The Failure of Psychology

Adam Mastroianni podcast:

Ever since I started my training in experimental psychology, I've been haunted by a doubt: how do we know that all of our work amounts to anything? Are we even headed in the right direction? I propose five tests to answer this question, and I show that psychology passes one and fails the other four. We're stuck in the adolescence of our field because we haven't yet discovered a paradigm. There s a way to cross that threshold, but it requires entertaining some strange ideas.

He says that if clinical psychologists really had useful skills that they learned, then they would be able to outperfeorm amateurs in an objective study. But this has been studied, and psychologists do no better than those with no training.

These studies are so embarrassing that they have now been declared unethical.

He also says that the Big Five personality traits, a high point of serious psychology research, does no better than enneagrams. But both do better than Myers-Briggs.

About 30% of psychologists subscribe to discredited Freudian ideas.

He says that for Psychology to become a science, it needs a theory for how the mind works, and rules for obtaining information.

The more scientific parts of psychology are in testing for intelligence, personality traits, and mental disorders.

Russell T. Warne writes a Quillette essay on how IQ testing gets bad press.

Because of IQ’s distorted image, some of the most well-established facts about intelligence are unknown outside of the field:

A standardised test administered at the age of twelve can predict who will earn a PhD, register a patent, or achieve another major accomplishment by midlife.
Smarter people tend to live longer than average.
For most jobs, IQ is one of the best predictors of employee performance.
Genetic factors are a stronger influence on people’s IQs in adulthood than in childhood.
Some of the same genetic variants that are more common in low-IQ individuals are also more common in people with some mental-health conditions.

He notes that leftist journalists like to deny that IQ is meaningful, but they obviously do not believe what they are saying, because they happily report some IQ stories such as lead exposure lowering IQ. It is a little like those denying that race exists, while also arguing for racial reparations.

The upsetting thing about IQ is its relation to genetic determinism. People think that IQ is determines by genes, is innate and immutable, and determines life outcomes. Furthermore it is correlated with race, sex, nationality, and religion. That makes IQ scary.