I’m so sorry for psychology’s loss, whatever it is
experimental-history.com
experimental-history.com
Speaking personally, the genesis of my mental issues is clearly not "chemical imbalance" but rather my relationship to the world. What I heard and saw on TV, my experiences with Mom, Dad, and Sister, my formative years in school and church--with, you guessed it, other people.
I see a lot of pop-psychology YouTube clickbait that goes "Heal your relationships! Here's how!" and I don't doubt that people can take certain action with willing parties and heal certain relationships, but geez, guys, it took me 50 years to get to this point of isolation and alienation, and I alone will never heal relationships that have taken such a beating. It would take collective, cooperative will and action to do so.
Treating one person at a time with these methods is like trying to catch the ocean and dye it green, one drop at a time. It just doesn't make sense. That's only one of many reasons why there are poor outcomes, especially for psychiatry, where they just toss you in a looney bin with lots of other messed-up people, and now that's your community and that's your reality, deal with it.
Humans and society are messy. There aren't easy answers and we are a culture dying for easy answers. Sometimes it really does help to have an impartial person sitting there just letting you bitch once a week. Sometimes it doesn't.
Somehow enough progress is made in the real world that psychology manages to meaningfully advance.
There's a lot of neat stuff in there but no real conclusions to draw from it beyond a potential avenue for further research. I'd like to see what comes out of it.
Usually beliefs that specific have a source. Knowing a bit about the biology involved, I got curious. In this case, the source was actually interesting and mentioning it might be of value to others.
Sometimes I'll indulge in snide comments but I try not to. They tend to detract from the conversion and the people I'd reply to are usually doing a good enough job of that on their own. ;)
The confidence in their own prognoses--despite no concrete evidence whatsoever--is impressive to behold.
Also, I've noticed that psychiatrists use very precise wording to communicate and ask questions, and all their words have very well-defined meanings, but those meanings are elusive to the smartest of mental patients. What does it mean, pray tell, when a physician asks you "are you hearing voices?" How much sleep have you been getting? Oh, you haven't meticulously logged it on graph paper every day for a month? Just estimate your sleep hours, unreliable narrator.
Also, physicians are prohibited from using technical jargon when communicating with patients; they must use layman's terms only. So this leads to a wonderful cornucopia of confusion when your patient is well-informed and educated about the relevant medical terminology, but the doctor can't oblige that mode of communication, and garble garble fluzzle zinko.
Most judgements on me are passed completely based on affect and demeanor. My affect can mean the difference between a cordial 20-minute sit-down with the doc or a 3-week "voluntary, not really" hospital incarceration that will cost $60,000.
The only credible and actual effective approach is described with this fairly new book from Chris Palmer (professor assistant at Harvard university): https://www.amazon.com/Brain-Energy-Revolutionary-Understand...
If sitting and talking helps do it. If not move one to something that does.
A lot of psychiatric medications are not well understood, not the chemical pathways, not the chemical mechanisms, some of them just "work" for some people, some people require a different one, and we don't know exactly why. In that sense it's not too different from talk therapy, we know that some work but I don't think we know exactly why.
Sincere question: how would you know if this bad place was withdrawal from meds or the reappearance of your pre-existing "bad place"? (Pre meaning before you began taking prescribed psychotropics.)
Why are you implying I'm throwing around labels? Do you think I never read anything about bipolarity? Do you want to enter a citations battle, where I cite studies on bipolarity? And which scientific truth? That mood regulator help regulate mood? I mean, it's their names, I saw the results, do you want citations on that?
Let’s not forget however that those support systems had (and still have) toxic attributes. They favored men, and put women and minorities in a subservient role. They tied you to family that may be abusive, or a dogmatic belief system. Kick that social structure out from under people, and what do you have left? An ever-changing and often overwhelming tapestry of less substantial and more poorly-defined relationships. Isolation as a replacement for conflict resolution. Therapy has not really caught up, nor is it even designed to address any of this.
Life is difficult enough that there are many psychological defenses in place - both at the individual and societal level - to keep us focused on our survival and not devote too many mental resources to considering underlying questions of motivation, purpose, or fairness.
Some people are in particular circumstances, or perhaps have certain personalities, such that those defense mechanisms aren't as strong, and once they step off the pure survival path, they experience a recognition of cold reality which can't be understood from the those who've never strayed from the survival path.
