[HN Gopher] Research in psychology: are we learning anything?
___________________________________________________________________
Research in psychology: are we learning anything?
Author : ctoth
Score : 72 points
Date : 2024-10-08 18:30 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.experimental-history.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.experimental-history.com)
| MailleQuiMaille wrote:
| Oof. What was the point of that article ? It felt like an
| unnecessary tough read.
| toolz wrote:
| I found it insightful and pleasant to see that there are people
| inside of a an important field being intellectually curious and
| honest about the direction of their field of study.
| MailleQuiMaille wrote:
| That's the promise that initially brought me to the article,
| and I like the reason of the article. I'm just not sure I got
| more info from the title than the content of the article
| itself. But that is maybe just me, another fellow
| psychologist.
| godelski wrote:
| I think one of the great ironies is that psychology is one of the
| hardest sciences but is treated so soft. I say this holding a
| degree in physics! (undergrad physics, grad CS/ML)
|
| By this I mean that to make confident predictions, you need some
| serious statistics, but psych is one of the least math heavy
| sciences (thankfully they recently learned about Bayes and
| there's a revolution going on). Unlike physics or chemistry, you
| have so little control over your experiments.
|
| There's also the problem of measurements. We stress in
| experimental physics that you can only measure things by proxy.
| This is like you measure distance by using a ruler, and you're
| not really measuring "a meter" but the ruler's approximation of a
| meter. This is why we care so much about calibration and
| uncertainty, making multiple measurements with different
| measuring devices (gets stats on that class of device) and from
| different measuring techniques (e.g. ruler, laser range finder,
| etc). But psych? What the fuck does it even mean "to measure
| attention"?! It's hard enough dealing with the fact that "a
| meter" is "a construct" but in psych your concepts are much less
| well defined (i.e. higher uncertainty). And then everything is
| just empirical?! No causal system even (barely) attempted?! (In
| case you've ever wondered, this is a glimpse of why physicists
| struggle in ML. Not because the work, but accepting the results.
| See also Dyson and von Neumann's Elephant)
|
| I've jokingly likened psych to alchemy, meaning proto-chemistry
| -- chemistry prior to the atomic model (chemistry is "the study
| of electrons") -- or to astrology (astronomy pre-Kepler, not
| astrology we see today). I do think that's where the field is at,
| because there is no fundamental laws. That doesn't mean it isn't
| useful. Copernicus, Brahe, Galileo (same time as Kepler; they
| fought), and many others did amazing work and are essential
| figures to astronomy and astrophysics today. But psych is in an
| interesting boat. There are many tools at their disposal that
| could really help them make major strides towards determining
| these "laws". But it'll take a serious revolution and some major
| push to have some extremely tough math chops to get there. It
| likely won't come from ML (who suffers similar issues of rigor),
| but maybe from neuroscience or plain old stats (econ surprisingly
| contributes, more to sociology though). My worry is that the slop
| has too much momentum and that criticism will be dismissed
| because it is viewed as saying that the researchers are lazy,
| dumb, or incompetent rather than the monumental difficulties that
| are natural to the field (though both may be true, and one can
| cause the other). But I do hope to see it. Especially as someone
| in ML. We can really see the need to pin down these concepts such
| as cognition, consciousness, intelligence, reasoning, emotions,
| desire, thinking, will, and so on. These are not remotely easy
| problems to solve. But it is easy to convince yourself that you
| do understand, as long as you stop asking why after a certain
| point.
|
| And I do hope these conversations continue. Light is the best
| disinfectant. Science is about seeking truth, not answers. That
| often requires a lot of nuance, unfortunately. I know it will
| cause some to distrust science more, but I have the feeling they
| were already looking for reasons to.
| empiko wrote:
| The parallels to ML you drew are on point. ML has this tendency
| to oversimplify complex phenomena with a easy to produce
| datasets, because that's what ML folks do, they find a smart
| and easy way to create a dataset and then they focus on the
| models. But this falls apart pretty quickly when you go into
| societal problems, such as hate speech or misinformation. Maybe
| there it would be nice to have some rigor and theory behind the
| dataset instead of just winging it. I am working on societal
| biases in NLP and I feel confident that majority of the
| datasets used have practically no validity.
| godelski wrote:
| I love ML. I came over from physics because it is so cool.
| But what I found odd is that few people were as interested in
| the math as I was, and even moreso were dismissive of the
| utility of the math (even when demonstrated!). It's gotten
| less mathy by the year.
|
| My criticisms of ML aren't out of hate, but actually love.
