Great post! It does feel like psychology today is about where alchemy was in the year 1661, and in the case of my own profession, psychiatry seems to be where medicine was prior to germ theory of disease.
She brings up Ptolemy at one point: "My impression is that we haven’t figured out the right ways to think about many problems in brain/mind research. Rather, it often seems like we are working in frameworks akin to Ptolomy’s wonky descriptions of planetary motion (under the misguided assumption that the planets revolve around the earth)."
And my response was: "My understanding is that Ptolemy’s model was fairly successful in accounting for planetary positions (and predicting things like solar and lunar eclipses) and enjoyed near universal support among scholars until it was displaced. It is difficult to think of anything comparable in the brain-behavior sciences. There is no unifying model of brain-behavior relationship that is empirically successful and is supported by scientific consensus. Different approaches to research are often dominant at different times, but that dominance is not typically because of compelling evidence; it is usually driven by the shortcomings of the previously dominant approach and by the enthusiasm that this or that new approach will deliver will the answers."
HA and thank you for this. I’ve been attempting to explain to my psychologist for some time now that whilst she is individually brilliant and her profession does occasionally help people and produce results, it’s not science (or maybe it’s baby science, or if I’m feeling particularly generous it’s possibly just bad science) because, at the very least, it’s neither frequently repeatable nor based on any sort of mechanism. Perhaps I’ll compare her field to alchemy next time I see her!
Great post! It does feel like psychology today is about where alchemy was in the year 1661, and in the case of my own profession, psychiatry seems to be where medicine was prior to germ theory of disease.
PS. You might be interested in this conversation I had with the neuroscientist Nicole Rust https://awaisaftab.substack.com/p/advancing-neuroscientific-understanding
She brings up Ptolemy at one point: "My impression is that we haven’t figured out the right ways to think about many problems in brain/mind research. Rather, it often seems like we are working in frameworks akin to Ptolomy’s wonky descriptions of planetary motion (under the misguided assumption that the planets revolve around the earth)."
And my response was: "My understanding is that Ptolemy’s model was fairly successful in accounting for planetary positions (and predicting things like solar and lunar eclipses) and enjoyed near universal support among scholars until it was displaced. It is difficult to think of anything comparable in the brain-behavior sciences. There is no unifying model of brain-behavior relationship that is empirically successful and is supported by scientific consensus. Different approaches to research are often dominant at different times, but that dominance is not typically because of compelling evidence; it is usually driven by the shortcomings of the previously dominant approach and by the enthusiasm that this or that new approach will deliver will the answers."
HA and thank you for this. I’ve been attempting to explain to my psychologist for some time now that whilst she is individually brilliant and her profession does occasionally help people and produce results, it’s not science (or maybe it’s baby science, or if I’m feeling particularly generous it’s possibly just bad science) because, at the very least, it’s neither frequently repeatable nor based on any sort of mechanism. Perhaps I’ll compare her field to alchemy next time I see her!