Patterns of mean-level change in personality traits across life course (2006)
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
It is more difficult to measure a human trait, than to measure a temperature.
I'm wondering what the options are? We can't just dismiss Psychology, cancel an entire field because it has difficulties. Why can't we study humans, what study of humans would take the place of Psychology?
I'd say all those pointing to the successes of 'hard' sciences, have it easier.
Isn't iterative improvement what all science is about?
It has nothing to do with “liberal” or “conservative” fields of studies and everything to do with reproducibility and predictivity. If psychology could make predictions to the 13th decimal place like we are able to do for the gyromagnetic ratio of the electron (and confirm via experiment), there would be no complaints.
There is also a tendency for the outcomes of psychology studies to be “oversold” in a sense. To be fair, this is more often due to the media sensationalizing the results or reading something into them that isn’t there, but you don’t see this as often in physics (well, maybe a bit with quantum mechanics and black holes).
But we do need to study humans, and they are hard to quantify. It is very misleading to compare measuring electrons to measuring 'how do I feel'. It is difficult to measure. That doesn't mean not to.
It seems like here the sentiment is strongly to go ahead and toss the baby out with the bath water.
Also reminds me of that one psychology study where they made a total coincidence into a correlation which the media went crazy over (https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2015/05/29/i-fooled-m...).
> B is worse!
What good is a comment like this, especially when B is completely unrelated to what anyone is talking about?
I think you might just be a little too high in the food chain to see the vast amounts of lay speculation about physics that goes on. Certainly less volume of speech than psychology but i think for the respective popularity of the fields, people find it _more engaging_ to do speculation of physical reality than just another psychological paper. The majority of journalists oversell everything. It's just that it's less often that physics makes it into regular magazines and publications, i think
OP was probably referring to liberal as in liberal arts (in comparison to hard sciences and/or professional degree tracks like engineering)
This is an issue in biology as well/in general, and it doesn't get near the amount of pushback here as psychology.
I think you are missing that you are being measured that accurately, by marketing departments using methods from psychology.
That's not a fair comparison. Medicine struggles to make vaccines that are more than 95% effective. HIV tests are 99.97% accurate. The mind is even squishier, psychology will always look amateurish compared to physics.
As software engineers on HN, we don't debug a computer program by talking about why the program might be feeling bad because it sexualized its mother as an infant or some other insane nonsense. I suspect once neuroscience gets better, and we can simply load up all our neurons into a computer and run the equivalent of GDB on it, it'll be really obvious that humans are 100% deterministic, people with psych problems are deficient in X, Y, or Z chemical or the wiring was screwed up in some place or another, and we'll be able to fix it.
Eventually we will look back on Psychologists the same as doctors that did Bloodletting and "Balancing the Humors"- complete crackpots that set science back a few hundred years.
Not being able to model something at the lowest possible level doesn't make something inherently unscientific.
It certainly makes it harder to test hypotheses and harder to be certain of the results, but it can still be scientific.
Science isn't a strait line of analytical progression, and when it does get side tracked, it isn't some nefarious group. I could just as easily say if only those stupid String Theorist had just stepped aside, we wouldn't have set Physics back a decade.
It's human dynamics, hmmm, I wonder if there is someone studying why groups get stuck in these loops, hmmm, why do humans seem to get stuck at a plateau that is difficult to think beyond, hmmmm let me think now, hmmm. Psychologist?
There are definitely problems in the field, in some subareas more than others. I am pleased to see how much discussion in the field there has been regarding issues with replication, sample sizes, etc., and I do see improvements there. Quite honestly, the discussion about these things has instigated the same questions in other fields. The progress is slow, and it frustrates me that I don't feel like I can fully trust a lot of the older research in the field, but...there is progress.
But I think you're right that it's a difficult field in general. Human minds are complicated -- possibly one of the most complex things in the universe to study. Human social interactions, relationships, group dynamics, identities, and start with those complex machines and now layer on top additional interdependent cause-effect relationships. The area of study is just, fundamentally, hard.
The field has developed techniques to try to address this -- that's why psych surveys tend to ask the same question in multiple different ways. By triangulating in to a fuzzy concept from multiple angles, it at least gets us to the point where (hopefully) there's some systematic variance we can talk about and study. We're never going to get to the point where we can measure "agreeableness" or "prejudice" or "empathy" with as much precision as physicists can measure changes in an atom. But studying the human condition in as systematic a way as we can still feels incredibly important to me, to do what we can to improve human flourishing.