| We've done great work and you need to be excited to do
| research -- and sometimes blind and sometimes going just on
| faith --, because it is grueling dealing with so much
| failure. Because it's so easy to mistake failure for success
| and success for failure. It's a worry that we'll be overtaken
| by conmen, that I have serious concerns that we are not
| moving towards building AGI. But it's difficult to criticize
| and receive criticism (many physics groups specifically train
| students to take it and deal with this seemingly harsh
| language. To separate your internal value from your idea). So
| I want to be clear that my criticism (which you can see in
| many of my posts) is not a call to stop ML or even slow it
| down, but a desire to sail in a different direction (or even
| allow others to sail in those directions as opposed to being
| on one big ship).
|
| I do know there are others in psych with similar stories and
| beliefs. But there's a whole conversation about the structure
| of academia if we're going to discuss how to stop building
| mega ships and allow people to truly explore (there will
| always be a big ship, and there always should! But it should
| never prevent those from venturing out to explore the
| unknown. (Obviously I'm a fan of Antoine de Saint-Exupery lol
| ))
| miksumiksu wrote:
| Not all psych is as jurasic as you describe. For example
| cofnitive psychology has better theorios with more predictive
| power than personal psychology that is often picked at. Sure
| journals are flooded with underpowered studies and studies with
| very little links to theory, and there is still massive gaps in
| scientific knowledge but core consturcts are solid.
| goldfeld wrote:
| Psychology is not inherently treated as soft, it's jusst that
| its human element attracts intuitive people much more than
| rational ones. If nore rationally minded people took up the
| study and research of psychology fields, more hard stuff would
| come to the front, although soft stuff is hardly behind in
| intelligence.
| artemavv wrote:
| > I do think that's where the field is at, because there is no
| fundamental laws
|
| I think that there are some fundamental laws, which are based
| on perceptions and their interplay. Speaking very briefly,
| there are five classes of perceptions: emotions, wishes,
| thoughts, beliefs, and body sensations. The division of
| perceptions into these classes is not a result of purely
| intellectual exercise or idle theorizing. If one starts
| carefully and diligently observe contents of their mind, these
| contents will delaminate into such classes naturally. Try that
| yourself and you will see it as a fact.
|
| Further introspection and assessment of arising perceptions
| would reveal some interesting patterns: there are two mutually
| incompatible kinds of emotions, and two mutually incompatible
| kinds of wishes, and so on.
|
| One could make observations about the interplay of these
| perceptions and their dynamic. For example, if someone in some
| specific situation experiences an emotion X and a wish A (with
| some specific qualities), they can either realize that wish or
| choose not to do so. Each choice will lead to some changes in
| the contents of the mind: emotion X is replaced by emotion Y,
| and/or wish A is changed into wish B, and so on. Gather enough
| observations of that kind, and you could eventually formulate
| some hypotheses about possible general laws of perceptions
| (e.g. make a prediction that emotion X will change to emotion Y
| in specific set of circumstances).
|
| These hypotheses could be verified by training several people
| to observe the same five classes of perceptions in the same
| manner. Arrange various test events for them, record their
| choices and outcomes of these choices (described in the same
| language of five classes of perceptions).
|
| If most of them report more or less the same subjective
| outcomes (without being told about hypothesis and predictions,
| of course), that's the first step of verification for a
| possible general law of perceptions.
|
| The second step of verification would be to apply brain imaging
| to those trained people, allowing us to map emotions X,Y,Z to
| some distinct patterns of the brain activity. After that do the
| same experiments with people who are untrained: arrange same
| test events for them while recording their brain activity. If
| changes in their brain patterns match for emotion X changed to
| emotion Y, that would be an objective confirmation of
| hypothesis formulated earlier.
| closed wrote:
| As someone who did statistics and psychology, I'm very
| surprised by this take, for a few reasons:
|
| 1. Many of the early pioneers in statistics were psychologists.
|
| 2. The econ x psych connection is strong (eg econometrics and
| psychometrics share a lot in common and know of each other)
|
| 3. Many of the people I see with math chops trying to do
| psychology are bad at the philosophy side (eg what is a
| construct; how do constructs like intelligence get established)
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| As in many fields, the strength of statistical practices
| continually improve. And the parent comment has it right
| about the difficulty. In physics its much easier to ensure
| your sample is representative (heterogeneity is huge), and
| you have no way of ensuring that last sample of 100
| participants have the same characteristics as your next
| sample of 100.
| mistermann wrote:
| Lots of great points. I would start with semiotics, including
| during the problem definition phase, otherwise you could easily
| end up lost in language without the slightest clue of the
| predicament you're in.
|
| Epistemology is also useful, because it might allow one to
| wonder if the problem space is non-deterministic (or not
| discoverable as).
