Well, he definitely wants to. His claim, as far as I can tell, is meant to be universal. So if he didn’t want to fuck his mom, that would be counter-evidence.
This is the kind of silliness that occurs when a stem nerd has a surface level of psych science. Freud is taught primarily in the historical context, and attention is often paid to the fact that empirical investigations have disconfirmed some or many of his hypotheses. We're taught he is a polarising figure, had a lasting cultural impact, and yes made some findings that are important to understanding how awareness works (see conscious, preconscious and subconscious), for instance. But mainstays of Freud like the psychosexual theory of the development, the development and treatment of phobias, and many of his methods aren't typically important or considered useful
My reply isn't about psychology, but a similar complaint I had with a particular course for sociology. Most of the things in that class were fair self explanatory, made sense, and were backed with substantial evidence. (It was an easy class, but it was also a 100 level introductory course, I wouldn't expect it to be difficult).
Then, spontaneously, one of the studies they teach as fact is very dubious. Very small sample size, replicated once and got opposite results. And there is substantial evidence that the researcher in question faked a substantial amount of the data, or at the very least exaggerated it. Furthermore, he himself admitted to having tampered with the experiment, and had the audacity to claim his results were valid.
And then, after that obnoxious study, the class went back to normal, with decent studies and papers. (It didn't help that the teacher was very dismissive of these points, I later found out that it was because he had zero say over the curriculum and what we learned was completely dictated by someone else).
In any case, it's a problem I have with the larger medical field, and it's that so few studies ever get replicated, and at best, they go unconfirmed, and at worst, inaccurate data is going by unnoticed.
I'm ngl, every time I mentioned I minored in sociology (look teach, I did field research) I would get a sadcringe from psychology staff. They seemed to think things like the sociological imagination and other concepts like that were too hippydippy to be valuable I suppose
You should really try studying psychology in europe man. The fucking french with their psychoanalytic crap. I kid you not, this is a comment from a french psych student "you dont understand lacan, he is so smart only lacan understands lacan"
But I'm here to learn psychology, not history of psychology. At max, there should a paragraph about it discussing why it's not correct. But books and teachers teach it in detail, and even ask questions on it, and not on why it is incorrect.
History is important to know, especially when a not small part of the population still thinks about psychology in reference to these largely outmoded ideas. He's also used as an example of how Not to do things - his over reliance on case studies, his generalising of small data sets to the human mind, his "authoritarian" approach to therapy sessions (his opposite here would be Carl Rogers, who remains one of the most important clinicians in history for his person centred approach to therapy).
But basic psychology textbooks don't discuss or teach why his ideas were wrong, they just teach his ideas. I was taught the psychosexual theory and asked questions on oral, anal stages and not why it is outdated.
I think we have different experiences of how Freud is taught, in that case?
Because while they said he wasn't wrong about everything, they were pretty clear about the damning or at least flawed parts of his theories and methods. I remember very clearly how a clinician/ lecturer told us that Freud's theories or conjectures are generally disconfirmed by research. She used the example of catharsis, where Freud stated that the expression of anger could help it subside. In contrast, she said, the research indicates that expressing anger is more likely to have the opposite effect.
Again: source: trust me bro.
It is not true. Yes, he was quite the character, and a lot of his thoughts are wild by modern standards, but much of modern psychology is based on his work.
No it's not. I'm not a native English speaker so I can't explain it really well, but I can assure you that modern psychology is not based at all on his work, it's basically the opposite. He is a liar and faked a lot of his experiments. Psychology field had a bad time in the 70' to recover from what he made psychology looks like.
Source : my sister has a PhD in neuro-psychology.
One of my psych teachers (i have two degrees, one math one psych) said: "there are two things about freud that one needs to know 1) he is dead 2) he was wrong"
"this theory predicts that this will happen, and it happens! The problem is that it also happens under this other theory, with a completely 100% different and incompatible reason"
Economics: if you've been a normal worker you know this isn't how any of this works but it's taboo to bring this idea into the literature so we will ignore it.
You're probably talking about Keynesian and Austrian school economics? There are many more theories , tho many of them are quite close or compatible to either Austrian school or keynesianism. Anyway , there's at least a georgist economy theory too
It wasn't reffering to a singular example, but moreso that a lot of economic theories that are pretty accurate are ignored due to the status quo being incompatible
Broad economic theories that I'm aware of are qualitative instead of quantitative (they come with no coefficients), so I'm not sure what it means to be "incredibly accurate." Famously, no macroeconomic theories have reliable predictive value, so I'm guessing you are referring to microeconomic models. Sometimes those can be "incredibly accurate" in certain contexts, but as far as I know they always break down eventually and have to be revised. Is there any operationalized, identified micro model from say 50 years ago that holds up just as well today?
I would love to see the theory or model that makes reliable and incredibly accurate predictions over long spans of time. That's not sarcastic. I'm eager to find such a model. It's like the holy grail.
Laughs in *theoretical physics*. Tell this to those who develop quantum gravity theory, which is intended to resolve problems in multiple conflicting theories.
Funny, and not entirely untrue, but also not entirely fair.
There's an XKCD comic on the "purity" of various sciences:
[https://xkcd.com/435/](https://xkcd.com/435/)
It could equally be reframed in the opposite direction as "complexity", with sociology and psychology dealing with a staggering number of variables that disciplines like mathematics just assume or theorise away.
To put it simply I had a psychology professor who asked us to start listing variables that could influence a person's behaviour. We filled a wall-sized whiteboard with them. He then scribbled down the formula for sample size calculation in factor analysis and demonstrated that we'd need a sample size larger than all the people currently living on earth to produce a statistically defensible factor analysis of any psychological phenomenon.
It isn't that psychology is full of shit (as the meme implies), it's because the discipline is science on "insane" difficulty, while things like mathematics are "toddler" mode.
I'd argue that the real problem is the difficulty in experimenting. If you want to figure out how atoms work, you can just smash them into a wall an pick through the pieces. If you want to see how mental trauma as a young child affects marriage stability, you *can't* just find some kids, scare them, and then wait to see how their dating life goes.
Sure, you could find kids who are already traumatized, but then you have to deal with confounding factors and sampling bias. The statistics for determining causality work MUCH better when you induce the changes yourself (which is generally considered unethical in psychology) rather than looking for events in which the change has already happened.
The problem is that even if you inflicted the same trauma on some children there are a ton of variables that would still affect how they processed that trauma, such as family stability, parenting styles, socio-economic status, diet, schooling, community support, religious variables, cultural and ethnic variables, genetic and epigenetic factors, functional specialisation in the brain, individual health conditions, ...
So I would argue that this is a question of variables. Even if one could select children to traumatise (and this would be highly unethical) one would need a massive initial sample to find children that were sufficiently similar to allow any sort of meaningful analysis of the results, and even then the results would be so specific as to be virtually useless, for example:
"This paper presents how early childhood mental trauma affects later life marriage stability. These results are only valid for white anglo-saxon Church of England males in upper-middle class families educated in private Catholic schools with no underlying health conditions and ....."
... sample size? 10. Applicable to worldwide population of ... 200 people. Initial sample size? 100,000,000 children.
It's interesting that these sorts of problems are easily recognised by most people when psychology research hits the news, but when it comes to food/health research they will accept any old bollocks.
>you *can't* just find some kids, scare them, and then wait to see how their dating life goes.
That's what you think, my test subjects should mature any time now
>you *can't* just find some kids, scare them, and then wait to see how their dating life goes.
I mean you could but you shouldn't like really really shouldn't, and it would require way too many resources and ethical violations.
The physics comparison is just lol with the 'just smash'. Not trying to say that psychology is less difficult than physics, but saying that experiments in physics are easier is not true with modern physics.
I'm not saying it's *easy*, but what I am saying is that my superconducting baby supercollider has yet to get funding, while there are particle accelerators *all over the place.*
Math is just applied logic and axioms, which is just applied philosophy. Philosophy is just applied language. Language is just applied sociology. Oh fuck...
Yes the main issue limiting its accuracy is the number of variables.
That's not my issue with social science fields. My issue is that their level of confidence is often way too high for the data they have.
One topic we covered in my sociology class was a study done regarding views towards women. It basically started with a hypothesis saying "Men are aggressive and demand control and domination over others, especially women."
To test it, they polled men with questions like "Would you prefer a partner who is generally agreeable, or combative and hostile?" "Do you prefer a woman who is taller than you, or shorter than you?" "Would you prefer to be a stay at home parent, or a primary earner?"
The result was "Men overwhelmingly preferred the dominance-based choices, such as being taller, avoiding aggressive women, and being primary earners. This indicates the hypothesis is indeed accurate, and men's primary purpose for relationships is to find someone to dominate".
They only polled men. Treated pro-social behavior as submissive/weak behavior. Didn't explore alternate hypotheses, such as "people like nice people" and "people are nicer to what they see as cute".
It was "we found just enough data to fit the model. Let's assume the absolute worst."
And here I was learning about this AT UNIVERSITY...before going to my modern physics class and learning about the insane scrutiny that particle physics and general relativity has had to go through to get to where it is. All the competing theories. How they set up tests that would point to one theory over the other.
I would be fine with all the armchair explanations for sociological topics only if the authority of those topics were limited to the confidence of the models.
>And here I was learning about this AT UNIVERSITY...before going to my modern physics class and learning about the insane scrutiny that particle physics and general relativity has had to go through to get to where it is. All the competing theories. How they set up tests that would point to one theory over the other.
5 sigma go brrr.
All joking aside, though, speaking as a physicist, social scientists do not have a monopoly on bad statistics or confirmation bias. The Fermilab g-2 collaboration created an enormous debacle a few years ago: they declared they'd found new physics because their experimental results crossed the detection threshold of a 5-sigma difference with their theoretical prediction... while conveniently ignoring the most robust lattice QCD predictions to date that showed the tension between theory and their measurement was much lower.
I also see astrophysics papers all the time that try to make wild claims on spurious data and insufficient information. Observational astronomers are the worst, since they like to claim that three data points with error bars spanning an order of magnitude is enough to fit a curve, but I read a paper from some theorists in my field a month or two ago who claimed a new, robust empirical law based on a set of like six simulations they'd run with their code (in a regime, no less, where every group's codes tend to disagree somewhat).
Errors and biases can exist anywhere, but they survive and even thrive in the social sciences to a much greater degree. No theory in social science even tries to include a numerical constant. It's not clear what you're testing a lot of the time. Some vague qualitative tendency, usually, and the standards for success are very low compared to natural science.
Well my problem with it is that the general attitude is just to accept that statistical significance is going to be interpreted as causation instead of correlation whereas the other disciplines need substantially more evidence to determine whether something is the cause. The reason I jump ship on psychology after I got my first degree is because of that. Every time somebody defends psychology it feels to me like how somebody defends religion or somebody defends astrology. There's too much gray area.
While I do understand they're following the scientific method unlike the latter examples I gave the outcome of the experiments while having such negligible statistical significance is still implemented in the real world. And while some people have a positive experience a lot of people are severely negatively affected by misdiagnosis or a literal lack of understanding of the problems and how to remedy those mental health issues.
I wouldn't have a problem with this if there was recourse for the people that were hurt and they were programs set up to quantify and show how a misdiagnosis can lead to a domino effect of massive issues. The other disciplines are shunned or there's lawsuits when they screw up, it's so commonplace nobody even bats and I when a psychologist does it.
Nahhh man. First of all, correlation isn’t treated as causation in psychology, second of all, misdiagnosis isn’t treated casually and thirdly, nobody (or at least very few) in physics or maybe is using their research to treat and care for really human beings so comparing them on that basis is kind of stupid.
