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Comment by thaw13579 | Hacker News Reader

I find the treatment of psychology on HN to be perplexing. On one hand, there have been attacks on psychology as a field [1] due to legitimate concerns related to replication. On the other hand, blog posts such as this come up every few days that take the same results for granted and frame them in everyday terms.

I wonder, are there different groups of HN readers with different attitudes towards psychology? Or does the treatment also depend on the presentation, e.g. in the form of a scientific publication vs. a brain hacking tips or cheatsheet.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12643978

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I actually get the impression that most of the articles that are "liked" by HN are somewhat grass roots. Take this one. It is a "hacker" that is spending time to try to improve biases held.

It is somewhat ironic, to me, that I am basically accusing us of having an anti-intellectual bend. However, it is not unique to psychology. There is a similar slant against "academic" computer science.

I think the same is true with philosophy too.

Hackers often seem to have an anti authority preference and are more likely to respect the plucky diy-er than the member of the establishment that has paid their dues. Other fields are by default assumed to be obfuscationary rather than hard or deep.

There is a difference between anti-intellectual and anti-academic.

>Take this one. It is a "hacker" that is spending time to try to improve biases held.

Funny, the other day there was a thread about Cialdini and his books (including Influence). He has a chapter on this phenomenon (I think he called it Social Proof).

We are more receptive to ideas if it comes from "one of us".

Amusingly, I skipped out based on the headline of "Pre-suasion." Just sounded stupid. Will have to relook at it, now.

Sounds like we have a serious case of in-group favouritism and with a hint of bandwagon effect

There is a similar slant against "academic" computer science.

As someone who went to college for CompSci, I see good reason for a slant against computer science. The problem is that it's the wrong topic for somebody who does software development!

What we do is not science, it's engineering. Much of the time spent teaching us the science aspect is wasted, at least compared to the opportunity to use the time on engineering topics like modeling and design, documentation, etc.

I completely agree. I love computer science. I love software development. But those two things are radically different things.

What I'm finding it difficult to find, these days, is actual mature-age accredited uni courses in computer science. Instead, you get a plethora of development courses which, as you say, are akin to engineering, not science.

I went to school for Software Engineering, in the engineering faculty. My school also had Computer Science.

The difference was somewhat ironically that the CS degree had more practical, hands on coding, and engineering was more theoretical, plus we had to take all the physics/chemistry/math courses to meet the requirements of the Engineering board.

> What we do is not science, it's engineering.

You could argue that for many of us it is Software Carpentry.

I am a B.Sc. in something something computers. I have worked on some serious stuff (real distributed sensor systems across huge geographical areas and another time working on fringes of a soft-realtime image-recognition system).

Much of the time however I feel I'm much more of a software carpenter.

I actually quite enjoyed some of the stuff from "Software carpentry" online course even though I already was an engineer.

> The problem is that it's the wrong topic for somebody who does software development!

For somebody building the next CRUD app, perhaps. In my line of work (EDA software), I routinely apply concepts from my computation science education on the job and in my code. Algorithms, data structures, discrete mathematics, graph theory, set theory, type theory, universal algebra, tractability theory, automata theory — these are all topics where knowledge has come in handy in my professional experience at various jobs.

Of course, concepts from other fields — biology, linguistics, and physics, for example — have also come in handy on occasion. I almost feel like there's no such thing as a "wrong topic for somebody who does software development", though some topics are certainly more relevant/useful than others.

Well, then you're most likely part of minority. And even in that minority I'm willing to bet that a lot of the time is spent in things that have little to do with Computer Science.

Be honest and think of all the time you've spent fiddling with build systems, various random tools (compilers, scripts, databases, version control, etc.).

Far too often, to be sure. Two things I have yet to encounter in my (admittedly short, so far) professional career are a sane build system and version control that isn't a PITA...

>I routinely apply concepts from ... theory

Sounds exactly like what I would expect an Engineer to do. Apply theory to the real world. Versus a scientist who I would expect to develop, test, and prove new theories.

If you are building programming languages, compilers, tools, etc, Comp Sci is certainly pertinent. If you aren't building programming tools, you can get away with a minimal Comp Sci background.

> I wonder, are there different groups of HN readers with different attitudes towards psychology?

Yes. This isn't a monolithic hive mind or fundamentalist religion. There are people from all walks of life with different ideas here. You will find trends, but no unanimity.

There is a favor towards Kahneman's work, either out of interest or approval. It hits all the HN high notes (oriented around decision-making, thinking, personal effectiveness, reason) while additionally being backed by Kahneman's more-than-typically-rigorous models.

On replication, this same criticism has recently been directed at physics, chemistry and biology, among others. [1]

Psychology, with view to its practical (non-research) use has not helped me, but at least three people I know say they benefitted from cognitive behavioural therapy. Perhaps in the future, medicine and science will subordinate it to the same role of philosophy to better explain human behaviour and thinking as the latter did in less techical approaches for centuries. [2]

And yes, I am somewhat skeptical of said blog posts that cite some "new study" claiming to explain something only to be refuted or contradicted months later.

[1] http://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-...