We can stop pretending that the garbage currently produced has any value whatsoever.
They forget that their “hard” natural sciences offer no proof of consciousness being caused by neurons and atoms, or them being somehow more “objectively real” than consciousness; indeed, this is not even a question physics et al. would have in their scope.
If you think about it, your mind is the only thing you have direct unmediated access to—and in any science, even physics, it is always at the beginning and the end of any discovery: once you remove the intermediate steps, all discoveries and all their real-world applications and implications ultimately concern the state of human mind. However, shiny gains offered by physics and respective technological advances can be blinding enough that we forget what’s fundamental.
> Every single thing laypeople learn about psychology and experiment
Laypeople miss-understand something, then blame the psychologist for their own miss-understanding.
Sounds like you and a lot of comments here.
Since Psychology is about humans, and how they respond, then it is possible to have Psychology studies about Psychology studies, and study why humans are biased, why are studies biased, and control for those factors.
Because a subject is difficult doesn't mean toss it all out the window. "shucks this stuff is hard, darn, guess it's all BS".
How do you even begin to setup an experiment where you setup a real study of human interaction without breaking any ethical norms? Before you object to this line of thinking, consider that Milgram experiment would not be allowed today.
If so, how can the field advance?
Seems like other fields are able to advance with observational studies, why is Psychology singled out as being impossible.
If studies can't be re-produced, then analyze why and try again until it can be. All the doomsayer arguments in this thread is weird. Who would ever say "man this double slit thing is tough to understand, maybe we shouldn't do physics anymore".
The only difference is that everyone thinks they are specialists in human psychology, so they feel like they can dismiss everything that doesn't fit their prior assumptions.
Papers on quantum mechanics start with so much math that noone outside the subfield has any idea what it says, so noone dares to dismiss it.
> my degree in an obscure subfield of quantum mechanics
Guess I'm wondering why his 'degree in un-related field and have read some psychology', is not as valid as your 'some degree in un-related field, and have read some psychology'.
Or do you think your CS PhD came with more psychology course work than his quantum mechanics degree?
You might need some Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. There are a lot of studies that show it works.
Anyway, good luck on the anger issues. Not sure who you will see since Psychologist are off the table. Maybe meditation? Lot of good meditation studies coming out lately.
Hope you read rest of thread. I think a few people gave much better answers on the split between different Psychological fields, and why perceptions of the field are skewed.
I do think there is an argument that Psychology (as the study of the mind), can also study how humans respond, and are biased in Psychological studies, and how the people running a study can also be biased, hence the field as a whole can become better at performing studies.
Or another way, by studying why studies aren't replicating, we can also form better models to improve future studies. Basically, examine why measurements are wrong, form a new hypothesis, and measure again, and eventually form what this thread would call 'scientific' findings.
Basically follow the scientific process, and not just get angry that results are not replicating and toss out the whole field. When physics doesn't replicate, they figure out why, there are follow up studies, re-formulations. We don't just cancel all of physics.
Meehl, Paul E. 1990. "Why summaries of research on psychological theories are often uninterpretable." Psychological Reports 66:195-244.
He gives a very detailed discussion of several factors that combine to make most psychology research (in his opinion) worthless.
His takeaway quote:
I think that for most faculty in soft psychology the full acceptance of my line of thought would involve a painful realization that one has achieved some notoriety, tenure, economic security and the like by engaging, to speak bluntly, in a bunch of nothing.
HN is against Psychology mostly because of measurements and reproducibility. But they are only applying this standard to published scientific papers.
When Really, Psychology is most used in -> MARKETTING.
Marketing is all Psychology, and they definitely do form hypothesis, measure results, and iterate on that.
They are measuring you all day. Everything you see, taste, feel, smell, is a Psychology Experiment done by Marketing departments in order to control your behavior. And by control your behavior, I mean, that is testing a hypothesis in the scientific method.
So, if that entire field is included into the field of 'Psychology', then yes it has grown by leaps and bounds as a science. Just not benevolently, or published in a scientific journal.
As always, with private, closed-down research, you can't tell. The instances I notice do clearly lead to bad outcomes, but that's a highly biased sample.
But anyway, I disagree that you can point to it as a counter-example. Not until you get some public data.
