Re: [tips] Feynman on Psychology

2014-01-29 Thread Christopher Green
The passage is actually, when you pull on it, it gets longer, and the 
comparison was to Hooke's Law, not explicitly to Newton.  It does appear in 
Cohen's The Earth is Round (p.05)” (p. 1001, first column), but Cohen was 
actually quoting a 1969 American Psychologist article by John Tukey.
http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~maccoun/PP279_Cohen1.pdf 

Best,
Chris
...
Christopher D Green
Department of Psychology
York University
Toronto, ON M6C 1G4

chri...@yorku.ca
http://www.yorku.ca/christo

 On Jan 28, 2014, at 8:42 PM, Mike Palij m...@nyu.edu wrote:
 
  
 
 
  
 
 
  
 
 
 I was going to sit this thread out but I'm curious about Chris'
 source for Jack Cohen's statement.  I'm challenging that Jack
 might have said something like that, I just want to know the
 source.
  
 -Mike Palij
 New York University
 m...@nyu.edu
  
  
 ---  Original Message  
 On Tue, 28 Jan 2014 14:28:21 -0800, Christopher Green wrote:
 Here's a more recent clip of Feynman talking about social science. 
 http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IaO69CF5mbYdesktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DIaO69CF5mbY
  
 He has a point, but he also seems to come from the Ernest Rutherford school 
 of 
 what counts as science (All science is physics, or it is stamp collecting.).
 
 The problem is (as I have debated many times on this forum) there is no set 
 definition of science. Each science has its own standards of theory and 
 evidence. For physics, the theory has to be mathematical and the measurements 
 have to be very precise. In psychology, the theories are almost never 
 mathematical (in part because the measurements are rarely very precise). 
 
 The statistician Jacob Cohen once said (à propos of null hypothesis testing) 
 that you're never going to get Newton's laws out of experiments that only 
 predict, if I stretch it, it will get longer. He's right. On the other 
 hand, 
 you can't fault a science for doing the best it can with the intellectual 
 tools 
 that it currently has available. It is one thing to complain that we don't 
 have 
 theories that make point-estimate predictions. It is another thing entirely 
 to 
 produce such theories. 
 
 Putting all this together into a coherent answer about whether (which part 
 of?) 
 psychology is a science s a very difficult thing. It is not as highly 
 developed a science as physics, to be sure. Perhaps physics is the wrong 
 model, 
 though. Perhaps evolutionary science is the right model instead (William 
 James 
 and John Dewey thought so). Perhaps we are barking up the wrong tree by 
 modelling ourselves after other sciences. Perhaps there is another approach 
 to 
 science -- to the natures of theory and evidence, and the relations between 
 them -- that will result in markedly better psychological understanding than 
 we 
 currently have. For over a century we have thought that we were only a decade 
 or so from that new understanding. We haven't gotten there yet.
 
 ---
 
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Re: [tips] Feynman on Psychology

2014-01-29 Thread Mike Palij
On Wed, 29 Jan 2014 05:56:22 -0800, Christopher Green wrote:
The passage is actually, when you pull on it, it gets longer, and the
comparison was to Hooke's Law, not explicitly to Newton.  It does
appear in Cohen's The Earth is Round (p.05) (p. 1001, first column),
but Cohen was actually quoting a 1969 American Psychologist article
by John Tukey.

This is my third attempt at a response but the previous ones just went
on too long and probably would not be of interest to most people so
a couple of points:

(1) In my opinion, Feynman takes cheap shots at easy targets in psychology.
I know of no instance when he used psychological research in psychophysics,
psychoacoustics, mathematical modeling of behavior/learning/cognition/etc,
and similar areas.  As far as I know, Feynman was not a scholar of psychology,
so his familiarity with it will tend to be shallow and superficial.  He probably
did not know that there was a Society for Mathematical Psychology and Journal
of Mathematical Psychology.  He was probably unaware of NYU's Lloyd 
Kaufman's work with the physicist Sam Williamson on using magnetic
imaging of brain/cognitive function (before fMRI and other neuroimaging
techniques became popular). He was probably unaware that Geoff Iverson,
a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Adelaide came to NYU
to work with Jean-Claude Falmagne on issues in psychophysics and measurement
theory, and obtained a PhD in experimental psychology at NYU (a condition
I refer to as multiple dissertation disorder) -- both Geoff and Jean-Claude
are now at the University of California-Irvine in their Institute for 
Mathematical
Behavioral Sciences; see:
http://www.imbs.uci.edu/imbs_faculty
For background on Jean-Claude, see his Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Claude_Falmagne 
I doubt that Feynman knew of any of the sophisticated mathematical psychologists
so I think that one should be cautious in taking what he has to say about 
psychology
too seriously.

