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Yeah, I've been meaning to take on the (LLM-assisted) project of reviewing every citation in The Sequences to see which ones are bunk. The Sequences were written before the replication crisis (was named/noted) and so much of EW's work is based on cognitive and other social science. I'm starting to suspect that a majority of the science behind his arguments is just BS.
I'm tempted to say "But the core of what he wrote is still so true and valuable!" It sounds like special pleading. If it works just as well with all the science, then why was all the science there in the first place?
It's a modus ponens/modus tollens thing. In the conclusion to the book Opening Skinner's Box, which I mentioned downthread, the author observes that, a hundred years in, psychologists still struggle to define what psychology is exactly, and if it's even meaningfully distinct from philosophy in any way. Sometimes when you ask psychologists to name discoveries their field has given us, they'll list off a handful that will sound quite impressive and which haven't fallen afoul of the replication crisis. But you quickly realise that when they say "we discovered X", they really mean "we gave a fancy scientific-sounding name to an observation about human nature which long predates our field". People had been talking about the concept of confirmation bias millennia before some academic slapped that label on it (Ctrl-F "Thucydides"). They didn't "discover" shit. To paraphrase Franklin, the findings of psychology are both true and original to it – but the parts that are true are not original to it, and the parts that are original to it are not true.
Eliezer wanted STEMlords to get onboard with his project, so he had to present the Sequences like they were a work of science, with lots of citations and superscript numbers and so on. But really, they're philosophy, and philosophers by their very nature does not demean themselves by justifying their opinions with sources and citations, the way that commoners have to. It would be cool to see a new edition of the Sequences, but purged of any pretension of being anything other than philosophy.
I was a psych major (well, double-major, I also did pre-law) and I ultimately think I want a refund on the psych part.
Psych really does have an identity crisis insofar as it tries to present as this grand theory of how the structure of the human brain maps to all the observed behaviors from the individual level all the way up to the, arguably, nation-state level, and thus someone who has mastered the science of psychology should be pretty good at predicting human behavior (not perfect!) in the same way someone who has mastered meteorology should be pretty good at predicting the weather.
But there's gaping holes in said theory at the very core, and it gets rattier and more tattered as the scale increases. "Social Psychology" regarding groups of people is like 90% woo.
Some areas like developmental psych (which has done a pretty good job at categorizing human development stages) and cognitive psych (which actually does succeed at mapping the human brain to human behaviors) are actually useful at understanding the world, so I argue work as 'sciences.'
And then you can plug in some neuroscience and it FEELS like you're gaining a deep understanding of how human decisionmaking and actions work. But what can you DO with that purported understanding?
The big condemnation of the field, leaving aside the replication crisis, is the failure to show results from applied clinical psychology. Most forms of therapy and 'mental illness' treatment just don't really work, at least not at effecting permanent 'fixes.' Scott used to talk about this quite a bit. Psychiatrists/therapists might be able to help a patient address one area of their dysfunction for a short period of time. True 'healing' is almost nonexistent.
If the application of your science to real life doesn't produce tangible results, its a sign that its been built on foundations of questionable value.
One exception: Exposure therapy. Despite being counterintutive, it works! If someone is afraid of a thing, and the thing isn't really all that scary/dangerous, then 'forcing' them to be in the presence of that thing, repeatedly and at increasingly high intensity, they will acclimate to become less afraid of it, which is exhibited as a tangible change in behavior.
Operant conditioning also works, although perhaps less effectively in humans than you'd expect. Its good to have some study of the unsurprising fact that "humans respond to incentives!"
But you have to be very exacting and apply some serious skepticism to pull out the useful parts of psych from the whole edifice, which is why the field as a whole is rotten. It hasn't reckoned with its own shortcomings and expelled the failed ideas.
And, of course, it likes to cover up one of its most patently useful and robust findings of the field: IQ testing.
You wanna know what happens to psychology discoveries that actually work at changing behavior? They become marketing.
Except when it doesn’t, of course. I have a phobia of wasps (and by adjacency bees because they look so similar but consider bumblebess to be harmless because their colors and flight are immediately distinguishable). While researching wasp traps it wasn’t hard at all to find many accounts of people who had gone through exposure therapy without any improvement. So YMMV.
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You have to be very cautious about this, it's mostly an exaggerated self-deprecating meme - large subfields of psychiatry and psychology work great.
Criticisms are often stemming from narrow areas such as SLS (shit life syndrome) driven depression and through exaggerated posting by a heavily loud population of patients with serious mental illness and Anosognosia.
