Inspired by another thread !ifrickinglovescience
What's your definition of "real science?" It's not clear what "real science" or even "the scientific method" refers to because the methods employed by scientists are actually quite heterogeneous. For example, is science all about "making testable predictions in advance of falsifying observations?" Well, what about astronomy and anatomy, where a lot of "science" is just... brute empiricism (also known as "just looking").
A lot of psychology is just looking. For example, developmental psychologists watch babies grow up and notice all sorts of interesting things and then just... write them down. For instance, did you know that 3 month old infants will look surprised when they see the law of object permanence violated? Apparently babies come into the world with some organization in advance of experience that allows them to grasp basic physical principles and build up expectations about how objects will behave based on their experiences.
I like what you pointed out that we just have to look sometimes, but it falls apart because of one simple reason... reproducibility. Does the heart always pump blood? Yes, unless the person is dead of course. About 5 liters apparently. This uniformity, this measurement, the near infinitel reproducibility of this observation I would say does make it real science.
What's the difference between you and everyone else who has just started learning about a topic and immediately thinks they know everything about it?
Plus, like, if you think the phrase 'the research suggests' is unscientific I am unsure as to what you think science actually is. You'll find that phrase in papers for every scientific discipline; it's a very scientific phrase. What is the problem here?
https://old.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/82uefr/cmv_psychology_is_not_a_real_science_and_its/
I think psych as a field is still represented in media by therapy, which is super stigmatized and has an unfortunate history. It is irritating when other science people dismiss psych, because we literally use the same scientific method.
The hard science in Physics in the early stages is based on simple mathematical relationships such as F=ma . This is also easily shown via experiment to be true and is also shown to be correct astronomically throughout the universe.
The hard science in psychology is one of a more statistical nature and also must contain many assumptions. It is more difficult to understand to the layman.
!mathematics thoughts on that?
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/kz43n/dear_reddit_do_you_think_psychology_is_a_science/
I had PTSD. Shit is crazy. Mental illness and the treatments..therapy tactics and meds are very real. I had textbook PTSD and textbook treatment
What are thoughts dramanauts?
What is psychology?
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Tbf brain imaging techniques are what, 70 years old? It took physics, crown jewel of sciences, the millenia from Aristotle to Newton. I feel like it's stuck in it's thermodynamics phase, making quantitative measurements/models of macroscopic phenomenon but still missing that physical mechanistic ontology that Stat mech brought later.
Eventually we will effectively map brain states and neurochemistry to psychological states and/or build a physical model of consciousness, which I believe is what cognitive neuroscience and psycophysics are doing right now. Eventually psychology might be treated like thermo, a historical thing with metaphors of engines and such before getting to the more fundamental Stat mech that recapitulates previous results with more powerful cowtools
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There is no hard aspect of psychology because its too politically motivated im sure we could do enough brain scans to find out if trans really have the a brain in the wrong body but even the idea of proving something so key to modern politics is dangerous. As would being able to filter actually mentally ill people from fakers so you can just sell everyone therapy and meds.
The medical sciences are increasingly seeking empirical individualized treatments yet psychologists are perfectly happy to push drugs that have wildly inconsistent results and that we dont even understand (the serotonin theory of Depression is under heavy fire and barely substantiated so psychcels cope "it works but we dont know why!!").
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We know why, the placebo effect
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Ssris have like a 50& success rate
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Then why does it have a stronger effect than placebo?
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this is why I cant trust it, and this attitude seems to be leaking into medicine. Sad
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No we couldn't lol. We know practically nothing about how the brain actually works and even if we did, a ct scan doesn't have nearly enough detail to show anything psychological
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