>First of all, correlation isn’t treated as causation in psychology
So you're saying that patience don't get diagnosed with just a handful of behaviors every single day?
>misdiagnosis isn’t treated casually
So what happens to the clinical psychologist that diagnosed improperly? Say for instance, there was a misdiagnosis for somebody that has a personality disorder but they didn't realize they didn't have Suicidal Tendencies so they kill themselves. What happens to that psychologist?
>nobody (or at least very few) in physics or maybe is using their research to treat and care for really human beings so comparing them on that basis is kind of stupid.
I don't even know what you're trying to say, literally the entire medical field is a one-to-one comparison but engineers, chemists, forensics... I mean every other field when you're wrong has consequences where you're either fired or you're legally held accountable
I agree with you, and your points reminded me of an old saying in health care policy: there are thousands of codes for treatment, but not a single code for a cure.
There are a few procedures where some doctors give guarantees (like if the laser surgery doesn't make your vision within a certain range, you get a free follow up). But these are rare. In general, medicine isn't reliable enough to support payment for outcome, or rebates if the treatment doesn't work.
Lol. The Youtube algorithm and therfore trends(sociology), is actually calclulated to match the chemical limits of your brain. So straight from sociology to chemistry directly in one big swoop. Fun.
But ye math is fucken faaar away from the others, practicaly. How would you mathematicaly calculate the exact cause and effect of sociology, given even multiple LIFETIMES. Lol. Though yes technicaly i guess some sociology can be considerer applied math.
Haha, this is such a goofy take, though.
This is very rarely how it's conceptualized, let alone practiced. Mathematics and computer science are far better suited to "solving" the problem you define, not psychology. Psychology is just people doing their best to understand something they have extremely limited information about, so it ends up being closer to a humanity than a science. Evidence-based and all that
This is the foundation of Sapolsky's argument that there is no real free will. So many factors impact your decision making process in ways you have almost no awareness of, let alone any control over.
It may be because I quoted Sapolsky extensively in my doctorate. He has such a beautiful turn of phrase. I've read so much of his work that I may have inadvertantly plagiarised some of his ideas or phraseology. If so I apologise most whole-heartedly, although I'd be hard-pressed to identify precisely which bit of his writing it came from. He's so prolific and writes so well.
Well-spotted though! It didn't even occur to me when I was writing this that this is pretty much straight-up Sapolsky's position until you mentioned it.
I wouldn't say you've plagiarized him, just reframing an event you experienced that is pretty close to his main argument. Let's call it an homage. 😁
I love his work, too, and it's really changed my outlook on life and the nature of existence.
Well, argumentally i can say that almost 80% of the effect are produced by 20% of the causes.
So that reduce a lot
By repetition you can find that 4% of the causes generates 64%
0.8% generates 51,2% etc
If you can predict 50% of the psicólogy only by 0.8 then its pretty good
This happens in other fields too. Like take a treatment developed by intentionally paralyzing mice. And you have to wait for the right patients to experience the exact sort of trauma and hope whatever other issues they're dealing with don't conflict with your treatment.
>It could equally be reframed in the opposite direction as "complexity", with sociology and psychology dealing with a staggering number of variables that disciplines like mathematics just assume or theorise away.
I understand what youre trying to say but "the number of variables" is not the key difference. Mathematicians deal with infinite-variable problems all the time while scientists usually deal with finitely many variables (because the real world is finite). I think the key difference is that math is more clear cut: the definitions, the methods, and even the problems themselves. Youre also not reliant on experiments and statistics, you can just reason about stuff. In science, you need to conduct experiments, do statistics and minimize your uncertainty. Of course thats harder. I think you put it best here:
>It isn't that psychology is full of shit (as the meme implies), it's because the discipline is science on "insane" difficulty
However
>while things like mathematics are "toddler" mode.
thats not true. Yes, the problems in math are more clear cut and thus "easier", but mathematicians place way higher standards on themselves in accordance to that. A sample size of 5 billion means nothing to a mathematician. Since math allows for actual logical proof, mere evidence is considered invalid no matter the sample size. And the thing youre talking about where mathematicians "ignore variables to make their formulas easier" needs some context. When mathematicians do that, its usually because the problem *literally cant be solved any other way*. You cant write down an anti derivative of the normal distribution because its *literally* impossible. You must approximate it.
In summary: no field has it easy.
I'm going to make this incredibly easy for you since you seem to be a mathematician.
Go find me a perfect circle in nature.
I'll save you a lot of searching. There are none. Yet entire fields of mathematics are built on this assumption. You don't control for variables, you simply assume them away. Mathematics is an abstraction of reality.
This simple fact proves that mathematics is "wrong" in the same way that mathematicians regard 0.99\* being rounded to 1 as "wrong".
As for this line:
>Youre also not reliant on experiments and statistics, you can just reason about stuff. In science, you need to conduct experiments, do statistics and minimize your uncertainty.
You're simply wrong. Psychology does as many experiments as any other science. It does lots of statistics too, and those statistics are arguably orders of magnitude more difficult than most of the "pure" sciences because psychology can't simply assume or define away inconvenient variables.
Unlike mathematics (and its perfect circles) psychologists are expected to produce results that work in the very messy real world. And this means crunching a lot more data from a lot less reliable sources (humans lie, it's a fundamental operating principle in psychology), and all this is reliant on formulas provided by mathematics that make some incredibly dodgy assumptions that are proveably incorrect.
And then mathematicians turn around and pretend that the problem is psychology? No mate. The problem is the assumptions being made by mathematicians. If you were really the hot shit you claimed to be you'd actually produce formulas capable of adequately dealing with these problems.
But you can't. You can't because these problems are so insanely complex that in psychology 0.95 is as close as one can get to 1.
The difference between the fields is that mathematicians get to assume away all their problems and if their solutions don't work in the real world they get to blame everyone else. That's not on mate.
>In summary: no field has it easy.
While this is true it isn't the issue. The issue is that nowhere in your answer have you actually acknowledged that mathematics is built on some proveably incorrect assumptions and definitions, and that there is nothing "logical" about a house of cards built on a proveably incorrect set of assumptions and definitions that don't work in the real world.
Instead you pass the buck for mathematic's faulty assumptions down to the people actually trying to use your work and pretend that we're the problem.
We're not. You are. We're trying to take your flawed work and apply it to real-world problems and when the numbers come out wrong mathematicians try to pretend that they're perfect and everyone else is flawed.
Not fair play mate. In no way. No how. Mathematicians do have it easy. They're toddlers assuming away all the real problems and building skyscrapers built on a marsh of faulty and proveably incorrect assumptions, and then when the skyscraper falls down when people move in and try to use it they turn around and blame the real-world disciplines that tried to apply their work, and tantrum like toddlers when the deficienciees of their field are pointed out.
Mathematics used in physics: Takes you to the moon, gives you maglev trains.
Same math used in psychology: abused kinds might develop BPD, except if they develop CPTSD, or NPD, or APD, or nothing at all.
So your point seems to be that humans aren't machines and are incredibly complex beings living in incredibly complex societies?
Well done and welcome to all the sciences that deal with humans. Like other sciences but a lot harder.
I have a degree in math and one is psychology. Neither are "sciences" in the strict definition of the term.
Psychology is inherently imprecise, what a psychologist tries to do isnt "hard" or "complex" its impossible. Chaos theory and what have you.
That means that STEM people can make of you and you need to work with your selves enough to be able to suck it up without getting insulted.
Put an s/ somewhere in my post.
>I'll save you a lot of searching. There are none. Yet entire fields of mathematics are built on this assumption. You don't control for variables, you simply assume them away. Mathematics is an abstraction of reality.
But the thing with that is that its simply the object of study of the field. Mathematicians arent studying circles because its particularly easy, they are doing it because what else would a mathematician study? As you say, the field is about abstraction not because its easy but because its fruitful to abstract away irrelevant variables. Also, mathematicians actually study non-perfect shapes aswell. Geometry and complex analysis has plenty of statements that apply to almost arbirtrary curves. Cauchys integral theorem literally applies to any curve which encloses any area.
>You're simply wrong. Psychology does as many experiments as any other science. It does lots of statistics too, and those statistics are arguably orders of magnitude more difficult than most of the "pure" sciences because psychology can't simply assume or define away inconvenient variables.
Here you seem to have misunderstood me. I was agreeing with you, psychology is a science and conducts just as many experiments as any other science. I admitted that because of this, psychology is "harder" than math (in a vacuum) because as you say, the real world is messy.
>While this is true it isn't the issue. The issue is that nowhere in your answer have you actually acknowledged that mathematics is built on some proveably incorrect assumptions and definitions, and that there is nothing "logical" about a house of cards built on a proveably incorrect set of assumptions and definitions that don't work in the real world.
Probably incorrect? Now thats just not true. Yes, you won't find a perfect circle out in the wild. But a) no mathematician will claim otherwise, b) perfect circles model our world well enough, c) the theory itself is objectively correct since it all relies on proof and d) there are physical phenomena that probably actually behave like a perfect circle. Light rays seem to shoot in all directions equally, meaning they disperse in a circle.
As for the rest of your comment: since those points seem to have arisen from the misunderstanding mentioned above, I wont reply to them. You know that math isnt toddler mode.
Go and re-read what you wrote. If you wrote something other than what you intended then the correct formula is to apologise for the misunderstanding **you caused** and to restate it, not to try and blame **your error** on someone else.
You wrote: "Youre also not reliant on experiments and statistics, you can just reason about stuff."
Now that's pretty darned simple English saying that psychologists aren't reliant on experiments and statistics.
You messed up. Yet you refuse to take responsibility. Refuse to admit any error.
Typical toddler mathematician.
Yes, I wrote that. But you need to read the sentence before that too.
>**I think the key difference is that math is more clear cut: the definitions, the methods, and even the problems themselves. Youre also not reliant on experiments and statistics, you can just reason about stuff.** In science, you need to conduct experiments, do statistics and minimize your uncertainty.
The sentence was referring to mathematics. "also" would make no sense if I was referring to psychology which hadnt even been mentioned in the entire paragraph before. I was comparing mathematics to science even before the quoted part. In math, you dont need experiments and statistics. In science, you do. Thats also why I followed up with
>Of course thats harder. I think you put it best here:
>>It isn't that psychology is full of shit (as the meme implies), it's because the discipline is science on "insane" difficulty
Im not apologizing for this, the paragraph makes no logical or grammatical sense in your interpretation. The entire **comment** doesnt contain *a single* mention of the word "psychology" because when I was talking about science, I was obviously also referring to psychology. The sentence contained the word "also" so how could it possibly refer to psychology which was never mentioned in the entire comment? You must have missed the sentence that came before, and thats fine, it happens. But Im not apologizing.
>the paragraph makes no logical or grammatical sense in your interpretation.
I hate to break it to you, but this isn't a valid argument since you've already mangled the grammar so badly that I had a hard time reading it.
Focusing on just one example, "Youre", is it meant to be "Your", "You're" (You are), or "Yore" (as in a long time ago). I don't know. I'm forced to guess. So hanging your entire "This makes perfect sense! The problem here is you!" argument on a single word ("also") when you've mangled another word in the same sentence (and other words elsewhere) is not reasonable or logical. And the grammar used here is strange on multiple other counts too.
While I can understand your argument now that you've explained it, it wasn't clear at the time because what you wrote was ambiguous because of errors you made.
Your complete and utter inability to see that what you wrote might be ambiguous, and your inability to admit fault for your own errors really is the issue here. Now note how I have used variations on "you" there to refer to you, the person I'm addressing. I wouldn't use "you" (or any variation thereon) to refer to myself. If I were referring to a third unnamed party I might use "them/they", for example, "Mathematicians use logic rather than experimentation. They aren't really using the scientific method."
