When I say “A guy does D when G happens” please read: “There are statistically significant, or theoretically significant reasons from social endocrinology, or social and evolutionary psychology to believe that under circumstances broadly similar to G, human males, on average, will be inclined towards behaving in manners broadly similar to the D way. Also, most tests are made with western human males, tests are less than 40 years old, subject to publication bias, and sometimes done by people who don’t understand math well enough to do their statistics homework, they have not been replicated several times, and they are less homogenous than physics, because psychology is more complex than physics.”
That pretty much sucks all the meaning out of “A guy does D when G happens”. Did you intend it that way?
With the exception of natural laws that caveat applies to almost any general claim, especially in psychology and sociology. It seems a strong claim to say those fields are entirely meaningless.
With the exception of natural laws that caveat applies to almost any general claim, especially in psychology and sociology. It seems a strong claim to say those fields are entirely meaningless.
I think it is you who are making the strong claim, viz. that diegocaleiro’s characterisation applies to the entirety of any field that is not about natural laws. That strong claim would indeed render such fields meaningless.
BTW, I would not even make diegocaleiro’s excuse, “because psychology is more complex than physics”.
Marvin Minsky (2007), who thinks the main problem with psychology is physics envy.
By “physics envy”, he means (from this article of his, not having The Emotion Machine to hand):
They’ve all been searching for some minimal set of basic principles of psychology, some very small collection of amazingly powerful ideas that, all by themselves, can explain how the mind works. They’d like to imitate Isaac Newton, who discovered three simple laws of motion which solved an entire world of problems about mechanics.
Fine, the mind is more complicated than Newton’s Laws. But so is the body, and biologists know a great deal about that, by doing actual science that has nailed down a lot of things. In comparison, that string of dubifiers is just… just… what on Earth are these people thinking, to be satisfied with so little?
That pretty much sucks all the meaning out of “A guy does D when G happens”. Did you intend it that way?
With the exception of natural laws that caveat applies to almost any general claim, especially in psychology and sociology. It seems a strong claim to say those fields are entirely meaningless.
I think it is you who are making the strong claim, viz. that diegocaleiro’s characterisation applies to the entirety of any field that is not about natural laws. That strong claim would indeed render such fields meaningless.
BTW, I would not even make diegocaleiro’s excuse, “because psychology is more complex than physics”.
Not an excuse, an agreement with Marvin Minsky (2007), who thinks the main problem with psychology is physics envy.
By “physics envy”, he means (from this article of his, not having The Emotion Machine to hand):
Fine, the mind is more complicated than Newton’s Laws. But so is the body, and biologists know a great deal about that, by doing actual science that has nailed down a lot of things. In comparison, that string of dubifiers is just… just… what on Earth are these people thinking, to be satisfied with so little?
Yes, and biologists understand the Harvard Law:
Written by Larry Wall, the famous biologist.
ETA: If the organism does as it damn well pleases, you didn’t do the right experiment.
ETA2: Don’t take my word for it, here’s Richard Feynman on the subject. (Where he talks about running rats in mazes, near the end.)