[HN Gopher] Why psychology isn't science (2012)
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Why psychology isn't science (2012)
Author : peterthehacker
Score : 81 points
Date : 2021-05-09 20:15 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.latimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.latimes.com)
| jimmar wrote:
| > How does one measure happiness? Psychologists can't use a ruler
| or a microscope, so they invent an arbitrary scale.
|
| The author makes it sound like you just pull a scale out of your
| ass. There are processes that researchers must follow to create a
| scale to measure something like happiness. If these rules are not
| followed correctly, you won't get your research published in
| reputable journals.
| peterthehacker wrote:
| Do you have examples of these standardized processes to measure
| happiness?
|
| The only measures I've heard of are not standardized and
| typically self-reported / survey based measures.
| nick0garvey wrote:
| I remember Feynman speaking quite harshly about most psychology
| towards the end of "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!". His
| complaints were largely around the lack of reproducibility and
| experiment practices universal across the field.
|
| This piece seems to criticize just one subset of psychology -
| happiness research - and use that to dismiss the entire field. I
| feel like writing putting one discipline above another should be
| a bit more vigorous in that dismissal, even if I ultimately agree
| with the general sentiment.
| kizer wrote:
| Psychology has a gazillion competing theories for everything.
| They ought to do a little more "converging" and a little less
| "diverging" for a bit (to borrow the diamond model from
| psychology).
| natn wrote:
| Kind of like physics?
| Peritract wrote:
| Psychology uses the scientific method to investigate and
| understand the world; it's a science.
|
| It's sometimes poorly done, but this is true of all the sciences;
| malpractice and poor rigour in particular experiments don't
| invalidate an entire field. It's also sometimes misused by other
| fields, but this is (again) true of all the sciences - a
| therapist misapplying a principle doesn't stop psychology being a
| science any more than an engineer miscalculating makes physics
| pseudoscience.
|
| Science is about the approach, not the topic or the perception.
| jagrsw wrote:
| > Science is about the approach, not the topic or the
| perception
|
| Agreed on the approach part; as for the topics: there are
| topics which are inherently hard to "prove"/falsify, either by
| lack of sufficient evidence (existence of god(s), UFO-as-aliens
| etc.) or lack of tooling required to tackle the complexity of
| interactions (many large scale societal problems, psychology,
| (geo-)politics etc.).
|
| And while "proper" study of those topics is definitely
| considered science, insisting that we soon can achieve
| breakthroughs is most likely misguided. What I mean is that we
| cannot even map and (even if crudely) simulate a single brain,
| let alone detailed-enough interactions between 7 billions of
| people. And that's what's probably required to get some solid
| answers here.
| Peritract wrote:
| Absolutely; I'm not disputing that in general, psychology is
| harder to pin down - any experiments are on something vastly
| complicated that is really hard to isolate. As a formal
| discipline, psychology is still relatively young, and so it's
| going to take a long time to get the kind of insights
| everyone is excited about.
| awillen wrote:
| That last sentence is really well-put. Science is a method. My
| wife is an actual scientist (biologist doing things with
| antibodies that I like 60% understand), and when I described
| A/B testing stuff on ecommerce sites to try and improve
| conversion rates, her response was something like "Oh, wow, so
| you're also doing science."
|
| And hey, as someone who was a psych major I can say that
| psychology is a much more difficult science than either my
| wife's work or me trying to improve conversion rates, but
| that's just because it's dealing with things that are harder to
| measure than changes in conversion rates or the bindings of
| antibodies to targets. As long as you're correctly applying the
| scientific method to it, you're doing science.
| edtechdev wrote:
| This is a junk article written by a right winger who writes for
| the "American Council on Science and Health" which you can read
| more about here:
|
| https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/10/american-counci...
|
| This article was written just to troll up attention for his book
| that came out the same year (2012) with a title that makes the
| bias more obvious: "Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-
| Scientific Left."
|
| I've never heard of the guy before, but it only took a minute of
| googling to find that out.
|
| I recommend people try the "lateral reading" technique when you
| come across articles like this. Essentially, Google the source to
| see if it's biased and unreliable like this is. More on lateral
| reading and the SIFT technique (stop, investigate, find, trace)
| https://library.nwacc.edu/lateralreading/sift
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| nothing with more recent thoughts than 2012?
|
| and here's the real article posted on
| https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2012/07/keep-psycholog...
| asperous wrote:
| Whether or not it's a science, applying the scientific method to
| psychology has uncovered extremely important findings in areas
| such as gender, personality, parenting and children, diversity,
| mental illness, work, marriage, and to a small extent happiness.
|
| The issue with psychology is that it's 1. relatively new 2. Area
| that is challenging to work in 3. Many in the field have
| questionable motives and perform work that lacks rigor.
| skindoe wrote:
| The article is right for the wrong reason psychology isn't
| science it's something much more important and goes beyond the
| dichotomy of science and "pseudoscience".