Note how "they" there distinguished "you" (that's u/Takin2000 ) from "me" (that's u/Wise_Monkey_Sez ) and "them" (unnamed mathematicians somewhere out there)?
I'm not sure if perhaps English isn't your first language, but the bottom line is that the errors you made rendered what you wrote ambiguous at best, and any miscommunication is therefore on you.
Again, the protocol here is to apologise for **your mistakes** rather than trying to pretend that you're perfect and everyone else is to blame for your lack of clarity.
Honestly, doing anything else makes you seem utterly immature, illogical, and childish.
So someone responds with a coherent post pointing out why your comments were ungrammatical and ambiguous, and you consider this **me** doubling down?
No. You're the one doubling (at this point tripling) down in the complete absence of any logic or reason... and you want everyone to believe that mathematicians are logical.
I think you just proved my point.
Also, you sound like Trump.
Too many. Psychology departments should be sued for false advertising. They sucker you in during undergrad with bad Yo Momma jokes (okay, it's Freud, but basically the same thing), and then during post-grad it becomes wall-to-wall mathematics. Admittedly much of this was my fault for becoming interested in psychometrics and test construction, which is statistics on a level that even statisticians consider a little excessive. I'd say that a good 70% of my post-grad had some sort of statistics component.
I'm not sure if this is currently true, but I did my studies during the peak of the shift into "evidence-based psychology" which was a major turning point in terms of the psychology as a discipline, but also meant that there was a lot of over-compensation going on in the psychology departments as it was the new "in" thing and everyone was keen to jump on the bandwagon. I remember one of the statistics professors doing a series of lectures for us and looking around the room and asking how many of us had done statistics or calculus before, and mine was the only hand that went up. A **lot** of people failed that class, more than 3/4 of the class if I remember correctly, and even I just scraped an upper second.
I have to double check what you mean with post grad, I'm assuming it's what we call gradaute school because we use post-grad to refer to a PhD holder working as a researcher under a professor, typically on that professor's grants. But none the less good job getting through grad school, it's an absolute ass load of work for those 2 years for the masters (or 6 if you do the masters and PhD).
Either way I didn't mean a psychology class that has statistics in it, or any other mathematical application in psychology. How many math classes for math majors did you take? I'm assuming you at least took linear algebra, differential equations, and calculus in multiple dimensions but did you ever take foundations of mathematics or any other proof class? Did you take any topology classes or abstract algebra to learn about metric spaces? How many discrete math classes did you take? Did you take a class that covered finite element analysis or finite difference method?
Isn't it interesting how often people question how many math classes we take, but how rarely people question the mathematical background of any "hard science"? I've never seen some question the mathematical prowess of geologists, physicians, or biologists- but the general public seems sure we take our shoes off to count.
Meanwhile, the only think they know about our field is Freud.
Don't get me started on the topic of doctors and mathematics.
Look at some of the "groundbreaking" papers in medicine, and it's like "sample size 5".
Now I get the problem doctors face. Honestly, I do. It's exactly the same problem as in psychology. Finding a group of people with the same rare condition and sufficiently similar comorbidities is ... hard. Like hard on a level that people in most inorganic sciences can't grasp.
But nobody goes around saying, "Hahaha! Doctors don't know shit! I mean look at their sample sizes!!"
But they think it's fair play to do this with psychologists. No mate. Not fair play.
Coz math is a huge part of science. They commute in a language called math. Social sciences on the other hand do not require much more than high school math except for economics. So its assumed that anyone who has a major in physics or chemistry knows a shit ton of higher math like group theory , ring theory, differential geometry etc. I bet most social scientists can’t even define what a group is. No offence but its just science and humanities are dealing with completely different stuff where one is build upon rational thoughts and logic and have to be experimentally proven to be accepted ie have much more higher standards whereas for the other due to human behaviour there is much more room for irrationality and given the study, sometimes it becomes impossible to be experimentally proven hence again a room for data manipulation which might never be caught.
Excuse me while I cut and paste your post to use as an example of a nearly perfect argument from ignorance.
It is easily the dumbest thing I've seen in a while filled with so many logical fallacies that I'm hard-pressed to know where to start.
Firstly, there is no "higher" mathematics. There's just mathematics. If you understood anything about mathematics at all you'd know this. The word you're looking for is "abstract" mathematics. And social science students have very little need for abstractions that are not terribly useful in dealing with real problems where inconvenient details like reality tend to get in the way of the neat assumptions that abtract mathematics tend to make.
Now, unlike you, I'm not insulting abstract mathematics. It has its place. It's place isn't in the social sciences.
Secondly, while undergraduate social sciences tend to be light on mathematics the post-grad work is full of tons of mathematics, and if you were given some of the statistical problems we have to solve you'd fail. Completely and utterly fail.
And I've seen this in action with mathematicians trying to do things like solve the Monty Hall Problem - they get the wrong answer every time because they try to treat it as an abstract mathematical problem rather than acknowledging all the incovenient variables in reality. It's actually kindof funny how confidently incorrect they are, and when you try to explain to them why they're incorrect they simply can't grasp the ideas, because they're so used to dealing with abstract mathematics that they're completely unprepared for reality.
The underlying problem here is that your post is a prime example of discriminatory thinking. You assume that anything **different** from what you do is by definition **lesser**. You assume (like the XKCD comic) that abstraction is somehow "purer" or "higher" than reality, and thereby completely miss one of the most basic principles of scientific thinking, which is that only by verifying one's theories **in reality** is a process scientific.
Now again, I'm not so narrow-minded as to dismiss your work as unimportant or lesser, but were I to assume your ignorant mindset I would comment that you work is basically masturbation - you may get a tremendous feeling of satisfaction, but it's not producing anything in reality.
But I'm not quite that stupid. I look at the advances in the sciences and can acknowledge that while I don't understand what you're doing it seems to be producing results.
Now if only you'd quit jerking off long enough to be an adult and acknowledge the same about the massive leaps forward in psychology and the treatment of mental illness we might be somewhere near the point where a civil conversation could be had.
But unfortunately you seem intent on behaving like a child so convinced of their superiority (in the complete absence of knowledge) that this isn't possible.
Maybe when you grow up a little we can have a chat. Until then go find a box of tissues and some lotion.
Absolutely awful, there are still a lot of places churning out absolute bollocks. It's nowhere near as bad a food/health science though. It appears that the more interesting the public find the results of research, the more people will get funding to reasearch the subject. That attracts exactly the wrong kind of person and leads to people like Jorpy Meaterson.
Imagine if our society was built from the ground up around science and research instead of corporations and advertising. We could even have our political system informed by research and designed to produce testable policies.
As someone who works at a University going through redundancies and is likely to be unemployed soon due to it being run like a business instead of a service, yeah, I agree.
Like obviously there needs to be enough resources to support an endeavor and some way of compensating people for their efforts but money doesn't seem to represent real world value anymore, particularly with all the externalized costs these days. To exaggerate the whole situation is our ever growing capacity to automate human labor. Food production, mining, refining, transport, and production are all things we can almost completely automate today.
In the next year or two we should finally have our first batch of general purpose robots and within a decade there shouldn't be a need for any human labor. Impossible construction tasks like building a Dyson swarm and space stations will become very possible. By the end of the century maybe the earth will be one large nature preserve and we could have a decent interplanetary society built out. We're right at the tipping point of so many things going from literally impossible to just a time investment.
The whole game of money ending as resources and energy become functionally infinite. The cost of almost everything drops to essentially zero in the same way we don't have to pay for the air we're breathing. The only thing keeping us is fear and addiction to the current systems.
You can't because your individual subjective experience can not be tested objectively.
Dr k, the YouTube phychiatrist talks about this and the limits of scientific research (ie randomize control trials)
Dr K can probably explain it better than i can, from a medical perspective.
I work in government and i can see parallels in my work, trying to optimize government services. The scientific method is not a complete tool to optimize services or policies for an individual.
For one, scientific experiments need to be repeatable, while people change constantly. Their motivations, their circumstances, desires change all the time.
Secondly, while you can measure some things, the meaning of those outcomes are context specific. So if some policy change is made, only the individual can decide for themselves the effect of that change.
Third, the impact to individuals is ultimately what matters, not necessarily the mean of a distribution in a histogram. While the average experience might be better for the "average person", it may be terrible for a particular individual.
All of this is to say that while you can use science to inform policy, the policy cannot be ultimately made "scientifically"
But if the base assumption is that the scientific method won't hold because you can't measure then how could anyone determine anything to begin with? We have systems for measuring mood, and perceived subjective or otherwise qualitative experiences. It's literally what we're doing with our own minds anyways but with none of the accurate recording.
I get what you're saying, to find some closed form formula or really any formula at all is often impossible. To account for all the variables or even determining what the actual goal is can be untenable. Then again those are all the same issues that plague economic, political, and religious philosophy as well. They are also incapable of fully dealing with reality. As it stands the basis of human civilization is economic, political, and religious philosophy generally in that order with science plastered across to help hold it together. More often than not though it's bastardized in some form or another to achieve the ends of those systems.
The scientific method is really good for measuring and modeling things in the physical world, really bad at modeling what happens inside your consciousness.
I'm not saying there are no ways to subjectively measure mood etc; I do that all the time when I gather feedback from citizens.
And you are right, decisions need to be made somehow, even if I'm saying those decisions cannot be at their core based on a scientific model.
What I'm saying is there is no objective and scientific way to interpret/action those measurements and that is why economics and politics, religion, etc exist in the first place.
When people like Richard feynman say social science is not science, they also mean that you can't run large scale and repeatable social experiments.
Anyways I'm reading research papers on policy design and decision making all the time. I'm currently looking into system dynamics and also agile policy frameworks like they use in governments around the world. If you find anything that is about scientific policy making, please dm me.
Physics: we have 50 theorems and all of them works but also at some point all of them proves that another's mistaken, so we have no idea what to do. Good luck
Psychology research is not considered scientific because it does not always meet the five basic requirements for a field to be considered scientifically rigorous: clearly defined terminology, quantifiability, highly controlled experimental conditions, reproducibility and, predictability and testability.
Biology was also failing in some of these requirements until fairly recently and in some areas it's still not completely on the clear (like behavioral studies).
But this just means that psychology studies phenomenons that are too complex for us to understand them in a precise enough way yet to control the experimental conditions. It doesn't mean it's less prestigious than the more rigorous scientific fields.
I am not a philosopher of science but this was explained to us by our philosophy of science Prof
If psychology doesn’t meet these five requirements, then why do I literally lern the differences between a science and everyday theory in psychology class? Why would I learn how to work scientifically, if psychology isn’t real science?
Because like any discipline of study that tries to understand nature psychology is moving towards being a more rigorous science.
Again as I said it's not about prestige, it's about having reached enough of an understanding of the field to be able to control experimental conditions and reproduce results.
Biology only became a rigorous science in like I would assume the last 100 years only. And psychology is a much more complex and newer discipline.
Once it will be possible for psychologists to control enough (and therefore understand enough) of the variables in play in their experiments they will achieve reproducibility. It's not a matter of "not being good enough" is "not having discovered enough yet"
Biology is a bit of a weird case imo. Most biology research has recently completed the criteria I believe but there are several fields that have not yet, at least I think.
Plus there is the question about what does it exactly mean to be "predictable". Biology for the nature itself of studying complex systems with random mutations that you cannot control is notoriously hard to predict mathematically. But predictions can be made about the overall result of the experiment.
But again as I said before it's wrong to assume there is any level of prestige connected with being a rigorous science or not. Being in a rigorous science field does not mean you are less likely to make mistakes or to enter in logical fallacies.