It's rational to reach many of the conclusions which mental ill people do. Not all, by any means. But I believe in some aspects of depressive realism, and I think many people who take their own lives are making a reasoned decision, as sad as that fact may be.
a key mechanism to develop growing up is trust and learning how to relate to others. i don't think "normal" growing up should keep us focused on survival.
or am i misreading you?
This is by design. Psychology is intentionally about the individual and when it occasionally does look at groups it tends to do so through the lens of how a group produces value for the individual.
Sociology is the study of collections of humans. It is intentionally about the group and when it occasionally looks at individuals it tends to do so through the lens of how an individual produces value for the group.
This is not too dissimilar from the study of finance (generally micro, focused on individuals or companies) vs economics (generally macro, focused on the relationships between companies or countries).
It feels like this is something that maybe good priests/churches used to do that accidentally got lost as society became more secular.
Certainly, and I could expound on this point at length, but suffice it to say that the elites of most long-lived world religions have had extensive experience, knowledge and wisdom in so-called "psychology" fields for millennia. In fact, as the State disestablishes religions, something must fill the vacuum, and in fact psych*y are used much in the same way as religion formerly was.
Psych*y is in fact a compulsory and State-Established Religion for most of us in the West, particularly in these United States, because of the coercive nature of the clinic and hospital system, the court-ordered treatments, the subsidized "medicine" drugs and practitioners, and so forth.
Most of us can tell you, even some atheists know, that psych*y is a shitty poor excuse for a religion, and no substitute for an actual faith practice, and the way the State foists it on us today is basically abuse.
But seriously there are some therapeutic interventions that are closer to what you describe. I worked in them early in my career. They tend to be (or are exclusively?) aimed at pediatric populations with a high level of need. But we would work in the home 2-3x a week with the child, parents, siblings, etc. we would do community outings to evaluate and work in that context, do school observations and teacher collab, etc. do parent training, relational work between parent/sibling/child, connect parents to therapy if necessary, case management and other services like snap, etc. The child was the “identified patient” but we were working with the entire family unit
As said it was generally unavailable unless you displayed exceptional need (eg your school was kicking you out because your behavior was so bad and your parents were putting you in respite care/considering residential treatment). It cost a lot. not nearly as much as residential but enough that no commercial insurance would pay for it. So if you got to that behavior level you had to go through the nightmare evaluation process of proving your child’s behavior was bad enough to qualify as functionally disabled to qualify for Medicaid entitlement because they’re the only ones that would pay. Even if you were under the income threshold for Medicaid and didn’t need the entitlement you still had to prove need for the service.
So I guess this is a long way of saying that there are alternative modalities to deliver therapy. There’s actually a ton of them. But in practice you’ll likely never see them because no one wants to fund them outside of the most extreme circumstances and even then it’s often hard to get new approaches off the ground. New approaches start in academia and this kind of stuff for adults doesn’t get grant funding afaik. Why bother, it’ll never happen outside of the research because there is very little public money for adult mental health services in most, if not all, states. Children get way more and still barely get enough.
So for adults you get the same old outpatient 45 or 60 minute psychotherapy, individual or group, where the only variance is the theoretical approach the clinician uses (which is increasingly “eclectic” aka “I don’t really do anything evidence based and just make it up as I go” but that’s a whole different issue). Or if your issues worsen you get inpatient for 3 days. If they worsen beyond that I hope you have continued access to insurance and social supports because then you’ll get a longer term residential placement. otherwise it’s often a shockingly quick road to homelessness or prison.
Psychiatry fits within what you described: individualized treatment, medication, etc. It's a branch of medicine after all, and it fits within the whole context of medical care as it is conceived currently (that is, brushing aside social context, community, etc)
Psychology is all about context, that's kinda its motto. A good therapist always considers the family, socioeconomic backgrounds, all the things you say it ignores.
Not what I said. I said they don't treat the family or the community. Psychology is typically an individualistic treatment of a single person (or a couple).
If you are interested in learning more I have found these two books to be good introductions to the topic:
- "Psychology, Subjectivity, and Society: An Introduction to German Critical Psychology" by Charles Tolman
- "Psychology from the Standpoint of the Subject: Selected Writings of Klaus Holzkamp" edited by Ernst Schraube and Ute Osterkamp.
