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Comment by Planktonne | Hacker News Reader

Psychology uses the scientific method to investigate and understand the world; it's a science.

It's sometimes poorly done, but this is true of all the sciences; malpractice and poor rigour in particular experiments don't invalidate an entire field. It's also sometimes misused by other fields, but this is (again) true of all the sciences - a therapist misapplying a principle doesn't stop psychology being a science any more than an engineer miscalculating makes physics pseudoscience.

Science is about the approach, not the topic or the perception.

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That last sentence is really well-put. Science is a method. My wife is an actual scientist (biologist doing things with antibodies that I like 60% understand), and when I described A/B testing stuff on ecommerce sites to try and improve conversion rates, her response was something like "Oh, wow, so you're also doing science."

And hey, as someone who was a psych major I can say that psychology is a much more difficult science than either my wife's work or me trying to improve conversion rates, but that's just because it's dealing with things that are harder to measure than changes in conversion rates or the bindings of antibodies to targets. As long as you're correctly applying the scientific method to it, you're doing science.

> Science is about the approach, not the topic or the perception

Agreed on the approach part; as for the topics: there are topics which are inherently hard to "prove"/falsify, either by lack of sufficient evidence (existence of god(s), UFO-as-aliens etc.) or lack of tooling required to tackle the complexity of interactions (many large scale societal problems, psychology, (geo-)politics etc.).

And while "proper" study of those topics is definitely considered science, insisting that we soon can achieve breakthroughs is most likely misguided. What I mean is that we cannot even map and (even if crudely) simulate a single brain, let alone detailed-enough interactions between 7 billions of people. And that's what's probably required to get some solid answers here.

Absolutely; I'm not disputing that in general, psychology is harder to pin down - any experiments are on something vastly complicated that is really hard to isolate. As a formal discipline, psychology is still relatively young, and so it's going to take a long time to get the kind of insights everyone is excited about.

Particle physics is younger than psychology and yet far more effective; why? There is a qualitative difference between the sciences which generate predictive models and those which cannot.

> Particle physics is younger than psychology and yet far more effective; why?

“Physics” isn’t, though, just carving out of particle physics as a distincg niche within it. But mostly the difference is particle physics deals with simpler systems in which the parts are easier to isolate.

> There is a qualitative difference between the sciences which generate predictive models and those which cannot.

No, there isn’t; all sciences, including psychology, generate predictive models. There’s a quantitative difference in the degree of uncertaintity expected in predictive models in various sciences which affects testing models, and is a product of the degree of difficulty of isolating the effect modelled from potentially confounding influences.

This definition is concerning because without strict criteria for what is and isn’t science, we welcome topics like phrenology.

Topics like this are, as a whole, not true. While I think psychology is no where near as problematic, the author’s argument that a loose definition of science, like whether the scientific method is employed, can be dangerous.

> This is dangerous because, under such a loose definition, anything can qualify as science. And when anything qualifies as science, science can no longer claim to have a unique grasp on secular truth.

Ultimately, what we define as scientific will impact what we perceive to be truthful. Setting a higher bar for a topic to be labeled scientific will strengthen our grasp on secular truth.

Defining science without reference to the scientific method sounds far more concerning. 'A discipline that uses the scientific method to investigate hypotheses' doesn't seem like a loose definition to me, and it definitely doesn't allow phrenology.

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