I am saying, even if results are private, and we don't have public data, you can still look at the world around you and see the results. I have read interviews with app developers that flat out say they have entire departments of psychologist dedicated to increasing screen time. Those are un-published, but that doesn't mean it isn't real and happening. Thus you can infer that the entire field of Psychology is not complete BS, since money is going into it for the results it provides.
It isn't pretty, and it isn't fitting the high ideals of 'pure science". That doesn't mean we can ignore the entire field, call it fake, or say it is all BS.
> Those are un-published, but that doesn't mean it isn't real and happening.
It means you don't know what is happening.
I'm just agreeing that there are instances. But also agree, in the private corporate world, they aren't good for us as a whole, for society or the field. And can't be verified in a 'scientific peer reviewed' way. We can only do second hand observations.
But, they are impactful. Just negatively.
I see them being impactful. I have no idea what they really are.
It leads to an interesting thought. Could you actually crack the riddle of pigeon movement given access to the entirety of humanity's resources? Be those resources manpower, computation, or funding? I really doubt it. It's going to be a chaotic interdependent system, rife with individual variation, and a good deal of randomness and chaos thrown in for good measure. All with no reason to expect any sort of remotely normal or measurable distribution.
I really don't think my opinion there is especially controversial. Yet, if not - then how is it we might instead imagine we can delve into the patterns of the human mind and psyche? Where complexity, chaos, and interdependence is many orders of magnitude greater? It just doesn't really make any sense to me. We only take it as a given because we're born into a society where this is a given. From astrology to phrenology history is littered with examples of "science" that weren't really science at all, just fields perpetuated by bias confirmation, lack of falsifiability, and so on. I often think we're stuck with some 'arrogance of the present' where, due to our advanced knowledge, we imagine we could surely never repeat the same mistakes of the past. Of course people of the past thought the exact same as well.
I disagree that is is impossible. We continue to chip away at the problem, at least to an extent that it seems worth continuing, not stopping.
This thread is filled with people that think Psychology is akin to astrology. But will then happily click on their phones that psychology has helped dial in to produce a response in them.
The problem is entirely with people confusing and treating Trends or heuristics as deterministic facts when they are far from it
So guess there are two camps in the thread:
Psychology is either over-stating its findings, 'trying to be too exact when exact is not possible', so it's bad science.
Or when it does find something, it's deemed not exact enough, 'how dare you report a simple heuristic', so it's bad science.
Damned either way.
You can make very strong predictions about that stuff.
Like fluid mechanics. It may actually be impossible to analytically predict the motion of individual particles in a fluid. Numerically it is certainly difficult. Yet we've extracted patterns to the point that we can design jet engines, wings, we can quantify the change in fuel economy from changing the shape of a car headlight...
In an ideal world, psychology limits itself to attempting to look at these broad patterns and does so in a rigorous, reproducible way.
It’s precisely when social sciences try to apply methods or standards from the natural/‘hard’ sciences that things go wrong. It is more difficult, as you said, and it’s also qualitatively different. We need different models. Human traits may be measurable, but as observable emergent properties of a many-layered complex system, they’re are not at all like temperature or any other physical property.
It gets darker than that. The veneer of certainty, backed by the successes of hard sciences but ostensibly applied to humans, creates a ripe environment for pseudoscience and grifters to take advantage of others during their most vulnerable times.
Yes - we should study humans, and iteratively get better at it. But we need to tread carefully.
> Isn't iterative improvement what all science is about?
Yes and no. There's more to science, but iterative improvement is a large part of it.
My issue with psychology (and other soft sciences, e.g. sociology, economics) isn't so much its striving to find answers, but its adopting a one-sided worldview before that striving, thereby coloring their findings with that one side.
Look at what you wrote--'I know it [psychology] is typically viewed as a 'liberal' field'. That's because it IS a liberal (well, a politically Progressive) field--its instructors, its researchers, its practitioners largely are self-admittedly liberal (and further Left on the political spectrum.) And when they hire, they hire like-minds.[1] (Which is a thing humans do--no one wants to work with people they... dislike... for some reason.)
And so, because they've no opposing worldview in their ranks to say 'no', well... can their findings be trusted? [2]
[1] A commentary on the perceived political homogeneity at the University--https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/the_value_...
