Hari Seldon entered the chat
PsychologyPsychohistory
Psychology is in many ways built on top of problematic methodology which have led to conflicting findings and a broad replication crisis.
Not to mention nearly all psychological research is conducted on WEIRD individuals (western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic). Usually college students.
Psychology gets unfairly singled out wrt replication but the same issues are found in a lot of other disciplines, such as biomed.
The standard p value in most psych research is 0.05, which means that you are willing to accept a 1/20 risk of a Type 1 error - that you are content with a 5% chance of a false positives, that your results were entirely due to random chance.
Keep in mind that you don’t publish research that doesn’t give results most of the time. Keep in mind that you have to publish regularly to keep your job. (And that if your results make certain people happy, they’ll give you and your university more money). Keep in mind that it is super fucking easy to say “hey, optional extra credit - participate in my survey” to your 300 student Intro Psych class (usually you just have to provide an alternative assignment for ethical reasons).
Pure psychology research definitely has its methodological and rigour issues that cast doubt on all its findings. However I think working psychologists in industry have validated psychological methods (A/B testing) and theories (dark patterns) for making profit at the expense of users’ privacy, mental health, time, and attention.
The biggest issue is that every brain is different, and you can’t slap absolutes on that. One study may be completely accurate, but with their specific sample.
They can predict behavior, but only for spherical brains in a vacuum.
I could read psychologists mind
I’m not a Scientologist, I am suspicious of psychology because I know it’s history. Sociology never suggested stabbing someone in the eye with an icepick, or create a psychosexualsatanic fantasy that gets innocent people put in prison. Economics never spearheaded a forced sterilization movement.
But their so much better today with the pseudoscience of IQ or the land of make-believe called evolutionary psychology.
Psych has many areas of study. Psychobiology, psycholinguistics, behaviorism, cog sci, borderline philosophy, defunct hx lessons in Freud and company, etc.
Cognitive science and behavioral economics have a fairly large overlap on a Venn diagram. There are also dual discipline individuals engaged in both mathematics and psychology.
Practical application and experimentation depend on what flavor of psych you’re engaging with. Dennet or even Pinker are going to read and be applied differently than, say, Kahneman & Tversky.
Vs, say, someone like Elizabeth Loftus back in the repressed memory explosion of the 90s.
How each area can intersect with experimentation is going to vary.
All of that said, who wasn’t fascinated by the idea of Asimov’s Hari Sheldon? I devoured those books in my youth.
I imagine this as a bell curve meme, where nothing ends are, “psychologists don’t know anything,” but not sure what the middle is.
Here, let me fill it out:
low IQ: psychologists don’t know anything
average IQ: psychologists don’t know anything
high IQ: psychologists don’t know anything
