What meaning is there in doing anything (being a doctor or a psychologist for instance… or any number of other professions) if we can’t even trust the research or the schooling? How can I make a difference in the world or do anything useful with no real knowledge?
That makes things sound worse than they are. I disagree that we have no real knowledge, and I’m also not sure about lumping doctors or psychologists together in this context. In medicine there are effects so huge that explaining them away as publication bias or spurious correlations is implausible (maybe because the relative risk is so huge, as with smoking causing lung cancer, or because the base rate is so low, as with asbestos causing malignant mesothelioma), so I count them as real knowledge. But I don’t know of similarly huge effects in psychology, so psychology might differ in that key respect.
(Here’s a speculative tangent that belongs in brackets. The foregoing might partly explain bad epistemic habits in research. Historically, lots of research went into things we basically fixed with magic bullets. So it didn’t much matter when people suppressed negative results or leaned heavily on observational studies; the true effect of the magic bullets was so huge that it held up despite the biases. This might’ve gotten researchers into the habit of not worrying about, or not finding out about, methodological biases. But now we’re searching for smaller effects those biases matter.)
Better still, most of the problems you refer to above are solvable. We could, for instance,
publish negative results
learn about warning signs that can indicate flaky study results
force researchers to publicly announce trials and their endpoint measures before their trials begin
force researchers to disclose funding sources and possible conflicts of interest
put more effort into searching the grey literature and foreign literature when reviewing studies
focus on randomized experiments (and use placebo controls where applicable in medical or psychological trials) over observational studies
impress the importance of evidence-based methods & treatments on practitioners and professional organizations
use statistical tests for detecting publication biases in reviews and meta-analyses
So, supposing I did accept the premise that the research base is so bad as to make doctors and psychologists useless, there’d still be an obvious alternative to giving up and walking away: I could become an epidemiologist or a medical statistician or a policy pundit, and encourage people to do the things I listed above.
Thank you for responding to this, Satt. I really did need some input here, and it’s very good to see another perspective and to have been shown a whole list of things that could be done.
I am in an unusually bad situation because the subject I’m most interested in is psychology. I noticed something was wrong with the psychology industry while I was still young enough to avoid getting into it. The three main problems are:
That you have to diagnose people immediately to collect insurance payments when in reality it takes a long time to know whether there’s even anything wrong with them at all, and being deemed “messed up” by a professional could be very hurtful to the patient.
I could tell that a lot of what was passing for therapy was BS and decided there must be something drastically wrong with the schooling. I didn’t know that that it was this bad, but I am glad I noticed something was drastically wrong early on.
I am primarily interested in gifted adults. Neither an abnormal psychology degree or developmental psychology degree would give me a solid understanding of gifted adults—those are focused on the average Joe and children with learning disabilities respectively. Gifted adults are neither very well served by the typical therapist (imagine taking a space ship to a car mechanic) or by schooling methods intended for children with learning disabilities. I didn’t realize that my main interest was in gifted adults until later, but I could tell that the psychology that I had been exposed to wasn’t what I was looking for. I have a space ship myself, and wanted psychology that taught me about space ships like mine.
So I went to college for web design instead. I studied psychology on my own. I love being a web developer, a lot, but I want to really make a difference in the world and I don’t feel that adding little buttons to websites is making that happen. Of course, web development can be used for making a difference, too, but if most of what I know about psychology is wrong (it quite possibly could be?) then how am I supposed to pursue my main interest? I was hoping to do self-improvement writing, and I can still do that at any time, and possibly gain an audience that way, but if the foundation of knowledge I am working from is bad, then it’s not useful to do so. What I want to get from writing about self-improvement is meaning, not money, so that would be unacceptable to me.
Something occurred to me: I’ve learned enough about the psychology of gifted adults now that I’d probably have a strong advantage when it comes to writing review articles or meta-analyses on gifted adults. I’m not credentialed, so could not give the articles any traditional “credibility” (that’s in quotes for a reason, now that I know all of this...). However, considering the circumstance (that getting an accredited psychology degree requires you to learn a bunch of mumbo-jumbo and that they don’t teach about gifted adults anyway), I’m thinking that getting a degree would not increase the quality of my articles substantially enough to justify spending tens of thousands of dollars and so many hours on it. Reading the key books on research practices would probably be the best action, though I do not know what they are.
