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Comment by Octokiddie | Hacker News Reader

> Does it matter if psychologists have an incorrect understanding of neural evolution? One answer to this question is simple: We are scientists. We are supposed to care about true states of the world even in the absence of practical consequences. If psychologists have an incorrect understanding of neural evolution, they should be motivated to correct the misconception even if this incorrect belief does not impact their research programs.

The hallmark of an incorrect model in science is that it makes incorrect predictions about the natural world (experiment). What incorrect predictions has psychology made based on the incorrect triune-brain theory?

I'm going to guess zero, not because the model works, but because psychology has made no experimentally testable predictions based on it.

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> The hallmark of an incorrect model in science is that it makes incorrect predictions about the natural world (experiment).

Sure, if you are insular and only care about how it affects the field and other scientists.

Sometimes these incorrect models are incorrect in ways that are really attractive from a narrative standpoint. The hallmark of those models is to be used to spawn hundreds of pop science books that expound on those models in unfounded ways and push people into useless behavior, sometimes at a societal level.

Maybe scientists and psychologists aren't using the idea of a lizard brain in experiments and current theories, but I know there's at least some laypeople people that use it as a way to explain their behavior or make assumptions about other people's behavior, or to form their own ad-hoc explanations and models of behavior based on poor understanding of even what was previously reported to them. I would hazard it's actually more than some, and a lot of people do it, with this or some other poorly reported incorrect model of behavior or how the body works or how the world works.

Incorrect knowledge should be corrected. Leaving it it as it is leads to myriad problems, small and large, eventually.

Well said. Just because it may be hard to pin down the consequences of the wrong-but-attractive narrative, there probably are consequences, especially on the long term.

The "chemical imbalance" narrative with depression is also probably wrong: https://theconversation.com/depression-is-probably-not-cause...

Is it really so surprising that these simplistic narratives don't actually accurately describe how the brain works? We should be prepared to admit that the brain is complicated and we don't really know it's functioning at a fundamental level.

Psychology can barely make any predictions. This isn't a meaningless technicality like the not-to-scale diagram of atoms used in old textbooks. Correcting poor assumptions to find new models of understanding is still important in this field.

The goal of cognitive science is to basically build the foundation (the understanding of how the brain works) that psychology lacks and is a field that psychologists are actively contributing to.

Ultimately, psychology was created as a pragmatic branch of philosophy with the understanding that we would not know how the brain works for quite some time but that we could still do something of value and help people.

Not just psychology. Even the claims within this very paper are hard to test. Anything involving evolution is almost impossible to test. The "science" is mostly observational and descriptive and arrived at through logical guesses.

If all of "science" involved strict rigor to the "scientific method" we'd have none of the social sciences like anthropology or evolutionary psychology.

This paper is simply pointing out differences in view points.

I think the general idea in psychology is real though, the paper gets into details which is a bit pedantic. In fact the paper literally states that they are all in agreement that all brains evolved from a common ancestor. This would be the "reptile" and for sure common features in our brain such as serotonin stem from this "reptile" brain.

Psychology gets a lot of bad rep for the reproduction crisis, but evolution should largely be worse because we can't experimentally verify anything without time travel.

So it's not like this paper is about true science defeating pseudo science. It's all really speculative.

The biggest I’ve seen is that talk therapies don’t work well if an underlying sleep concern is not addressed. Sleep as the parasympathetic nervous system is predictable from a more primitive model whereas a cognitive - behavioral model assumes thoughts can drive recovery.

I think there's a good chance you are right, but academically-minded people have a tendency to hastily dismiss hypotheses that run counter to what they believe is a correct theory. I can imagine someone dismissing the idea that a psychological pathology is related to a neurological one because the latter is in the "wrong" part of the brain for the symptoms the former presents.

Most of psychology can't be ethically tested. It doesn't mean the entirely field is not empirically verifiable.

Is there a reasonable distinction between "it's not possible to test $X" and "it's not possible to test $X in any ethical way?"

Yes

edit: I was trying to jokingly reply "Yes {smiling-imp-emoji}" when I realized I've never seen an emoji on Hacker News before - looks like they get automatically removed!

Perhaps one distinction would be that ethics change across time and country. So it might be possible to run a test in 2020s UK that cannot be repeated in 2030s.

It means it hasn’t been verified, which means you can’t be sure a lot of it is useful at all.

Scientific rigor has it's limits. Certain fields need to make intuitive leaps of speculation.

For example the entire field of astronomy is basically unverifiable bullshit. It's all speculation. We make guesses on what's going on with the stars outside of our solar system from twinkling light that comes from light years away.

Any science to verify the claims made by astronomy with the amount of rigor you demand would involve light speed space ships to go to those stars and verify.

If we could do this I think you'd find a ton of astronomy would be flat out wrong.

Nonetheless the field is still useful and legitimate despite the high likelihood a lot of it is wrong and despite the fact we can't verify much.

That doesn't prevent modern researchers from using past data collected via less scrupulous means though. e.g. Pavlov's experiments

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