>One study found, for example, that a third of social psychologists admitted that they would be unwilling to hire a known conservative to the faculty, and nearly half thought that their colleagues would be unwilling to hire such a person.33 Subsequent work suggests that those findings are not limited to psychology, and that conservative scholars might have a similar willingness to discriminate against liberals.34 On the whole, there does not appear to be a robust pipeline of conservatives desperate to get into academia.
This is substantially different from what you are suggesting, this idea that there is a natural bias when it seems to be a supply problem (and a dismissal of academia entirely, as the article links together the larger conservative push against higher education). Can't hire that which does not exist or believes your field is a farce.
There's a supply problem for women in STEM and our response has been to investigate every potential cause while investing in scholarships and outreach. If we found out that 33% of STEM employers were unwilling to hire women, we'd say, "Aha, that explains the supply problem. Let's fix that." I can't fathom spending tens of thousands of dollars to enter a highly competitve field where a third of employers will rule you out outright (and presumably more will discount you against other candidates).
Even if conservatives aren't interested for other reasons, the presence of a supply problem does not rule out bias. There is evidence of substantial self-reported bias, so there's probably bias.
A lot of social sciences seem to have "math-envy", and try to fit a subject to a tool that is not well suited for it.
If I read some early literature (not Freud though, he's a charlatan), I often find deep insight, and observations that get to the heart of some issue in a way that is only half science and half art, but revealing some knowledge in a way art can as well.
Current psychology is quite different, mostly dry. In summary, my issue is not lack of rigor, but too much rigor and lack of deep insight.
And being ready to have the conceptual frameworks altered by the flood of new insights from neuroscience.
The big five personality types discussed in TFA tho are on solid experimental footing (of being stable characteristics of humans that explain about half of what we label as personality) and a fit subject for other experimental investigations like this on changes over a lifetime.
When you consider the extent it is trusted to produce truth and the extent that such 'truth' influences public policy and law, I think encouraging distrust of psychology is a social good. There is a difference between talking the details with the experts who recognize the limits of existing studies and talking about 'Psychology says we should do X' with the general population who aren't aware of the concept of reproducibility.
It is much like discussing the possible uses of crypto. If another friend in tech is talking about some possible benefit of crypto, I take a completely different approach than if my gram calls me up asking if I heard about new crypto tech X that will double her retirement.
Imagined if we studied and tried to understand how CPUs work by endlessly clicking around in the interfaces of popular user software. "Oooh, look, this one has a 'file' menu too! I think file menus might be one of the universal traits of all computation!".
We know that there is such a thing as psychology, and when we finally understand it that the psychologists will have had nothing to do with that. Their insights are minimal on the best days, and non-existent the rest of the time.
They're off heading in their own pseudo-science direction, and it's doubtful that they'll disband even after someone else figures out their science for them. It will just limp onwards like phrenology.
Guess, that is the problem. Seems like most of the thread doesn't seem to think it can be studied at all. You seem to acknowledge it can be, just not by 'Psychologist'.
I think this is a case of changing the title. Everyone seems to have a pretty negative view of the field of Psychology, so there are now a lot of other fields off doing Psychology but they changed their names, thus 'psychologists will have had nothing to do with that'. But where did it start?
Or maybe I'm not up on the times. What I'm calling Psychology has up and left and call themselves neuroscientist now, or 'cognitive neuroscience'.
You might want to read up on the history of thermodynamics. It took decades to figure out how to define and measure temperature. It's far more difficult to measure temperature than a human trait because one requires precise definition and modeling while the latter doesn't.
> Why can't we study humans, what study of humans would take the place of Psychology?
Neuroscience. Psychology is the easy way out to doing real science.
> I'd say all those pointing to the successes of 'hard' sciences, have it easier.
"Hard science" is more difficult because hard science has to testable via experiment. It isn't just a bunch of people agreeing to a consensus.
> Isn't iterative improvement what all science is about?
But psychology isn't iterative. It isn't improvement. 99% of psychology is not testable. The biggest critics of psychology are pyschologists themselves ( at least the honest ones ). Ask yourself why there are many competing schools of psychology. And then ask yourself why there is no scientific or experimental way to find the "right or correct school of psychology".
Psychology today is as scientific as astrology was hundreds of years ago. Until telescopes and radio waves allowed us to peer into the cosmos and gave us astronomy. The lack of tools and modeling of the human brain is what's holding back the science of the brain ( neuroscience ). Psychology is just modern day voodoo not different than astrology.