| guerrilla wrote:
| This was awesome. Don't just read the comments. Spoiler:
| psychology is not stupid, it's just young.
|
| I completely agree. This is how I see psychiatry after having
| experienced it for decades: it's just slightly better than going
| to a shaman. It's witchcraft and it mostly doesn't work because,
| well, it's witchcraft. We just are not at a point in history
| where we can do much about these things and we have to be adults
| and accept that. It's okay, there was a time when we'd die of
| simple infections too. That's how psychology is now, very young
| and full of witchcraft.
|
| Also, the article was funny... And wtf is that cheeseboat?
| kranke155 wrote:
| I think this is very fair. Every science that was starting out
| was indistinguishable from nonsense when starting out. But to
| say we shouldn't have pursued alchemy, because we didn't
| understand chemistry? One likely led to the other.
| masfuerte wrote:
| I had the same question. It's Cincinnati chili. Wikipedia has
| an article [1] and Serious Eats goes into way more detail [2].
| It actually sounds pretty good. I'll give it a go but with much
| less cheese.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnati_chili
|
| [2]: https://www.seriouseats.com/cincinnati-chili-
| recipe-8402230
| cheeseomlit wrote:
| I agree with the authors identification of the problems in the
| field, but I'm not sure about their conclusions, or 'ways
| forward', which are
|
| 1. Debunk 'folk' psychology, with comparisons to the illegitimacy
| of 'folk' biology and 'folk' physics
|
| 2. Shake things up- meaning don't be afraid to question
| established dogma regardless of reputational risks
|
| I, a completely unqualified internet commenter, will give number
| 2 a try. I'd argue that psychology is a folk science, which is to
| say its not a science at all, but an art. As we've recently
| discovered, a massive swath of psychological studies are non-
| reproducible. So maybe we shouldnt treat psychology as if it were
| a rigorous scientific pursuit, but a philosophical one, or even a
| therapeutic one (IE. make it synonymous with psychiatry). Leave
| the science to the neuroscientists, who can quantify and measure
| the things they're studying (I understand there is some overlap
| between these fields sometimes). If your study consists of asking
| people questions and treating their answers as quantitative
| measurements of anything, I don't know- it feels like something
| has been lost in the sauce there. Too many variables to draw any
| meaningful conclusions.
| lazyeye wrote:
| In a similar way Im wondering what gender studies would be
| called?
| dudu24 wrote:
| What a stereotypical hackernews comment, wow.
|
| > I, a completely unqualified internet commenter,
|
| Just leave it there.
| dartos wrote:
| How would people learn if they don't get feedback on their
| ideas?
|
| Why go out of your way to gatekeep random internet comments?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Sometimes you should make the effort to learn _before_
| sharing your idea with other people.
|
| So many people will blindly walk forward in the dark,
| completely in ignorance, and then get upset that people ask
| them to light a candle first.
| cheeseomlit wrote:
| Care to enlighten me? It's not like I stated any of that as
| fact, it was qualified with an admission of my own ignorance-
| I'm open to being corrected. Or are you just demonstrating
| what happens when established dogma is questioned in this
| field? If so point taken, I can see why they're having
| problems
| DinoDad13 wrote:
| Which established dogma do you want to challenge and why?
| cheeseomlit wrote:
| Moreso 'question' than 'challenge'- but it seems like the
| idea that psychology is a hard science at all is sort of
| a baseline assumption, or dogma. This article goes into
| great detail on all sorts of issues in the field, but
| stops short of questioning whether or not the whole thing
| could even be classified as scientific. I'd argue that
| the reproducibility crisis throws that into question to
| some degree (though that crisis apparently extends into
| 'harder' sciences as well, so maybe not?)- And
| intuitively, human psychology just doesn't seem like
| something you can quantify, at least not to the level of
| granularity required by the scientific method. That is,
| unless you're measuring the activity of neurons,
| synapses, hormone levels, any physical measurable
| phenomena, to draw your conclusions- and I'm not sure how
| much of that is done in psychology as opposed to
| neuroscience
| feoren wrote:
| I think there's a common pattern on Hacker News that goes
| something like:
|
| A: Overly broad generalization of a huge body of work put
| together over 100 years by tens of thousands of
| professionals
|
| B: Ugh, hate this take from armchair experts
|
| A: Okay, then give me _all the examples_! Otherwise you 're
| proving me right!
|
| I happen to think your overly broad generalization is more
| right than wrong, but I also recognize the silliness of
| asking to be "enlightened" on an entire branch of human
| endeavor via internet comments. This is a problematic
| argument form, and someone calling out this behavior does
| not prove you right.
