Originally posted by eckmek
Yep every science that's not physics is a pseudo-science. I'm so glad someone finally pointed that out. It's so obvious.
Lulz.
This could be true though.
But it's more that psychology, well.. some of the things psychologists claim border on superstition. I'm not saying they aren't true per se, I'm saying they are certainly not backed by the rigours of the scientific method.
Basically in psychology it's okay to ask people with a depression how often they sleep, note it is less than average, and then say 'Aha, a cause of depression is lack of sleep.', while easily it could be the other way around.
eckmek
quote:
Originally posted by kuollutrunkkau5
Lulz.
This could be true though.
But it's more that psychology, well.. some of the things psychologists claim border on superstition. I'm not saying they aren't true per se, I'm saying they are certainly not backed by the rigours of the scientific method.
Basically in psychology it's okay to ask people with a depression how often they sleep, note it is less than average, and then say 'Aha, a cause of depression is lack of sleep.', while easily it could be the other way around.
Well, i guess to me it just sounds like you've had some really unfortunate experiences with psychologists and are now blaming the entire profession/science?
I'm just saying just because a science doesn't have the same rigors of the traditional natural sciences doesn't mean it's not a science :)
Lira
quote:
Originally posted by kuollutrunkkau5
Lulz.
This could be true though.
But it's more that psychology, well.. some of the things psychologists claim border on superstition. I'm not saying they aren't true per se, I'm saying they are certainly not backed by the rigours of the scientific method.
Basically in psychology it's okay to ask people with a depression how often they sleep, note it is less than average, and then say 'Aha, a cause of depression is lack of sleep.', while easily it could be the other way around.
Please, go study some psychology and only then come back. You obviously know next to nothing about behavioural sciences other than what mediocre students that happened to earn an unremarkable degree and find themselves in an average job due to lack of opportunities told you when they were in a hurry to watch a re-run of "Friends" for the thousandth time.
Lilith
quote:
Originally posted by Lira
Please, go study some psychology and only then come back.
Why would anyone study psychology when they can just go to the library and read a book?
/derp
kuollutrunkkau5
quote:
Originally posted by eckmek
Well, i guess to me it just sounds like you've had some really unfortunate experiences with psychologists and are now blaming the entire profession/science?
There is a difference between psychology and clinical psychology. Most psychologists do not spend their time talking to people about their problems.
quote:
I'm just saying just because a science doesn't have the same rigors of the traditional natural sciences doesn't mean it's not a science :)
That's the whole idea of science. Rigour, to make sure that you aren't wrong that easily. To filter fact from human perception (which is often wrong).
That's the idea of science, human perception is simply wrong quite often. For instance, human perception leads us to believe that cold can give you well 'a cold', however scientific investigation has shown that this is not the case. You get the cold by a bacterion, not a temperature, the name is a misnomer. However, people do get the cold more often in winter months because they see less sunlight then, so teir natural resistance is lower as vitamin D is essential for your natural antibodies.
Psychology is simply a pseudoscience that as nothing to do with science, science is formulating an hypothesis you can test, and then testing it and discarding it when tests turn out false. Psychology is pure speculation and brainstorming but ultimately not testing if you're correct or not.
Psychology could also be called dangerous, as it has quite often been used in the past as a political tool. I'm sure we all remember the pseudobabble psychology had to offer on homosexuality or racial ideas.
quote:
Please, go study some psychology and only then come back. You obviously know next to nothing about behavioural sciences other than what mediocre students that happened to earn an unremarkable degree and find themselves in an average job due to lack of opportunities told you when they were in a hurry to watch a re-run of "Friends" for the thousandth time.
This has actually been published in a peer reviewed journal.
They have a variety of stuff to further their cause. Go check it out.
Or let's not forget the Sokal Hoax. Or ehh, the Rosenhan Experiment perhaps?
Please, the opinion that psychology is a pseudo-science (or proto-science, if you will) is really not that uncommon, for instance literature such as this.
[W]hen Michael Yapko (1994) surveyed nearly 1,000 members of the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, he found that more than half believed that "hypnosis can be used to recover memories from as far back as birth"; one third agreed that "the mind is like a computer, accurately recording events that actually occurred"; and one fourth of them - this is scary - agreed that "someone's feeling certain about a memory means the memory is likely to be correct." None of these statements is true; on the contrary, they are belied by extensive research on the normal processes of memory confabulation, distortion, and error. There was no difference between MAs and PhDs in their endorsement of these items.
And don't even get me started on the various infalsifiable claims that perpetuate psychological literature. How on earth can you prove or disprove things like that people who have autism are born with it? Or that homosexuality can be cured, or that such a thing as a 'mind' can even exist? Yet these things have all been more or less accepted at various points in the psychological corpus.
Inhaerently, psychology is a pseudoscience because it tries to investigate that whose existence cannot even be shown, this suppose 'human mind', all we know that exists are neurons, nothing more.