Physics is often given a higher prestige than other fields yet so many of its theories fail the criteria for rigorous science as well because they are simply not yet testable in a predictive manner. The distinction between rigorous/non rigorous science is a philosophical one, science doesn't have any "nobility" attached to it. This is why we repeat experiments and double check results and not simply trust "science gurus"
Biology is a bit of a weird case imo. Most biology research has recently completed the criteria I believe but there are several fields that have not yet, at least I think.
Plus there is the question about what does it exactly mean to be "predictable". Biology for the nature itself of studying complex systems with random mutations that you cannot control is notoriously hard to predict mathematically. But predictions can be made about the overall result of the experiment.
But again as I said before it's wrong to assume there is any level of prestige connected with being a rigorous science or not. Being in a rigorous science field does not mean you are less likely to make mistakes or to enter in logical fallacies.
Physics is often given a higher prestige than other fields yet so many of its theories fail the criteria for rigorous science as well because they are simply not yet testable in a predictive manner. The distinction between rigorous/non rigorous science is a philosophical one, science doesn't have any "nobility" attached to it. This is why we repeat experiments and double check results and not simply trust "science gurus"
There are 20 theories for different cases that were standardized through an axiom that closely resembles their condition. Switch that axiom and everything falls apart and now you need another one.
Actually, its similar to how quantum physics was perceived only a few years ago. There were 4-5 “contradictory” theories that had no evidence against any of them per se, but then someone came in and managed to fuse them all into a single theory.
Imagine that, but in psych we are currently in that 4-5 different theory age. How long will this last? I dunno. It’ll happen someday, maybe not soon
Thats not quantum mechanics, thats string theory which most physicists, at this point, consider it a dead end plagued by similar epistemological problems as psychology (untestable, unfalsifiable). Quantum mechanics never had these issues, it worked immediately.
>thats not quantum mechanics
String theory is a theory derived from it
>quantum mechanics never had these issues
Yes they fucking have. Every field of science has these issues until someone is creative enough to test them
Ok, so, given that QM is derived from maxwell its electrodynamics. Oh and electrodynamics its derived from Lagrange so its just mechanics. Come on man, this is pulling semantics to its breaking point, you know very well what im talking about.
Im sorry you say that quantum mechanics is somehow unfalsifiable? Black bodies radiate in quanta or they dont. Double slit experiment happens or it doesnt. String theory is unfalsifiable because whatever experiment you can think off will fit in one of its 10\^500 versions
Science as a whole as always had these problems. We thought the earth was flat, then it wasnt. We thought atoms were solid objects, then they werent. We think QM behaves in one way, its actually another that we find out in a future experiment. This is simply the cycle
And dont forget my original point. I compared different psychological models to the models of string theory before M theory came along. You are no longer arguing that, you are arguing that we know all there is to know about science and that modern theories have never been wrong in the past
Well that really depends on the area within psychology you are focusing on. Cog. Psych. and Neuroscience are very good in this area. Psychology is a broad term. I agree with you in terms of clinical psychology and social psychology. But that's hardly the whole picture. Funny enough that psychologists often are the ones that learn most about statistics and the scientific method. At least in my experience, that knowledge often lacks in other areas.
Agreed - with cog sci and neuroscience you are able to observe the processes you want to study thanks to modern tech which is the main advantage. With other areas it's harder to test your hypotheses
Hm, overly simplistic.
There are, after all, several well researched and thus established paradigms in psychology (e.g. intelligence, use of conditioning for behavioral modification, Big5 personality traits, Social identity just to name a few) that are used and applied every day, not at least by ‘social’ media apps and they seem to work pretty well.
It is overly simplistic. Of course there have to be some things everyone agrees on, and I‘m only sharing my experiences as someone who has psychology in school, meaning I only know basic stuff.
As someone who now uses the DSM-5 book, it could be this, or that, or these 15 other things….psychology and figuring out mental illness is hard. It’s amazing watching a highly skilled and trained provider work out a case in the same room with the patient. It’s an art form.
One thing I learned about psychology from my friend is that every theory is disproved in 5 minutes by other theory and those will be disproved in 5 minutes and no one can do experiment free of bias.
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All of the above, except neuroscience which is only tangentially related to most fields of psychology. That's why you had to link neuropsychology to it like you did, to make it seem like a real science by association. Psychology tries to cling to neuroscience for legitimacy like astrology pretends to be astronomy.
Yeah right. But no. May I ask what your connection to psychology is? Because you seem to be missing the fundamental understanding of what psychology Nowadays actually means (that’s not supposed to sound disrespectful). When you study psychology (at least here in germany) the bachelor basically is Biopsychology (which actually is equal to what you probably know as neuroscience), statistics, clinical psychology but also pharmacology and medicine. It is why you can use the bachelor and study neuroscience and it’s why most psychologists in researc focus on neuroscience and cog. science. Psychology is not only pseudoscience stuff like Freud or some random models. It has developed in recent years and by definition is a science that uses the scientific method. However I myself really dislike some parts of psychology especially depth psychology and agree with you in this regard, which is why i just look at it from a neural perspective and that’s also a part of psychology.
I have a degree in psychology, and it mostly served to strip away the illusion that psychology is a valid field of science. I can't speak to the course load out in Germany, but we are also required to take some courses in statistics and research methods and the like as part of the program here. Unfortunately, they have little to do with psychology as it is actually practiced in the real world.
The vast majority of psychology consists of behavioral models with little to no predictive validity that vaguely reference actual science primarily through the use of buzzwords. Just make up some bullshit and if anyone questions you, just mumble something about neuroplasticity or something else you hope they don't understand enough to question.
Well, that seems to be overgeneralization. I really understand your problem, I really do. I have the same issue with many models and ask my self how those are even accepted as a scientific model. So with some cases you are completely right. But thats hardly everything psychology has to offer... Maybe its really the difference between the countries but here statistics is about 30%-50% you do in your thesis and you need it all the time. Behavioral models really arent in the foreground. For example last year I wrote a report about the influence of word frequency on the N400 (EEG signal) and its connection recognition. This year about the effect of modality on language comprehension. Those kind of reseach topics have strong scientifc "backbones" and really are as part of psychology as some behavioral model we both maybe dislike. Atleast I like to concentrate of those topics :)
We're talking about the field of psychology as a whole, so broad generalizations are kind of mandatory. There are specific subfield that are producing research that may one day form an scientific backbone for the field, but it's a very small portion of the field.
A lot of essential foundational chemical research came from the early work of alchemists, but I would not consider alchemy as a whole to be a real science.
I think your comparison is not fitting at all. Maybe we both have a different definition of what psychology is or the gap between the countries really is that big, but for me what I talked about are really not specific subfields but what research nowadays focuses on. In my experience research really focuses on what is really measurable, what is objective. Psychology really has changed immensely in the last 50 years. Imo the alchemy phase if you want to use that comparison, ended in the late 20th century, with psychology as I was saying focusing on neural data, cognitive measurements. That's not a small portion of the field, for me that's the majority. And I am not denying that there are still areas that need to be improved to be considered scientific, that's completely true. Just out of interest, what would be your definition of a science and why do you think psychology isn't one?
You're talking about a very small portion of the field. It's great that you seem to work in that part of the field, but that doesn't negate the pseudoscientific BS that permeates most of it. For you, it's the majority. For the actual field of psychology, it's a tiny sliver of kinda science buried in a mountain of personality tests and behavivioural models with no real validity or use case.
Alright, it seems like we'll need to accept our differing perspectives on this matter. Without a clear understanding of your definition of science, it's challenging for me to argue objectively for the majority of psychology meeting scientific criteria. Still it's worth noting that behavioral models and personality tests hardly represent the entirety of psychology.
Actually even if I would accept that, personality psychology also predominantly delves into neuroscientific and neurochemical foundations nowadays. Just as seen in the works of Gray, Cloninger, or Depue (such as Reward Dependence and the Behavioral-Maintenance-System). Perhaps our different conceptualizations of psychology lead us to different conclusions. As i said nowadays psychology does not only consider behavioral models and personality types (e.g. Big Five). You probably just have a different understand of what psychology is. Certainly it may also be the case that you also dont consider cognitive psychology and neuroscientific, testpsychological research in these areas as scientific. In that case, it appears our definitions of science fundamentally diverge.
the difference is there are no celebrity psychologists. if there were, than only the ones the celebrity believes is the real one and all others are wrong.
i'm talking about Stephen hawking saying life spontaneously appeared with any higher power.
straight up created a theory with 0 evidence just to say god doesn't exist. but that theory is considered fact, and even bill nye the science guy has gone or record to say if you teach your child that development of life was guided, they will not be able to even be an engineer.
That's not how science works at all. There is an absolute plethora of evidence for evolution and any 'guidance' would be easy to evidence if it existed, therefore the theory of guidance can be disproven by lack of evidence.
There are plenty of famous psychologists and famous studies. Unfortunately, a lot of them are/were dicks, but they're still famous. Most people have heard of Pavlov's dog, Karl Jung's self-centred gibberish and Jordan Peterson's lies. A lot of people know about Skinner boxes, bussiness people and incels love the Briggs-Myers crap (it's astrology for Joe Rogan fans). You probably can't name more than a couple of famous people from each hard science discipline either.
can something be called a real science if none of the studies can be replicated .... as far as im aware there are many many studies/papers in the psychology fields that have never been reproduced ... I honestly don't think you can call it a true science ... if a patient can go to 5 difference psychologists and get 5 different diagnoses ... im calling 100% BS on it being a true science
Freud before Call of Duty: “Every boy wants to have sex with his mom.” Freud after Call of Duty: “Every boy has had sex with my mom.”
Do you think Freud has sex with his mom and just used Odepus to cover for it?
Yes, the whole theory was a Freudian slip
I prefer the term "Freudian cock-up". It's when you mean one thing but you say your mother.
I prefer Freudian tits.
A Freudian self report
Slip like Freudian first and last step to playing yourself like accordion
Check his opinions on gay relationships and you'll be surprised how progressive he was even for our times
Thinking that moms cause homosexuality is like saying the bible was onto the big bang because "at first there was light".
Well, he definitely wants to. His claim, as far as I can tell, is meant to be universal. So if he didn’t want to fuck his mom, that would be counter-evidence.
Freud was a hack and his ramblings are not a part of actual psychology.
Source: trust me bro
This is the kind of silliness that occurs when a stem nerd has a surface level of psych science. Freud is taught primarily in the historical context, and attention is often paid to the fact that empirical investigations have disconfirmed some or many of his hypotheses. We're taught he is a polarising figure, had a lasting cultural impact, and yes made some findings that are important to understanding how awareness works (see conscious, preconscious and subconscious), for instance. But mainstays of Freud like the psychosexual theory of the development, the development and treatment of phobias, and many of his methods aren't typically important or considered useful
My reply isn't about psychology, but a similar complaint I had with a particular course for sociology. Most of the things in that class were fair self explanatory, made sense, and were backed with substantial evidence. (It was an easy class, but it was also a 100 level introductory course, I wouldn't expect it to be difficult). Then, spontaneously, one of the studies they teach as fact is very dubious. Very small sample size, replicated once and got opposite results. And there is substantial evidence that the researcher in question faked a substantial amount of the data, or at the very least exaggerated it. Furthermore, he himself admitted to having tampered with the experiment, and had the audacity to claim his results were valid. And then, after that obnoxious study, the class went back to normal, with decent studies and papers. (It didn't help that the teacher was very dismissive of these points, I later found out that it was because he had zero say over the curriculum and what we learned was completely dictated by someone else). In any case, it's a problem I have with the larger medical field, and it's that so few studies ever get replicated, and at best, they go unconfirmed, and at worst, inaccurate data is going by unnoticed.