When i read studies in the field it often feels like a less reputable macroeconomics, which in turn feels like a less reputable theoretical physics...
hard for me believe that you would infer anything statistically meaningful on population scale from that small of a sample, or am i missing something? is it common to work with so small sample sizes in psychology?
Combina that with the fact that they often use psychology students as experiment group and the fact that most research doesn’t go further than assume a normal distribution, and you might start to understand why more than 2/3rds of all psychology research cannot be reproduced.
As sibling posts mentioned, a much bigger issue than sample size is representativeness: college psychology study samples tend to be drawn disproportionately from college students. They might not generalize well to the general population even if you increase the sample size ten fold or a hundred fold.
While that statement is technically correct, it is useless in practice. In order to determine whether a sample is representative (of the trait you are trying to measure), you need to know what the true mean value of the trait is – but if you knew that, you wouldn't need to conduct the experiment in the first place.
That's why it is important to have a large sample size, because under some very general assumptions, the distortions caused by outliers become smaller the more samples you look at. In the limit (that is, when the sample size equals the population size) those distortions disappear entirely, and the sample mean becomes the true population mean.
1. We assume that people have stable measurable independent properties f1(x1.., t), f2(x1.., t), ...
2. We assume these are modelled by a linear model, f1(t) = ax + b, etc.
3. We assume the parameters (a, b) of this model causally determine `f1` st. each corresponds to an independent cause of `f1`
4. We assume that we have some reliable measurement process, say m, which measures each property producing samples of that a,b: m(f1) = random samples of a,b
5. Then we assume that these samples are representative of the true values, ie., that mean(a samples) = a + random_error
The problem with the field is that (1 - 4) are false -- arguing about 5 is a little like arguing what time a broken clock should be set to.
The physicist replies, "At the atomic level I did not, technically, touch it."
Without a causal model of a human mind (and its relationship to the world) -- what exactly is there a "statistics" of?
You cannot really have a scientific psychology; the necessary experiments are impossible or unethical.
> While that statement is technically correct, it is useless in practice.
I don't really follow your argument for small sample sizes being useless in practice.
Isn't the whole point of things like confidence/credible intervals, the bootstrap, and other common statistical methods, to quantify the uncertainty of estimates due to the sampling procedure, including sample size and the possibility of outliers? And, while we may not know that our sample is representative, isn't random sampling from the population of interest a method that will generate a sample that is representative with high probability?
That these methods are well known in statistical practice suggests that samples are generally useful, even when they are not large. The existence of pathological distributions where we might get misleading results (e.g., the classical "wealth over the people in a room if you throw Bill Gates in there") doesn't make these methods useless, does it?
That depends on the sample size. The comment I replied to claimed that "you could estimate population statistics of millions (or even infinite) with a sample of just 30 or so".
Which is certainly not true if the sample is drawn randomly, except under very specific circumstances (such as population variance being extremely small). You don't need a billionaire in order for income distribution samples to be wildly misleading. It's enough for the variance to be high, so that very small samples are almost guaranteed to have a mean that differs substantially from that of the whole population.
How did I just produce a reliable estimate using a sample size of only six?
By quantifying the uncertainty of the estimate. There's a trade off between sample size and uncertainty, and that trade off allows small sample sizes to be useful for many practical applications, most of which can accommodate uncertainty.
Again, small samples are informative. Whether they are informative enough for a particular application doesn't determine whether they are informative enough for all applications in general. I certainly wouldn't call them "useless in practice."
Doesnt sound representative for me at all
Yes. Even much smaller sample sizes are common. I've seen "results" published in supposedly reputable journals with sample sizes as small as 9. Not 9 other studies that were meta-analyzed, mind you. 9 individual people.
This is just one of several reasons why most of psychology is junk science, if not outright fraudulent. Statistical methods is usually a required course for students in such disciplines, so I do not buy the "they don't know better" excuse. Not that you need to know statistics in order to understand that you can't conclude anything from a sample size of 9.
There are good ideas in the field, to be sure. But on the other hand...
This is without a doubt one of the worst and most normalized human rights violations happening in the world today, and the scale and impact of it is hard to imagine.
The police then take that person to a place of safety, usually a hospital.
I can speak from a lot of experience when I say I would trust a clinical psychologist over a psychiatrist any day of the week. Psychiatrists are just doctors who learn to prescribe medication based on a simple set of rules and psychometry. There are psychiatrists who take their field very seriously, but that's the exception rather than the rule.
