This cliché comment and the subthread it spawned are an example of the direction we don't want threads to go on HN. That's why we have guidelines like the following, all of which you broke rather egregiously. Can you please not do that on this site in the future? If you don't find articles about psychology books interesting there are countless other things to read here.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
I was unaware that we’re not allowed to critique posts. My comment was highly upvoted before you flagged it, so clearly the community was fine with it.
I didn’t call anyone names, and this isn’t a “flamebait” topic, so I don’t know what you mean by “egregious” violation.
Thoughtful critique is fine; this is about comment quality. I'm afraid the sort of generic dismissal you posted, repeating what has become a cliché while adding no new information, does not clear the quality bar. "The community was fine with it" is unfortunately not dispositive—indignant repetition of clichés routinely attracts upvotes. This is a failure mode of the upvoting system (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).
Re calling names, it isn't that you called anyone names personally, it's that words like "pseudoscience" and "fiction" count as name-calling in the way you used them, since you didn't actually make an argument. Actually if one removes name-calling in this sense, there's almost nothing left of your comment, except perhaps the last sentence, and even that seems more an expression of disdain than a substantive contribution.
How is it cliche? Phychology has a well known issue with replication. Is that not worth discussing? There was actually a ton of info in this thread that you wiped.
I don’t see how your comment attacking me clears the bar you claim exists here. I can’t call this pseudoscience but you can call me cliche? That’s a blatant double standard. You’re a mod, you shouldn’t even be commenting.
I also notice I was singled out for this flag even though others in this thread made the exact same point.
Cliché comments are often about well-known things. The point is that once something has been repeated often enough, simply repeating it again without adding new information makes for a low-quality post.
Take no. 6 for example: Behave by Robert M. Sapolsky. Dr. Sapolsky is a professor at Stanford with nearly 300 publications [0] and has been teaching biology and neurology for years. I'm curious, why do you think this book is pop-pseudoscience? Have you read it? Are there certain things you disagree with or think aren't based on research or reproducibility?
I have read about half the books in the list and this is the only one I have read from that list that didn't really feel like pop science. This is an amazing book and is the only one I am familiar with from that list that I would actually recommend everyone should read.
Edit: I will also add that The Body Keeps The Score is an interesting book, but I would definitely not recommend everyone read it. If you have suffered some trauma it is definitely worth a read.
Have you read the Body Keeps the Score? It felt pop in the sense that it was on the leading edge, but I felt the author made a best effort to put forth the available science
Ha I just added an edit to my comment on that book specifically. It is definitely an interesting book and would agree that the author put forth a lot of evidence for everything he stated. I haven't tried EMDR personally but it is compelling.
Thinking Fast and Slow is also a serious book. There have been some hits on how Kahneman wrote up priming, but few dispute he and Tversky have a big body of brilliant and rigorous research. They don't deserve to be on the same list as Freud, Sacks or (probably) Ariely. While those guys are interesting, all are rather less scientific. Cialdini I'm not sure about. His "Focus Theory of Normative Conduct" has been very influential but perhaps it is a one-trick pony?
Minds aren't scientific, so psychology isn't scientific. It's that simple; you've fooled yourself into thinking that you have "a mind", a supposedly-measurable durable part of your personality which persists beyond the mere meat of your brain and neurons, not unlike a soul.
I’m not a psychologist, but I don’t think psychology is entirely comprised of studying “the mind” or the super ego/sense of self that you are referring. Specifically with human behavioral biology, it is concerned with what happens with synaptic responses influencing an action, hormonal responses influencing synapses, biological inputs (senses) triggering hormonal responses, environmental stimulus influencing the senses, and so on and so forth. It is very much rooted in evolutionary biology, and doesn’t touch on whatever is “beyond the meat.”
That being said what do you have to say about certain personality categorizations like the big five which were determined based off of statistical clustering [0]? Is this not science for some reason because it includes personality?
How are you going to fool yourself, qualitatively and subjectively, that you have a mind if you don't have something capable of qualia in the first place?