|
| So let's be clear about what "enlightening you" means. If
| your argument is "psychology is based on a fundamentally
| flawed/useless study design (surveys) and we can never
| learn anything real from it", then a few examples of
| reproducible, interesting, not a-priori obvious results
| from surveys should be sufficient to show that we actually
| can learn real things from surveys. (And be careful not to
| fall into the "I could have told you that!" fallacy.)
| Luckily, this question was already asked on Reddit, and I
| think there are some strong examples:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicPsychology/comments/qktt6h
| /...
|
| On the other hand, the field is absolutely _rife_ with
| problematic study design and even some entire psychology
| departments (e.g. Stanford) seem to be completely rotten.
| The most salient example of this is the "implicit bias"
| studies that came out of Stanford. Their study design was
| something like:
|
| Task 1: Associate good words with white/Christian/American
| themes as fast as you can
|
| Task 2: Associate bad words with "foreign" themes
|
| Task 3: Associate good words with white/Christian/American
| themes _again_
|
| Task 4: Associate good words with "foreign" themes
|
| And the result is: you're racist because Task 4 takes you a
| few milliseconds longer. It never occurred to them (or it
| did and they intentionally forced the result) that in Task
| 4, you're literally _unlearning_ what you 've just
| practiced 3 times. It was one of the most blatantly bad
| studies I've ever seen in my life and I didn't see anyone
| else calling out how problematic it was, because
| _Stanford_.
|
| So in general I actually agree with your take: the field is
| rife with junk science, some of it obvious, and almost
| certainly some of it intentional. But please also recognize
| that "I'm an expert in tech and therefore everything, and
| if you can't prove me wrong in an internet comment then
| that proves me right!" is a very problematic argument
| style. It sounds like you're trying to prove yourself
| right, and a much more efficient way to get smarter is to
| habitually try to prove yourself _wrong_.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| To be fair, most studies of implicit bias are randomly
| ordered on a trial to trial basis.
| cheeseomlit wrote:
| I appreciate the productive answer- You're right, re-
| reading it now my tone was more argumentative than
| inquisitive- Itd be foolish to dismiss such a large body
| of work as 'useless' and I hope it didn't come off that
| way- Of course understanding human psychology is
| immensely useful for all sorts of reasons
| bee_rider wrote:
| Philosophy is often very well grounded, often annoyingly so. We
| gave up on it because it turns out you can create iPhones if
| you ignore the philosophical problem of induction, go do
| science instead, and assume the laws of physics won't try and
| conspire against you.
|
| Rather, I wonder if Psychology would be better thought of as
| something _even less_ grounded than science. Something where
| we're just are happy with an accumulation of stuff that's
| happened to work well enough, without pretending that we're
| hunting fundamental principles. Something like a profession:
| Engineering, Doctoring, that sort of stuff.
| mistermann wrote:
| Why would the problem of induction prevent one from inventing
| things?
|
| Also, where did you learn it was given up on, _and_ that is
| the reason why?
| dambi0 wrote:
| Neuroscience isn't immune from non-reproducibility, for example
| this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41672599 from just a
| couple of weeks ago
| bbor wrote:
| Oo my favorite topic! Great writing and the right themes are
| there, but I think they're missing a lot by not taking a more
| historically-holistic view. Aka wondering what all the people
| who've been criticizing psychology think, from Chomsky to Piaget
| to Lacan to Freud to Husserl to Hegel to Kant to Locke to Scotus
| to Ibin-Sinna all the way back to the OG, Aristotle.
|
| Obviously some were more empirical than others so you can't
| believe them all, but without engaging with their works -- even
| in a negative way - you're forced to reinvent the wheel, like the
| bitcoin people did with banking regulations.
|
| For example, this quote makes me feel the author thinks
| psychology is more special/unusual than it is:
| We're in good company here, because this is how other fields got
| their start. Galileo spent a lot of time trying to overturn folk
| physics: "I know it seems like the Earth is standing still, but
| it's actually moving."
|
| In what way has any natural science been anything other than
| overturning folk theories? What else could you possibly do with
| systematic thought other than contradict unsystematic thought?
|
| In this case, this whole article is written from the assumption
| that true, proper, scientific psychology is exclusively the
| domain of the Behaviorists. This is a popular view among people
| who run empirical studies all day for obvious reasons (it's way
| cheaper and easier to study behavior reliably), but those aren't
| the only psychologists. Clinical psychology (therapy) is usually
| based in cognitive frameworks or psychoanalytical, pedagogy is
| largely indebted to the structuralism of Piaget, and
| sociology/anthropology have their own set of postmodern, Marxist,
| and other oddball influences.
|
| All of those academies are definitely part of psychology IMO, and
| their achievements are undeniable!
