[EverywhereTrip]

The problem isn't irreproducibility in "science".

It is irreproducibility in a few fields. Most notably, nutrition, psychology, and economics.

These are all fields which study humans. The study of humans is far more fraught with bias and ideology. Humans are also independent decision making agents and behave in a way that atoms do not.

[SubiculumCode]

I agree (as a psychologist/neuroscientist) that psychology has problems with reproducibility, but I think you pick the incorrect issues (bias and ideology) nor is it that we are bad or dishonest scientists. Rather, I believe it is the aggregating factors of 1)system complexity, and 2)non-uniform samples (subject's differing in unexpected/unknown ways between samples), and 3) weak theoretical knowledge

Another post here made the point that it is necessary to guide empiricism with strong theoretical frameworks. Those strong theoretical frameworks are missing in psychology/neuroscience, because it is a very very new field tacking something very very complicated. We have weak theories, and thus empirical findings may fail to replicate for differences we do not measure (season? time of day? menstruation? obesity? coffee? as examples of things that might not be measured, or is not practical to include into statistical models due to df) and so on. But this is not to say that there has not been progress. There has been lots of progress, and theories are becoming better, ever so slowly. but we build on converging methods spanning basic neuroscience of individual neurons or local networks to MRI studies of macro phenomenology.

In the end, I think of myself more as a cartographer or explorer, much like those that set sail across the sea knowing little about what will be found, BUT DOCUMENTING IT in their naval logs and reports, so that one day those observations can be put together and build the world map. That is why open neuroscience is critical to our field.

[sidlls]

" but I think you pick the incorrect issues (bias and ideology) nor is it that we are bad or dishonest scientists."

Of course there's no dishonesty. And to be bad would require what you do to be science in the first place. From my perspective (physicist), "science" is applied too broadly. What you do isn't useless or unimportant. I just struggle to square it with "science" in any meaningful sense. That's probably not a popular opinion, but whatever: I stand by it.

[SubiculumCode]

What makes physics a science and psychology not? Are our brains made of the same matter as the rest of the universe? Surely so. Is it because psychology seeks to describe/predict aggregated phenomena? This is a non-starter. Take for example the derivation of Boyle's law, pv = k, for pressure. Surely this derivation was the result of real scientific inquiry, despite that equation merely describing the aggregate of underspecified and innumerable interactions? Is it instead because brains are too complex for scientific inquiry? I quite understand that, despite the immense technical prowess of physicists and engineers, the problems they seek to elucidate are all said and done, easy. Easy because the complexity is low, easy because the problem space is limited, easy because you can see and control more of the entire picture. Is psychology not a science because its problems are just too hard for physicists to tackle? Or to tackle in way they'd prefer: easy, controlled, identifiable, enumerated??? Is it because you can never *actually* rerun a psychology experiment because people are always different always changing? Well, please refer to the experiments deriving Boyle's law. Each experiment was not an exact replica of the previous, because the innumerable collisions/interactions of molecules will never take the same path through time, no matter how hard we try, because, well hell, quantum physics, or so I am told. Buy Boyle did derive some useful relationships, despite the heterogeneity of subjects/runs, and so has psychology.

[SantalBlush]

How are you defining "science"? That would help us understand how it's applied too broadly.

[elisharobinson]

why stop there modern medicine is also full to the brim with non tested hypothesis. i,e only recently have we seriously looked at the effects of saline and the placebo effect is well documented phenomenon.

[adamisom]

Funny you mention placebo effect. It actually is probably far less of a thing than popularly believed see https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/31/powerless-placebos/

From one point of view that just proves your point more, from another, less. If placebo effect is tenuous then all else equal that’s a good sign for the rest of medicine… but in fact lots of medicine is tenuous. The landmark “Most Published Research Findings Are False” was looking at medical findings iirc.

[derbOac]

Surveys suggest it's not limited to a few fields. You might be right about fields studying humans though.

[cbozeman]

I'm going to take the opposite position and posit that the "problem" with studying humans is that we just don't know enough yet.

We can't predict human behavior because our science is simply not advanced enough. I think once we have as strong an understanding of biology as we do something like say, physics or mathematics, we'll find it significantly easier to predict human behavior.

Or put another way, I don't think we can't predict human behavior because humans are "special", but because we're actually kind dumb on a cosmic scale.

[derbOac]

I've started to wonder if there's some ceiling to predictability in a complexity sense. People throw this idea around in terms of emergent phenomena at all levels of analysis, but it would be interesting to see it empirically and robustly so. Will we be able to predict human behavior better? Probably but my guess is there might be some limit, or at least some sweet spot in terms of how far down you'd want to go the hierarchy of level of explanation.