If you (or other LWers) have thoughts on how to approach this sticky problem, I’m interested in hearing them.
What do you mean by “gifted adults”? Just “adults with very high IQ”? I think there’s a standard trick for that when you pen them all together and then you have a regular human society where the social effects of giftedness disappear. Or do gifted people have abnormal psychology in absolute terms, not just relative with alienation and boredom and so on?
There are lots and lots of definitions for “gifted”. State’s legal definitions range from vague things like “people with a talent” to numerical specifications. The gist: I’ve seen definitions that range from a rarity of 1 in 4 to 1 in 50. Truth be told, my real interest is highly gifted adults and geniuses, not just “gifted adults” in general.
From what I’ve read, “highly gifted” tends to be associated with IQs > 145.
The people in each IQ range have their own characteristics. People with IQs near 130 tend to be more popular. People with IQs around 160 or greater have difficulty fitting in and tend to limit social contact because they are too different. These are relative obviously. It has been observed that people with IQs over 145 frequently have enough intensity that it results in them coming across in an energetic way that is called a variety of things from electric to charismatic. This appears to be genetic. There are other things like how exceptionally gifted children have trouble answering “simple” questions and doing “simple” tasks like “draw a bird”—too many options come to mind, and they have to choose, then, between 100 kinds of birds.
This is just the tip of the iceburg when it comes to the differences that have been talked about. I am not sure that any one piece of research I’ve read is true, but there are probably over a hundred differences that have been either researched or observed by psychologists who work with gifted individuals. I have observed a lot of these differences for myself, and have seen patterns. I can also use what I know to make guesses about who is gifted and how gifted they are and I am usually close. I feel certain that there are a huge number of differences of both types, though what, specifically they are and how common they are to each IQ range would be hard to say.
Also, I don’t think it’s called “abnormal psychology” when there’s nothing wrong with them.
That makes things sound worse than they are. I disagree that we have no real knowledge, and I’m also not sure about lumping doctors or psychologists together in this context. In medicine there are effects so huge that explaining them away as publication bias or spurious correlations is implausible (maybe because the relative risk is so huge, as with smoking causing lung cancer, or because the base rate is so low, as with asbestos causing malignant mesothelioma), so I count them as real knowledge. But I don’t know of similarly huge effects in psychology, so psychology might differ in that key respect.
(Here’s a speculative tangent that belongs in brackets. The foregoing might partly explain bad epistemic habits in research. Historically, lots of research went into things we basically fixed with magic bullets. So it didn’t much matter when people suppressed negative results or leaned heavily on observational studies; the true effect of the magic bullets was so huge that it held up despite the biases. This might’ve gotten researchers into the habit of not worrying about, or not finding out about, methodological biases. But now we’re searching for smaller effects those biases matter.)
Better still, most of the problems you refer to above are solvable. We could, for instance,
publish negative results
learn about warning signs that can indicate flaky study results
force researchers to publicly announce trials and their endpoint measures before their trials begin
force researchers to disclose funding sources and possible conflicts of interest
put more effort into searching the grey literature and foreign literature when reviewing studies
focus on randomized experiments (and use placebo controls where applicable in medical or psychological trials) over observational studies
impress the importance of evidence-based methods & treatments on practitioners and professional organizations
use statistical tests for detecting publication biases in reviews and meta-analyses
So, supposing I did accept the premise that the research base is so bad as to make doctors and psychologists useless, there’d still be an obvious alternative to giving up and walking away: I could become an epidemiologist or a medical statistician or a policy pundit, and encourage people to do the things I listed above.
Thank you for responding to this, Satt. I really did need some input here, and it’s very good to see another perspective and to have been shown a whole list of things that could be done.