I'm not trying to argue for some kind of an immaterial soul, or claiming that all of psychology is scientific (many theories, at least as it appears to a layman, aren't). And sure, a durable personality and various other mental models we have might be illusions to varying degrees.
But if the lower-level immediate experiences are treated as a real (if emergent and somewhat culturally dependent) thing, I don't see why higher-level mental phenomena such as the common need for a durable sense of self couldn't be treated as real as well.
I’m still here as a direct product of treatment by induced seizures by electroshock. After finishing treatment, it’s as if the toxic narrator of my life has vanished from my life and I’m suddenly just here, myself. But it’s just pseudoscience and I would have done better to read some decent literature.
My girlfriend has had EMDR therapy that resolved her
responses to triggers (similar to panic attacks? I'm not sure how to describe it) from C-PTSD, but it's just pseudoscience and she would have done better to read some decent literature.
ECT was certainly way over applied back in the day, but it's made a bit of a comeback in recent years for treating severe depression. In the sense that clinical trials are science, it's definitely science. It's true we don't really understand why it works, but you could say the same thing about a number of drugs for treating psychiatric disease, and I doubt you would say those are not science. Here is a FAQ about ECT from Hopkins: https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/psychiatry/specialty_areas/b...
1. Yes it is, or at least was. It’s a branch of psychology that developed into a science its own right. Just as physics was once “natural philosophy”. Epistemologically however neuroscience does still fall under the umbrella term of psychology.
No it’s not and this comparison is facetious. Nobody practices alchemy as a mainstream science in 2021.
There are plenty of people doing astrology for instance but in a clinical setting? In funded university programs? Producing papers that can be openly challenged? I don’t think so. Again facetious.
It’s the study of the “mind” (not brain). It’s very basis is the study of a pseudo-religious phenomenon. Neuroscience is real science because it studies the brain not the artificial and archaic concept of the mind.
There can be personal value in studying psychology. It’s just not science, it’s fictional.
How does this critique apply, e.g. to Jonathan Haidt's work on moral foundations? Or, if you want something more rigorous, to prospect theory and other decision theorists' attempts to build simple tractable models of decision-making?
I don't think a single book on that list discusses electroshock therapy. I think it could be both true that electroshock therapy works and psychology can be a pseudoscience.
I'm reading Principles by Ray Dalio. In it he mentions how Bridgewater had been using myer-briggs to test and measurement their employees personalities.
I've always been dismissive of the myer-briggs test. Since the tests are "not reproducable", must mean it's at best a pseudo-science.
But then I realized, who am I to dismiss the idea? I'm not an expert. Much smarter people than I (Dalio) believe in it. At the end of the day, does it help us move closer to understanding the differences between our minds?
I'd say yes it does. It may not be a "perfect" 100% correct model, but at least it's a step towards a direction.
Myers Briggs is the poster boy for pseudo science.
> But then I realized, who am I to dismiss the idea? I'm not an expert. Much smarter people than I (Dalio) believe in it.
This is an appeal to authority; you should stick to your original gut feeling. Dalio and the like make their money selling books and as such write what people want to hear. It’s Chicken Soup For The Soul for people with bachelor degrees.
Dalio actually made his money by operaring as he preached. Based on that we can say it did not cause critical impediment to his progress. That does not validate Meyers-Briggs. Lots of succesful leaders have loved all sort of pseudoscience.
things like the Myers-Briggs test fall on the more scientific side of a continuum of explanatory and prescriptive narratives including The likes of "surrounded by idiots" The i-ching, tarot cards, mythology etc.
They are very useful for inscribing yourself into the narrative in order to break you out of your perspective and help guide you toward a more positive direction than otherwise.
There’s plenty of reproducibility and falsifiability and all those other essential ingredients. The very fact that there is a “reproducibility crisis” at all shows that as a field it’s open to this kind of cross examination.
Psych makes plenty of fairly reliable predictions around social behaviour, childhood development and human machine interaction.
Only somebody who didn’t understand psychology would say it produces no reproducible results.