|
| How can we trust our own rationalizations if our subjective
| experience of rationalization is flaws to begin with?
|
| Carl Jung would be disappointed.
| okareaman wrote:
| Is a hotdog a sandwich? What is it about humans that make us
| categorize things and then argue about the categorization?
| Categories are imperfect shortcuts to thinking about a problem.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Let me answer your question with a story about Jaffa Cakes
|
| > In the United Kingdom, value added tax is payable on
| chocolate-covered biscuits, but not on chocolate-covered
| cakes.[14][15] McVities defended its classification of Jaffa
| Cakes as cakes at a VAT tribunal in 1991, against the ruling
| that Jaffa cakes were biscuits due to their size and shape, and
| the fact that they were often eaten in place of biscuits.[16]
| McVities insisted that the product was a cake, and allegedly
| produced a giant Jaffa cake in court to illustrate its
| point.[16]
|
| > The court discounted the expert evidence, as it went beyond
| the capacity of an ordinary purchaser.[17] The product was
| assessed on the following criteria:[18][19] *
| The product's name was regarded as a minor consideration.
| * The ingredients were regarded as similar to those of a cake,
| producing a thin cake-like mixture rather than the thick dough
| of a biscuit. * The product's texture was regarded as
| being that of a sponge cake. * The product hardens when
| stale, in the manner of a cake. * A substantial part of
| the Jaffa cake, in terms of bulk and texture, is sponge.
| * In size, the Jaffa cake is more like a biscuit than a cake.
| * The product was generally displayed for sale alongside other
| biscuits, rather than with cakes. * The product is
| presented as a snack and eaten with the fingers, like a
| biscuit, rather than with a fork as a cake might be. The
| tribunal also considered that children would eat them in "a few
| mouthfuls", in the manner of a sweet.
|
| The court was adjudicated by Mr Donald Potter QC, who found in
| favour of McVitie's and ruled that whilst Jaffa Cakes had
| characteristics of both cakes and biscuits, the product should
| be considered a cake, meaning that VAT is not paid on Jaffa
| cakes in the United Kingdom.[14][20] Mr Potter QC also
| expressed that Jaffa Cakes were not biscuits.[21]
|
| The Irish Revenue Commissioners also regard Jaffa cakes as
| cakes, since their moisture content is greater than 12%. As a
| result, they are charged the reduced rate of VAT (13.5% as of
| 2016).[22]
| karaterobot wrote:
| I get what you're saying, but I think this is an example of
| when it's okay to dive into semantics. When we urge people to
| "trust the science", as we've been doing a lot in the last
| little while, it matters a great deal how we define science.
| Swizec wrote:
| Everyone knows a hot dog is a type of taco.
| [deleted]
| peterthehacker wrote:
| Categories and abstraction generally is essential for solving a
| problem. Furthermore, how we categorize disciplines as
| scientific or pseudoscientific is very important. From the
| article:
|
| > But to claim it is "science" is inaccurate. Actually, it's
| worse than that. It's an attempt to redefine science. Science,
| redefined, is no longer the empirical analysis of the natural
| world; instead, it is any topic that sprinkles a few numbers
| around. This is dangerous because, under such a loose
| definition, anything can qualify as science. And when anything
| qualifies as science, science can no longer claim to have a
| unique grasp on secular truth.
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| Yes. We use categories to describe a system. We categorize an
| engine into a the ignition system, cooling system, air intake
| system, ect.. We describe node.js by its categories --
| errors, file system, streams, ect.. Systems are cyclic which
| means humans can pretty well make assumptions of a future
| state of a system by the current and past state of that
| system. If we want to know a future state, we need to first
| describe the system. I really like Robert Pirsig's idea of an
| analytical knife from "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
| Maintenance" to cut up systems into categories or category
| trees, there isn't a one way to do it but rather many ways to
| describe a system in categories that are more and less
| useful.
| okareaman wrote:
| The slippery slope argument. If we don't hold the line,
| pretty soon we'll be calling astrology a science. Psychology
| has the potential to be a science, but it's early and we
| don't know enough. Electricity wasn't a science until Michael
| Faraday made it one. On the other hand, astrology has no
| potential to be a science.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| The slippery slope argument is only a fallacy when slipping
| down the slope doesn't actually happen (or can't possibly
| follow from the described beginning state). Some slippery
| slopes _do actually exist._ For example, if you put your
| weight over the line, you can literally slip down a
| slippery slope.
|
| On the subject of categories, they cease to be useful when
| the contents of the categories can no longer tell you
| anything about the category itself. The further you get
| down this axis, the less useful the category is. So any
| dilution of the strength of a category by overly broad
| inclusion should be scrutinized.
| cies wrote:
| Sure. Another post on the front page now is about trees[1].