(2) When George Sperling was at NYU (he's now at UC-Irvine), there was
a probably apocryphal story that he said in reference to NYU's psychology
department: They don't do science below the 8th floor (NYU's psychology
building is ten stories tall and the experimental/physiological had occupied
the 8-10th floor in the last third of the 20th century; circa 1990 the 
physiological
psychologists migrated to NYU's Center for Neural Science which have some
of NYU's current crop of math psychologists as co-faculty; social, clinical,
and community psychology occupied the floors below the 8th).  Now, George
was a math psychologist who seemed disdained the rest of psychology (it is 
rumored that his parents were both psychoanalysts and he learned his disdain 
early but this too may be apocryphal) and when I audited a graduate course 
he taught while I was pre-doc fellow at NYU one year, I was completely lost 
in most of what he covered, especially linear operator theory (for an example, 
see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operator_%28mathematics%29#Linear_operators ).
I didn't feel too badly about not understanding because (a) I was just a 
visiting
fellow, and (b) none of the other graduate students seem to understand it either
(another possibly apocryphal story is that George said in a faculty meeting
that the students in this class had to be the dumbest students he ever taught).
One has to wonder what a conversation between Feynman and George Sperling
or Jean-Claude Falmagne or Geoff Iverson or Roger Shepard or Robyn
Dawes or other mathematical psychologists would be like.  Would he
dismiss them as well because, well, they're psychologists?

-Mike Palij
New York University
m...@nyu.edu

P.S. Jack Cohen's office was on the 5th floor and I believe that he was
unaffiliated, that is, did not below to any particular program area in the
psychology department.  I believe that he did not have much interaction 
with the folks on the 8th-10th floor. Graduate students in experimental
had to take a year long sequence in math psychology taught by Jean-Claude
instead of Jack's year long graduate statistics sequence, at least for the 
time period 1970-1990.  Nonetheless, I have the deepest respect for 
Jack though in retrospect I think was somewhat weak in some areas
(e.g., in understanding of null hypothesis testing; I think most psychologists
have a warped understanding of null hypothesis testing, Gerd Gigerenzer
notwithstanding, and suggest reading Erich Lehman book on Fisher
and Neyman (Egon Pearson actually has a smaller role in the history
of statistics); see:
http://www.amazon.com/Fisher-Neyman-Creation-Classical-Statistics/dp/1441994998

P.P.S.  Jack Cohen got his PhD in clinical psychology at NYU in 1950.

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[tips] Feynman on Psychology

2014-01-28 Thread Michael Britt
Here's a clip from a video showing physicist Richard Feynman talking about the 
scientific method.  In this 55 sec clip from the video he alludes to psychology 
and says essentially, you can't have a prediction be shown to be right no 
matter which way it comes out. Which is of course a good point.  He then goes 
on to be a bit more dismissive of psychology because since it's hard to measure 
a concept like love then you can't claim to know anything about it.

http://reelsurfer.com/watch/share/40721

Thoughts?

Michael

Michael A. Britt, Ph.D.
mich...@thepsychfiles.com
http://www.ThePsychFiles.com
Twitter: @mbritt


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Re: [tips] Feynman on Psychology

2014-01-28 Thread Rick Stevens
It kind of sounded like he was criticizing Freudian theories rather than
psychological research.

Rick Stevens
School of Behavioral and Social Sciences
University of Louisiana at Monroe



On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 1:43 PM, Michael Britt mich...@thepsychfiles.comwrote:

 Here's a clip from a video showing physicist Richard Feynman talking about
 the scientific method.  In this 55 sec clip from the video he alludes to
 psychology and says essentially, you can't have a prediction be shown to
 be right no matter which way it comes out. Which is of course a good
 point.  He then goes on to be a bit more dismissive of psychology because
 since it's hard to measure a concept like love then you can't claim to
 know anything about it.

 http://reelsurfer.com/watch/share/40721

 Thoughts?

 Michael

 Michael A. Britt, Ph.D.
 mich...@thepsychfiles.com
 http://www.ThePsychFiles.com
 Twitter: @mbritt


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Re: [tips] Feynman on Psychology

2014-01-28 Thread Michael Britt
Yes, he did appear to be deliberately jabbing Freudian theory, which is 
understandable, but I can see someone watching this section of the video and 
concluding from it that because we can't quantify love, psychology is ipso 
facto not a science.  

How would we defend psychology to Feynman (if he were still alive of course)?  
We could have acquainted him with behavioral methods of studying humans, which 
does allow for quantification, but how would we justify to him that we can 
study emotions?


Michael

Michael A. Britt, Ph.D.
mich...@thepsychfiles.com
http://www.ThePsychFiles.com
Twitter: @mbritt

On Jan 28, 2014, at 4:11 PM, Rick Stevens stevens.r...@gmail.com wrote:

  
  
  
 It kind of sounded like he was criticizing Freudian theories rather than 
 psychological research.  
 
 Rick Stevens
 School of Behavioral and Social Sciences
 University of Louisiana at Monroe
 
 
 
 On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 1:43 PM, Michael Britt mich...@thepsychfiles.com 
 wrote:
 Here's a clip from a video showing physicist Richard Feynman talking about 
 the scientific method.  In this 55 sec clip from the video he alludes to 
 psychology and says essentially, you can't have a prediction be shown to be 
 right no matter which way it comes out. Which is of course a good point.  He 
 then goes on to be a bit more dismissive of psychology because since it's 
 hard to measure a concept like love then you can't claim to know anything 
 about it.
 
 http://reelsurfer.com/watch/share/40721
 
 Thoughts?
 
 Michael
 
 Michael A. Britt, Ph.D.
 mich...@thepsychfiles.com
 http://www.ThePsychFiles.com
 Twitter: @mbritt
 
 
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Re: [tips] Feynman on Psychology

2014-01-28 Thread Christopher Green
Here's a more recent clip of Feynman talking about social science. 
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IaO69CF5mbYdesktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DIaO69CF5mbY 

He has a point, but he also seems to come from the Ernest Rutherford school of 
what counts as science (All science is physics, or it is stamp collecting.).

The problem is (as I have debated many times on this forum) there is no set 
definition of science. Each science has its own standards of theory and 
evidence. For physics, the theory has to be mathematical and the measurements 
have to be very precise. In psychology, the theories are almost never 
mathematical (in part because the measurements are rarely very precise). 

The statistician Jacob Cohen once said (à propos of null hypothesis testing) 
that you're never going to get Newton's laws out of experiments that only 
predict, if I stretch it, it will get longer. He's right. On the other hand, 
you can't fault a science for doing the best it can with the intellectual tools 
that it currently has available. It is one thing to complain that we don't have 
theories that make point-estimate predictions. It is another thing entirely to 
produce such theories. 

Putting all this together into a coherent answer about whether (which part of?) 
psychology is a science s a very difficult thing. It is not as highly 
developed a science as physics, to be sure. Perhaps physics is the wrong model, 
though. Perhaps evolutionary science is the right model instead (William James 
and John Dewey thought so). Perhaps we are barking up the wrong tree by 
modelling ourselves after other sciences. Perhaps there is another approach to 
science -- to the natures of theory and evidence, and the relations between 
them -- that will result in markedly better psychological understanding than we 
currently have. For over a century we have thought that we were only a decade 
or so from that new understanding. We haven't gotten there yet. 

Chris 
...
Christopher D Green
Department of Psychology
York University
Toronto, ON M6C 1G4

chri...@yorku.ca
http://www.yorku.ca/christo

 On Jan 28, 2014, at 4:37 PM, Michael Britt mich...@thepsychfiles.com wrote:
 
  
 
 
  
 
 
  
 
 
 Yes, he did appear to be deliberately jabbing Freudian theory, which is 
 understandable, but I can see someone watching this section of the video and 
 concluding from it that because we can't quantify love, psychology is ipso 
 facto not a science.  
 
 How would we defend psychology to Feynman (if he were still alive of course)? 
  We could have acquainted him with behavioral methods of studying humans, 
 which does allow for quantification, but how would we justify to him that we 
 can study emotions?
 
 
 Michael
 
 Michael A. Britt, Ph.D.
 mich...@thepsychfiles.com
 http://www.ThePsychFiles.com
 Twitter: @mbritt
 
 On Jan 28, 2014, at 4:11 PM, Rick Stevens stevens.r...@gmail.com wrote:
 
  
  
  
 It kind of sounded like he was criticizing Freudian theories rather than 
 psychological research.  
 
 Rick Stevens
 School of Behavioral and Social Sciences
 University of Louisiana at Monroe
 
 
 
 On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 1:43 PM, Michael Britt mich...@thepsychfiles.com 
 wrote:
 Here's a clip from a video showing physicist Richard Feynman talking about 
 the scientific method.  In this 55 sec clip from the video he alludes to 
 psychology and says essentially, you can't have a prediction be shown to 
 be right no matter which way it comes out. Which is of course a good 
 point.  He then goes on to be a bit more dismissive of psychology because 
 since it's hard to measure a concept like love then you can't claim to 
 know anything about it.
 
 http://reelsurfer.com/watch/share/40721
 
 Thoughts?
 
 Michael
 
 Michael A. Britt, Ph.D.
 mich...@thepsychfiles.com
 http://www.ThePsychFiles.com
 Twitter: @mbritt
 
 
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Re: [tips] Feynman on Psychology

2014-01-28 Thread Mike Palij
I was going to sit this thread out but I'm curious about Chris' 
source for Jack Cohen's statement.  I'm challenging that Jack
might have said something like that, I just want to know the
source.

-Mike Palij
New York University
m...@nyu.edu


---  Original Message  
On Tue, 28 Jan 2014 14:28:21 -0800, Christopher Green wrote:
Here's a more recent clip of Feynman talking about social science. 
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IaO69CF5mbYdesktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DIaO69CF5mbY 
He has a point, but he also seems to come from the Ernest Rutherford school of 
what counts as science (All science is physics, or it is stamp collecting.).

The problem is (as I have debated many times on this forum) there is no set 
definition of science. Each science has its own standards of theory and 
evidence. For physics, the theory has to be mathematical and the measurements 
have to be very precise. In psychology, the theories are almost never 
mathematical (in part because the measurements are rarely very precise). 

The statistician Jacob Cohen once said (à propos of null hypothesis testing) 
that you're never going to get Newton's laws out of experiments that only 
predict, if I stretch it, it will get longer. He's right. On the other hand, 
you can't fault a science for doing the best it can with the intellectual tools 
that it currently has available. It is one thing to complain that we don't have 
theories that make point-estimate predictions. It is another thing entirely to 
produce such theories. 

Putting all this together into a coherent answer about whether (which part of?) 
psychology is a science s a very difficult thing. It is not as highly 
developed a science as physics, to be sure. Perhaps physics is the wrong model, 
though. Perhaps evolutionary science is the right model instead (William James 
and John Dewey thought so). Perhaps we are barking up the wrong tree by 
modelling ourselves after other sciences. Perhaps there is another approach to 
science -- to the natures of theory and evidence, and the relations between 
them -- that will result in markedly better psychological understanding than we 
currently have. For over a century we have thought that we were only a decade 
or so from that new understanding. We haven't gotten there yet. 
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Re: [tips] Feynman on Psychology - ERROR IN COMMENT

2014-01-28 Thread Mike Palij

I had a momentary psychotic break with reality and left
*NOT* in one of the sentences I wrote. Below is the
corrected text. Apologies to Chris and anyone else.

On Tue, 28 Jan 2014 17:43:34 -0800, Mike Palij wrote: 
I was going to sit this thread out but I'm curious about Chris' 
source for Jack Cohen's statement.  I'm *NOT* challenging that Jack

might have said something like that, I just want to know the
source.


-Mike Palij
New York University
m...@nyu.edu


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RE: [tips] Feynman on Psychology

2014-01-28 Thread Jim Clark
Hi



Just to pick up on a few points in this thread.



Of course we know as psychologists that few concepts have nice, tidy 
definitions (i.e., necessary and sufficient conditions) and that prototypical 
models of concepts like science (and dog and chair and ...) are the norm. 
 But that doesn't mean we cannot distinguish science from non-science or 
pseudoscience, just as we generally do not go around sitting on dogs and taking 
chairs for walks, or at least not until our later years.



Feynman's allusion to love is misguided since many concepts studied now by 
scientists in very precise ways were once only vaguely defined ... think 
temperature.  Were the early researchers studying temperature, crudely 
defined (that feels hotter than it did before we ...), not doing science?



I think psychology (or at least certain areas within psychology) does fairly 
well on certain aspects of science, notably with respect to testing hypotheses 
against observation, with careful attention to threats to the validity of our 
observations and inferences.