It’s not physics. You can’t do it in a lab. But it can explain and predict within bounds of certainty.
DSM is often wielded as a criticism but this is strictly speaking a psychiatric i.e “medical” tool which strictly speaking should be used as a basis for making diagnosis not for diagnosis itself. It’s limitations are well understood in the field of psychology and again somebody who understood the field would know this.
> Can you provide an example of a prediction that can accurately be made with psychology?
In any given internet discussion on a non-deterministic topic, there will be at least one person (usually several) who speaks as if they are omniscient (have the ability to accurately read minds, predict the future, know comprehensive reality, etc).
Psychology is a big field. A lot of the work in the psychology of judgment and decision-making is very reproducible, especially in the area of cognitive bias.
At its very best and most rigorous, psychology is pseudoscience.
Perhaps that is true with the old literature (Freud, Jung, etc), even if parts of it also offer some insight on human behaviour.
But from what I have read, the turning point was when Albert Ellis and Aaron T Beck developed the idea of Cognitive Therapy, which started the whole evidence based therapy movement (they diverged a bit with Ellis calling his talk therapy "Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy").
Aaron T Beck perhaps laid the foundation by testing out his research theories with actual clinical studies (like pharma companies do, for e.g. conducting studies like treating one group with anti-depressants, another group with a placebo, and treating a different group of patients with his talk therapy and proving that Cognitive Therapy was just as effective as anti-depressants in alleviating anxiety and depression, and in many cases better than anti-depressants for the long-term). Since then, there have been a lot of similar studies done on the efficacy of such therapies for treating Schizophrenia and various personality disorders.
(Interestingly, Aaron T Beck actually believed in Freudian psychology and practiced it as a psychoanalyst and one of his earlier studies was to prove that it was effective. But his study proved him wrong and thus he went on to develop CT, along with Ellis' and Buddhist ideas.)
So it is no longer fair to call psychology as a pseudo-science anymore, in my opinion. (For those who like to use capitalism as some kind of yardstick / indicator of the efficacy of some new technology / science, it is interesting to note that most insurance companies now cover and push for such evidence based therapies.)
But yes, a lot of self-help books are indeed based on pseudo-science or pop-psychology.
Psychology is probabilistic science, that's the best we can do given the complexities of the mind. If you want to get a taste of rigor in psychology I suggest you read some of the works by Carl Jung.
Agreed, most people looking to understand the psyche would be better off reading literature / art.
If the probabilities are reproducible it is still science I would say. Take quantum mechanics for example. It can not predict what exactly is going to happen, only how likely each outcome would be.
> It can not predict what exactly is going to happen, only how likely each outcome would be.
Yeah but the key difference is that QM is a mathematically solid theory starting from a couple basic laws to yield predictions with p-values of 0 (for all intents and purposes anyway). Also note that there are non-probabilistic measurements in QM, be they measurements of aggregate behavior or just pure states [1]. In that respect, QM and most physical sciences really are miles ahead of psychology (though I don't think that's reason to discredit the latter, as it has obvious empirical merit).
If I may be a bit bolder still, I'd argue that it's not merely a quantitative difference. As pointed out by many other comments, psychology completely lacks any sort of unifying framework, except perhaps for small clusters of thematically similar phenomena. A collection of empirical facts does not a scientific theory make, or--taken to the cheeky extreme--"All science is either physics or stamp collecting" [2].
I can understand why you feel this way about popular Psychology literature, but I would encourage you to read some introductory textbooks on Psychology, like _Basic Vision: An Introduction to Visual Perception_.
I too don't consider psychology to be a science, but I also realize that my operational definition of science is quite restrictive (from your other comments it appears that so is yours). As a result, I think that there are plenty of disciplines that fall outside of the realm of science but still end up being rather insightful, like medicine--I sure don't think doctors work according to the "scientific method" (whatever that is), but I certainly wouldn't discount a good book written by a doctor as being on the same level as fiction.
tl;dr: it not being science doesn't make it fiction