| Where's the line between a short tree and a bush? We humans see
| the difference, but biology (a hard science) shows that using
| their classification rules there is no difference between a
| tall bush and a short tree.
|
| [1]: https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-
| th...
| snet0 wrote:
| This is simply conflating terms, though.
|
| If your field re-defines a commonly used term to mean
| something very precise, obviously you're going to encounter
| problems when you try work backwards. "Tree" in the meaning
| of "some phylogenetic categorisation that contains elements
| x, y, z" may not exist in biology, but "tree" in the meaning
| of "big leafy thing made of wood" exists as sure as anything.
|
| Drawing lines is for scientific language, not general-purpose
| language.
| infimum wrote:
| > Is a hotdog a sandwich?
|
| Depends on whether the bun is cut in half. If yes it's a
| sandwich otherwise it's a pizza. /s
|
| Arguments about categorizations can be productive in as far as
| they allow you a glimpse into the thought-process of other
| people (=
| cies wrote:
| > the 'hard' ones (physics, chemistry, biology) considering
| themselves to be more legitimate than the 'soft' ones
| (psychology, sociology)."
|
| I'd like to add business (economics) to the list of soft ones as
| well. They are all, in a way, studies of human behavior.
|
| That is not to say that those soft fields dont apply a lot of
| scientific methods and use techniques discovered in "hard
| science" fields (statistics, calculus, etc.)
| Aerroon wrote:
| I think in some sense you can split economics as a field.
| There's the part that deals with mostly mathematical rules -
| these are things like the supply and demand curve and what they
| imply on a system. Then you have the part that seems to study
| human behavior and tries to somehow quantify it. And last, you
| have what I'd call politics (political activism?), where it's
| about trying to justify certain political decisions. Sadly,
| these are all mixed together.
| andrepd wrote:
| Well the purely mathematical part is... just mathematics.
| Economics begins when you claim that certain mathematical
| systems are an accurate model of economic behaviour of
| humans.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| Yep, economics definitely belongs in the social science field.
|
| The problem is, even in the "hard" sciences a lot of research
| is hardly scientific. When it comes to human behavior it
| probably could be studied in a more thorough and methodical
| way, but for now we simply lack the tools. Today's psychology
| will be considered pseudoscience in the future, same as
| astrology which comes from a time when we knew nothing about
| other solar systems.
| seigando wrote:
| I can't help but smile when somebody uses words as a professional
| gut punch. Looking forward to the discussion on this.
| mannerheim wrote:
| > I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned
| are examples of what I would like to call Cargo Cult Science. In
| the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war
| they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they
| want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make
| things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways,
| to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces
| on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like
| antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to
| land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It
| looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No
| airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science,
| because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of
| scientific investigation, but they're missing something
| essential, because the planes don't land.
|
| - Cargo Cult Science, by Richard Feynman (1974)
| <https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm>
| chakhs wrote:
| What the instrumentalists miss is the fact the knowledge is not
| all experimental, science is a subset of knowledge, not all
| knowledge
| russellbeattie wrote:
| Psychology is to psychiatry what astrology is to astronomy.
|
| Are my ego and id in contention? Is Mars in retrograde? Same
| effect on my mental health.
| natn wrote:
| maybe you're thinking of psychoanalysis?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I saved this HN comment about this topic a few months ago:
|
| " Correlations are a profound part of our universe.
|
| When observing the universe, humans can never prove any facts
| about the universe. We can only establish correlations.
| Correlations between events that occur in our universe is the
| furthest "truth" we can establish about the universe short of a
| full on proof.
|
| What this means is that nothing in the physical universe can be
| proven. Proof is the domain of maths and logic, correlations is
| the domain of science. Science cannot prove anything, it can only
| establish correlations and causations.
|
| The reason this occurs is because at any time in the future one
| can observe an event that contradicts a hypothesis. You can
| hypothesize that all birds have wings and observe 2 trillion
| birds with wings but you never know when one day you'll observe a
| bird without wings disproving your entire hypothesis. That is why
| nothing can be proven, you can only correlate things through
| observation.
|
| The other interesting part about correlation is what it isn't:
| Causation. People often talk about how correlation is not
| causation but people never talk about what causation is and how
| to establish it. If I can't empirically use correlation to
| establish causation how on earth is causation ever formally
| established? People rarely question this disconnect.
|
| The fact is, causation is rarely formally established but a
| method does exist and it's subtle.
|
| If I observe that whenever Bob flicks a switch the light comes on
| then I established that the light coming on is correlated with
| Bob flipping the switch. This is as far as I can go with just
| observation.
|
| To establish causation I must make myself both an observer and an
| entity that is part of the system itself. I have to take control
| and flip the switch randomly and observe that when I don't flip
| the switch nothing happens and when I do flip the switch the
| lights come on.