The author does a fantastic job of summing up the big issues facing psychology and a lot of my own thoughts regarding the academic side of the social sciences in general. So very few people in the field seem to care about the basics of the scientific method (reproducible experiments, hypotheses that can be falsified, etc.) or of producing research that can really be applied in useful ways. And unfortunately so much of it seems to bleed over into pop science and business "coaching" these days, too.
if the sample is drawn only from, say, students from the same class at a particular boarding school, how likely are the effects to apply to the entire population of students?
But it's not like social science people decided that an n of 20 or 30 was a good number to use because that's conveniently what they likely had access to (roughly the size of an undergrad classroom) for field data. and they didn't come up with it anyway), this is a number you're going to find in chapter 1, page 3 or 4 of any introductory stats text.
Why do you think the teachers you have met are a representative sample of all teachers everywhere?
You: “Your statistical methods are flawed.
Me: “???”
When you’re a grad student you have to read a few methods and applications papers. When you’re a professor you have to stay on top of what matters in your field but you mostly attend conferences and seminars for that.
Other than that… we don’t read anyone’s work. Indeed nearly all research isn’t ever cited and the fraction of cited papers not in the “central methodology” category above which are actually carefully read is probably extremely low.
The average scientific field has hundreds of journals. In Econ there are five to ten which matter. It’s too time consuming to read more than a small fraction of the work that comes out even in my own sub-field. I would have thought math was even worse but I don’t know the field.
So, math papers are read, like blue prints, for building on top of them.
Psychology papers are, apparently, not the basis for anything.
Psychology, sociology, economics and other high level scientific forms have so many unknowns that it's extreamly difficult to verify if a claim is scientifically true so its not surprising to me that fraud is easier in these fields than others.
Insightful, funny writer who takes a really pragmatic view of his own field in a time of great upheaval. Can't recommend him enough.
> Plenty of these findings are interesting and some are useful (especially if you are a rich, lonely monkey).
You'll have to read the article for the context.
Modern meta-analysis has its roots in clinical and educational psychology, and now there's the lens focused on replicability and preregistration. If history is any guide, about 20 years from now the methods that come out of this will start to be applied widely and routinely in biomedical research and then elsewhere.
The useless fat in science isn't limited to psychology: there have been controversial articles all over the place about decreasing scientific returns for investments, and drowning out of innovation by incentivized noise. Sure, maybe there's less fat in some fields than others, but there's plenty of fat to go around.
What's maybe unique about psychology is how much outrage and exposure there is about it. Other fields might be in denial but the time will come.
Also, part of the reason we don't mourn the loss of fabricated or unreplicable studies is because the people who hung their hat on it continue to do so, burying their head in the sand. Everyone else probably was silently waiting for more evidence to come, and came it did, and then it was swept under the rug of self-correcting science.
Modern academics is sort of a marvel in how much bullshit it can absorb without consequence. It's like the The Blob of modern institutions.
>The second formerly useful proto-paradigm is something like “situations matter.” This idea maintains that people's contexts have immense power over their behavior, and the strongest version maintains that the only difference between sinners and saints is their situations. The most famous psychology studies of all time are “situations matter” studies: the Milgram shock experiments, the Asch conformity studies, the bystander effect, the Stanford Prison Experiment (since revealed to be much more of a scripted play than a study). The now-much-ridiculed “social priming” studies, like the one where you unscramble words about being old and then walk more slowly, are also “situations matter” studies. So are “nudges,” where tiny changes in situations bring big changes in behavior, like redoing the layout of a cafeteria to encourage people to eat more veggies.
Does anyone know any good situationist studies aside from the big names?
Two fakers collaborating might equally have conspired. Either way this is hilarious.
I think studying well defined and important things is... extremely important :) I think for example it should be possible to measure remission from depression.
I also think though that psychology could 'make philosophy out of its physics' (in an analogy with an experimental field like chemistry or material science), and form theories about happiness, well being, etc.. that are grounded in insightful philosophies. And then try to measure or make some progress and recommendations to guide the field (like, how should we define well being, how should we measure it, and what kind of interventions help it).
[1] before I get attacked on this: I do not say that there are no good therapists with CBT training - but I am confident most of them would still be very good even without the training or method.
