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Comment by throw4847285 | Hacker News Reader

There is always somebody, especially on HN, who will comment on an article debunking pop psychology, "Well that makes sense because it's all bullshit."

I understand there is a bias towards the hard sciences here (which is somewhat odd, because the vast majority of commenters here do not practice any hard science). But I think there is extra skepticism of psychiatry and psychology (which get lumped together), and I wonder why that might be.

Well, I have a theory, but it relies on psychology and it isn't very charitable.

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All models are wrong. Some are useful.

Science involves doing experiments, collecting data, and testing hypotheses, i.e. claims are falsifiable.

We don't have the technology to collect the necessary data to be able to test hypotheses for psychiatric and psychological phenomenoms, and even many other non brain related medical claims about the human body.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

Seems pretty reasonable to take claims about unverifiable subjects with a grain of salt.

It is fine to be a sceptic.

However, if you were unlucky enough to suffer with a completely debilitating mental illness, and all you have to treat it are a series of therapies that appear to work for some people, would you not try them?

Trauma therapies like EMDR and CBT can save or transform your life. Maybe they work no better than crystal healing or prayers for some people, but if your life was derailed I bet you would try anything...

> would you not try them?

Would I have to give up on my scepticism to do so? Why?

If I was in distress, and if there was no well-proven treatment available, I'd probably have a go provided the therapy wasn't actually a scam or actively harmful. I'd probably even attempt to engage with it honestly and openly.

But I'd temper my expectations based on the lack of reproducable evidence.

> wasn't actually a scam or actively harmful

I mean people would even try those with enough distress. And to be fair a lot of surprising innovation comes from people trying those! But of course mostly they're a scam or actively harmful.

I only skimmed the wikipedia article, but it seems like it is missing emphasis on the biggest problem in soft sciences like psychology - the fact that a huge chunk of their data comes from self-reporting by subjects.

It's the equivalent of basing nutrition science on a Pew poll where people self-report their favorite food.

Sure, it's useful to know people's general preferences sometimes, but for science that data is junk.

Self-reported data is subjective, but when the very thing you are studying is the self-reported subjective experiences of people then it is actually the only data you should care about. Yes “I don’t feel depressed anymore” is a subjective statement but so is “I feel depressed, can you help me?” That specific example is a caricature of course, the data are usually much more specific than “do you feel depressed?”

The replication crisis has become a thought-terminating cliche. There is a lot of space between "this field suffers from methodological issues" and "it can be dismissed outright."

Also, falsifiability is broadly rejected as solution to the demarcation problem.

I honestly think a lack of grounding in philosophy of science leads people to draw the line between science and pseudo-science based on nothing but vibes. For example, I've seen people reject mainstream psychiatry as totally pseudoscience and then endorse evolutionary psychology, a field with a huge bullshit issue.

> For example, I've seen people reject mainstream psychiatry as totally pseudoscience and then endorse evolutionary psychology, a field with a huge bullshit issue.

Both of those have huge bullshit issues, that is the problem with such sciences you have to pick your poison and that guy just picked another than you prefer. Big things like stereotype threat turned out to just be bullshit, but you still see people believing in it since they want to believe in the idea rather than whats actually real.

Edit: Also almost everyone resorts to evolutionary psychology arguments when it suits them, such as why so many eats themselves fat etc.

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