|
| For anyone who finds this interesting and wants to dunk on
| behaviorists with me, just google "Chomsky behaviorism" and
| select your fave content medium -- he's been beating this drum
| for over half a century, lol.
| Notatheist wrote:
| >epicycles all the way down
|
| I don't mind this idea at all! I'm the abyss staring into itself.
|
| That said I don't think digging into skulls until we identify the
| neurons that cause the big sad or teaching people ways to cope
| with their awful lives is worth much. I want psychology to help
| me understand (a maybe terrible) existence, not to solve it.
| Something like overturning our intuitions is perfect. If tomorrow
| they make a flawless anti-depressant that will let me endure
| misery I argue we'll be worse off.
| inSenCite wrote:
| This was a great write up.
|
| One thing that struck me as to the difficulty / young-ness of
| this field is also the fact that it is the only science that is
| us studying our thinking selves. It's almost like trying to draw
| a picture of the exact spot you are standing on.
| parpfish wrote:
| i think that that issue leads to particularly intense 'folk
| psychology' because everybody has experience with _a_ mind
| which will lead to everybody having their own litle set of folk
| psychology beliefs that the scientists need to overturn.
|
| contrast that to something like... geology. i'm sure there was
| folk geology back in the day about where different types of
| rocks come from, but for 99% of people they weren't
| particularly invested in it. so when the scientists came out
| with empirical research, most people would be fine with it.
|
| but when psychologist confront folk psychology, people often
| take it as a personal affront. any comment section about
| psychology research (HN included) is filled with armchair
| experts contradicting researchers with their own pet theories
| parpfish wrote:
| i think that before a science can be "a science" with powerful
| theories and universal laws, there needs to be a long period of
| existing as a proto-science where people aren't doing experiments
| and are just observing and describing.
|
| before darwin, you had to have linneaus just describing and
| cataloging animals.; before {astronomy theory guy}, you had to
| have {people just tracking and observing stars}.
|
| psychology may have tried to jump the gun a bit by attempting to
| become theoretical before there were a few generations of folks
| sitting around quantifying and classifying human behavior.
|
| this was definitely true in cognitive neuroscience. once folks
| got their hands on fMRI, this entire genre of research popped up
| that was "replicate an existing psychology study in the scanner
| to confirm that they used their brain". imo, a lot more was
| learned by groups that stepped back from theory and just started
| collecting data and discovering "resting state networks" in the
| brain.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Astronomy: you might go with Galileo Galilei, and you wouldn't
| be too wrong. [0]
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei
| mistermann wrote:
| By forcing formal study of the mind into the constrained
| methods used for studying the physical world, it allows the
| government and profit/power seekers to be the only actors free
| to use the methods that work best.
|
| I wonder if this is purely a coincidence.
| titanomachy wrote:
| I'm floored by the suggestion that professional training as a
| therapist does not produce a statistically significant
| improvement in ability to treat mental health conditions.
|
| It's interesting that one comparison they offered was between
| advice from a random professor versus a session with a therapist.
| I can remember several helpful conversations with kind, older
| professors during difficult times. Maybe we should identify
| people whose life experiences naturally make them good counselors
| and encourage them to do more of it, instead of making young
| adults pay $200k for ineffective education and a stamp saying
| they can charge for therapy.
| thierrydamiba wrote:
| I think a lot of people just never find the right therapist and
| then assume all therapists are terrible.
|
| It's interesting because even the most staunch opponents of
| mental health talk therapy have people in their life they talk
| to, they just don't consider them therapists.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| But this begs the same question: if mental illness really is
| what psychologists say it is, and if treatment is a learnable
| skill, then the practitioner shouldn't matter that much
| assuming his training was good.
|
| But most evidence suggests that some "je ne sais quoi" has to
| exist in the therapeutic relationship.
|
| In other words, Freud was right about Transference as a
| necessary ingredient to psychotherapy (and probably about a
| lot else that is still too controversial to talk about or
| pass IRB muster).
| staticvoidstar wrote:
| Isn't the "je ne sais quoi" just feeling safe to be
| themselves and open? Whatever that means for each person
| wk_end wrote:
| Well, sure, but "people in their life that they talk to"
| aren't really therapists. They're functioning quite
| differently - they can have a personal involvement that a
| therapist, ethically, isn't permitted to have. The sorts of
| things someone talks to with their friends overlaps with but
| is also often quite distinct from the sort of thing a
| therapist is probing for. There's no direct financial
| incentive to keep the "patient" coming. And they're making no
| claim to, broadly, help someone improve their overall mental
| health - people vent to their friends because it feels nice,
| not because it's necessarily constructive.