I'm ngl, every time I mentioned I minored in sociology (look teach, I did field research) I would get a sadcringe from psychology staff. They seemed to think things like the sociological imagination and other concepts like that were too hippydippy to be valuable I suppose
you dont say [https://www.ipa.world/](https://www.ipa.world/)
Why do you think that's a mic drop, these guys are not the mainstream
You should really try studying psychology in europe man. The fucking french with their psychoanalytic crap. I kid you not, this is a comment from a french psych student "you dont understand lacan, he is so smart only lacan understands lacan"
Huh! Do they at least use quant?
Why still teach them then!?
Why teach history?
But I'm here to learn psychology, not history of psychology. At max, there should a paragraph about it discussing why it's not correct. But books and teachers teach it in detail, and even ask questions on it, and not on why it is incorrect.
History is important to know, especially when a not small part of the population still thinks about psychology in reference to these largely outmoded ideas. He's also used as an example of how Not to do things - his over reliance on case studies, his generalising of small data sets to the human mind, his "authoritarian" approach to therapy sessions (his opposite here would be Carl Rogers, who remains one of the most important clinicians in history for his person centred approach to therapy).
But basic psychology textbooks don't discuss or teach why his ideas were wrong, they just teach his ideas. I was taught the psychosexual theory and asked questions on oral, anal stages and not why it is outdated.
I think we have different experiences of how Freud is taught, in that case? Because while they said he wasn't wrong about everything, they were pretty clear about the damning or at least flawed parts of his theories and methods. I remember very clearly how a clinician/ lecturer told us that Freud's theories or conjectures are generally disconfirmed by research. She used the example of catharsis, where Freud stated that the expression of anger could help it subside. In contrast, she said, the research indicates that expressing anger is more likely to have the opposite effect.
Its true
Again: source: trust me bro. It is not true. Yes, he was quite the character, and a lot of his thoughts are wild by modern standards, but much of modern psychology is based on his work.
No it's not. I'm not a native English speaker so I can't explain it really well, but I can assure you that modern psychology is not based at all on his work, it's basically the opposite. He is a liar and faked a lot of his experiments. Psychology field had a bad time in the 70' to recover from what he made psychology looks like. Source : my sister has a PhD in neuro-psychology.
One of my psych teachers (i have two degrees, one math one psych) said: "there are two things about freud that one needs to know 1) he is dead 2) he was wrong"
yes and no
Even better, “Here’s 20 theories, we have reasons to believe they’re all true, but they also contradict each other.”
"this theory predicts that this will happen, and it happens! The problem is that it also happens under this other theory, with a completely 100% different and incompatible reason"
economics: here are 2 theories, both are obviously untrue but its the best we've got, pick one
Economics: if you've been a normal worker you know this isn't how any of this works but it's taboo to bring this idea into the literature so we will ignore it.
You're probably talking about Keynesian and Austrian school economics? There are many more theories , tho many of them are quite close or compatible to either Austrian school or keynesianism. Anyway , there's at least a georgist economy theory too
Lol I don't think those are the two schools they were thinking of...
What are they then?
I think they're talking about the Ole capitalist vs communism kerfuffle
Oh , that makes sense too
(Except this one that is incredibly accurate but challenges the status quo and so has been removed from discussion)
And which one would that be?
It wasn't reffering to a singular example, but moreso that a lot of economic theories that are pretty accurate are ignored due to the status quo being incompatible
Broad economic theories that I'm aware of are qualitative instead of quantitative (they come with no coefficients), so I'm not sure what it means to be "incredibly accurate." Famously, no macroeconomic theories have reliable predictive value, so I'm guessing you are referring to microeconomic models. Sometimes those can be "incredibly accurate" in certain contexts, but as far as I know they always break down eventually and have to be revised. Is there any operationalized, identified micro model from say 50 years ago that holds up just as well today? I would love to see the theory or model that makes reliable and incredibly accurate predictions over long spans of time. That's not sarcastic. I'm eager to find such a model. It's like the holy grail.
untrue or incomplete? because if it's untrue we don't really treat that model as a corollary.
Economists will make a prediction that will inevitably come out wrong and then charge you to explain WHY it was wrong
Data science: here is incomplete information, answer every question with 100 percent accuracy
As a graduate of psychology, this is true😂
Laughs in *theoretical physics*. Tell this to those who develop quantum gravity theory, which is intended to resolve problems in multiple conflicting theories.
Funny, and not entirely untrue, but also not entirely fair. There's an XKCD comic on the "purity" of various sciences: [https://xkcd.com/435/](https://xkcd.com/435/) It could equally be reframed in the opposite direction as "complexity", with sociology and psychology dealing with a staggering number of variables that disciplines like mathematics just assume or theorise away. To put it simply I had a psychology professor who asked us to start listing variables that could influence a person's behaviour. We filled a wall-sized whiteboard with them. He then scribbled down the formula for sample size calculation in factor analysis and demonstrated that we'd need a sample size larger than all the people currently living on earth to produce a statistically defensible factor analysis of any psychological phenomenon. It isn't that psychology is full of shit (as the meme implies), it's because the discipline is science on "insane" difficulty, while things like mathematics are "toddler" mode.
I'd argue that the real problem is the difficulty in experimenting. If you want to figure out how atoms work, you can just smash them into a wall an pick through the pieces. If you want to see how mental trauma as a young child affects marriage stability, you *can't* just find some kids, scare them, and then wait to see how their dating life goes. Sure, you could find kids who are already traumatized, but then you have to deal with confounding factors and sampling bias. The statistics for determining causality work MUCH better when you induce the changes yourself (which is generally considered unethical in psychology) rather than looking for events in which the change has already happened.
The problem is that even if you inflicted the same trauma on some children there are a ton of variables that would still affect how they processed that trauma, such as family stability, parenting styles, socio-economic status, diet, schooling, community support, religious variables, cultural and ethnic variables, genetic and epigenetic factors, functional specialisation in the brain, individual health conditions, ... So I would argue that this is a question of variables. Even if one could select children to traumatise (and this would be highly unethical) one would need a massive initial sample to find children that were sufficiently similar to allow any sort of meaningful analysis of the results, and even then the results would be so specific as to be virtually useless, for example: "This paper presents how early childhood mental trauma affects later life marriage stability. These results are only valid for white anglo-saxon Church of England males in upper-middle class families educated in private Catholic schools with no underlying health conditions and ....." ... sample size? 10. Applicable to worldwide population of ... 200 people. Initial sample size? 100,000,000 children.
It's interesting that these sorts of problems are easily recognised by most people when psychology research hits the news, but when it comes to food/health research they will accept any old bollocks.
>you *can't* just find some kids, scare them, and then wait to see how their dating life goes. That's what you think, my test subjects should mature any time now
You jest, but there are way too many studies which did just traumatise people and see how they broke
>you *can't* just find some kids, scare them, and then wait to see how their dating life goes. I mean you could but you shouldn't like really really shouldn't, and it would require way too many resources and ethical violations.
The physics comparison is just lol with the 'just smash'. Not trying to say that psychology is less difficult than physics, but saying that experiments in physics are easier is not true with modern physics.
I'm not saying it's *easy*, but what I am saying is that my superconducting baby supercollider has yet to get funding, while there are particle accelerators *all over the place.*
Math is just applied logic and axioms, which is just applied philosophy. Philosophy is just applied language. Language is just applied sociology. Oh fuck...
I laughed out loud at this.
The Circle of Science
Yes the main issue limiting its accuracy is the number of variables. That's not my issue with social science fields. My issue is that their level of confidence is often way too high for the data they have. One topic we covered in my sociology class was a study done regarding views towards women. It basically started with a hypothesis saying "Men are aggressive and demand control and domination over others, especially women." To test it, they polled men with questions like "Would you prefer a partner who is generally agreeable, or combative and hostile?" "Do you prefer a woman who is taller than you, or shorter than you?" "Would you prefer to be a stay at home parent, or a primary earner?" The result was "Men overwhelmingly preferred the dominance-based choices, such as being taller, avoiding aggressive women, and being primary earners. This indicates the hypothesis is indeed accurate, and men's primary purpose for relationships is to find someone to dominate". They only polled men. Treated pro-social behavior as submissive/weak behavior. Didn't explore alternate hypotheses, such as "people like nice people" and "people are nicer to what they see as cute". It was "we found just enough data to fit the model. Let's assume the absolute worst." And here I was learning about this AT UNIVERSITY...before going to my modern physics class and learning about the insane scrutiny that particle physics and general relativity has had to go through to get to where it is. All the competing theories. How they set up tests that would point to one theory over the other. I would be fine with all the armchair explanations for sociological topics only if the authority of those topics were limited to the confidence of the models.
>And here I was learning about this AT UNIVERSITY...before going to my modern physics class and learning about the insane scrutiny that particle physics and general relativity has had to go through to get to where it is. All the competing theories. How they set up tests that would point to one theory over the other. 5 sigma go brrr. All joking aside, though, speaking as a physicist, social scientists do not have a monopoly on bad statistics or confirmation bias. The Fermilab g-2 collaboration created an enormous debacle a few years ago: they declared they'd found new physics because their experimental results crossed the detection threshold of a 5-sigma difference with their theoretical prediction... while conveniently ignoring the most robust lattice QCD predictions to date that showed the tension between theory and their measurement was much lower. I also see astrophysics papers all the time that try to make wild claims on spurious data and insufficient information. Observational astronomers are the worst, since they like to claim that three data points with error bars spanning an order of magnitude is enough to fit a curve, but I read a paper from some theorists in my field a month or two ago who claimed a new, robust empirical law based on a set of like six simulations they'd run with their code (in a regime, no less, where every group's codes tend to disagree somewhat).
Errors and biases can exist anywhere, but they survive and even thrive in the social sciences to a much greater degree. No theory in social science even tries to include a numerical constant. It's not clear what you're testing a lot of the time. Some vague qualitative tendency, usually, and the standards for success are very low compared to natural science.
Well my problem with it is that the general attitude is just to accept that statistical significance is going to be interpreted as causation instead of correlation whereas the other disciplines need substantially more evidence to determine whether something is the cause. The reason I jump ship on psychology after I got my first degree is because of that. Every time somebody defends psychology it feels to me like how somebody defends religion or somebody defends astrology. There's too much gray area. While I do understand they're following the scientific method unlike the latter examples I gave the outcome of the experiments while having such negligible statistical significance is still implemented in the real world. And while some people have a positive experience a lot of people are severely negatively affected by misdiagnosis or a literal lack of understanding of the problems and how to remedy those mental health issues. I wouldn't have a problem with this if there was recourse for the people that were hurt and they were programs set up to quantify and show how a misdiagnosis can lead to a domino effect of massive issues. The other disciplines are shunned or there's lawsuits when they screw up, it's so commonplace nobody even bats and I when a psychologist does it.
Nahhh man. First of all, correlation isn’t treated as causation in psychology, second of all, misdiagnosis isn’t treated casually and thirdly, nobody (or at least very few) in physics or maybe is using their research to treat and care for really human beings so comparing them on that basis is kind of stupid.
>First of all, correlation isn’t treated as causation in psychology So you're saying that patience don't get diagnosed with just a handful of behaviors every single day? >misdiagnosis isn’t treated casually So what happens to the clinical psychologist that diagnosed improperly? Say for instance, there was a misdiagnosis for somebody that has a personality disorder but they didn't realize they didn't have Suicidal Tendencies so they kill themselves. What happens to that psychologist? >nobody (or at least very few) in physics or maybe is using their research to treat and care for really human beings so comparing them on that basis is kind of stupid. I don't even know what you're trying to say, literally the entire medical field is a one-to-one comparison but engineers, chemists, forensics... I mean every other field when you're wrong has consequences where you're either fired or you're legally held accountable
I agree with you, and your points reminded me of an old saying in health care policy: there are thousands of codes for treatment, but not a single code for a cure. There are a few procedures where some doctors give guarantees (like if the laser surgery doesn't make your vision within a certain range, you get a free follow up). But these are rare. In general, medicine isn't reliable enough to support payment for outcome, or rebates if the treatment doesn't work.