It's basically impossible to separate the benefits of talk (social interaction, validation, etc) from the talk therapy. Lots of people whould probably be served just as well if they had someone much less trained, or not even trained at all to talk to in a similar manner.
Furthermore as the social bonds disintegrate studies suggest that individuals have less friends and less interpersonal interaction generally (social media use excluded) at the same time the need for psychologists has increased. In some demographics over half the members have been diagnosed with a mental illness. How can we be sure that all of the sudden lots of people have become mentally ill vs lots of people need someone to listen to them?
This goes especially for actually severe mental disorder, because the thing there is, those patients have things going on in their head that most people can't relate to or understand(like irrational fears for instance). Psychologists however have a lot of experience talking with these people, reading and interpreting abnormal body language. And they know the sort of things you definitely don't want to say to a patient.
As for your point about social media, my personal view is that you're mostly right except I do think real mental illness is increasing, because loneliness is such a strong cause of depression especially, but also social phobia.
Throughout my childhood most of my interactions with people outside my family consisted or bullying by other kids and neglect by teachers. Because of this, it's deeply instilled in me that in any social interaction people are catalogueing my every mistake or negative attribute, or just ignoring me. No amount of conversation with other people(or medication btw) has helped me overcome this, but the only progress I have made was in therapy. What I really needed was help to understand why my brain works this way, and how I can be more aware of my own irrational thinking. This has helped me to obsess a lot less about social situations. Though I still have a deep mistrust of people at my core, I've at least been able to let some people in and learn to trust them. And accept that they really do like me for who I am.
While a bit rambling, I hope that provides some context on what a good therapist can do compared to speaking to friends and loved ones.
For young men without strong male influences in particular I think a kind person in some sort of big brother program is probably worth a team of psychological professionals in many cases.
But we need to recognise that actually, there are people who can't be helped this way, who need more than just any talk at all, and that clinical psychologists have a lot of useful expertise on how to help these people, that can't simply be written off as unscientific or just a friendly conversation. There's a lot more to it than that.
I'm guessing that if 9 is enough to call it junk, then 20 would not sway your opinion. What is a good number then? 100? 1000?. Guess could do identical study on groups of 10,100,1000, and show that the results replicate across the size. Of course, this has been done, hence why they get away with smaller sizes.
That's precisely why psychologists take statistics classes as part of their education. I get that those aren't everyone's cup of tea, but people who don't even understand the basics have no business conducting and publishing studies. In fact, well-designed scientific studies typically start with a discussion of p-values, sample sizes, possible sources of biases, etc. If you don't see any mention of those in a study, you know you're looking at junk.
Psychology is still a newcomer, and study of the mind and the human animal is difficult because it is complex and hard to measure. That doesn’t mean you can’t start somewhere.
These are structural and methodical issues which are not at all related to it’s age. In many cases it is simply bias, negligence or pure fraud.
These are examples of a 'new' science. Humans are complex and hard to measure, so yes, there are problems with study design, and re-producibility. Because they are working it out. That is because of the field of study, not evil intent, some dark cabal of researchers putting out false data on purpose. If there is some obvious way to solve these problems, then those people should do it.
I was going to throw out some sarcastic example from another field. But guess, when I think about it, maybe it does happen. String Theory in Physics is an example of "group think" leading an entire field down the wrong rabbit hole of stuff that is faulty and can't be measured. So guess it can happen anywhere.
It's okay to not know. It's not okay to claim results when there aren't any to be drawn from the available data.
And astrology did not "turn into" astronomy. Astronomy developed (in part) as a result of astrologers trying to predict the motion of celestial objects. But astrology is not at all the forerunner of scientific astronomy, since its main concern (how celestial movements influence human lives) lacks any factual underpinnings. It's not that astrology produced incorrect results; the entire endeavor is fundamentally wrong.
Might need to do some history readying. Of course the study of celestial movements eventually became astronomy, who do you think was looking at the stars before astronomy existed. All of history isn't some nice linear line of analytic reasoning. I wonder if HN also has a general bias against history, since it is a non-technical field with a lot of interpretations.
