bias. There is evidence of substantial self-reported bias, so there's probably bias.
A lot of social sciences seem to have "math-envy", and try to fit a subject to a tool that is not well suited for it.
If I read some early literature (not Freud though, he's a charlatan), I often find deep insight, and observations that get to the heart of some issue in a way that is only half science and half art, but revealing some knowledge in a way art can as well.
Current psychology is quite different, mostly dry. In summary, my issue is not lack of rigor, but too much rigor and lack of deep insight.
And being ready to have the conceptual frameworks altered by the flood of new insights from neuroscience.
The big five personality types discussed in TFA tho are on solid experimental footing (of being stable characteristics of humans that explain about half of what we label as personality) and a fit subject for other experimental investigations like this on changes over a lifetime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
When you consider the extent it is trusted to produce truth and the extent that such 'truth' influences public policy and law, I think encouraging distrust of psychology is a social good. There is a difference between talking the details with the experts who recognize the limits of existing studies and talking about 'Psychology says we should do X' with the general population who aren't aware of the concept of reproducibility.
It is much like discussing the possible uses of crypto. If another friend in tech is talking about some possible benefit of crypto, I take a completely different approach than if my gram calls me up asking if I heard about new crypto tech X that will double her retirement.
Imagined if we studied and tried to understand how CPUs work by endlessly clicking around in the interfaces of popular user software. "Oooh, look, this one has a 'file' menu too! I think file menus might be one of the universal traits of all computation!".
We know that there is such a thing as psychology, and when we finally understand it that the psychologists will have had nothing to do with that. Their insights are minimal on the best days, and non-existent the rest of the time.
They're off heading in their own pseudo-science direction, and it's doubtful that they'll disband even after someone else figures out their science for them. It will just limp onwards like phrenology.
Guess, that is the problem. Seems like most of the thread doesn't seem to think it can be studied at all. You seem to acknowledge it can be, just not by 'Psychologist'.
I think this is a case of changing the title. Everyone seems to have a pretty negative view of the field of Psychology, so there are now a lot of other fields off doing Psychology but they changed their names, thus 'psychologists will have had nothing to do with that'. But where did it start?
Or maybe I'm not up on the times. What I'm calling Psychology has up and left and call themselves neuroscientist now, or 'cognitive neuroscience'.
You might want to read up on the history of thermodynamics. It took decades to figure out how to define and measure temperature. It's far more difficult to measure temperature than a human trait because one requires precise definition and modeling while the latter doesn't.
> Why can't we study humans, what study of humans would take the place of Psychology?
Neuroscience. Psychology is the easy way out to doing real science.
> I'd say all those pointing to the successes of 'hard' sciences, have it easier.
"Hard science" is more difficult because hard science has to testable via experiment. It isn't just a bunch of people agreeing to a consensus.
> Isn't iterative improvement what all science is about?
But psychology isn't iterative. It isn't improvement. 99% of psychology is not testable. The biggest critics of psychology are pyschologists themselves ( at least the honest ones ). Ask yourself why there are many competing schools of psychology. And then ask yourself why there is no scientific or experimental way to find the "right or correct school of psychology".
Psychology today is as scientific as astrology was hundreds of years ago. Until telescopes and radio waves allowed us to peer into the cosmos and gave us astronomy. The lack of tools and modeling of the human brain is what's holding back the science of the brain ( neuroscience ). Psychology is just modern day voodoo not different than astrology.
When i read studies in the field it often feels like a less reputable macroeconomics, which in turn feels like a less reputable theoretical physics...
(page 15 for the pretty graphs)
Nir Barzilai, a researcher of aging, tells a great story about a very nice 100 year old man. When Nir comments on how nice the man is to his 80yo son, the son says: "well, he was a real jerk when he was my age."
https://peterattiamd.com/nirbarzilai2/
This shouldn't be too shocking due to the effects of reduce testosterone over time in men, and starting from such a higher level of aggressiveness.