Weird Science

> I generally agree with you that all science should be testable, i.e. it should give us tell us things that we did not know, but can then test. However, I don't agree that you can easily extrapolate from that to saying these fields are science and these are not.

I'm talking about this in the context of the political power of science, or more precisely what gets called "science" and why. Coming out of WWII that power derived largely from the very literal power of the mechanized scientific war machine and its ultimate expression in the atom bomb. Not to repeat myself but E=mc² has nothing to prove, what political power physicists hold derives from the universality of their domain of knowledge. Anyone anywhere can test the formula by testing its predictions.

> Psychology, economics etc. do make predictions and many have been tested.

Not to the degree that we can rely on them for large-scale policy decisions, though? I mean the guy who runs the Federal Reserve is on record saying he doesn't know what he's doing, eh?

In re: Pavlov, I don't know how to respond. Behaviorism as an example of successful scientific psychology seems... I dunno... counterproductive?

> String theory is the canonical example here.

String theory isn't science. String theorists should be embarrassed to call what they do "physics" and they should admit that they're actually mathematicians. There's no shame in that, is there?

Anhow, to get back to my main point, I don't really have a problem with people wanting to call what they do "science" until we get to the point when they want to wield political power. To caricature what I mean: I don't think it's valid to say "I'm a scientist therefore believe me." if you can't make solid dependable predictions about it (whatever it is that you're trying to get people to believe.) If you're able to say, truthfully, "I can make predictions that you can rely on, and I can also teach you how to make the same predictions using the same data and methods so you don't have to take my word for it." then not only is that proper science (in my view) but it's also unimpeachable in the realm of political power.

I just didn't understand what you meant. I still don't.

> We're humans talking about human activity, not proof systems.

Are you saying that we're talking about something other than proof systems, or are you saying that "we ourselves are not proof systems"? Either way I don't understand. Are you saying that formal logic isn't useful for reasoning about "human activity"?

> I'm not discussing further

Ah, well, nevermind then.

Seriously though, I didn't mean to derail conversation, I was and still am genuinely interested in what you were saying. I can be pretty slow on the uptake sometimes, so please don't take my lack of understanding as criticism of you or what you were saying.

> you seem to believe psychology has never made a correct prediction.

I never said that nor would I. The word "psychology" has a broad range, everything from Freud and Jung to the molecular biology of nerves and neurons, from philosophy to quantum physics. Painting and rhetoric could even be considered to come under the rubric of human psychology. I have my own beliefs about various aspects and components of (some) of all that, but I'm asking you about yours.

> There's entire areas of the brain named after psychologists who correctly identified their function.

Okay, sure, structural neurology has advanced by leaps and bounds (since the bad old days of phrenology) and often informs things like surgical interventions, so that's a kind of scientific knowledge and predictive power. We have leaned much about the anatomy of the brain and how that in turn affect what could be called the anatomy of the mind. I could quibble that that's still pretty close to chemistry and biology which are inside my definition of science, or that it's seldom used to affect political policy, but I'm reminded of the epic battle in re: lead in fuel.

> Pavlov's dogs are a western cultural touchstone.

I don't really know how to respond to this. God save us from policy decided on the basis of Pavlovian psychology?

> > derailed from the (natural?) progression of scientific knowledge

> How can you make any claim to define science with such utter teleological nonsense?

Why do you call that "teleological nonsense"?

I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that science generally starts with describing natural phenomenon, until a large body of reliable facts has accumulated, then a phase of ordering sets in, where the relations between elements are sussed out, which leads to prediction when we know the elements of a system and the rules they obey, and we can predict their behavior and so open the way to engineer new systems (aka "technology"). That's what I meant by the "progression of scientific knowledge". I added the "(natural?)" part because to me that's a interesting and open question. Is there a natural progression to what is, after all, the most artificial of human activities?

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Edit to add: In re: "entire areas of the brain named after psychologists who correctly identified their function."

This just went by on "new links": "Can brain scans reveal behaviour? Bombshell study says not yet"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30747742 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00767-3

> Brain-imaging data sets had been swelling in size. To show that this growth was making studies more reliable, Marek, based at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri (WashU), and his colleagues split the data in two and ran the same analysis on each subset, expecting the results to match. Instead, they found the opposite. “I was shocked. I thought it was going to look exactly the same in both sets,” says Marek. “I stared out of my apartment window in depression, taking in what it meant for the field.”

> Now, in a bombshell 16 March Nature study1, Marek and his colleagues show that even large brain-imaging studies, such as his, are still too small to reliably detect most links between brain function and behaviour.

> As a result, the conclusions of most published ‘brain-wide association studies’ — typically involving dozens to hundreds of participants — might be wrong. Such studies link variations in brain structure and activity to differences in cognitive ability, mental health and other behavioural traits. For instance, numerous studies have identified brain anatomy or activity patterns that, the studies say, can distinguish people who have been diagnosed with depression from those who have not. Studies also often seek biomarkers for behavioural traits.

> “There’s a lot of investigators who have committed their careers to doing the kind of science that this paper says is basically junk,” says Russell Poldrack, a cognitive neuroscientist at Stanford University in California, who was one of the paper’s peer reviewers. “It really forces a rethink.”