| datavirtue wrote:
| So the patient is holding the therapist wrong?
| scarmig wrote:
| Although I agree it's a matter of finding the right
| therapist, I think that undersells the problem a fair bit.
|
| There are large barriers to trialing a lot of therapists, and
| finding the right one can be like finding a needle in a
| haystack. Therapy is quite expensive, and many therapists
| already have a full caseload. And the pool of therapists is
| very homogeneous: essentially, a ton of well-off white women
| who might not have the tools or shared experiences to
| facilitate a helpful therapeutic alliance with individuals
| coming from a broader background than they're comfortable
| with.
| solfox wrote:
| As much as that's an eye-catching headline, even the author
| admits it was a bad study that hasn't been reproduced.
| dustyventure wrote:
| If the author told you their psychology study was
| reproducible, not dismissing it would be the other category
| of error.
| codingdave wrote:
| Where did it say the education was ineffective? There are
| reasons to believe it is not the only path to being effective
| at helping others, but that does not invalidate that if you
| spend a few years learning tools and techniques and pattern
| matching to behaviors, you have a valid toolkit in front of you
| for being a therapist.
|
| Now, it is a valid argument whether or not it should be
| required (and there is no requirement to label yourself as a
| "coach"), and the price tag on it is of course always a
| consideration. But being dismissive of higher education is just
| as silly as being overly dependent on it.
| ordu wrote:
| _> professional training as a therapist does not produce a
| statistically significant improvement in ability to treat
| mental health conditions._
|
| It produces a statistically significant improvement, just not
| with people who are already gifted at it. You can get not
| gifted people and teach them to be not worse than gifted. It is
| not much, but it is not nothing either.
| lemonwaterlime wrote:
| Part of the problem is the therapists (and medical
| practitioners in general) are often forbidden from doing the
| thing they were trained to do for a variety of reasons: risk
| and liability, patient turnaround, standardization. These
| things can get in the way of doing the right thing in the times
| where that is known. That's before considering the ambiguous
| cases.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| Can you give some examples?
| hotspot_one wrote:
| > often forbidden from doing the thing they were trained to
| do for a variety of reasons
|
| you forgot to add `insurance company rules` to your list.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > The best thing to do is forget all of it, estrange yourself
| from the word "creativity" entirely, and start with the extremely
| bizarre fact that humans write songs and novels and solve math
| problems, and we don't know how this happens.
|
| (Found in note [10] in the article.)
|
| This reads, very much in a positive way, like someone is
| describing the idea of "root cause analysis". That bodes well for
| this person to epistemicly "know" stuff like they write about. At
| least they'll be more likely to "know that they don't know" yet,
| which is a necessary step along the way.
|
| It reminds me of a saying I've heard: "Forget what you know."
| ("Forget" is even in the quote. I wouldn't be surprised if the
| author is familiar with the saying.) Perhaps more clearly,
| "Forget what you think you know." The idea being for one to
| identify and challenge their assumptions in order to work it out
| from "first principles".
| lutusp wrote:
| A great article, particularly for its candor.
|
| As Neil DeGrasse Tyson and others have said, in the same way that
| chemistry replaced alchemy, neuroscience will replace psychology.
| But this isn't likely to happen soon -- the human brain is too
| complex for present-day efforts.
|
| But there's some progress. In a recent breakthrough, we fully
| mapped the brain of a fruit fly
| (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03190-y).
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Its a piss poor article that was written to vent, but it didn't
| try very hard to find good psychological research. Episodic
| memory psychological literature is very strong, IMO, yet never
| gets brought up in these kinds of articles. Its always the
| fluffy puffy research that fuels tabloid headlines, not the
| research that shows, for example, differential patterns of
| memory strategies over child development, or the contributions
| of context to recognition memory, the differences between
| recollection and familiarity processes supporting recognition
| memory..you know, all the stuff that is not flashy for
| tabloids, but is real psychological science. Dr. Charan
| Ranganath was a member of my dissertation committee who
| recently wrote a wonderful book about memory and gave some
| really fantastic interviews. For example, on Fresh Air:
| https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1233900923 Now yes, some of
| this is informed by neuroimaging and neuroscience spanning
| human and animal models, but also lots and lots of behavioral
| memory research. And the findings that are discussed are pretty
| reliable, shown over and over again in different ways. So, no,
| this article is not great. It did not do diligent research. Its
| a rant that focuses on specific types of research that is a
| small majority of the REAL field.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| > neuroscience will replace psychology
|
| That seems like say that hardware engineers should be the ones
| debugging software.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| Because you don't even know what Freud actually did.
|
| He assumed the human is a machine and used _analytical_ thinking
| trying to understand it.
