[subliminalzen]

It's not just psychological research that is deeply flawed. Only a quarter of scientific drug research is successfully reproduced as well.[1]

Carl Jung claimed one of the chief factors responsible for mass brainwashing is scientific rationality.[2] Society worships the Goddess of Reason while frowning down on "irrational" and non-verifiable religious testimony.

Now that science is proven to be systemically corrupt, what will "rational" people base their understanding on?

Aside: I designed a personality test / psychoanalytical tool that was inspired by Carl Jung. It's called Critical Stimulus and it can be found at https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/critical-stimulus. The printable version can be downloaded at gumroad: https://gumroad.com/l/criticalstimulus

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[1] http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-t...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_in_Jungian_psychology

[omginternets]

>Now that science is proven to be systemically corrupt, what will "rational" people base their understanding on?

This is not a new notion in the least. The "rational" people will continue doing what they've always done: revising their conclusions.

Science is a process, and while we can question the notion of "scientific progress" in philosophical terms, this is neither a new idea nor evidence that science doesn't work. It's certainly not evidence that science is no better than irrational thinking.

>Carl Jung claimed one of the chief factors responsible for mass brainwashing is scientific rationality.

Few people take psychoanalysts seriously these days, in large part because of their long record of absurd claims and shoddy clinical work. Jungian theory has it's place in a conversation about literary theory, but not in a conversation about science.

[drumdance]

I don't know about psychoanalysis as defined by Freud and Jung, but therapy in general is an intensely personal experience.

I'm sure there are scientific aspects that can be brought to bear on a situation, but for a lot of people the "literary theory" part is just as helpful. Especially when you stop to think how much neurosis is fueled by pop culture (i.e. status envy).

[omginternets]

>but therapy in general is an intensely personal experience.

And empirically speaking, psychoanalytic therapy has a piss-poor record in dealing with mental illness.

If you're looking for spiritual guidance, then maybe a psychoanalyst can help. If you're looking for clinical efficacy, they demonstrably don't.

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to make a relevant Google Scholar query, but be careful not to confuse psychoanalysis with clinical psychology.

> for a lot of people the "literary theory" part is just as helpful.

Fine, but this is a conversation about psychology as a science.

[GalacticDomin8r]

> Society worships the Goddess of Reason while frowning down on "irrational" and non-verifiable religious testimony.

Yup, and now that the science in question was attempted to be verified and shown to be poor, we can improve the process. Try that with religion.

> Now that science is proven to be systemically corrupt

Huh? Anyone who took psychological research as gospel does so at their own risk and ignorance. We've long known psychology is a soft science little better than voodoo. For example, most of the psychological establishment still default to 12 step programs for addictions. Guess what? It works about as well as any faith based healing program.

This is just another measure of validating the scientific method. Which is to say we don't know everything but we're learning.

[Lawtonfogle]

>Yup, and now that the science in question was attempted to be verified and shown to be poor, we can improve the process. Try that with religion.

Can we?

To the scientists devoted to furthering knowledge, they will improve. But there will be many who hold onto this. A subset of what we currently see as science is probably better described as religion already and we are soon to see this distinction clearer than in the past.

[GalacticDomin8r]

> Can we?

If we couldn't, this HN discussion wouldn't exist.

[weland]

> Only a quarter of scientific drug research is successfully reproduced as well.[1]

This is a debate in semantics: research that is not successfully reproduced is not scientific.

It should be part of that which society frowns down on as non-verifiable testimony.

Natural sciences or engineering-related research that cannot be reproduced is nothing but scientific theater. There are various reasons why people do that (including financial ones in the drug industry), but that's a discussion for another time.

This is not proof that "scientific rationality" is brainwashing people. If anything, it's proof that non-reproducible research dressed as legitimate science is dangerous -- so dangerous, in fact, that it can put lives in danger (e.g. when it happens in drug research).

[omginternets]

>This is a debate in semantics: research that is not successfully reproduced is not scientific.

That's both untrue and fallacious (see: no true Scotsman).

If you set your p-value threshold at .05, then one in twenty experiments will produce a false positive. As such, plenty of research is conducted in a benevolent and meticulous fashion, only to yield a non-reproducible result. It's still scientific; it's just not true.

I don't agree with subliminalzen, but (with all due respect -- really!) your comment is hogwash.

[weland]

> That's both untrue and fallacious (see: no true Scotsman).