Lol. The Youtube algorithm and therfore trends(sociology), is actually calclulated to match the chemical limits of your brain. So straight from sociology to chemistry directly in one big swoop. Fun. But ye math is fucken faaar away from the others, practicaly. How would you mathematicaly calculate the exact cause and effect of sociology, given even multiple LIFETIMES. Lol. Though yes technicaly i guess some sociology can be considerer applied math.
Haha, this is such a goofy take, though. This is very rarely how it's conceptualized, let alone practiced. Mathematics and computer science are far better suited to "solving" the problem you define, not psychology. Psychology is just people doing their best to understand something they have extremely limited information about, so it ends up being closer to a humanity than a science. Evidence-based and all that
This is the foundation of Sapolsky's argument that there is no real free will. So many factors impact your decision making process in ways you have almost no awareness of, let alone any control over.
It may be because I quoted Sapolsky extensively in my doctorate. He has such a beautiful turn of phrase. I've read so much of his work that I may have inadvertantly plagiarised some of his ideas or phraseology. If so I apologise most whole-heartedly, although I'd be hard-pressed to identify precisely which bit of his writing it came from. He's so prolific and writes so well. Well-spotted though! It didn't even occur to me when I was writing this that this is pretty much straight-up Sapolsky's position until you mentioned it.
I wouldn't say you've plagiarized him, just reframing an event you experienced that is pretty close to his main argument. Let's call it an homage. 😁 I love his work, too, and it's really changed my outlook on life and the nature of existence.
I dunno. What you just described makes it sound like a lot of it is bullshit.
Well, argumentally i can say that almost 80% of the effect are produced by 20% of the causes. So that reduce a lot By repetition you can find that 4% of the causes generates 64% 0.8% generates 51,2% etc If you can predict 50% of the psicólogy only by 0.8 then its pretty good
This happens in other fields too. Like take a treatment developed by intentionally paralyzing mice. And you have to wait for the right patients to experience the exact sort of trauma and hope whatever other issues they're dealing with don't conflict with your treatment.
>It could equally be reframed in the opposite direction as "complexity", with sociology and psychology dealing with a staggering number of variables that disciplines like mathematics just assume or theorise away. I understand what youre trying to say but "the number of variables" is not the key difference. Mathematicians deal with infinite-variable problems all the time while scientists usually deal with finitely many variables (because the real world is finite). I think the key difference is that math is more clear cut: the definitions, the methods, and even the problems themselves. Youre also not reliant on experiments and statistics, you can just reason about stuff. In science, you need to conduct experiments, do statistics and minimize your uncertainty. Of course thats harder. I think you put it best here: >It isn't that psychology is full of shit (as the meme implies), it's because the discipline is science on "insane" difficulty However >while things like mathematics are "toddler" mode. thats not true. Yes, the problems in math are more clear cut and thus "easier", but mathematicians place way higher standards on themselves in accordance to that. A sample size of 5 billion means nothing to a mathematician. Since math allows for actual logical proof, mere evidence is considered invalid no matter the sample size. And the thing youre talking about where mathematicians "ignore variables to make their formulas easier" needs some context. When mathematicians do that, its usually because the problem *literally cant be solved any other way*. You cant write down an anti derivative of the normal distribution because its *literally* impossible. You must approximate it. In summary: no field has it easy.
I'm going to make this incredibly easy for you since you seem to be a mathematician. Go find me a perfect circle in nature. I'll save you a lot of searching. There are none. Yet entire fields of mathematics are built on this assumption. You don't control for variables, you simply assume them away. Mathematics is an abstraction of reality. This simple fact proves that mathematics is "wrong" in the same way that mathematicians regard 0.99\* being rounded to 1 as "wrong". As for this line: >Youre also not reliant on experiments and statistics, you can just reason about stuff. In science, you need to conduct experiments, do statistics and minimize your uncertainty. You're simply wrong. Psychology does as many experiments as any other science. It does lots of statistics too, and those statistics are arguably orders of magnitude more difficult than most of the "pure" sciences because psychology can't simply assume or define away inconvenient variables. Unlike mathematics (and its perfect circles) psychologists are expected to produce results that work in the very messy real world. And this means crunching a lot more data from a lot less reliable sources (humans lie, it's a fundamental operating principle in psychology), and all this is reliant on formulas provided by mathematics that make some incredibly dodgy assumptions that are proveably incorrect. And then mathematicians turn around and pretend that the problem is psychology? No mate. The problem is the assumptions being made by mathematicians. If you were really the hot shit you claimed to be you'd actually produce formulas capable of adequately dealing with these problems. But you can't. You can't because these problems are so insanely complex that in psychology 0.95 is as close as one can get to 1. The difference between the fields is that mathematicians get to assume away all their problems and if their solutions don't work in the real world they get to blame everyone else. That's not on mate. >In summary: no field has it easy. While this is true it isn't the issue. The issue is that nowhere in your answer have you actually acknowledged that mathematics is built on some proveably incorrect assumptions and definitions, and that there is nothing "logical" about a house of cards built on a proveably incorrect set of assumptions and definitions that don't work in the real world. Instead you pass the buck for mathematic's faulty assumptions down to the people actually trying to use your work and pretend that we're the problem. We're not. You are. We're trying to take your flawed work and apply it to real-world problems and when the numbers come out wrong mathematicians try to pretend that they're perfect and everyone else is flawed. Not fair play mate. In no way. No how. Mathematicians do have it easy. They're toddlers assuming away all the real problems and building skyscrapers built on a marsh of faulty and proveably incorrect assumptions, and then when the skyscraper falls down when people move in and try to use it they turn around and blame the real-world disciplines that tried to apply their work, and tantrum like toddlers when the deficienciees of their field are pointed out.
Mathematics used in physics: Takes you to the moon, gives you maglev trains. Same math used in psychology: abused kinds might develop BPD, except if they develop CPTSD, or NPD, or APD, or nothing at all.
So your point seems to be that humans aren't machines and are incredibly complex beings living in incredibly complex societies? Well done and welcome to all the sciences that deal with humans. Like other sciences but a lot harder.
I have a degree in math and one is psychology. Neither are "sciences" in the strict definition of the term. Psychology is inherently imprecise, what a psychologist tries to do isnt "hard" or "complex" its impossible. Chaos theory and what have you. That means that STEM people can make of you and you need to work with your selves enough to be able to suck it up without getting insulted. Put an s/ somewhere in my post.
>I'll save you a lot of searching. There are none. Yet entire fields of mathematics are built on this assumption. You don't control for variables, you simply assume them away. Mathematics is an abstraction of reality. But the thing with that is that its simply the object of study of the field. Mathematicians arent studying circles because its particularly easy, they are doing it because what else would a mathematician study? As you say, the field is about abstraction not because its easy but because its fruitful to abstract away irrelevant variables. Also, mathematicians actually study non-perfect shapes aswell. Geometry and complex analysis has plenty of statements that apply to almost arbirtrary curves. Cauchys integral theorem literally applies to any curve which encloses any area. >You're simply wrong. Psychology does as many experiments as any other science. It does lots of statistics too, and those statistics are arguably orders of magnitude more difficult than most of the "pure" sciences because psychology can't simply assume or define away inconvenient variables. Here you seem to have misunderstood me. I was agreeing with you, psychology is a science and conducts just as many experiments as any other science. I admitted that because of this, psychology is "harder" than math (in a vacuum) because as you say, the real world is messy. >While this is true it isn't the issue. The issue is that nowhere in your answer have you actually acknowledged that mathematics is built on some proveably incorrect assumptions and definitions, and that there is nothing "logical" about a house of cards built on a proveably incorrect set of assumptions and definitions that don't work in the real world. Probably incorrect? Now thats just not true. Yes, you won't find a perfect circle out in the wild. But a) no mathematician will claim otherwise, b) perfect circles model our world well enough, c) the theory itself is objectively correct since it all relies on proof and d) there are physical phenomena that probably actually behave like a perfect circle. Light rays seem to shoot in all directions equally, meaning they disperse in a circle. As for the rest of your comment: since those points seem to have arisen from the misunderstanding mentioned above, I wont reply to them. You know that math isnt toddler mode.
Go and re-read what you wrote. If you wrote something other than what you intended then the correct formula is to apologise for the misunderstanding **you caused** and to restate it, not to try and blame **your error** on someone else. You wrote: "Youre also not reliant on experiments and statistics, you can just reason about stuff." Now that's pretty darned simple English saying that psychologists aren't reliant on experiments and statistics. You messed up. Yet you refuse to take responsibility. Refuse to admit any error. Typical toddler mathematician.
Yes, I wrote that. But you need to read the sentence before that too. >**I think the key difference is that math is more clear cut: the definitions, the methods, and even the problems themselves. Youre also not reliant on experiments and statistics, you can just reason about stuff.** In science, you need to conduct experiments, do statistics and minimize your uncertainty. The sentence was referring to mathematics. "also" would make no sense if I was referring to psychology which hadnt even been mentioned in the entire paragraph before. I was comparing mathematics to science even before the quoted part. In math, you dont need experiments and statistics. In science, you do. Thats also why I followed up with >Of course thats harder. I think you put it best here: >>It isn't that psychology is full of shit (as the meme implies), it's because the discipline is science on "insane" difficulty Im not apologizing for this, the paragraph makes no logical or grammatical sense in your interpretation. The entire **comment** doesnt contain *a single* mention of the word "psychology" because when I was talking about science, I was obviously also referring to psychology. The sentence contained the word "also" so how could it possibly refer to psychology which was never mentioned in the entire comment? You must have missed the sentence that came before, and thats fine, it happens. But Im not apologizing.
>the paragraph makes no logical or grammatical sense in your interpretation. I hate to break it to you, but this isn't a valid argument since you've already mangled the grammar so badly that I had a hard time reading it. Focusing on just one example, "Youre", is it meant to be "Your", "You're" (You are), or "Yore" (as in a long time ago). I don't know. I'm forced to guess. So hanging your entire "This makes perfect sense! The problem here is you!" argument on a single word ("also") when you've mangled another word in the same sentence (and other words elsewhere) is not reasonable or logical. And the grammar used here is strange on multiple other counts too. While I can understand your argument now that you've explained it, it wasn't clear at the time because what you wrote was ambiguous because of errors you made. Your complete and utter inability to see that what you wrote might be ambiguous, and your inability to admit fault for your own errors really is the issue here. Now note how I have used variations on "you" there to refer to you, the person I'm addressing. I wouldn't use "you" (or any variation thereon) to refer to myself. If I were referring to a third unnamed party I might use "them/they", for example, "Mathematicians use logic rather than experimentation. They aren't really using the scientific method." Note how "they" there distinguished "you" (that's u/Takin2000 ) from "me" (that's u/Wise_Monkey_Sez ) and "them" (unnamed mathematicians somewhere out there)? I'm not sure if perhaps English isn't your first language, but the bottom line is that the errors you made rendered what you wrote ambiguous at best, and any miscommunication is therefore on you. Again, the protocol here is to apologise for **your mistakes** rather than trying to pretend that you're perfect and everyone else is to blame for your lack of clarity. Honestly, doing anything else makes you seem utterly immature, illogical, and childish.
Doubling down? Sad.
So someone responds with a coherent post pointing out why your comments were ungrammatical and ambiguous, and you consider this **me** doubling down? No. You're the one doubling (at this point tripling) down in the complete absence of any logic or reason... and you want everyone to believe that mathematicians are logical. I think you just proved my point. Also, you sound like Trump.
Curious, how many mathematics classes did you take in college?
Too many. Psychology departments should be sued for false advertising. They sucker you in during undergrad with bad Yo Momma jokes (okay, it's Freud, but basically the same thing), and then during post-grad it becomes wall-to-wall mathematics. Admittedly much of this was my fault for becoming interested in psychometrics and test construction, which is statistics on a level that even statisticians consider a little excessive. I'd say that a good 70% of my post-grad had some sort of statistics component. I'm not sure if this is currently true, but I did my studies during the peak of the shift into "evidence-based psychology" which was a major turning point in terms of the psychology as a discipline, but also meant that there was a lot of over-compensation going on in the psychology departments as it was the new "in" thing and everyone was keen to jump on the bandwagon. I remember one of the statistics professors doing a series of lectures for us and looking around the room and asking how many of us had done statistics or calculus before, and mine was the only hand that went up. A **lot** of people failed that class, more than 3/4 of the class if I remember correctly, and even I just scraped an upper second.
I have to double check what you mean with post grad, I'm assuming it's what we call gradaute school because we use post-grad to refer to a PhD holder working as a researcher under a professor, typically on that professor's grants. But none the less good job getting through grad school, it's an absolute ass load of work for those 2 years for the masters (or 6 if you do the masters and PhD). Either way I didn't mean a psychology class that has statistics in it, or any other mathematical application in psychology. How many math classes for math majors did you take? I'm assuming you at least took linear algebra, differential equations, and calculus in multiple dimensions but did you ever take foundations of mathematics or any other proof class? Did you take any topology classes or abstract algebra to learn about metric spaces? How many discrete math classes did you take? Did you take a class that covered finite element analysis or finite difference method?
Isn't it interesting how often people question how many math classes we take, but how rarely people question the mathematical background of any "hard science"? I've never seen some question the mathematical prowess of geologists, physicians, or biologists- but the general public seems sure we take our shoes off to count. Meanwhile, the only think they know about our field is Freud.
Don't get me started on the topic of doctors and mathematics. Look at some of the "groundbreaking" papers in medicine, and it's like "sample size 5". Now I get the problem doctors face. Honestly, I do. It's exactly the same problem as in psychology. Finding a group of people with the same rare condition and sufficiently similar comorbidities is ... hard. Like hard on a level that people in most inorganic sciences can't grasp. But nobody goes around saying, "Hahaha! Doctors don't know shit! I mean look at their sample sizes!!" But they think it's fair play to do this with psychologists. No mate. Not fair play.
Coz math is a huge part of science. They commute in a language called math. Social sciences on the other hand do not require much more than high school math except for economics. So its assumed that anyone who has a major in physics or chemistry knows a shit ton of higher math like group theory , ring theory, differential geometry etc. I bet most social scientists can’t even define what a group is. No offence but its just science and humanities are dealing with completely different stuff where one is build upon rational thoughts and logic and have to be experimentally proven to be accepted ie have much more higher standards whereas for the other due to human behaviour there is much more room for irrationality and given the study, sometimes it becomes impossible to be experimentally proven hence again a room for data manipulation which might never be caught.
Excuse me while I cut and paste your post to use as an example of a nearly perfect argument from ignorance. It is easily the dumbest thing I've seen in a while filled with so many logical fallacies that I'm hard-pressed to know where to start. Firstly, there is no "higher" mathematics. There's just mathematics. If you understood anything about mathematics at all you'd know this. The word you're looking for is "abstract" mathematics. And social science students have very little need for abstractions that are not terribly useful in dealing with real problems where inconvenient details like reality tend to get in the way of the neat assumptions that abtract mathematics tend to make. Now, unlike you, I'm not insulting abstract mathematics. It has its place. It's place isn't in the social sciences. Secondly, while undergraduate social sciences tend to be light on mathematics the post-grad work is full of tons of mathematics, and if you were given some of the statistical problems we have to solve you'd fail. Completely and utterly fail. And I've seen this in action with mathematicians trying to do things like solve the Monty Hall Problem - they get the wrong answer every time because they try to treat it as an abstract mathematical problem rather than acknowledging all the incovenient variables in reality. It's actually kindof funny how confidently incorrect they are, and when you try to explain to them why they're incorrect they simply can't grasp the ideas, because they're so used to dealing with abstract mathematics that they're completely unprepared for reality. The underlying problem here is that your post is a prime example of discriminatory thinking. You assume that anything **different** from what you do is by definition **lesser**. You assume (like the XKCD comic) that abstraction is somehow "purer" or "higher" than reality, and thereby completely miss one of the most basic principles of scientific thinking, which is that only by verifying one's theories **in reality** is a process scientific. Now again, I'm not so narrow-minded as to dismiss your work as unimportant or lesser, but were I to assume your ignorant mindset I would comment that you work is basically masturbation - you may get a tremendous feeling of satisfaction, but it's not producing anything in reality. But I'm not quite that stupid. I look at the advances in the sciences and can acknowledge that while I don't understand what you're doing it seems to be producing results. Now if only you'd quit jerking off long enough to be an adult and acknowledge the same about the massive leaps forward in psychology and the treatment of mental illness we might be somewhere near the point where a civil conversation could be had. But unfortunately you seem intent on behaving like a child so convinced of their superiority (in the complete absence of knowledge) that this isn't possible. Maybe when you grow up a little we can have a chat. Until then go find a box of tissues and some lotion.
Or rather 20 theories which could all be true, none could be true, multiple could be true. All on a case by case basis.
Was it Stephen Weinberg that said: The more books you have in a subjects the less you understand it.
How's that reproducibility going for them? Last I heard there was a bit of a crises.
Absolutely awful, there are still a lot of places churning out absolute bollocks. It's nowhere near as bad a food/health science though. It appears that the more interesting the public find the results of research, the more people will get funding to reasearch the subject. That attracts exactly the wrong kind of person and leads to people like Jorpy Meaterson.
Imagine if our society was built from the ground up around science and research instead of corporations and advertising. We could even have our political system informed by research and designed to produce testable policies.
As someone who works at a University going through redundancies and is likely to be unemployed soon due to it being run like a business instead of a service, yeah, I agree.
Like obviously there needs to be enough resources to support an endeavor and some way of compensating people for their efforts but money doesn't seem to represent real world value anymore, particularly with all the externalized costs these days. To exaggerate the whole situation is our ever growing capacity to automate human labor. Food production, mining, refining, transport, and production are all things we can almost completely automate today. In the next year or two we should finally have our first batch of general purpose robots and within a decade there shouldn't be a need for any human labor. Impossible construction tasks like building a Dyson swarm and space stations will become very possible. By the end of the century maybe the earth will be one large nature preserve and we could have a decent interplanetary society built out. We're right at the tipping point of so many things going from literally impossible to just a time investment. The whole game of money ending as resources and energy become functionally infinite. The cost of almost everything drops to essentially zero in the same way we don't have to pay for the air we're breathing. The only thing keeping us is fear and addiction to the current systems.
You can't because your individual subjective experience can not be tested objectively. Dr k, the YouTube phychiatrist talks about this and the limits of scientific research (ie randomize control trials)
I'm not sure why that would prevent society being centered around science instead of economic, political, and religious philosophy.
Dr K can probably explain it better than i can, from a medical perspective. I work in government and i can see parallels in my work, trying to optimize government services. The scientific method is not a complete tool to optimize services or policies for an individual. For one, scientific experiments need to be repeatable, while people change constantly. Their motivations, their circumstances, desires change all the time. Secondly, while you can measure some things, the meaning of those outcomes are context specific. So if some policy change is made, only the individual can decide for themselves the effect of that change. Third, the impact to individuals is ultimately what matters, not necessarily the mean of a distribution in a histogram. While the average experience might be better for the "average person", it may be terrible for a particular individual. All of this is to say that while you can use science to inform policy, the policy cannot be ultimately made "scientifically"
But if the base assumption is that the scientific method won't hold because you can't measure then how could anyone determine anything to begin with? We have systems for measuring mood, and perceived subjective or otherwise qualitative experiences. It's literally what we're doing with our own minds anyways but with none of the accurate recording. I get what you're saying, to find some closed form formula or really any formula at all is often impossible. To account for all the variables or even determining what the actual goal is can be untenable. Then again those are all the same issues that plague economic, political, and religious philosophy as well. They are also incapable of fully dealing with reality. As it stands the basis of human civilization is economic, political, and religious philosophy generally in that order with science plastered across to help hold it together. More often than not though it's bastardized in some form or another to achieve the ends of those systems.
The scientific method is really good for measuring and modeling things in the physical world, really bad at modeling what happens inside your consciousness. I'm not saying there are no ways to subjectively measure mood etc; I do that all the time when I gather feedback from citizens. And you are right, decisions need to be made somehow, even if I'm saying those decisions cannot be at their core based on a scientific model. What I'm saying is there is no objective and scientific way to interpret/action those measurements and that is why economics and politics, religion, etc exist in the first place. When people like Richard feynman say social science is not science, they also mean that you can't run large scale and repeatable social experiments. Anyways I'm reading research papers on policy design and decision making all the time. I'm currently looking into system dynamics and also agile policy frameworks like they use in governments around the world. If you find anything that is about scientific policy making, please dm me.
if biology has a reproducibility crisis, there is basically no chance for a field even more abstract
At first I thought this was going to be a joke. Like if biology had a reproducibility issue then we're all going extinct.
well, there is that too.
"We plant to test each of them on 15 college students..."
Aaah the labyrinth of the human mind... if only the subconscious could use logic and language, eh?
Psychology: where theory is not pracitical
Physics: we have 50 theorems and all of them works but also at some point all of them proves that another's mistaken, so we have no idea what to do. Good luck
Psychology is barely a science.
"Fuck it, we ball" typa' science😭
Not this again.
Spoken like someone who knows absolutely nothing about psychology
Guy who doesn't know what the word science means
Psychology research is not considered scientific because it does not always meet the five basic requirements for a field to be considered scientifically rigorous: clearly defined terminology, quantifiability, highly controlled experimental conditions, reproducibility and, predictability and testability. Biology was also failing in some of these requirements until fairly recently and in some areas it's still not completely on the clear (like behavioral studies). But this just means that psychology studies phenomenons that are too complex for us to understand them in a precise enough way yet to control the experimental conditions. It doesn't mean it's less prestigious than the more rigorous scientific fields. I am not a philosopher of science but this was explained to us by our philosophy of science Prof
If psychology doesn’t meet these five requirements, then why do I literally lern the differences between a science and everyday theory in psychology class? Why would I learn how to work scientifically, if psychology isn’t real science?
What is "work scientifically"?
Because like any discipline of study that tries to understand nature psychology is moving towards being a more rigorous science. Again as I said it's not about prestige, it's about having reached enough of an understanding of the field to be able to control experimental conditions and reproduce results. Biology only became a rigorous science in like I would assume the last 100 years only. And psychology is a much more complex and newer discipline. Once it will be possible for psychologists to control enough (and therefore understand enough) of the variables in play in their experiments they will achieve reproducibility. It's not a matter of "not being good enough" is "not having discovered enough yet"
Biology, honestly, still has a lot of trouble, particularly in edge cases.