How on earth can you even begin to found a science on interviewing people. Psychology is a discipline almost devoid of any magnitudes an units. It gathers its data by human interpretation rather than objective apparatus used to ascertain values. A different person interviewing the same person on another day and a different result is obtained.
And come on, the psychological view of as little as 20 years back is nowadays already considered 'outdated', and what nonsense they believe today will be considered outdated in 20 years again. It's a vessel for culture, nothing more.
As a physicist, you observe in hard units experimental data. You then try to obtain a mathematical framework that explains these data that reaches well beyond the original data you have collected. Your mathematical model has to go through several checks, such as that it has to default to the model that it is supposed to replace as a special case. Then it will have to be applied to hitherto unexplainable phaenomena to see if it they abide by it. Then it has to praedict things that have not yet been observed and when they have it has to be accurate. Physical principles have been used to praedict that planets exist which were not yet observed, quantum mechanics has been used to praedict the existence of black holes years and years before such things were ever observed or people could even imagine such things. Time dilation, electron-tunneling, all stuff that could be calculated and praedicted before it was observed.
Even biology, theories of sexual selection and evolution have been used to foresee things which were not yet observed. The evolution of organisms as complex as insects has already been sketched ahead and confirmed to some degree. It has been praedicted, that human beings living in certain parts of the planet would develop certain proteins, and later observed to be correct.
Now really, does psychology offer any of this rigour and any of these glimpses into the future? Psychology is almost completely devoid of any praedicting value. Psychology has almost to no extend been able to praedict things which have not yet been observed, essential to test a scientific theory. And you can't even test if it praedicts it or not, because psychology doesn't deal in units and magnitudes. It's completely open to interpretation if an observation satisfies it or not.
In science, you calculate in advance just how much the result may deviate from your theoretical ideal because you know the impraecision of your measurements and instruments.
dj_alfi
quote:
Originally posted by kuollutrunkkau5
WALLOFTEXT
LOL! did you really type all that out or did you copy+paste it from somewhere?
oh and @ eddie: lol at the law suit thingie :P
kuollutrunkkau5
Google it and see if it already exists. The short answer is no.
Also, +/- 900 keystrokes per minute is a nice thing to have.
Only that guy beats me when he needs to tell people how much DIE HURENSOHNEN IHRE SCHEISSE SOLLEN ESSEN in-between his fraggs.
eckmek
Waiting for Lira to get you 'cause no way am i responding to that WALLOFTEXT :p
I'm sure he will too. There sure is a solid basis for it in your post.
kuollutrunkkau5
I might as well put the burden of proof on you here. I made the bold claim that almost no psychological findings and theories are falsifiable. So all you have to do is show me, ideally at least one that satisfies these criteria:
A: The theory explains how and in what way observable and testable facts happen related to its domain (the human mind).
B: The explanation is far-reaching enough to praedict patterns which have yet to be observed and when observed can be tested to concord with the theory.
C: The observations and testings thereof are of course to be done objectively with marginal room for interpetation. Ideally before any observation is done already there should be determinable between what margins the observable data should lie for the theory not be considered 'falsified'.
Nao, a psychological theory that satisfies these criteria I've got some crow to swallow.
They have a variety of stuff to further their cause. Go check it out.
Quote the article you mentioned. Copying and pasting what someone said is hardly a proof of how unreliable their work is: and, if there are flaws in the methodology, don't get your hopes up - one reason why people publish their findings is so they can be criticised, not because they found the holy grail.
quote:
Originally posted by kuollutrunkkau5
Or let's not forget the Sokal Hoax. Or ehh, the Rosenhan Experiment perhaps?
Alan Sokal sought to expose post-modernism and has no relevance to this debate whatsoever. As for the Rosenhan experiment, you probably remember they simulated the abnormal symptoms so they could run the experiment. As it's stated in the original article, and I quote:
Immediately upon admission to the psychiatric ward, the pseudopatient ceased simulating any symptoms of abnormality. In some cases, there was a brief period of mild nervousness and anxiety, since none of the pseudopatients really believed that they would be admitted so easily. Indeed, their shared fear was that they would be immediately exposed as frauds and greatly embarrassed. Moreover, many of them had never visited a psychiatric ward; even those who had, nevertheless had some genuine fears about what might happen to them. Their nervousness, then, was quite appropriate to the novelty of the hospital setting, and it abated rapidly.
Those responsible for these pseudo-patients had been fed wrong data concerning symptoms of abnormality, and you like it or not, they must've behaved in a very suspicious manner because they knew what they were up too (hardly a common behaviour). Seymour Kety's criticism is so famous it's even on Wikipedia, but I'm going to post it here as well:
If I were to drink a quart of blood and, concealing what I had done, come to the emergency room of any hospital vomiting blood, the behavior of the staff would be quite predictable. If they labeled and treated me as having a bleeding peptic ulcer, I doubt that I could argue convincingly that medical science does not know how to diagnose that condition.
[The original article isn't available on pdf, but he was quoted by Robert Spitzer, who in turn had quite a few things to say].