No it's not. A sound scientific approach requires that a theory be based on reproducible results. If an experiment that verifies your theory confirms your result today and infirms it tomorrow, then the theory, the experimental approach, or both, are wrong.

Of course, experiments that can't be reproduced are part of the scientific endeavour. Every discovery comes at the end of a long sequence of experiments with results scattered all over the grah. But treating them as anything other than stumbling steps that help you refine your understanding of the problem or as dead ends is as unscientific as it gets.

[omginternets]

>But treating them as anything other than stumbling steps that help you refine your understanding of the problem or as dead ends is as unscientific as it gets.

Which isn't at all what I'm suggesting.

I'm arguing against the idea that applying the scientific method and getting a false positive makes the effort unscientific.

So yes, it is both untrue and fallacious.

[weland]

> Only a quarter of scientific drug research is successfully reproduced as well.[1]

The article you are mentioning in [1] refers to the fact that a quarter of the published drug research is not successfully reproduced.

That doesn't mean that people published papers saying "Hey, we did this experiment. Its results cannot be consistently reproduced, so we think it's unconclusive/because our theory is flawed with regards to this or that/because the experiment was flawed with regards to this or that and we think it can be refined by changing this approach or that apparatus".

It means that a quarter of the published papers say "Hey, we did this experiment which offers conclusive proof of X", but it turns out that their experiments cannot be consistently reproduced, so they're proof of exactly nothing.

That is unscientific.

[omginternets]

>It means that a quarter of the published papers say "Hey, we did this experiment which offers conclusive proof of X"

This is patently false. Publication is never a claim of conclusive proof; it's a claim of evidence.

I'm sorry, but you are wrong about this. False-positives don't suddenly make the experiment un-scientific. You're very misinformed about how science works:

- False positives are part of the landscape

- Contradictory evidence is part of the landscape

- The above issues are resolved by tracking reproducibility of results

You can come to a wrong conclusion using valid scientific means. The scientific method hinges on the assumption that research will eventually converge on a correct result.

[Lawtonfogle]

I went to college and worked on both degrees in Computer Science and Psychology. I wanted to go into researching in a field that crossed the two of them. I even did undergraduate research in a lab that worked at creating and testing VR to aid in therapy.

What I saw, read, and heard as I began my climb up the Ivory Tower made me turn back and go into industry instead. Once you are inside you begin to see the corruption. From the lack of pay to people who were allowing their views to corrupt their work (often seen by tweaking definitions of terms, especially in the realms of sociology and social psychology).

I still want to go back, but I would like to do so once I'm personally financially secure as that would remove one of the vectors for corruption.

P.S. To be clear, nothing was bad in the lab I worked in, perhaps because there was little to make political about creating VR landscapes and interactions.

[drumdance]

VR and psychology -- cool! I got to visit Stanford's VR lab last year. They are doing some really cool pro-social stuff that has lots of therapeutic potential. Excited to see what comes out of it over the next 20 years.

[sanoli]

> Now that science is proven to be systemically corrupt, what will "rational" people base their understanding on?

Oh yes, and all the scientific advancements will stop working from now on since science is proven to be corrupt. I can hear the satellites and the MRI machines crashing because science doesn't work anymore...

What this means is that studies are less rigorous than promoted to be.

[nonbel]

You may be unaware that the idea and initial development of MRI came from someone who does not believe in the sodium potassium pump. In fact, it was developed specifically based on alternative theories regarding how ionic concentrations are regulated. He is also a creationist... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Vahan_Damadian

The guy who developed PCR (basically DNA testing) also has some interesting views: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis

From this I conclude that scientific advancement doesn't depend so much on commonly accepted scientific claims.

[sanoli]

It doesn't matter. The people who develop newer MRI machines will use what they believe in the formulation of their experiments. If that initial development of MRI that you mention didn't amount to nothing, it would have been thrown aside by the medical and scientific communities. If I believe in the Loch Ness monster and I develop a new vaccine that can have its efficacy demonstrated in rigorous studies, so what about my Loch Ness? What part of him being a creationist affected the technical aspects of his MRI studies?

[nonbel]

>"What part of him being a creationist affected the technical aspects of his MRI studies?"

Nothing, I just gave those examples of people to show science can be systematically corrupt/wrong (since it is in their minds) and there will still be advancements.

[subliminalzen]

The signal to noise ratio isn't good though. Personal integrity has been sacrificed for scientific "advancement".

[drumdance]

It's always been that way. A good book about this is Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything.