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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

There's an unfortunate tendency to treat science as the only source of truth. Really, psychology (like engineering and medicine) is a profession. Professions aren't just based on the scientific method -- they draw from a semi-formal pile of experience known as "best practices." These are often just based on something that a clever person decided to try decades or centuries ago which seems to have not hurt anyone. Of course it is an iterative process so sometimes these things are overturned, but the process seems to work allright.

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Spot on. I’ve met many psychologists who struck me as kind, wise people with a helpful perspective. Society needs them.

But to plug this fuzzy, professional knowledge into equations, call it science, and use it to make decisions in business and policy is at best naive and at worst fraud.

> psychology (like engineering and medicine) is a profession.

Throwing engineering in there with psychology and medicine is not a very good grouping of disciplines. At least not if "engineering" means the kind of engineering that professionals in the field have legal liability for (like the engineering that goes into designing bridges and buildings).

Engineering does have "best practices", but those practices have to operate within limits that are very well understood based on underlying physical science that has been thoroughly tested and for which we have mathematical models with excellent predictive capability. The "best practices" in psychology and medicine have nothing like that kind of support.

> the process seems to work allright

Engineering, at least the kind that designs bridges and buildings, seems to work all right, yes. I'm not sure I would say the same for psychology and medicine.

If you actually talk to engineers who have to follow regulation and building code, they will tell you how often the rules are nonsense and don't make technical sense, they have to click checkboxes to say that something is fulfilled that doesn't even make sense in the given context etc.

I certainly agree that many local regulations and building codes are not there for engineering reasons, they're there for political and economic reasons that have nothing to do with good engineering.

But it's also true that any of those engineers who say that a particular regulation doesn't make technical sense, will be able to explain to you in detail why it doesn't make technical sense, based on the kind of theoretical and practical knowledge I described, the kind that is backed by well-tested models with excellent predictive capacity.

I think the differentiation between "science" and "profession" is a bit crude. You obviously don't include mathematics in this, but it is a form of deductive reasoning as far away from science as the arts are. Deductive reasoning is just far less prone to fault than inductive reasoning, be it mathematics or philosophy, and the methods we have developed in some of the natural sciences over the centuries to model real-life behavior on mathematics are really great.

You are right that these largely don't exist in the Social sciences, but this is at least partially due to the much more complex subject matter. Still, both the social sciences as well as the natural sciences are trying to approximate reality through models built on experiments, and are thus fundamentally different from deductive reasoning in closed systems.

Not trying to mince words here, but engineering is applying validated knowledge to solve real world problems, sure, you can call it profession, but the fields generally associated with engineering are still in the business of generating knowledge. Medicine and Psychology heavily rely on the scientific method to validate abstract concepts, while engineering adjacent disciplines like Computer Science heavily really on maths and deductive reasoning to solve problems in the space of algorithms and computers.

There was an interesting discussion on HN last week that brought up the fact that mathematics has its own crises, namely a communication crises. It was brought up that the proofs can be so dense that errors will be published and go unchecked for a long time. The interesting part is that everything that's needed for "replication" is literally within the paper and the errors still fall through the cracks.

There is still an awful lot of engineering that is model-based without strong deductive proofs. (Mechanical failure theory comes to mind). But the actual origin of "profession" comes from professing an oath to the public good. Meaning the traditional professions (law, medicine, engineering) aren't necessarily aimed at creating new knowledge, but applying knowledge to the betterment (or profit) of society. Sometimes that butts up against problems without known solutions that requires adding knowledge to the field, but that's not really the primary goal, unlike something like mathematics.

You obviously don't include mathematics in this, but it is a form of deductive reasoning as far away from science as the arts are.

I disagree strongly with this. To reduce mathematics (and philosophy in your next sentence) to not-a-science, just because it's based on deductive reasoning is doing it a major disservice.

It is especially because of its deductiveness that mathematics is such a valuable tool for science. It answers the fundamental question "assuming A, what can we prove to be true about A' and A''?". Without that deductive proof, many inductive scientific theories could not even be formulated, let alone disproven.

And then you go on stating that engineering is applying validated knowledge to solve real world problems. Do you realize that much of that validation of said knowledge has been done through mathematical models? That the only reason we have certainty in engineering is because of the deductive rigour of mathematics?

Mathematics & philosophy aren’t sciences because there are no hypotheses, experiments, and results; it’s just thinking and logic.

It’s still incredibly valuable and the basis of many good things.

I would also add that engineering isn’t only working with existing scientific knowledge; we were building steam trains and optimizing them long before we started doing scientific thermodynamics.

Generally in math, they call hypotheses "conjectures," and proofs are similar to results.

Science and math are definitely good friends and so I'm sure lots of analogies between the two could be made, but I believe the comment was getting at the epistemological difference between 'proven' (the happy state in mathematics) and 'not contradicted by experimental evidence' (the happy state in science).

I'm really not sure what you are getting at. Psychology is pretty definitively a science. So is a massive chunk of medicine. Science holds extra weight because it involves at least attempting a verification step following an idea.

Treating science as gospel is stupid. But without personal experience (and frequently even with) stating something as true is largely meaningless. Stating something is true, while providing data to back it up, as well as evidence that other subject experts have checked that data may not be perfect, but that doesn't put it on equal footing with a gut check.

How could you possibly know that the "process seems to work alright" without scientific evidence that it's doing so? You actually have no idea in that case whether you're doing harm or helping, and if you're somehow helping, it could just be a very expensive placebo.

I mean, I don't work in mental health, but if somebody has mental health issues that they are dealing with, and they buy an "expensive placebo" in the form of talking about their problems with a professional, and it helps... that seems like a successful treatment, right? I'm actually not even sure how to define placebo in this context.

I think it's important to focus on "expensive" and not "placebo" in that statement. If a placebo is all that's needed (or all that we can do), then arguably it shouldn't be expensive.

Lots of things seem oddly priced from my point of view, this is one of them, but who are we to argue with the market, right?

The market priced it based on the assumption that it works better than placebo.

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