Complaining that professionals who were fed wrong data couldn't "get it right" is far from being fair, don't you think? Would the awesome physicists be spot on if some particle started acting up just to test them? Would that validate Bruno Latour's criticism?
quote:
Originally posted by kuollutrunkkau5
Please, the opinion that psychology is a pseudo-science (or proto-science, if you will) is really not that uncommon, for instance literature such as this.
[W]hen Michael Yapko (1994) surveyed nearly 1,000 members of the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, he found that more than half believed that "hypnosis can be used to recover memories from as far back as birth"; one third agreed that "the mind is like a computer, accurately recording events that actually occurred"; and one fourth of them - this is scary - agreed that "someone's feeling certain about a memory means the memory is likely to be correct." None of these statements is true; on the contrary, they are belied by extensive research on the normal processes of memory confabulation, distortion, and error. There was no difference between MAs and PhDs in their endorsement of these items.
Are you really trying to disprove psychology claiming that therapists don't know enough about psychology? That's an argument against the quality of the education these people have received. I mean, even the psychology undergrads I chat with often tell me how awesome it is that memories are fallible!
quote:
Originally posted by kuollutrunkkau5
And don't even get me started on the various infalsifiable claims that perpetuate psychological literature. How on earth can you prove or disprove things like that people who have autism are born with it? Or that homosexuality can be cured, or that such a thing as a 'mind' can even exist? Yet these things have all been more or less accepted at various points in the psychological corpus.
Oh, a Popperian!
By the way, psychologists have been tried to ditch the concept of mind for quite a while (hell, William James a hundred years ago was bold enough to claim consciousness didn't exist); and, as I recall it, homosexuality no longer counts as a mental disease. It's a young field of research, having become independent only in the past hundred years or so. Given that scientists are human beings and they're hardly perfect exemplars of rationality, it comes as no surprise that they're still trying to discard old ideas that have been retained from the pre-psychology era. And lest we forget, the awesome science of physics had quite a hard time trying to get rid of loads of Aristotelian nonsense until quite recently in the history of ideas.
quote:
Originally posted by kuollutrunkkau5
Inhaerently, psychology is a pseudoscience because it tries to investigate that whose existence cannot even be shown, this suppose 'human mind', all we know that exists are neurons, nothing more.
Read a psychology book before being so sure of yourself. There are tons of definitions of what psychology is, and most self-respecting psychologists will tell you that they investigate human behaviour or something analogous. Not even cognitive scientists tend to be so naïve.
quote:
Originally posted by kuollutrunkkau5
How on earth can you even begin to found a science on interviewing people. Psychology is a discipline almost devoid of any magnitudes an units. It gathers its data by human interpretation rather than objective apparatus used to ascertain values. A different person interviewing the same person on another day and a different result is obtained.
Yeah, right, because that's its only modus operandi.
quote:
Originally posted by kuollutrunkkau5
And come on, the psychological view of as little as 20 years back is nowadays already considered 'outdated', and what nonsense they believe today will be considered outdated in 20 years again. It's a vessel for culture, nothing more.
Oh, sure... because progress is really what pseudosciences are all about.
quote:
Originally posted by kuollutrunkkau5
As a physicist, you observe in hard units experimental data. You then try to obtain a mathematical framework that explains these data that reaches well beyond the original data you have collected. Your mathematical model has to go through several checks, such as that it has to default to the model that it is supposed to replace as a special case. Then it will have to be applied to hitherto unexplainable phaenomena to see if it they abide by it. Then it has to praedict things that have not yet been observed and when they have it has to be accurate. Physical principles have been used to praedict that planets exist which were not yet observed, quantum mechanics has been used to praedict the existence of black holes years and years before such things were ever observed or people could even imagine such things. Time dilation, electron-tunneling, all stuff that could be calculated and praedicted before it was observed.
Are you really claiming that there's no such thing as quantitative research in psychology, just qualitative ones? And that it makes no predictions?
quote:
Originally posted by kuollutrunkkau5
Even biology, theories of sexual selection and evolution have been used to foresee things which were not yet observed. The evolution of organisms as complex as insects has already been sketched ahead and confirmed to some degree. It has been praedicted, that human beings living in certain parts of the planet would develop certain proteins, and later observed to be correct.
Props to biologists, yay!
quote:
Originally posted by kuollutrunkkau5
Now really, does psychology offer any of this rigour and any of these glimpses into the future? Psychology is almost completely devoid of any praedicting value. Psychology has almost to no extend been able to praedict things which have not yet been observed, essential to test a scientific theory. And you can't even test if it praedicts it or not, because psychology doesn't deal in units and magnitudes. It's completely open to interpretation if an observation satisfies it or not.
What do you think psychologists have used to entertain themselves since the rise of behaviourism in the previous century? Why do you think they design experiments?
Out of curiosity: Are you a physicist? Have you ever bothered to study psychology, or even any philosophy of science after Karl Popper?
Goebbel Goebbel
ahhhh you gotta love the try too hard and always fail clique...go go kikoocunt5
