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Comment by Xcelerate | Hacker News Reader

> I am a little surprised how much anti-Psychology sentiment there is on HN. I know it is typically viewed as a 'liberal' field

It has nothing to do with “liberal” or “conservative” fields of studies and everything to do with reproducibility and predictivity. If psychology could make predictions to the 13th decimal place like we are able to do for the gyromagnetic ratio of the electron (and confirm via experiment), there would be no complaints.

There is also a tendency for the outcomes of psychology studies to be “oversold” in a sense. To be fair, this is more often due to the media sensationalizing the results or reading something into them that isn’t there, but you don’t see this as often in physics (well, maybe a bit with quantum mechanics and black holes).

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I'd say a large part of the bias here is because the media over-hypes the results, which isn't necessarily the fault of the field. All fields are driven to hype results to get more research dollars. There does seem to be a bit more backlash when Psychology is over-hyped then when others do it.

But we do need to study humans, and they are hard to quantify. It is very misleading to compare measuring electrons to measuring 'how do I feel'. It is difficult to measure. That doesn't mean not to.

It seems like here the sentiment is strongly to go ahead and toss the baby out with the bath water.

But the media often picks up on over-hyped results from research studies that are either extremely biased or p-hacked.

Also reminds me of that one psychology study where they made a total coincidence into a correlation which the media went crazy over (https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2015/05/29/i-fooled-m...).

> It has nothing to do with “liberal” or “conservative”

OP was probably referring to liberal as in liberal arts (in comparison to hard sciences and/or professional degree tracks like engineering)

> If psychology could make predictions to the 13th decimal place like we are able to do for the gyromagnetic ratio of the electron (and confirm via experiment), there would be no complaints

This is an issue in biology as well/in general, and it doesn't get near the amount of pushback here as psychology.

Well, i don't know, i think lots of things in physics have been oversold. It's just that the requirements for sellability is that someone has translated it into lay speech, whether or not that speech is technically accurate. We had the "god particle", black hole hype, quantum computing mega-hype, "fusion within 10 years", etc.

I think you might just be a little too high in the food chain to see the vast amounts of lay speculation about physics that goes on. Certainly less volume of speech than psychology but i think for the respective popularity of the fields, people find it _more engaging_ to do speculation of physical reality than just another psychological paper. The majority of journalists oversell everything. It's just that it's less often that physics makes it into regular magazines and publications, i think

economics is worse than psychology

> > A is bad.

> B is worse!

What good is a comment like this, especially when B is completely unrelated to what anyone is talking about?

> If psychology could make predictions to the 13th decimal place like we are able to do for the gyromagnetic ratio

I think you are missing that you are being measured that accurately, by marketing departments using methods from psychology.

> If psychology could make predictions to the 13th decimal place like we are able to do for the gyromagnetic ratio of the electron (and confirm via experiment), there would be no complaints.

That's not a fair comparison. Medicine struggles to make vaccines that are more than 95% effective. HIV tests are 99.97% accurate. The mind is even squishier, psychology will always look amateurish compared to physics.

It's because psychology is speculative neuroscience. And speculation isn't science, it's bullshitting.

As software engineers on HN, we don't debug a computer program by talking about why the program might be feeling bad because it sexualized its mother as an infant or some other insane nonsense. I suspect once neuroscience gets better, and we can simply load up all our neurons into a computer and run the equivalent of GDB on it, it'll be really obvious that humans are 100% deterministic, people with psych problems are deficient in X, Y, or Z chemical or the wiring was screwed up in some place or another, and we'll be able to fix it.

Eventually we will look back on Psychologists the same as doctors that did Bloodletting and "Balancing the Humors"- complete crackpots that set science back a few hundred years.

You could just as easily call medicine "speculative biochemistry" or call chemistry "speculative particle physics".

Not being able to model something at the lowest possible level doesn't make something inherently unscientific.

It certainly makes it harder to test hypotheses and harder to be certain of the results, but it can still be scientific.

We also don't debug computer programs by looking at logic gates. We have abstractions built on top of that.

Why do you think the Bloodletters set back science? As if there was anybody at that time that would have made more rapid progress if only they hadn't been held back.

Science isn't a strait line of analytical progression, and when it does get side tracked, it isn't some nefarious group. I could just as easily say if only those stupid String Theorist had just stepped aside, we wouldn't have set Physics back a decade.

It's human dynamics, hmmm, I wonder if there is someone studying why groups get stuck in these loops, hmmm, why do humans seem to get stuck at a plateau that is difficult to think beyond, hmmmm let me think now, hmmm. Psychologist?

Psychology is a bigger field than Freudian psychoanalysis.

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