|
| By doing this I establish causation. To establish causation to
| higher and higher degrees I need to Cause (keyword) random events
| and make sure that a cause influences an effect AND absence of a
| cause and therefore absence of an effect occurs.
|
| Also note that establishing causation is not proof. At any point
| in time in the future I can flip the switch and the light may not
| come on which is contradictory evidence for causation.
|
| Causation in the statistical sense is like correlation, you
| establish it to a degree of confidence but you can never Prove A
| caused B.
|
| Note that there are ways to test causal hypotheses without
| intervening.
|
| For example, suppose we wish to test the hypothesis that smoking
| causes lung cancer via the main mechanism of tar buildup in the
| lungs, against the alternative hypothesis that smoking is
| correlated with lung cancer because of a gene that predisposes
| people to both smoking and lung cancer (this example comes from
| Judea Pearl's Book of Why).
|
| If the former hypothesis is true, then we should see a
| correlation between smoking behavior and tar deposits, and we
| should also see a correlation between tar deposits and lung
| cancer even after controlling for smoking behavior. Composing the
| causal effects at each stage, we can then calculate the indirect
| causal effect of smoking on lung cancer. If this suffixes to
| explain the correlation, then that rules out the alternative
| genetic explanation for the correlation.
|
| Of course, we can always propose ad-hoc further hypotheses that
| complicate the analysis: maybe the correlation between smoking
| and tar deposits is itself non-causative, etc.
|
| This only goes to show that scientific inquiry must be done with
| judgment and with expert domain knowledge, testing plausible
| hypotheses in good faith. But that's true for detecting mere
| correlations too -- we can always doubt our instruments, or claim
| the data is a statistical fluke. And it's true in randomized
| controlled trials: it's conceivable we didn't properly randomize,
| for example.
|
| * This (causation as correlation) revelation was highlighted by
| Hume and this and other work by him had profound influence on
| Kant (famously awaking him from his "dogmatic slumbers") and
| scientists like Darwin and Einstein - the latter obviously in a
| more healthy scientific age when those at the forefront of
| physics were not so disdainful of philosophers."
| SunlightEdge wrote:
| So psychology contains a broad range of subjects. Biopsychology
| (systems neuroscience) is under psychology as much as it's under
| biology. That's definitely a science. And Cognitive
| neuropsychology is similar. Social, developmental, abnormal
| (mental illness), language development etc. Yes ok they are less
| of a science. But they still should be studied and how else
| should you do it? Psychology is as much a science as biology is.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > In the philosophy of science and epistemology, the demarcation
| problem is the question of how to distinguish between science and
| non-science. It examines the lines between science,
| pseudoscience, and other products of human activity, like art and
| literature, and beliefs. The debate continues after over two
| millennia of dialogue among philosophers of science and
| scientists in various fields. The debate has consequences for
| what can be called "scientific" in fields such as education and
| public policy. [1]
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_problem
|
| > The demarcation between science and pseudoscience is part of
| the larger task of determining which beliefs are epistemically
| warranted. This entry clarifies the specific nature of
| pseudoscience in relation to other categories of non-scientific
| doctrines and practices, including science denial(ism) and
| resistance to the facts. The major proposed demarcation criteria
| for pseudo-science are discussed and some of their weaknesses are
| pointed out. In conclusion, it is emphasized that there is much
| more agreement on particular cases of demarcation than on the
| general criteria that such judgments should be based upon. This
| is an indication that there is still much important philosophical
| work to be done on the demarcation between science and
| pseudoscience. [2]
|
| 2. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-science/
|
| Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/435/
| Animats wrote:
| _" Because psychology often does not meet the five basic
| requirements for a field to be considered scientifically
| rigorous: clearly defined terminology, quantifiability, highly
| controlled experimental conditions, reproducibility and, finally,
| predictability and testability."_
|
| Predictability and testability being the big problems. Science is
| prediction, not explanation. Psychology has a huge replication
| problem.
|
| Advertising, though, has become a science. Predictability,
| testability, controlled experimental conditions, quantifiability
| - that's Google's business.
| dilawar wrote:
| String theory is also very weak on predictions. I guess if it
| should be classified as non-science.
| freshair wrote:
| I think you'd be in good company with that conclusion.
| tachim wrote:
| You mean predictions that can be tested right now? Unclear
| why the proposed time horizon is the right one. This standard
| would have rejected most of quantum mechanics, some of GR,
| and many other useful theories and explanations when they
| were first proposed.
| infogulch wrote:
| The Big Five personality classification (currently being
| discussed on the front page [1]) has been reproduced and has
| predictive power. Sure the results are 'mild' compared to the
| physical sciences, but it's the best (first?) result that's
| come out of psychology research that actually meets this bar so
| far. Apparently it was used by Cambridge Analytica during that
| whole FB scandal, which is not great but validates it at least?
