"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
I didn’t call anyone names, and this isn’t a “flamebait” topic, so I don’t know what you mean by “egregious” violation.
Re calling names, it isn't that you called anyone names personally, it's that words like "pseudoscience" and "fiction" count as name-calling in the way you used them, since you didn't actually make an argument. Actually if one removes name-calling in this sense, there's almost nothing left of your comment, except perhaps the last sentence, and even that seems more an expression of disdain than a substantive contribution.
I don’t see how your comment attacking me clears the bar you claim exists here. I can’t call this pseudoscience but you can call me cliche? That’s a blatant double standard. You’re a mod, you shouldn’t even be commenting.
I also notice I was singled out for this flag even though others in this thread made the exact same point.
I don't know which others in this thread you're referring to, but nobody's being singled out. We just don't have the bandwidth to see everything that gets posted here. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[0] https://profiles.stanford.edu/robert-sapolsky?tab=publicatio...
Edit: I will also add that The Body Keeps The Score is an interesting book, but I would definitely not recommend everyone read it. If you have suffered some trauma it is definitely worth a read.
That being said what do you have to say about certain personality categorizations like the big five which were determined based off of statistical clustering [0]? Is this not science for some reason because it includes personality?
[0] http://socpers.psihologietm.ro/PDFs/Sava%20&%20Popa%20(2011)...
I'm not trying to argue for some kind of an immaterial soul, or claiming that all of psychology is scientific (many theories, at least as it appears to a layman, aren't). And sure, a durable personality and various other mental models we have might be illusions to varying degrees.
But if the lower-level immediate experiences are treated as a real (if emergent and somewhat culturally dependent) thing, I don't see why higher-level mental phenomena such as the common need for a durable sense of self couldn't be treated as real as well.
What does that even mean? I have no idea what this is supposed to mean.
2. Electroshock “therapy” is not neuroscience.
There are plenty of people doing astrology for instance but in a clinical setting? In funded university programs? Producing papers that can be openly challenged? I don’t think so. Again facetious.
I'm hesitant to try my skills at one that doesn't map somewhere to neuroscience.
There can be personal value in studying psychology. It’s just not science, it’s fictional.
So you don't believe in the existence of qualia?
That's a pretty strong philosophical position.
It doesn’t have the rigour of say physics for sure … but physics is specifically the science of what can be measured.
I wouldn’t write it off as a science though. You may write off some of its practitioners for sure but you can do that with anything.
I've always been dismissive of the myer-briggs test. Since the tests are "not reproducable", must mean it's at best a pseudo-science.
But then I realized, who am I to dismiss the idea? I'm not an expert. Much smarter people than I (Dalio) believe in it. At the end of the day, does it help us move closer to understanding the differences between our minds?
I'd say yes it does. It may not be a "perfect" 100% correct model, but at least it's a step towards a direction.
> But then I realized, who am I to dismiss the idea? I'm not an expert. Much smarter people than I (Dalio) believe in it.
This is an appeal to authority; you should stick to your original gut feeling. Dalio and the like make their money selling books and as such write what people want to hear. It’s Chicken Soup For The Soul for people with bachelor degrees.
Amusingly enough, most psychology academics would be in violent agreement with you on that.
They are very useful for inscribing yourself into the narrative in order to break you out of your perspective and help guide you toward a more positive direction than otherwise.
Psych makes plenty of fairly reliable predictions around social behaviour, childhood development and human machine interaction.
Only somebody who didn’t understand psychology would say it produces no reproducible results.
It’s not physics. You can’t do it in a lab. But it can explain and predict within bounds of certainty.
DSM is often wielded as a criticism but this is strictly speaking a psychiatric i.e “medical” tool which strictly speaking should be used as a basis for making diagnosis not for diagnosis itself. It’s limitations are well understood in the field of psychology and again somebody who understood the field would know this.
Can you provide an example of a prediction that can accurately be made with psychology?
> Only somebody who didn’t understand psychology would say it produces no reproducible results.
I’m well versed enough with psychology. I even remember when people took the DSMIV seriously!
That's the manual of psychiatry (which is a very, very different thing) right?
DSM's only interaction with the field of psychology is for insurance purposes for therapists who are also psychologists.
I mean, I read it when I was doing a psychology undergrad, but it definitely wasn't something that was required.
FWIW, I think that you may not be defining psychology the same way as many of the commentators here.
In any given internet discussion on a non-deterministic topic, there will be at least one person (usually several) who speaks as if they are omniscient (have the ability to accurately read minds, predict the future, know comprehensive reality, etc).
Can you post a study you feel shows that nothing in psychology is reproducible?
At its very best and most rigorous, psychology is pseudoscience.
But from what I have read, the turning point was when Albert Ellis and Aaron T Beck developed the idea of Cognitive Therapy, which started the whole evidence based therapy movement (they diverged a bit with Ellis calling his talk therapy "Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy").
Aaron T Beck perhaps laid the foundation by testing out his research theories with actual clinical studies (like pharma companies do, for e.g. conducting studies like treating one group with anti-depressants, another group with a placebo, and treating a different group of patients with his talk therapy and proving that Cognitive Therapy was just as effective as anti-depressants in alleviating anxiety and depression, and in many cases better than anti-depressants for the long-term). Since then, there have been a lot of similar studies done on the efficacy of such therapies for treating Schizophrenia and various personality disorders.
(Interestingly, Aaron T Beck actually believed in Freudian psychology and practiced it as a psychoanalyst and one of his earlier studies was to prove that it was effective. But his study proved him wrong and thus he went on to develop CT, along with Ellis' and Buddhist ideas.)
So it is no longer fair to call psychology as a pseudo-science anymore, in my opinion. (For those who like to use capitalism as some kind of yardstick / indicator of the efficacy of some new technology / science, it is interesting to note that most insurance companies now cover and push for such evidence based therapies.)
But yes, a lot of self-help books are indeed based on pseudo-science or pop-psychology.
Agreed, most people looking to understand the psyche would be better off reading literature / art.
> Psychology is probabilistic science
It’s not science if it doesn’t include reproducibility.
Yeah but the key difference is that QM is a mathematically solid theory starting from a couple basic laws to yield predictions with p-values of 0 (for all intents and purposes anyway). Also note that there are non-probabilistic measurements in QM, be they measurements of aggregate behavior or just pure states [1]. In that respect, QM and most physical sciences really are miles ahead of psychology (though I don't think that's reason to discredit the latter, as it has obvious empirical merit).
If I may be a bit bolder still, I'd argue that it's not merely a quantitative difference. As pointed out by many other comments, psychology completely lacks any sort of unifying framework, except perhaps for small clusters of thematically similar phenomena. A collection of empirical facts does not a scientific theory make, or--taken to the cheeky extreme--"All science is either physics or stamp collecting" [2].
tl;dr: it not being science doesn't make it fiction