Astrology is not "the study of celestial movements". It's the utterly baseless claim that those movements have a high-level influence on human lives. That's not proto-science, it's pseudoscience. And it's not at all comparable to incorrect theories in other fields (like phlogiston or the luminiferous aether). There is no reason to expect that astrology works, and its claims are made without any supporting evidence. That has nothing to do with science.
I am NOT saying Astrology is true. I'm saying that a lot of people over history, long before astronomy exited, observed the stars, and traced their movement, and yes, some of them attributed their movements to 'gods', or did what today we called 'Astrology'. Then eventually, someone was like, man, these celestial bodies seem to follow some patterns, and drifted away from thinking it was 'the gods', and started putting math to it, and boom, we look back on it and call it 'Astronomy'.
But Astronomy did not pop into existence fully formed as a science.
Electrical engineering, aerospace engineering, nuclear physics, and many other difficult fields of study are far, far newer than psychology. And yet have no problems with reliably producing significant, real-world results.
By that metric, Psychology seems profoundly lacking.
But, to do so, I would need to cite something in Psychology, and you can just deny it again. What evidence can be cited if all evidence is dismissed.
You will probably say something along the lines of 'what can be verified or repeated'. Ok, just go look. Why do I need to re-cite an entire discipline, just go read it.
From my personal experience, the problem is that people who study psychology are not interested or skilled in statistics. Unskilled professors teaching uninterested students perpetuates the cycle.
The field is slowly improving but still has a long way to go.
Unless those small sample sizes are justified by rigorous statistical modeling, showing that the result is still significant even with the small sample size, such studies absolutely are junk.
The burden is on the researcher to demonstrate that their experimental design is suitable for obtaining meaningful results. Failing to do so is the definition of junk science.
And needless to say, lack of statistical knowledge is not an excuse for not doing this. If a medical scientist is unable to perform an accurate statistical analysis of their data, it means that they cannot publish – not that they can skip that part because it's too difficult for them. The entire study is meaningless without it.
Pretending that these papers of “wow, we found a substance that when given to ten people in a cancer group with a 99% six month lethality and three survived more than two years” contribute nothing is a weird belief. Penicillin was what n = 1.
But you shouldn’t judge a group by its average. Also, it’s misogynistic in this case, obviously.
Something can be statistically meaningful with a small sample size if the effect size is large for instance.
Reaching old age is still an achievement, especially for young male motorcycle riders, and experience of society and its history always comes for free. The "locking away" stage is something old people generally try to actively avoid, and mostly generally for those with actual dementia in any case.
The kind of wisdom that they have earned dealing with the daily practicalities of personal life, society, law, bureaucracy and in general the knowledge of navigating the winds of change for many decades. But in order to get the benefit of that wisdom, you have to value them as individuals with valuable experience instead of thinking of them as someone who spent their years merely waiting for the day of their retirement.
This shouldn't be too shocking due to the effects of reduce testosterone over time in men, and starting from such a higher level of aggressiveness.
(page 15 for the pretty graphs)
> social vitality: living or preferring to live in a community rather than alone.
Seems like you grow out of wanting to live in a community. I wonder if a aging population will cause cities to decline in population more rapidly than the raw numbers indicate it would.
Old people don't seem to mind community though, I think it's just that people who are often sick or hurting tend to be less social. Going blind and deaf doesn't help either. I imagine it's plain harder for old folks no matter what their preference for solitude.
I tend to find, if you want to be young, act like the young.
Famous Warren Buffet quote, "I looked up the actuarial tables, and I saw that 6 year olds had the longest life expectancy. So, I decided to eat exactly what a 6 year old would eat."
Seemingly, it works.
I watched a TED talk on the health benefits of living in cohousing and larger households once. Besides well proven increases in overall lifespans and decreases in almost all chronic diseases, there's also huge economic benefits. Building a saltwater pool for example makes a lot more sense to do for a community of 20 than for an individual nuclear family.
The comments were filled with straight up vitriol. It was as if people felt personally attacked and like they were being forced to live with other people. Everyone seemed to already have their minds set on "finally living on their own" and "having their own space" (neither of which, imo, are contradictory to cohousing).
Yet, around the world, large multigenerational households are and have been the norm. Nuclear families are a pretty recent concept that came with the rise of suburbia and the GI Bills
Nir Barzilai, a researcher of aging, tells a great story about a very nice 100 year old man. When Nir comments on how nice the man is to his 80yo son, the son says: "well, he was a real jerk when he was my age."