|
| CA was years ago. Google probably has a much more refined model
| by now. Too bad they aren't sharing it.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27097590
|
| [2]: my comment on [1]
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27099032
| loveistheanswer wrote:
| Perhaps the root problem is that it is seemingly impossible for
| psychology to isolate and control for the dependent variable in
| question: consciousness.
| tachim wrote:
| Science definitely involves explanation as well as prediction,
| otherwise we'd still be iterating on more and more complex
| epicycles as predictive models for astrophysics. Induction
| isn't everything.
| kubanczyk wrote:
| Prediction and Ockham's razor. "Explaining" is nothing more
| than hitting someone's head with verbiage until they
| capitulate.
| caddemon wrote:
| Biology has a replication crisis almost as bad as psychology. I
| agree with a lot of these criticisms but I wonder why we don't
| see articles questioning if biology is a science. Perhaps there
| was a period in the past where biology was more rigorous,
| whereas psych has always been really handwavy?
|
| There's not a lot of real predicting in bio research IME
| (granted only with a couple subfields). A bunch of things are
| tried and then whatever works is the focus of the publication,
| with a write up implying there was a clear hypothesis from the
| start. Of course not all bio labs are like this, but I'd argue
| not all psych labs are either.
|
| A lot of this is bad incentives and poor training, but human
| research is especially hard to control. So I think the issue is
| partially inherent to the field (in both psych and to some
| extent bio).
| freshair wrote:
| Biology is huge. It encompasses everything from neuroscience
| to zoography. Somebody could probably make a good case for
| psychology being under the umbrella of biology, if they were
| inclined.
|
| I'd guess the replication crisis in biology is not evenly
| distributed among branches of biology; for instance I guess
| it's much worse in biomedicine than it is ornithology. And
| even within one branch of the biology, I expect the
| replication crisis is not evenly distributed. Studies about
| the behaviors of birds probably reproduce less than studies
| about the distribution of birds (particularly since the
| introduction of photography, which removes a lot of ambiguity
| from the later but not necessarily the former.)
| curiousgal wrote:
| > _I wonder why we don 't see articles questioning if biology
| is a science._
|
| Simply because we can't question the results of the field:
| medicine, vaccines, etc. Whereas for psychology, I fail to
| think of a single tangible result.
| choeger wrote:
| Biology got us two (soon three) working mRNA-bases Covid-19
| vaccines.
| loveistheanswer wrote:
| "psychiatric diagnosis still relies exclusively on fallible
| subjective judgments rather than objective biological tests"
|
| -Allen Frances
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Frances
| f430 wrote:
| Science itself isn't science either.
| snet0 wrote:
| I consider myself somewhat sympathetic to the view being put
| forward, but this is just lazy writing.
|
| > How does one measure happiness? Psychologists can't use a ruler
| or a microscope, so they invent an arbitrary scale.
|
| All scales are arbitrary. We measure length in meters for no
| reason other than the meter is a nicely human-sized measurement.
| I'd maybe even argue that the _definition_ of a scale is that it
| 's arbitrary, a mapping of /something/ onto the number line
| chosen in a way that the numbers are within "human" range.
|
| The real difference being highlighted isn't anything to do with
| measurement, it's just a difference in dimensions. It's very
| obvious how we can compare 2 things in space-time dimensions,
| either they happened at different times that we can map onto our
| time scale, or they occupy different sizes in space that we can
| map onto our space scale. Emotions aren't quantifiable _in these
| dimensions_ , but that doesn't mean we cannot create a space in
| which they are.
|
| If the author would argue that happiness isn't a "thing" in the
| way "this piece of paper" or "1945" is, I think that argument can
| be had, and has been taking place over thousands of years of
| philosophy. To not even raise the question, but (in my eyes) to
| assume the answer as obvious, is, as I said, lazy writing.
| proc0 wrote:
| > a mapping of /something/ onto the number line chosen in a way
| that the numbers are within "human" range.
|
| Can you even do this with happiness? What is a unit of
| happiness?
| ExtraE wrote:
| What is a unit of wealth? Took us a while but we figured out
| fiat currency.
| freshair wrote:
| That's a pretty shitty unit. Using those units, it's
| nontrivial to even compare two measurements made in the
| same country with the same currency, only one generation
| apart in time. When dealing with a decent unit like meters,
| you don't need to choose from one of several competing
| models of distance-inflation to account for the difference
| in a meter in 2001 and 2021.
| ExtraE wrote:
| I didn't say it was a good unit, just that it was one.
|
| That being said, I'd argue "2001 dollars" is a unit, not
| "dollars". You'll often see data in econ journals cite
| something in that type of unit.
|
| Another angle on this is that comparing wealth across
| time is nontrivial (and the money isn't to blame). How do
| you compare the value of a iPhone in 2020 to a landline
| in 1980? It's possible, but nontrivial. Our units (in
| some messy imperfect way) reflect that (and other
| factors).
