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Comment by gboudrias | Hacker News Reader

> If psychology claims to be a science it MUST collectively accept this

I'm an undergrad in psychology. To my dismay, there is no consensus that psychology should be a science. You still hear claims that humans are too great to be measured, etc. That we are more than material, and therefore can never be studied objectively.

Of course, I disagree with this (everything real can be measured in some way), but the problem runs way deeper. It is an epistemic disaster, where most students do not try to learn the first thing about epistemology. Without exaggeration, some psychologists just want to tell nice stories. I remain baffled. I'm hoping time solves the issue, because I sure don't have a solution.

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Transformation from a medieval guild to evidence-based medicine was a painful journey in medice, too.

For example Semmelweis 170 years ago. He gathered data and published findings, that patient mortality is greatly reduced if doctors disinfect their hands before treating patients. Other doctors took this suggestion as offensive, rejected his ideas and attacked him for suggesting them. He had a mental breakdown and died in an asylum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

Benjamin Rush successfully pursued a libel claim against a man who wrote that his bloodletting killed more patients than it ever helped. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1312212/

> Rush continued to advocate his depletion therapy during the yellow fever epidemics in Philadelphia in 1794 and 1797, although his reputation and practice were already waning. By 1797, William Cobbett, the satiric journalist who frequently targeted Rush, was in full cry. He reviewed the 1793 bills of mortality for Philadelphia and showed that the mortality rates increased significantly following the institution of Rush's remedies. He characterized Rush's work as “… one of those great discoveries which have contributed to the depopulation of the earth.” When Rush referred to calomel as the “Samson of medicine,” Cobbett wrote:

>> Dr. Rush in that emphatical style which is peculiar to himself calls mercury the Samson of medicine. In his hands and those of his partisans it may indeed be justly compared to Samson: for I verily believe they have slain more Americans with it than ever Samson slew of the Philistines. The Israelite slew his thousands, but the Rushites have slain their tens of thousands (28).

> Rush sued Cobbett for libel in 1797. The case dragged on for 2 years, probably due to political maneuvering by Rush's enemies. Cobbett was found guilty and fined $5000 (later reduced to $4250), at the time the largest award ever made in Pennsylvania. The damage had long since been done, however, and Rush's practice had vanished by 1797.

We don't take calomel anymore, but it was used for over a century more, including in "teething powders" until 1954. There's a 1965 "Perry Mason" episode in which an attempted murder victim is given lemonade laced with mercuric chloride, with the dubious idea that this will be written off by investigators as a product of a reaction between his habitual calomel and a very weak acid.

It's in the full article, but Rush's idea was that you should give like ten times the customary dose.

Interesting, do they subtract this effect when they calculate the deaths due to smoking?

Check out Paul Meehl, a psychologist who was really into epistemology:

https://meehl.dl.umn.edu/sites/g/files/pua1696/f/074theoryte...

http://meehl.umn.edu/unpublished-material/philosophical-psyc...

Here's a fundamental problem with psychology reproducibility even in principle: experiments often depend on the subject not knowing about the experiment; therefore, the more well-known an experiment, the harder it is to perform.

For example, it would be difficult to perform a large Stanford Prison Experiment without any of the participants knowing about the Stanford Prison Experiment (which knowledge would taint the results). And if you select for ignorant participants, your sample is no longer random.

An interesting point and not untrue, but it's only important if we're trying to get at "human nature" in itself, which to me seems kind of silly as we're social animals by nature. In practice, there's nothing wrong with testing different levels of awareness, and if an experiment is part of popular culture then it's part of us too.

It should be noted that the SPE's methodology was totally fucked in the first place, and before reproducing it we'd need to actually perform it "right" at least once (which can't be done now that ethics* boards are a thing).

>if an experiment is part of popular culture then it's part of us too.

Sure, but so what? The point is that certain psychological experiments can, just by being known to the participants, have their results change, and this means in some sense there are fundamental problems with the replicatability of those experiments.

I'm of the opinion that the complexity of possible human behavior and phenomena is too great to allow for some experiments to be replicated and controlled.

There are some scientific facts about humans that you can establish because you can do a replicated, controlled experiment and there are others that you can't, for ethical (no one should allow this experiment to be done) or material reasons (this experiment is very easy to conduct assuming you have multiple copies of the planet earth).

How many different ways are there to form a solar system? I am sure the requirements for experiment and possible combinations of factors are just as daunting.

So, I don't think thats the real problem. I think the main real problem is that in the failing fields they look for differences between groups while in the successful fields they look for "universal" rules.

> I'm of the opinion that the complexity of possible human behavior and phenomena is too great to allow for some experiments to be replicated and controlled.

If these elements of human behavior cannot be confirmed by replicable experiments, what chance do we have of knowing about it. Claims about such behavior are nothing more than stories, for they are not based on evidence.

> There are some scientific facts about humans that you can establish because you can do a replicated, controlled experiment and there are others that you can't

There is no such thing as a 'scientific fact' that cannot be established by a replicated controlled experiment. The stated dichotomy is really important though, and one that it seems psychology has partially failed to make. For it lost its reputation by presenting 'stories' as scientific fact.

That is not to say there is no value in studying human behavior that is beyond science, but we need to realize that we cannot treat the result of this as 'scientifically true'. Instead, it is something like 'intuitively true based on anecdotal experience'.

That has always been the impression I got, but I kind of dismissed it as being a thing of a past that you only read about in old psychology textbooks. It is kind of baffling that this persist in the 21st century.

>everything real can be measured in some way

False

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_problem

Good comeback, sad that it's relevant too. I've seen entirely too many sketchy books and articles attempting to link quantum physics and psychology.

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