[2] Wittgenstein conceded that philosophy in the 20th century would only be useful in itsapproaches to linguistics and language

The psychology replication crisis is much worse than any other field.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/05/if-you-cant-make-predic...

>The psychology replication crisis is much worse than any other field.

The article doesn't get into this.

Coming from a physics background, I will not say there's a crisis, but:

1. Few research is replicated.

2. We who did physics research were very unconcerned about whether our results could be replicated. Our journal papers were very concise, and it was common practice not to give all the details needed to replicate, partially due to paper size concerns, but very often also to keep the "secret recipe" to ourselves as a means to prevent others from conducting future research that we want to conduct (need less competition for grant money).

3. Pick any researcher in any field of physics, and ask them: "Can you list a few papers published in the last 15 years that are highly cited that you think are completely wrong?" Everyone will have a list like that. Everyone.

>keep the "secret recipe" to ourselves >Everyone will have a list like that

You and/or your publishers are terrible human beings.

>You and/or your publishers are terrible human beings.

Eh? Not sure why. Because we have a list of papers we don't believe? It would be naive to believe everything that is published.

I don't like the notion of withholding information, and personally I would not like to accept any paper that does that, but I'm merely stating the norm in the field.

You still have to contend with journal size restrictions. A paper in Physical Review Letters needs to be less than 3 pages. You simply cannot put in enough detail for replication in there. Nature has a page limit of 5.

Maybe I was wrong but here are the reasons for the condemnation

1. propagating falsehoods, or flaws in published work without correcting or refuting their validity, claims etc. by your strong admission that everyone knows of such work (which is subsequently used and cited) yet "completely wrong" there must be so much crap getting published. but there is disinclination to do anything about it

2. witholding of information necessary for reproducing results of experiments as a means of discouraging co-operation with peers you view as rivals or adversaries.

The second is really serious because it effectively subverts the scientific method, undermining scientific consensus and progress. That these are "norms in the field" means nothing save for everybody's indifference and lack of cooperation.

Is the above correct?

Historically you have the roles reversed in that medicine and science are both subordinates of philosophy. But admittedly due to the predominance of analytic philosophy, particularly in modern western philosophy, it has become much more of what you describe. This is really more a failing of modern philosophy than a condemnation of the field as a whole. There were/are/will-be many philosophers that don't ascribe to its limitations.

As a former philosophy student, I disavow philosophy for its uselessness. Save for ethics and a few niche topics of inquiry where it has practical utility, its only function is to add epistemlogical detail to science's study of nature (historically known as natural philosophy).

To paraphrase what John Locke said to Newton: "Sir, it is the lesser duty of mine as Philosopher and under labourer of the Natural Philsopher, to remove the debris and furnish detail that the latter imparts to our Knowledge."

As someone who is probably guilty of ignoring most psychology articles due to doubts about psychology research, I think this article is an interesting step forward for popular psychology. This categorization of biases is something I can use both for myself and when I try to help others. This article is unlikely to lead to debates about research methods and statistics because it's very high level and presents few opinions.

Incidentally, I noticed these cognitive biases probably apply equally well to strong AI (artificial intelligence). No matter how powerful an AI is, it's always going to lack some information, it will take time to calculate things, it will lack experience, and it will not have enough memory capacity to remember every detail. Strong AI will probably have to learn to use cognitive biases.

> This article is unlikely to lead to debates about research methods and statistics because it's very high level and presents few opinions.

Huh? The article is entirely opinion. Every single thing that's in bold text is a testable hypothesis presented as pure fact. Even the selection of "problems" is pure and problematic conjecture (are these actually the most important problems? Are these actually problems at all? Would addressing these problems improve our decision making?).

There'll be no debate about research methods because there's no scientific research here. What's presented in this article might be based on observation, but it's definitely not based on scientific testing (or, to the extent it is, that evidence isn't presented).

There's nothing wrong with an article like this, per se. But shrugging off psychology research (much of which explores and attempts to rigorously test the conjectures made in this article), while also accepting this article's statements at face value, is a bit ridiculous. It amounts to "philosophy I agree with is not problematic, but science I agree with should be harshly critiqued"

I can see your viewpoint. I see the article as a suggested categorization of a complex subject, where that suggested categorization is an opinion of what's useful. You're right, that's an opinion. I've read many textbooks that were also opinion in the same sense.

Notice how this particular article is devoted to skepticism generally, rather than promoting a particular hypothesis.

It should be heartening that most science topics here are treated with this kind of Feynmanian attitude, always willing to accept contradictory evidence, always reluctant to draw strong conclusions.

Psychology as a field has many problems, but subfields within psychology are backed by a fair amount of evidence.

It's possible to be interested in a field's subject matter while being critical of the methods.

For example, US space research at NASA may be awash in politics, crippled by a lack of long-term vision, and overly focused on military applications, but space is still cool.

The workings of the mind and the results of cognitive biases are fascinating, but that doesn't excuse poor statistics and a lack of rigor.

> are there different groups of HN readers with different attitudes towards psychology?

yes

> I wonder, are there different groups of HN readers with different attitudes towards psychology?

Yes and no. Yes, we are all different people. No, there is not much sense to grouping us based on a single dimension. That is an excellent example of what Vonnegut called a granfalloon.

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