| freshair wrote:
| > I'd argue "2001 dollars" is a unit,
|
| Why though? Why dollars in a particular year, rather than
| dollars in general? Sure the value of a dollar changes
| from year to year, but the value of a dollar _also_
| changes constantly in any given year too. Over the past
| year, the value of a US dollar relative to a Euro has
| fluctuated by more than 10 cents. In fact the relative
| values of currencies fluctuate constantly, near-enough to
| instantaneously. But this isn 't reflected in the pricing
| of most consumer goods; the price of common household
| goods in a grocery store might vary a few times a week,
| but not thousands of times an hour. So in one context the
| value of a dollar seems to vary constantly, but in
| another context the value of a dollar is substantially
| more stable. So a dollar doesn't even have a set
| particular value at any instant in time; it depends on
| what kind of store you're standing in.
|
| If happiness is a metric with units _even worse than
| this_ , then I see little hope for any scientific study
| of happiness.
| dTal wrote:
| There's no global reference frame for distance _or_
| wealth. You can 't point to a spot in space and say "the
| Earth was here 1000 years ago". All you can say is that A
| is x meters from B, right now. And likewise you can't
| compare wealth now with wealth 50 years ago - it's not a
| coherent concept, when you could buy a house on a blue
| collar wage, but not a smartphone at _any_ price. What
| you _can_ do is say that person A is twice as wealthy as
| person B.
| proc0 wrote:
| Ok sure, so what is it then? The point is you need that
| unit before you can measure.
| ExtraE wrote:
| I'm not sure, I'm not a psychologist. I'm only arguing
| that such a unit could exist (either now or at some point
| in the future).
|
| (If you're asking about the units for wealth: USD, Euros,
| etc)
| proc0 wrote:
| Ok I see, to clarify, I mean at the individual, concrete
| level, as oppose to statistical, and indirect measures of
| it. I really doubt there is anything, since it's
| subjective and we also don't know the underlying
| mechanisms of the mind which produce it.
| ExtraE wrote:
| Subjective well being (SWB) comes to mind but not sure if
| that fits your definition. There are many other similar
| measures, like the ladder question.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_well-being
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Most wealthy people do not feel wealthy though. This
| includes millionaires.
| ExtraE wrote:
| Assuming this is true: And...? Wealth in this context
| isn't a feeling.
| snet0 wrote:
| It is whatever the scale decides it is. A unit of mass isn't
| anything, either, unless you decide to use Planck units. But
| we have myriad units of emergent phenomena. This is just on a
| higher level of abstraction, and so it is harder, but I don't
| believe it's impossible.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Typically, you'd do Measurement System Analysis (MSA)[1]
| which includes things like repeatability, reproducibility,
| drift and linearity. A standard traceable to an authority
| such as NIST is needed to do this.
|
| For length, MSA can be easily conducted. For happiness,
| what metrology system are you going to use? What's the
| proposed measurement method?
|
| [1] MSA: https://www.metrology-
| journal.org/articles/ijmqe/pdf/2010/02...
| ewestern wrote:
| Agree that "arbitrary" was a poor word choice, but it seems as
| though he meant something like "subjective", which is consonant
| with the rest of the article. I think differentiating
| subjective scales from objective scales isn't terribly fraught,
| and treating subjective measures as less rigorous than
| objective measures seems correct to me.
| snet0 wrote:
| Calling happiness subjective feels weird to me. It's not like
| "How would you rate The Avengers?", I think asking "How would
| you rate how you feel at this moment?" is asking the subject
| to measure something objective about their well-being, no?
| Maybe I'm oversimplifying it.
| ewestern wrote:
| I mean, all observations involve a subject. The question is
| whether there are other subjects that can observe an object
| and reach consensus about the object. If yes, then, in my
| view, it's objective. If not, then it's purely subjective.
|
| I go for a run most days and my watch asks me how I feel
| afterward. I don't answer, because I really have no idea
| whether my "Good" answer one day corresponds to a "Good"
| answer on another day. Often, it probably doesn't. In my
| view, talking about subjective well-being is anything but
| simple.
| baron_harkonnen wrote:
| To add to your point, any psychology/sociology researcher
| trained in quantitative methods will immediately recognize that
| "happiness" is a latent variable.
|
| Quantitative psych people are well versed in how to think about
| and model latent variables. They don't go "oh shit! can't
| measure happiness, I guess we'd better just make stuff up."
|
| I'm plenty critical of the research coming out of psych, but to
| pretend that the field remains naive to even the most basic
| principles of modeling is a bit ridiculous (and like you said,
| lazy)
| andreilys wrote:
| Reproducibility in social psychology is less than 50% [1].