|
| Yet you think the interpretation of dreams is just BS. Either you
| only read secondary literature or you have a deficiency in
| reasoning.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| > "Another way of thinking about it: of the 298 mental disorders
| in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, zero have been cured.
| That's because we don't really know what mental illness is..."
|
| I'm of the firm belief that today's understanding of
| psychological maladies is comparable to mid-19th century theories
| of the causes of disease - when doctors had little idea of the
| causality of infectious disease or cancer or heart disease
| (indeed they had no way of distinguishing between transmittable
| infectious diseases and other types of illness).
|
| Take the importance of insect control and water treatment and
| condoms in preventing infectious disease from bubonic plague to
| cholera to HIV and syphilis - they just had no idea until Koch
| and Pasteur came along. It's probably safe to compare this to our
| current advertising system, which deliberately makes people feel
| miserable about various aspects of their appearance and social
| status with the goal of convincing them that buying some product
| or other will fix their lives - and it's especially damaging when
| developing children and teenagers are the targets.
|
| The fact that capitalist consumer society norms are as much as
| source of mental illness in modern populations as the filthy open
| sewers of old European cities were of infectious disease is a
| concept I suspect today's corporatized academic institutions will
| have a hard time accepting.
|
| A further issue is that currently illegal psychedelic drugs show
| more potential for understanding and treating a wide variety of
| mental illness conditions under controlled conditions than any of
| the widely prescribed antidepressants do, and yet most
| governments are rigidly opposed to their legalization.
| gargalatas wrote:
| I have a solid example here that bogles my mind every now and
| them watching people killing other people especially in the US: I
| would expect after all those years mental health to be accounted
| in a serious criminal case like killing somebody. Meaning that a
| person who kills somebody else definitely has mental issues that
| come from their childhood. So what about parents in those cases,
| aren't they having their part on the sick mentality of their
| child? Why not pressing charges to them?
| nverno wrote:
| > a person who kills somebody else definitely has mental issues
| that come from their childhood
|
| People that kill other people often function well in their
| society. It doesn't make sense to me to classify that as mental
| issues. People are inherently territorial, aggressive animals -
| at least to the extent being so doesn't make them much of an
| outlier.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| > Meaning that a person who kills somebody else definitely has
| mental issues that come from their childhood. So what about
| parents in those cases, aren't they having their part on the
| sick mentality of their child? Why not pressing charges to
| them?
|
| Even assuming the premise of killing someone implies mental
| illness, and assuming the mental illness stems from trauma,
| there's a pretty large leap in reasoning here. Why must the
| trauma come during childhood? Why not in adulthood? Even in
| childhood, why does it have to come from the parents?
|
| Then you have the idea of continuing up the causal chain. Why
| are we pressing charges to the parents? If the parent's
| traumatized their kids, there's good chance they did it due to
| their own mental illness/trauma, which means the parents
| themselves were abused in childhood. So we should go after
| their parents.... except that just means we should go after
| there parents.... ad infinitum.
| taurath wrote:
| > There's a thought that's haunted me for years: we're doing all
| this research in psychology, but are we learning anything?
|
| Advancements in PTSD, dissociation, treatment resistant
| depression and attachment disorders is astounding. We know a lot
| more about how people work.
|
| Psychology has always been a person centered field - humans are
| complex, and what it does is more akin to QA than coding. It's
| individualized. It doesn't love studies because the underlying
| mechanism or traumas can be different even for people who went
| through the same things.
|
| Unfortunately advancements are not evenly distributed. There is
| an army of CBT therapists who work in one method that works for
| some but not the majority. Finding a practitioner is a crapshoot
| even when looking for specialists.
|
| The DSM is functionally treated as a billing manual, and to be
| paid practitioners need to jump through a long series of hoops.
| The medical billing side can't deal with the complexity.
|
| All these aside, there are people who are really truly healing in
| ways they wouldn't without the field. There are ideas that
| propagate through human culture make human behavior more
| understandable.
| acchow wrote:
| Given that "humans are complex" and "it's individualized",
| would advancements be greater and faster by just allowing
| clinicians and scientists to just talk things out instead of
| coming up with "studies" which pretend to be "science" with a
| low reproducibility rate (and non-publishing on null results)?
| autoexec wrote:
| We've learned that it hasn't produced much research that holds up
| to replication, that the vast majority of research never gets
| properly replicated at all anyway, and that despite the endless
| meta-analysis of glorified internet surveys people's mental
| health hasn't been improving.
