cause it's subjective???[Disclaimer: I am trained in Analytical Chemistry, all my professional work is in Molecular Biology.]
“Why psychology isn’t science”
Written by Tom Cruise
Excellent, relevant, and important piece. Bravo to you for posting this.
The author is correct. Wilson should go into therapy.
Science is “the new hotness” and everybody wants in on it.
Nowadays even your shampoo is “scientifically formulated”.
Something doesn't have to be science to be of use and of value - but like barnacles attaching themselves to the bottom of a ship - the hangers on must occasionally be scraped off.
Well, psychology isn’t a pedestrian crosswalk either, so?
Until they put Hoplophobia in the DSM.
when majority opinion determines what is a mental illness and what isn’t (aka 1973-74 homosexuality 180 degree shift) it isn’t science.
When you can be screamed at and threatened by homosexuals to change your mind about homosexuality and cave into the demands of angry homosexuals at your convention, it isn’t science.
Opinion:
No one on the planet can predict how any one individual is going to react to any given stressful situation.
All of this “psychology” saying what happened and why after-the-fact is a bunch of hooey.
If science is a guessing game then I guess pschychologists are scientists.
That’s about all they are good for-—guessing about what is wrong.
It seems to me that a psychologist can do science whether or not psychology is science so it’s a bit of a cat fight.
Psychiatry is a science. Psychology is a skill.
Being a skill, there is a lot of room for incompetent morons however, with the right person, a talented psychologist can be a Godsend.
Psychology will only become “real” science when we can digitize the entire working human brain and analyse it like we would a computer in a car.
[ Why psychology isn’t science ]
Because modern psychology is just somebodys opinion...
Those opinions are not facts..
First, One of my degrees is in psychology. The first week of every psychology class they would include an introductory chapter stating how psychology is a science.
If someone tells me they are telling the truth, I generally believe them. But if they keep repeating it, I often wonder if they are trying to convince me or themselves. You get my drift, I never considered psychology a science.
The reason I never considered psychology a science was due to the biased variable of the critical mind and the influence of past perceptions on any measured variable. It was impossible to stimulate consciousness without stimulating one of the senses and thus also the critical mind. Thus, psychological studies were correlations at best.
Then I discovered a new technique that stimulated stored memories and directly generates a measurable response in the subject without stimulating any of the five senses. I just demonstrated it at a conference in Chicago this past weekend for over a hundred attendees.
I had volunteers from the group come down and I would touch the stored memories in the fields surrounding their physical bodies and move their physical bodies in various directions. I did this while standing 10-15 feet from the subject, their eyes were closed, I said nothing and did not touch their physical body in any way. Using this, I told them of detail events in their lives back to conception and removed the related emotional trauma (if any) for them. The subject did not speak at all prior to me stating my findings. It is so easy. I can read stored memories of an individual’s life experiences almost the way x-rays do bones. They are real physical tangible objects to me. I do not use power of suggestion in any way. It’s easy to explain the neuroscience of how I am doing this. Eric Kandel and Joe Ledoux are missing the boat in their memory research at Columbia and NYU!
When this scientific methodology is utilized, psychology is a science. The Duke University Medical School IRB has already approved the research project where I demonstrate how this works. It is measurable, repeatable, eliminated variable bias, is a direct stimulus response relationship, and works in a double blind. In my initial trial I hit 17 of 20 tests right on and only missed the three as the screens creating the blind were located too close together and the subject’s memory field overlap was too great. i.e. no matter which screen blind the subject was behind the memory field extended in front of both of them. They need to be at least 20 feet apart to create a separation.
In all fairness, sciences and “social studies”, both exist in a ratio of ‘science’ to ‘study’, which varies between disciplines.
That is, ‘science’ is a very rigorous set of reproducible procedures that should produce a nearly identical outcome each time they are performed.
However, interpolation or extrapolation of scientific outcomes is a study.
A chess analogy is a good one. If you successfully follow the rules and play a game of chess, all you have succeeded in doing is playing a game of chess. If you do not follow the rules, you have not played a game of chess, no matter what it looks like. And even if you have won a game of chess it changes nothing. You cannot interpolate or extrapolate based on what you have done, such as you are a better chess player, beyond that particular game.
In the case of psychology, there is deductive psychology, which is a study, and clinical psychology, which is much more scientific.
Compare that with say, astrophysics, so much of which is theoretical and unique that while they can assert some things as scientific facts, much of what they do is observational and speculative, that is, a study. And since the Hubble telescope, they have been severely humbled, and repeatedly, by what they do not know.
Until they start attaching lie detectors to patients or invent a machine that can tell them what I am thinking then psycology is as inaccurate as an online poll. Bear in mind that DUmmies overwhelm these polls, both psycological and online.
cause it's subjective???But, I do observe myself and co-workers exhibit some snobbishness to a degree from time to time towards ‘social studies’.
It's a lot closer to witchcraft than it is to geology.