|
| So yes I do think the majority of psych researchers are
| making stuff up (through p-hacking and other nefarious means)
| in order to get funding and tenure
|
| 1. https://replicationindex.com/2018/11/20/how-replicable-is-
| ps...
| fastaguy88 wrote:
| A question the 50% figure raises is - what is the
| reproducibility rate for "real" science? This is difficult
| to estimate. Considering the dramatic improvements in
| cancer therapy, one might argue that cancer research is a
| "real" science, but there are reproducibility issues in
| that field as well. [https://www.nature.com/news/cancer-
| reproducibility-project-r...] And the link to the
| replication index site connects us to an article about John
| Iaonnidis, who suggests that most medical research results
| are wrong. (The article concludes that perhaps only 27% are
| false discoveries.) So what is the threshold? As others
| have pointed out, it's probably more about process than
| reproducibility, though reproducible results are certainly
| preferred.
| ampdepolymerase wrote:
| We do have replicable, quantifiable, social psychology.
| Facebook and Cambridge Analytica are infamous for that.
| Unfortunately whenever experiments are carried out, you get
| end up with an uproar over issues of privacy,
| accountability, and informed consent.
| loopz wrote:
| Spying and manipulation are not necessarily reproducible
| hypotheses. In case of FB and CA, external conditions
| changed.
| amirkdv wrote:
| You may be assigning more intent than is necessary to
| explain the (very real) reproducibility problem in psych.
|
| Not to belabor this but to note the irony here: there is
| probably a similar psychological (ehem) phenomenon that
| happens to a psyc grad student who lets their presumptions
| bleed into their interpretation of a measurement.
|
| > The first principle is that you must not fool yourself --
| and you are the easiest person to fool.
|
| R. Feynman
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _Reproducibility in social psychology is less than 50%._
|
| That doesn't seem particularly terrible in comparison to
| scientific reproducibility in other fields. What am I
| missing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
| temp8964 wrote:
| People usually underestimate how difficult it is to do
| experiments, especially when you want to get
| quantitatively consistent results. Physics experiments
| sound easier than human experiments, but if you really do
| it and be serious with the numbers, you will find even
| high school physics experiments are really hard. For
| example, try to confirm F=ma, or measure local gravity to
| the third digit.
| temp8964 wrote:
| 50% is reproducibility of experimental studies. There are
| fields don't even do experiment. There are fields don't
| even run statistics. There are fields don't even use
| logic.....
| freshair wrote:
| They could be fooling themselves too, not knowingly
| spreading falsehoods. A lot of of what we call p-hacking
| can happen by accident by somebody who isn't very good at
| statistics or just isn't being careful.
| tuismuggler wrote:
| The meter - while arbitrary as a UNIT of measurement - is
| defined. It is the length light will travel in a vacuum in
| 3.33ns ish. Whereas the unit of happiness has no such
| definition and varies from person to person.
| skj wrote:
| How close are we to a black hole?
| snet0 wrote:
| It's defined _in terms of other units_.
| snet0 wrote:
| Of course, once you get to the second, we are now just
| measuring something, and our unit is based on counting a
| thing. But how do you measure something that can't be
| counted?
| aaron-santos wrote:
| I'm disappointed that the author didn't at least address his
| issues with operationalization. Leaving it out makes the peice
| read like a freshman essay.
| peterthehacker wrote:
| The happiness scale is arbitrary because it lacks
| reproducibility. The metric system is standardized such that
| every time you measure the length of something in the physical
| world that measurement is reproducible.
| snet0 wrote:
| The problem there is that subject well-being is time-variant.
| Of course when I ask you at 3 week intervals "how are you
| feeling?", I'm going to get different answers. If I ask you 3
| seconds apart, though (ignoring you getting annoyed at the
| question), would you not expect consistent results?
| pedalpete wrote:
| I think this points more to the issue. "How are you
| feeling" is subjective.
|
| As far as I am aware, there is no psychological
| measure/test which is not subjective. Please correct me if
| I'm wrong.
|
| To me, this is why neurology is hard science and psychology
| is soft science.
| amirkdv wrote:
| > The problem there is that subject well-being is time-
| variant.
|
| > If I ask you 3 seconds apart, though [...] would you not
| expect consistent results?
|
| I completely agree with your original comments about lazy
| writing by the OP. But these all seem besides the point.
|
| Our bodies and minds go through all sorts of states, some
| cognitively introspectable, some not.
|
| "Happiness", whatever it may be, is what it is and need not
| conform to your presumptions. That's the point of studying
| it. Nothing about its fluctuations or the way these are
| felt by an individual are a problem per se with the
| research. It just means it's hard to do, and we may not
| know a whole bunch about it.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Re why this categorization is important - not explicitly
| mentioned in the article: Science is a useful tool for learning
| new things, and developing new tech and guidance. By bringing
| attention to psychology's questionable adherance to scientific
| processes, you question the value it brings. This is important
| when evaluating the results of work produced by the field, and
| what actions to take based on them.