Who cares if monkeys are paying for sex if people are killing themselves from depression? Are there not tons of psychological illnesses where progress could be made in new techniques to help people live their lives well? Maybe reduce the need for drugs?
Psychology might be too complex for the current scientific method. Millions of variables and not enough humans to control.
At one point the 10,000 hours rule was so popular that it almost became common sense. And it's bull. Ego depletion was so well known. And boom it's not replicable either. Is everything just food pyramid?
The real problem of the 10,000 hour rule is that it implis all the skills and professions are equally hard.
> Good/useful/valuable/important/positive-ROI science doesn't necessarily require everyone to know what the major discoveries are nor even care when 60% of studies fail to replicate.
Handful of reasons I feel this way:
- If I care deeply about exactly 10 of the 100 publications in my sub-field, and you care about a different 10, it may not matter much to either of us when 60 of them are later refuted. I may have not cared about those specific conclusions, already been skeptical about them, or have several other studies and my own unpublished results to maintain my confidence in the broader idea.
- While we all have great examples of dramatic upheavals in _other_ people's fields — pick your favorite of cosmology, genetic engineering, mathematics, etc. — when you're immersed in it, science is much more incremental, subtle, and complex. Congratulations! You've ventured on beyond the Dunning-Kruger effect. Scientific progress is not a series of miracles.
- Relatedly, I'm guessing most scientists are much more aware of the shortcomings in their own and their peers' research. Do keep this in mind while reading the perspective of an insider. Be skeptical, by all means, but not only of psychology.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-do-you-know/2020...
I find the irony in this context particularly rich.
The biggest difference between psychology, (alongsid its armed infantry counterpart psychiatry,) is that unlike math or physics or chemistry, which are all intrinsically descriptive, psychology is concerned with how to change behavior that has not yet happened. Not to describe phenomena that already exist but have not been encountered or formally described yet.
An eye for an eye.
I’m so sorry for psychology’s loss, whatever it is - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37315292 - Aug 2023 (94 comments)
Is it defamation to point out scientific research fraud? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37152030 - Aug 2023 (13 comments)
Harvard professor Francesca Gino was accused of faking data - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36968670 - Aug 2023 (146 comments)
Fabricated data in research about honesty - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36907829 - July 2023 (46 comments)
Fraudulent data raise questions about superstar honesty researcher (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36726485 - July 2023 (33 comments)
UCLA professor refuses to cover for Dan Ariely in issue of data provenance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36684242 - July 2023 (131 comments)
Harvard ethics professor allegedly fabricated multiple studies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36665247 - July 2023 (215 comments)
Harvard dishonesty expert accused of dishonesty - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36424090 - June 2023 (201 comments)
Data Falsificada (Part 1): “Clusterfake” – Data Colada - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36374255 - June 2023 (7 comments)
Noted study in psychology fails to replicate, crumbles with evidence of fraud - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28264097 - Aug 2021 (102 comments)
A Big Study About Honesty Turns Out to Be Based on Fake Data - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28257860 - Aug 2021 (90 comments)
Evidence of fraud in an influential field experiment about dishonesty - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28210642 - Aug 2021 (51 comments)
But if the author is trying to insinuate no meaningful progress in psychology was made in the last X years because of some twitter poll then that's doubtful -- scientists getting to the point they can scan neurons and reconstruct what you see through the activations.
I do agree that you could generate endless reams of pseudo-data about the human behavior by labeling and classifying tiny patterns, and that that's not very practical. But that doesn't invalidate the rest.
Perhaps one way to operationalize psychology would be to take a huge dataset, e.g. 1 million tinder profiles, and have a contest to identify the .1% that got married or something (and how long they stayed married for).
How about we don't "operationalize psychology". And how about we don't "operationalize psychology" by using an app meant to hook up singles and build chance encounters for love.
The mere knowledge that some of "us" will go to any lengths to manipulate psychology and make hidden adjustments "for our own benefit" smacks of the British Empire we left behind.
Or at least, that's a polite way to hint that "operationalizing psychology" is starting to sound like the 1940s, and the last resort is to link your 'psycho' thinking to the British Empire as a saving grace, as if that dead tree could cast a blanket over this 'lab monkey' nonsense.
Scanning neurons is neuroscience, not psychology. Given that pop psychology is pushing Jung around like he's still a recent discovery, then yeah, it hasn't progressed much.