I think we do less well in many areas with respect to specifying mechanistic 
models for our hypotheses and theoretical models. As we grow better at this 
aspect of science, psychology will become better able to see similarities and 
differences between macro-theories and in the process more of a unified 
discipline. And just to be clear, mechanistic models can be in terms of 
psychological constructs, not necessarily brain processes, although it should 
be somewhat clear that they might ultimately be realized in a biological system.



Take care

Jim





Jim Clark

Professor  Chair of Psychology

U Winnipeg

Room 4L41A
204-786-9757
204-774-4134 Fax


From: Christopher Green [chri...@yorku.ca]
Sent: January-28-14 4:28 PM
To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS)
Subject: Re: [tips] Feynman on Psychology










Here's a more recent clip of Feynman talking about social science.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IaO69CF5mbYdesktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DIaO69CF5mbY

He has a point, but he also seems to come from the Ernest Rutherford school of 
what counts as science (All science is physics, or it is stamp collecting.).

The problem is (as I have debated many times on this forum) there is no set 
definition of science. Each science has its own standards of theory and 
evidence. For physics, the theory has to be mathematical and the measurements 
have to be very precise. In psychology, the theories are almost never 
mathematical (in part because the measurements are rarely very precise).

The statistician Jacob Cohen once said (à propos of null hypothesis testing) 
that you're never going to get Newton's laws out of experiments that only 
predict, if I stretch it, it will get longer. He's right. On the other hand, 
you can't fault a science for doing the best it can with the intellectual tools 
that it currently has available. It is one thing to complain that we don't have 
theories that make point-estimate predictions. It is another thing entirely to 
produce such theories.

Putting all this together into a coherent answer about whether (which part of?) 
psychology is a science s a very difficult thing. It is not as highly 
developed a science as physics, to be sure. Perhaps physics is the wrong model, 
though. Perhaps evolutionary science is the right model instead (William James 
and John Dewey thought so). Perhaps we are barking up the wrong tree by 
modelling ourselves after other sciences. Perhaps there is another approach to 
science -- to the natures of theory and evidence, and the relations between 
them -- that will result in markedly better psychological understanding than we 
currently have. For over a century we have thought that we were only a decade 
or so from that new understanding. We haven't gotten there yet.

Chris
...
Christopher D Green
Department of Psychology
York University
Toronto, ON M6C 1G4

chri...@yorku.camailto:chri...@yorku.ca
http://www.yorku.ca/christo

On Jan 28, 2014, at 4:37 PM, Michael Britt 
mich...@thepsychfiles.commailto:mich...@thepsychfiles.com wrote:










Yes, he did appear to be deliberately jabbing Freudian theory, which is 
understandable, but I can see someone watching this section of the video and 
concluding from it that because we can't quantify love, psychology is ipso 
facto not a science.

How would we defend psychology to Feynman (if he were still alive of course)?  
We could have acquainted him with behavioral methods of studying humans, which 
does allow for quantification, but how would we justify to him that we can 
study emotions?


Michael

Michael A. Britt, Ph.D.
mich...@thepsychfiles.commailto:mich...@thepsychfiles.com
http://www.ThePsychFiles.com
Twitter: @mbritt

On Jan 28, 2014, at 4:11 PM, Rick Stevens 
stevens.r...@gmail.commailto:stevens.r...@gmail.com wrote:







It kind of sounded like he was criticizing Freudian theories rather than 
psychological

Re: [tips] Feynman on Psychology - ERROR IN COMMENT

2014-01-28 Thread Christopher Green
It was in one of his late articles. In American Psychologist, I think. Might it 
have been in The Earth is Round, p.05”? I'll have to check.

Chris
...
Christopher D Green
Department of Psychology
York University
Toronto, ON M6C 1G4

chri...@yorku.ca
http://www.yorku.ca/christo

 On Jan 28, 2014, at 8:51 PM, Mike Palij m...@nyu.edu wrote:
 
 I had a momentary psychotic break with reality and left
 *NOT* in one of the sentences I wrote. Below is the
 corrected text. Apologies to Chris and anyone else.
 
 On Tue, 28 Jan 2014 17:43:34 -0800, Mike Palij wrote: 
 I was going to sit this thread out but I'm curious about Chris' source for 
 Jack Cohen's statement.  I'm *NOT* challenging that Jack
 might have said something like that, I just want to know the
 source.
 
 -Mike Palij
 New York University
 m...@nyu.edu
 
 
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