I am in an unusually bad situation because the subject I’m most interested in is psychology. I noticed something was wrong with the psychology industry while I was still young enough to avoid getting into it. The three main problems are:
That you have to diagnose people immediately to collect insurance payments when in reality it takes a long time to know whether there’s even anything wrong with them at all, and being deemed “messed up” by a professional could be very hurtful to the patient.
I could tell that a lot of what was passing for therapy was BS and decided there must be something drastically wrong with the schooling. I didn’t know that that it was this bad, but I am glad I noticed something was drastically wrong early on.
I am primarily interested in gifted adults. Neither an abnormal psychology degree or developmental psychology degree would give me a solid understanding of gifted adults—those are focused on the average Joe and children with learning disabilities respectively. Gifted adults are neither very well served by the typical therapist (imagine taking a space ship to a car mechanic) or by schooling methods intended for children with learning disabilities. I didn’t realize that my main interest was in gifted adults until later, but I could tell that the psychology that I had been exposed to wasn’t what I was looking for. I have a space ship myself, and wanted psychology that taught me about space ships like mine.
So I went to college for web design instead. I studied psychology on my own. I love being a web developer, a lot, but I want to really make a difference in the world and I don’t feel that adding little buttons to websites is making that happen. Of course, web development can be used for making a difference, too, but if most of what I know about psychology is wrong (it quite possibly could be?) then how am I supposed to pursue my main interest? I was hoping to do self-improvement writing, and I can still do that at any time, and possibly gain an audience that way, but if the foundation of knowledge I am working from is bad, then it’s not useful to do so. What I want to get from writing about self-improvement is meaning, not money, so that would be unacceptable to me.
Something occurred to me: I’ve learned enough about the psychology of gifted adults now that I’d probably have a strong advantage when it comes to writing review articles or meta-analyses on gifted adults. I’m not credentialed, so could not give the articles any traditional “credibility” (that’s in quotes for a reason, now that I know all of this...). However, considering the circumstance (that getting an accredited psychology degree requires you to learn a bunch of mumbo-jumbo and that they don’t teach about gifted adults anyway), I’m thinking that getting a degree would not increase the quality of my articles substantially enough to justify spending tens of thousands of dollars and so many hours on it. Reading the key books on research practices would probably be the best action, though I do not know what they are.
If you (or other LWers) have thoughts on how to approach this sticky problem, I’m interested in hearing them.
What do you mean by “gifted adults”? Just “adults with very high IQ”? I think there’s a standard trick for that when you pen them all together and then you have a regular human society where the social effects of giftedness disappear. Or do gifted people have abnormal psychology in absolute terms, not just relative with alienation and boredom and so on?
There are lots and lots of definitions for “gifted”. State’s legal definitions range from vague things like “people with a talent” to numerical specifications. The gist: I’ve seen definitions that range from a rarity of 1 in 4 to 1 in 50. Truth be told, my real interest is highly gifted adults and geniuses, not just “gifted adults” in general.
From what I’ve read, “highly gifted” tends to be associated with IQs > 145.
The people in each IQ range have their own characteristics. People with IQs near 130 tend to be more popular. People with IQs around 160 or greater have difficulty fitting in and tend to limit social contact because they are too different. These are relative obviously. It has been observed that people with IQs over 145 frequently have enough intensity that it results in them coming across in an energetic way that is called a variety of things from electric to charismatic. This appears to be genetic. There are other things like how exceptionally gifted children have trouble answering “simple” questions and doing “simple” tasks like “draw a bird”—too many options come to mind, and they have to choose, then, between 100 kinds of birds.
This is just the tip of the iceburg when it comes to the differences that have been talked about. I am not sure that any one piece of research I’ve read is true, but there are probably over a hundred differences that have been either researched or observed by psychologists who work with gifted individuals. I have observed a lot of these differences for myself, and have seen patterns. I can also use what I know to make guesses about who is gifted and how gifted they are and I am usually close. I feel certain that there are a huge number of differences of both types, though what, specifically they are and how common they are to each IQ range would be hard to say.
Also, I don’t think it’s called “abnormal psychology” when there’s nothing wrong with them.