The APA No Longer Represents Good Science or Clinical Practice | Hacker News Reader

The APA No Longer Represents Good Science or Clinical Practice

medium.com

52 pointsmpweiher16 comments

Does resigning make a difference in these cases? I’m very worried about the almost complete institutional capture by this woke anti scientific/data driven approach, but what does the future look like? Anyone who disagrees eventually leaves and these institutions have no internal debate? What then? They eventually get discredited as authorities? Or they just maintain their position and this all gets much worse?

Yes. When voices are being ignored, voting with your feet is the typical other option. Institutions which are weakened inevitably fail

Who can say? Consider, though, that just because someone writes an open letter and resigns, doesn't necessarily make them right -- certainly, at minimum, it does nothing to cement them as somehow free from their own agenda or biases.

Neither, then, does the ostensibly irony free use of terms like "wokeness", or the placement of "lived experience" in scare quotes, do anything to bolster a putatively data-driven perspective hounded by some opposing team.

Whole fields of medical and psychological science have changed over just the course of my lifetime. I expect they will continue to change to reflect the complex needs of our society, and based on new understanding we continue to uncover. This letter is not especially moving.

> Whole fields of medical and psychological science have changed over just the course of my lifetime. I expect they will continue to change to reflect the complex needs of our society, and based on new understanding we continue to uncover.

Ok, but that’s not the scientific method. The actual scientific method should be free of all political and societal needs. It is based on reproducable results. It doesn’t care if you’re black, white, trans, bi, or toxically masculine. It only cares about actual facts.

That's really a narrow-minded view on the scientific method. While it's true that the process of carrying out an experiment should (at least in theory) be free of human biases, the reality is that bias pervades science just as much as any human endeavour.

Even if you manage to completely get rid of biases in the actual experiment, what we choose to study, how the study is structured, and how we interpret the results will be subject to our biases. Science doesn't "care if you're black, white, trans, bi, or toxically masculine" because it doesn't "care" about anything. It's the fallible humans carrying out science that choose what to care about and investigate.

Very odd (or telling, at least) that this is getting downvoted. Of course there are all sorts of forces at play on what gets studied, what gets published once it’s studied, and what gets shared once it’s published. The scientific method has many tools to mitigate biases within itself/its practitioners. But as you say, the scientific method is a very, very small part of an enormous scientific apparatus that doesn’t (yet) have similar tools for mitigating these forces in itself.

A trivial example: It’s hard for non-native English speakers to get published in the world’s premiere journals because, well duh, they publish in English. Are we to conclude the scientific method can only be carried out to Nature’s standards in English? Obviously not.

The scientific method is about disproving hypotheses.

There is tons of ugliness in that process, going back well before our time (e.g. Galileo).

Phrased differently, the scientific process is about the multi-generational accumulation of empirical mastery. The details by which humans have achieved mastery is a complicated story.

> This appears to be as true regarding its historical involvement with the mistreatment of detainees as documented in the Hoffman Report as it is regarding its capitulation to “wokism” in the present.

Ah okay, so he's bitter because the thinks the APA has been taken over by the woke mob.

The Hoffman Report:

The Hoffman Report is the informal name for the 2015 investigation into the American Psychological Association’s (APA) practices regarding its relaxing of ethical standards for psychologists involved in torture interrogations. The full name for the report is, Independent Review Relating to APA Ethics Guidelines, National Security Interrogations, and Torture. It was authored by attorneys David Hoffman, Danielle Carter, Cara Viglucci Lopez, Heather Benzmiller, Ava Guo, Yasir Latifi and Daniel Craig of the law firm, Sidley Austin, LLP.

https://psychcentral.com/pro/the-hoffman-report-the-american...

Do people think the fix will need a "long march through the institutions" as well? I think we may get lucky and they may have rotten the institutions into irrelevance enough that setting up new ones may work this time.

Interesting times.

https://archive.is/wGRrW

tl;dr: He believes violent video games cause violent behavior and that the APA is too woke.

He said the APA is “grossly distorting the evidence” that violent video games cause violent behavior.

The APA's position is that there is no evidence to support a causal link.

Yup, had a feeling this was going to be about "wokeness" when I saw that title

Reply on news.ycombinator.com