For instance medications work great for the traditional serious mental illness - Schizophrenia and related disorders and Bipolar. It helps that these are more directly biochemically mediated. Now patients relapse but it's usually through poor choices (stopping medication, drugs).
A more restrictive society does not have that problem. To some extent the other conditions have the same problem. If the treatment for your depression is to get off your ass and to stop smoking weed as much as it is taking an SSRI, then a society that doesn't keep you away from weed isn't going to be able to do shit.
Much of mental illness is as much a political and ethical problem as it is a treatment problem.
Even with the area where what you are saying is more true (the classic "SSRIs don't really do shit for depression and anxiety" critique) has a lot of nuance.
For example SSRIs are one of the worst treatment for depression. They are first line because they don't have side effects like "eat a certain type of cheese and die" or the image problem of ECT.
Scott likely writes about this less because he finds that the medications and treatment do actually help, and as a heterodox nerdy person he likely had a lot of exposure to people with personality disorders being treated with medication and with mild symptoms. Both types of people medicine doesn't have much to offer.
As your clinical practice expands you see stuff work and less marginal pathology.
The vast majority of doctors in the vast majority of specialities have consulted psych and watched them fairy dust some magic bullshit with a few pills. The average person is going to care about life satisfaction issues and mild to moderate depression and anxiety but that's a small fraction of the morbidity and nearly zero of the mortality.
Define "work great"? Leaving aside the drugs end of things, does psychotherapy/counseling reliably deliver good results compared to much cheaper alternatives like, say, talking to a priest or a volunteer who's completed a two-hour course on active listening?
But the treatments, and the academy that developed them, have very obviously oversold their "solutions" to the point of actively and chronically aggravating the political and ethical problems. They have made a habit of claiming that that old, well-tested, workable solutions should be replaced by new and improved solutions that will fix everything, and then when these new solutions don't actually work they and their allies pointedly ignore all the consequences.
Would you disagree that if we want to answer the question of why this murder happened, the answer is that Psychology as an industry didn't do its job? If you disagree, could you explain why?
You can't separate out the medication side of things and call it done. This is where a large part of the evidence base is. Medications are what's indicated for most moderate to severe pathology for example (with therapy as an adjunct if at all).
As a physician I'm obvious more familiar with the medication side of things, but my understanding of therapy is that narrowly tailored therapy regimens work fantastically well. OP mentioned exposure therapy. DBT for Borderline is another classic. Therapy research is more complicated for much of the usual reasons - you can just give a patient Amlodipine and watch what their BP does. Standardizing therapy care for research is nearly impossible. That standardization applies to general clinical practice - you have a huge variation in proficiency of practitioners. Anyone who has exposure to high quality (read: expensive) therapy will tell you it is an incredibly effective modality and temporary. For many manifestations of things like Anxiety and Depression high quality therapy will be more effective than medication. This is not an indictment of medication.
Don't make the mistake of looking at the online conversation about the discipline and assume that is at all applicable to the reality of things, for instance the criticism "they have made a habit of claiming that that old, well-tested, workable solutions should be replaced by new and improved solutions that will fix everything" is an extremely common patient fear but is incredibly rare thing in most practice settings. Yes shady high volume people are out there but most surgeons fetishize outcome metrics, most PCPs get a hard-on for saving their patients money and most psychiatrists want their patients to take easy to afford and obtain stuff so they actually take the medications. As a poster here you are probably higher education and income so you are more likely to encounter someone who is better at customer service than care who will sell you the new thing. That's out there. That's a small fraction of the care and overall pathology.
Psychiatry has a specific problem - many mentally ill people are mad, can't understand they have a mental illness, believe they just have a medical problem, want Adderall or Cannabis as a drug of abuse and so on. These people complain about the field. They are not reliable narrators.
The killing of Iryna and other similar events is a political problem. America has a very individual rights oriented approach to managing mental illness. Also things that are mental illness adjacent but not quite mental illness (like heavy substance use or personality disorders). If the judge says the patient has to be released, if there aren't state hospitals beds, psychiatry has limited options. Many severely mentally ill people get discharged and immediately stop taking their medication (which was working!) and go do drugs. An antipsychotic can't help with that. Send them to jail or lock them up for good in hospitals or give the doctors more rights to do things against their patients wishes. These all have costs. I don't know what's best, that's a complicated topic. Historically societies just killed them if they were poor. We don't do that anymore (which is good!) but we've replaced it with the actuarial risk of murder and other bad outcomes.
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Ironically, while we were unable to replicate the result of people persisting their beliefs when they encounter crushing counterevidence among the classically religious, we may succeed in doing so among Rationalists.
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