|
| We're certainly learning how to use psychology to manipulate
| people though. Advertising, dark patterns, propaganda, and
| behavioral conditioning just wouldn't be the same without
| psychology research. We're performing research on children to
| learn the youngest age they can recognize a brand name (age 3
| last I checked) or how best to keep them hooked playing a video
| game/child casino though and that research is making companies
| money hand over fist.
| antonkar wrote:
| I'm afraid that after reading this guy, people will just give up,
| thinking there is nothing that works. And this is not the case at
| all, depression and many other problems are curable. Mine got
| cured, in addition to anxiety, anger management problem and
| suicidality. You can get help or start by reading a workbook
| yourself.
|
| He links to a meta analysis* that says CBT does cure depression
| and does so consistently for many decades without any declines in
| effectiveness. Later for some reason, he says no single mental
| illness was ever cured.
|
| It seems the main point of the article is to say that nothing
| except "nudges" ever worked in psychology - this is nonsense that
| he himself contradicts as I mentioned above.
|
| Skip this sensationalist guy, use https://scholar.google.com to
| do your own research
|
| * https://research.vu.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/26037670/2017_C...
| Michelangelo11 wrote:
| > I recently read The Secrets of Alchemy by Lawrence Principe,
| which I loved, especially because he tries to replicate ancient
| alchemical recipes in his own lab. And sometimes he succeeds! For
| instance, he attempts to make the "sulfur of antimony" by
| following the instructions in The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony
| (Der Triumph-Wagen Antimonii), written by an alchemist named
| Basil Valentine sometime around the year 1600. At first, all
| Principe gets is a "dirty gray lump". Then he realizes the recipe
| calls for "Hungarian antimony," so instead of using pure lab-
| grade antimony, he literally orders some raw Eastern European
| ore, and suddenly the reaction works! It turns out the Hungarian
| dirt is special because it contains a bit of silicon dioxide,
| something Basil Valentine couldn't have known.
|
| > No wonder alchemists thought they were dealing with mysterious
| forces beyond the realm of human understanding. To them, that's
| exactly what they were doing! If you don't realize that your ore
| is lacking silicon dioxide--because you don't even have the
| concept of silicon dioxide--then a reaction that worked one time
| might not work a second time, you'll have no idea why that
| happened, and you'll go nuts looking for explanations. Maybe
| Venus was in the wrong position? Maybe I didn't approach my work
| with a pure enough heart? Or maybe my antimony was poisoned by a
| demon!
|
| > An alchemist working in the year 1600 would have been justified
| in thinking that the physical world was too hopelessly complex to
| ever be understood--random, even. One day you get the sulfur of
| antimony, the next day you get a dirty gray lump, nobody knows
| why, and nobody will ever know why. And yet everything they did
| turned out to be governed by laws--laws that were discovered by
| humans, laws that are now taught in high school chemistry. Things
| seem random until you understand 'em.
|
| Well, this example doesn't just fail to support the argument, but
| undercuts it. Basil successfully identified the kind of antimony
| that would work, -despite- having no concept of sulfur dioxide.
| He did not write down something like "not all kinds of antimony
| work for this recipe, so get a bunch of different kinds and try
| them all" -- that, or a stronger version ("sometimes the recipe
| fails, we don't know why"), would support the author's point.
|
| So we're left with the author trying to argue that this alchemist
| thought the world was "too hopelessly complex to ever be
| understood" on the basis of ... the alchemist correctly
| identifying the ingredient that would make the recipe work.
| jasonhong wrote:
| One big area of psychology not mentioned in the article that has
| been seeing a good amount of success is applied psychology with
| respect to Human-Computer Interaction.
|
| For example, there's a lot of basic perceptual psychology
| regarding response times and color built into many GUI toolkits
| in the form of GUI widgets (buttons, scrollbars, checkboxes,
| etc). Change blindness
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_blindness) is also a known
| problem for error messages and can be easily avoided with good
| design. There's also a lot of perceptual psychology research in
| AR and VR too.
|
| With respect to cognitive psychology, there's extensive work in
| information foraging
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_foraging) which has
| been distilled down as heuristics for information scent.
|
| With respect to social psychology, there are hundreds of
| scientific papers about collective intelligence, how to make
| teams online more effective, how to socialize newcomers to online
| sites, how to motivate people to contribute more content and
| higher quality content, how and why people collaborate on
| Wikipedia and tools for making them more effective, and many,
| many more.
|
| In past work, my colleagues and I also looked at understanding
| why people fall for phishing scams, and applying influence
| tactics to improve people's willingness to adopt better
| cybersecurity practices.
|
| Basically, the author is right about his argument if you have a
| very narrow view of psychology, but there's a lot of really good
| work on applied (and practical!) psychology that's going on
| outside of traditional psychology journals.
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