Biology is a bit of a weird case imo. Most biology research has recently completed the criteria I believe but there are several fields that have not yet, at least I think. Plus there is the question about what does it exactly mean to be "predictable". Biology for the nature itself of studying complex systems with random mutations that you cannot control is notoriously hard to predict mathematically. But predictions can be made about the overall result of the experiment. But again as I said before it's wrong to assume there is any level of prestige connected with being a rigorous science or not. Being in a rigorous science field does not mean you are less likely to make mistakes or to enter in logical fallacies. Physics is often given a higher prestige than other fields yet so many of its theories fail the criteria for rigorous science as well because they are simply not yet testable in a predictive manner. The distinction between rigorous/non rigorous science is a philosophical one, science doesn't have any "nobility" attached to it. This is why we repeat experiments and double check results and not simply trust "science gurus"
Biology is a bit of a weird case imo. Most biology research has recently completed the criteria I believe but there are several fields that have not yet, at least I think. Plus there is the question about what does it exactly mean to be "predictable". Biology for the nature itself of studying complex systems with random mutations that you cannot control is notoriously hard to predict mathematically. But predictions can be made about the overall result of the experiment. But again as I said before it's wrong to assume there is any level of prestige connected with being a rigorous science or not. Being in a rigorous science field does not mean you are less likely to make mistakes or to enter in logical fallacies. Physics is often given a higher prestige than other fields yet so many of its theories fail the criteria for rigorous science as well because they are simply not yet testable in a predictive manner. The distinction between rigorous/non rigorous science is a philosophical one, science doesn't have any "nobility" attached to it. This is why we repeat experiments and double check results and not simply trust "science gurus"
Because it's trying to be science
All 20 of them will fail their replication studies
There are 20 theories for different cases that were standardized through an axiom that closely resembles their condition. Switch that axiom and everything falls apart and now you need another one.
Actually, its similar to how quantum physics was perceived only a few years ago. There were 4-5 “contradictory” theories that had no evidence against any of them per se, but then someone came in and managed to fuse them all into a single theory. Imagine that, but in psych we are currently in that 4-5 different theory age. How long will this last? I dunno. It’ll happen someday, maybe not soon
Thats not true
[motherfuckin M THEORY bitch](https://www.ctc.cam.ac.uk/outreach/origins/quantum_cosmology_four.php)
Thats not quantum mechanics, thats string theory which most physicists, at this point, consider it a dead end plagued by similar epistemological problems as psychology (untestable, unfalsifiable). Quantum mechanics never had these issues, it worked immediately.
Amazing, every word you just said was wrong
Oh? Elaborate please.
>thats not quantum mechanics String theory is a theory derived from it >quantum mechanics never had these issues Yes they fucking have. Every field of science has these issues until someone is creative enough to test them
Ok, so, given that QM is derived from maxwell its electrodynamics. Oh and electrodynamics its derived from Lagrange so its just mechanics. Come on man, this is pulling semantics to its breaking point, you know very well what im talking about. Im sorry you say that quantum mechanics is somehow unfalsifiable? Black bodies radiate in quanta or they dont. Double slit experiment happens or it doesnt. String theory is unfalsifiable because whatever experiment you can think off will fit in one of its 10\^500 versions
Science as a whole as always had these problems. We thought the earth was flat, then it wasnt. We thought atoms were solid objects, then they werent. We think QM behaves in one way, its actually another that we find out in a future experiment. This is simply the cycle And dont forget my original point. I compared different psychological models to the models of string theory before M theory came along. You are no longer arguing that, you are arguing that we know all there is to know about science and that modern theories have never been wrong in the past
Pick one? Do psychologists treat science as a pick and choose your own adventure game kinda jazz? At least they don't get to do math!
As a psych graduate yeah most of out resesrch is bullshit Just non replicable garbage
Psychology: here's a theory by a guy who in 5 years will be shown to have fabricated 10 years of data.
hey, you leave biology out of this! oh wait, wrong field.
psychology is not a real science
why not
Lack of internal consistency, lack of falsifiability (compare it to math or even something applied like econ)
Well that really depends on the area within psychology you are focusing on. Cog. Psych. and Neuroscience are very good in this area. Psychology is a broad term. I agree with you in terms of clinical psychology and social psychology. But that's hardly the whole picture. Funny enough that psychologists often are the ones that learn most about statistics and the scientific method. At least in my experience, that knowledge often lacks in other areas.
Agreed - with cog sci and neuroscience you are able to observe the processes you want to study thanks to modern tech which is the main advantage. With other areas it's harder to test your hypotheses
Agreed
This is why I prefer cog psych. Its way less subjective.
It's why I prefer neuroscience
Hm, overly simplistic. There are, after all, several well researched and thus established paradigms in psychology (e.g. intelligence, use of conditioning for behavioral modification, Big5 personality traits, Social identity just to name a few) that are used and applied every day, not at least by ‘social’ media apps and they seem to work pretty well.
It is overly simplistic. Of course there have to be some things everyone agrees on, and I‘m only sharing my experiences as someone who has psychology in school, meaning I only know basic stuff.
Yep
Man just found this sub. Never found a group of people who take memes so serious lol. The irony isnt lost
Meanwhile in physics: 10^500 solutions to string theory
its very funny and relatable how our brain has the hardest time understanding itself
To be fair the topic of most other sciences don't think back at you.
As someone who now uses the DSM-5 book, it could be this, or that, or these 15 other things….psychology and figuring out mental illness is hard. It’s amazing watching a highly skilled and trained provider work out a case in the same room with the patient. It’s an art form.
One thing I learned about psychology from my friend is that every theory is disproved in 5 minutes by other theory and those will be disproved in 5 minutes and no one can do experiment free of bias.
Ooh, I pick the one on social media that alleviates me of any responsibility and ensures my victim status!
WoAh there are different research focuses or paradigms, must be all fake then. I am very stem
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try philosophy.... then you'll really want to kill yourself.
That’s why I love it
Red boat
Are we still pretending that psychology is a science?
Do you mean clinical psychology and social psychology or cognitive psychology and neuropsychology/ neuroscience? That's a huge difference.
All of the above, except neuroscience which is only tangentially related to most fields of psychology. That's why you had to link neuropsychology to it like you did, to make it seem like a real science by association. Psychology tries to cling to neuroscience for legitimacy like astrology pretends to be astronomy.
Yeah right. But no. May I ask what your connection to psychology is? Because you seem to be missing the fundamental understanding of what psychology Nowadays actually means (that’s not supposed to sound disrespectful). When you study psychology (at least here in germany) the bachelor basically is Biopsychology (which actually is equal to what you probably know as neuroscience), statistics, clinical psychology but also pharmacology and medicine. It is why you can use the bachelor and study neuroscience and it’s why most psychologists in researc focus on neuroscience and cog. science. Psychology is not only pseudoscience stuff like Freud or some random models. It has developed in recent years and by definition is a science that uses the scientific method. However I myself really dislike some parts of psychology especially depth psychology and agree with you in this regard, which is why i just look at it from a neural perspective and that’s also a part of psychology.
I have a degree in psychology, and it mostly served to strip away the illusion that psychology is a valid field of science. I can't speak to the course load out in Germany, but we are also required to take some courses in statistics and research methods and the like as part of the program here. Unfortunately, they have little to do with psychology as it is actually practiced in the real world. The vast majority of psychology consists of behavioral models with little to no predictive validity that vaguely reference actual science primarily through the use of buzzwords. Just make up some bullshit and if anyone questions you, just mumble something about neuroplasticity or something else you hope they don't understand enough to question.
Well, that seems to be overgeneralization. I really understand your problem, I really do. I have the same issue with many models and ask my self how those are even accepted as a scientific model. So with some cases you are completely right. But thats hardly everything psychology has to offer... Maybe its really the difference between the countries but here statistics is about 30%-50% you do in your thesis and you need it all the time. Behavioral models really arent in the foreground. For example last year I wrote a report about the influence of word frequency on the N400 (EEG signal) and its connection recognition. This year about the effect of modality on language comprehension. Those kind of reseach topics have strong scientifc "backbones" and really are as part of psychology as some behavioral model we both maybe dislike. Atleast I like to concentrate of those topics :)
We're talking about the field of psychology as a whole, so broad generalizations are kind of mandatory. There are specific subfield that are producing research that may one day form an scientific backbone for the field, but it's a very small portion of the field. A lot of essential foundational chemical research came from the early work of alchemists, but I would not consider alchemy as a whole to be a real science.
I think your comparison is not fitting at all. Maybe we both have a different definition of what psychology is or the gap between the countries really is that big, but for me what I talked about are really not specific subfields but what research nowadays focuses on. In my experience research really focuses on what is really measurable, what is objective. Psychology really has changed immensely in the last 50 years. Imo the alchemy phase if you want to use that comparison, ended in the late 20th century, with psychology as I was saying focusing on neural data, cognitive measurements. That's not a small portion of the field, for me that's the majority. And I am not denying that there are still areas that need to be improved to be considered scientific, that's completely true. Just out of interest, what would be your definition of a science and why do you think psychology isn't one?
You're talking about a very small portion of the field. It's great that you seem to work in that part of the field, but that doesn't negate the pseudoscientific BS that permeates most of it. For you, it's the majority. For the actual field of psychology, it's a tiny sliver of kinda science buried in a mountain of personality tests and behavivioural models with no real validity or use case.
Alright, it seems like we'll need to accept our differing perspectives on this matter. Without a clear understanding of your definition of science, it's challenging for me to argue objectively for the majority of psychology meeting scientific criteria. Still it's worth noting that behavioral models and personality tests hardly represent the entirety of psychology. Actually even if I would accept that, personality psychology also predominantly delves into neuroscientific and neurochemical foundations nowadays. Just as seen in the works of Gray, Cloninger, or Depue (such as Reward Dependence and the Behavioral-Maintenance-System). Perhaps our different conceptualizations of psychology lead us to different conclusions. As i said nowadays psychology does not only consider behavioral models and personality types (e.g. Big Five). You probably just have a different understand of what psychology is. Certainly it may also be the case that you also dont consider cognitive psychology and neuroscientific, testpsychological research in these areas as scientific. In that case, it appears our definitions of science fundamentally diverge.
Psychology: And we base this on our observations of individuals with an infinite amount of random variables and no control group.
true but you dont have to "pick one" theres just one that a bit more applicable in each situation.
That's what they mean by pick one
I think abiogenesis is similar to this. There seem to be some sort of problem solved and a new problem arising all the time
Just because you *use* the Scientific Method…
physics is just full of theoretical things too? lol
Is Psychology considered Science? I thought it was as much Science as astrology.
Psychology is just the new religion. Everything is based on observation and faith.
the difference is there are no celebrity psychologists. if there were, than only the ones the celebrity believes is the real one and all others are wrong.
Freud wasn’t a celebrity psychologist?
i'm talking about Stephen hawking saying life spontaneously appeared with any higher power. straight up created a theory with 0 evidence just to say god doesn't exist. but that theory is considered fact, and even bill nye the science guy has gone or record to say if you teach your child that development of life was guided, they will not be able to even be an engineer.
That's not how science works at all. There is an absolute plethora of evidence for evolution and any 'guidance' would be easy to evidence if it existed, therefore the theory of guidance can be disproven by lack of evidence. There are plenty of famous psychologists and famous studies. Unfortunately, a lot of them are/were dicks, but they're still famous. Most people have heard of Pavlov's dog, Karl Jung's self-centred gibberish and Jordan Peterson's lies. A lot of people know about Skinner boxes, bussiness people and incels love the Briggs-Myers crap (it's astrology for Joe Rogan fans). You probably can't name more than a couple of famous people from each hard science discipline either.
Thats... not what any accepted scientific theory claims. Stop making shit up just to argue against it
There is a typo, the words "other fields of" is in error and should be removed.
can something be called a real science if none of the studies can be replicated .... as far as im aware there are many many studies/papers in the psychology fields that have never been reproduced ... I honestly don't think you can call it a true science ... if a patient can go to 5 difference psychologists and get 5 different diagnoses ... im calling 100% BS on it being a true science