Comment by skim_milk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skim_milk | Hacker News Reader

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I've yet to find a reputable, established psychology scholar that actually believes psychology is a serous science. The drug pushers, actuaries, and politics/industry folk do enjoy funding their pseudoscience and appointing their people to university, and it does drown out reasonable voices, but it doesn't seem like the real academic psychology scholars take them too seriously.

On the contrary, many old-timer traditional literature-focused e.g. Object Relational psychology schools are having a heyday having their insights shown to align with reality using all the bleeding-edge genetics and AI-powered data going around.

Every time this comes up, it feels like a fake controversy manufactured by people who are tech-savy enough to know how to find scientific papers on Google Scholar, but, curiously, have yet to discover the library, or the conference or... the college lecture hall. You know, places where people discuss literature?

Yes, psychology is just a literature, and... I'm not sure anyone seriously disagrees? Perhaps this is just the natural conclusion to having a field swamped by well-meaning but misplaced industry funds, laypeople can't cut through the bullshit on Google Scholar or find a librarian.

As a reputable Psychologist in the field, I disagree with your statement.

I will say though that psychology/neurosciences are more in the 'mapping out the problem' stage, due to the considerable complexity of the subject, and sources of variability. There is a difference between 'its serious science' and 'I take my finding seriously'. A healthy dose of skepticism is neccessary in your own research due to sampling heterogeneity.

>>I will say though that psychology/neurosciences are more in the 'mapping out the problem' stage, due to the considerable complexity of the subject,

I really like that turn of phrase...I tend to think we're still in that phase for most of the sciences as well. Be it medicine, physics, astronomy, mathematics(?) - we seem to think we have answers when we're still trying to figure out what questions to ask..

hell - just in my lifetime we've had quantum physics, black holes, gut flora, the sun is the power source for all life and god knows what else :-)

Its really interesting to see how things develop and as a lay person, it makes it a really interesting time to be alive :-)

> I've yet to find a reputable, established psychology scholar that actually believes psychology is a serous science.

I know some, and I think we could find some who write publicly.

> On the contrary, many old-timer traditional literature-focused e.g. Object Relational psychology schools are having a heyday having their insights shown to align with reality using all the bleeding-edge genetics and AI-powered data going around.

Do you have a link, this smells like bullshit too. In fact i'd put a lot of money on it being just as much bullshit as the research supporting drug prescriptions or talk therapy. Why am i so confident? We live in crazy times and no amount of "science" can control for this short of changing social, political, or economic structures themselves.

The book Hatred, Emptiness, and Hope by Otto Kernberg (a key Object Relational scholar) goes over all the latest advancements. Some people also are talking about Cloninger's phylogenetic origins of human consciousness and connecting it to these topics as well (e.g. personality organization from the Object Relationals - psychotic, borderline, neurotic)

Do you have a peer-reviewed source? I should have specified before-hand. If we're referring to "science" in any meaningful sense, of course.

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