|
| When something is categorized as "science", you make assumptions
| about it. Categorizing psychology this way is misleading, and
| devalues the categorization's purpose.
| worik wrote:
| IN stage one micro economics on the first day the lecturer said:
| "Economics is a science because it uses mathematics"
|
| Really very sad. Just because psychology (and economics) is not
| science, does not mean they are useless or untrue. Science is
| awesome, but not the only path to truth.
| Layke1123 wrote:
| What other way meaningfully leads to the truth?
| sbagel wrote:
| Reminded of a great NPR podcast from years ago: a man with dark
| thoughts (about hurting his wife and child) goes to several
| therapists and is presented with wildly different often polar
| opposite techniques and approaches to helping him. One therapist
| even stopped returning his calls. Worth a listen/read.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2015/01/09/375928124/dark-thoughts
| andrepd wrote:
| Well isn't that liable to happen in _any medical diagnosis_?
| Two doctors have two different opinions. Does that mean
| medicine isn 't a scientific discipline?
| aritmo wrote:
| Neuroscience replaces psychology.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience
| snet0 wrote:
| Can you expand on how you think this is the case? Looking at
| the brain to find out what people think seems to me like
| looking at atoms to see how an engine works.
| natn wrote:
| LOL, yea, like surveillance satellites make photography
| redundant.
| natn wrote:
| It would be more accurate to say that "Psychology is not 'just' a
| science."
|
| There are areas of psychology that rely on methods that are not
| scientific, because their subject of study is too hard to
| approach in a rigorously scientific way (though that doesn't mean
| it's not legitimate knowledge creation, it just comes with more
| caveats).
|
| But there are also areas of psychology that can be, and are
| studied with scientific rigour, such as with similar experimental
| designs to biology.
|
| As someone who has formally studied psychology, the main
| impression this article makes is that the author knows very
| little about the contemporary academic discipline of psychology,
| and is just a bit arrogant about it.
| [deleted]
| aasasd wrote:
| Probably a nice article, pity that Latimes doesn't let one read
| it to the end.
|
| > _Like what you're reading? Too bad because here is a SUPRISE
| MODAL CALL TO ACTION, sucka_
| combatentropy wrote:
| I don't know why such a short, lightweight, 9-year-old article
| was plucked from the past and upvoted 50 times onto Hacker News'
| front page.
|
| > Happiness research is a great example of why psychology isn't
| science. How exactly should "happiness" be defined? The meaning
| of that word differs from person to person and especially between
| cultures. What makes Americans happy doesn't necessarily make
| Chinese people happy.
|
| I would say that the specific cause may differ but the feeling
| does not. And even the differences in the causes are exaggerated.
| Sushi may make you happy. A cheeseburger makes me happy. In both
| cases, our favorite food makes us happy. Paris makes you happy.
| London makes me happy. In both cases, our favorite city makes us
| happy. Our parents fighting would make our childhoods unhappy,
| though the particular individuals who fight would differ.
| Interests shared with a mate, studies show, makes a marriage
| happier, though the particular interests may vary from couple to
| couple.
|
| Yeah, it's hard to measure concretely. But even the most concrete
| sciences, like physics and astronomy are squishy, just ask
| quantum physicists. And I see revisions to biology in the news
| several times a year.
|
| Just because you can't nail down every last fact, doesn't mean
| that you can't comb through the foam to extract and build a body
| of knowledge.
| andrepd wrote:
| Very true. In the end science is simply about empirical
| observation of reality, measurement, and continual readjustment
| of beliefs to match those observations. Whether the subject
| domain can be more or less exactly measured is neither here nor
| there.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| Note it's an opinion piece. There are many branches of psychology
| and some of them have pretty solid foundations. Yes, there are
| still more questions than answers in many areas, but so is in
| physics once you get to the boundaries of the micro- and
| macrocosm (although in psychology, I'd argue, we're still very
| much behind when compared do physics and other hard sciences).
|
| At the end of the day, what counts is whether the experiments
| confirm the theory or not. Practically speaking, in the 'applied-
| psychology' field of psychotherapy there is at least one method,
| CBT, that has been battle tested and is widely used for curing
| various disorders such as fobias. From the scientific point of
| view, no psychotherapeutic study will ever be classified as
| scientific as it's inherently impossible to conduct a double-
| blind study (single-blind is the maximum you can get).
| Nevertheless, for all intents and purposes, CBT is working and is
| helping people statistically more than a simple talk with a
| friend or religious rituals (which also have their efficacy
| levels).
|
| Granted, "For the past few months I felt bad, but now I feel
| quite good" is not very scientific, but has enormous value for
| people who are being helped in this way. Instead of stigmatizing
| psychology as non-science, we should promote approaches that
| favor reproducibility and proved to be efficient in practice.
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