Current Events > Is psychology really a useless degree?

(+) Yeah! (+)

how would you compare a bachelors in psych to a bachelors in mathematics?

Youre not going to be doing pure math without a grad degree either, but the perception seems different
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g980 posted...

how would you compare a bachelors in psych to a bachelors in mathematics?

Youre not going to be doing pure math without a grad degree either, but the perception seems different

Perception and selection bias.

Not the smartest most motivated students are drawn to the psych degree, tbh.
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SchoolForAnts posted...

Also, just so were clear, you CAN open your own practice with just a bachelors in psychology? Do you have to pass any test?

I can only speak for Georgia and a few other states, but the way is works is this:
*To get a license like Licensed Professional Counselor or Licensed Clinical Social Worker requires passing a state set of requirements, which include a master's degree.
*You CAN open your practice with just a bachelors (or even without it), but virtually no insurance company or government program will reimburse you.
*Some people open loosely defined places like "Healing places" or "Christian counseling centers" that don't require any licensed personnel, but they generally have a shady reputation as far as actual therapy goes.

No. Just get an office job where they dont care about the degree and youll be fine. Provided youre ok doing so and leaving the field
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teepan95 posted...

SterlingM posted...

yes since its gonna be supplanted by neurology

its gonna be like astronomy and astrology

OK I'll bite

wtf?

astrology, like psychology is based on conventional wisdom and astronomy, like neurology, is based on empirical facts

so in the future any credible research about the brain and human behavior will be through neurology and not psychology
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ooo, spicy take
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SterlingM posted...

teepan95 posted...

SterlingM posted...

yes since its gonna be supplanted by neurology

its gonna be like astronomy and astrology

OK I'll bite

wtf?

astrology, like psychology is based on conventional wisdom and astronomy, like neurology, is based on empirical facts

so in the future any credible research about the brain and human behavior will be through neurology and not psychology

Lol. That is a pretty harsh evaluation of psychology. Not sure comparing it to a literal pseudoscience is entirely fair.
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SterlingM posted...

astrology, like psychology is based on conventional wisdom

If you actually believe that you are very ignorant. I am a behavioral neuroscientist and I work with people ranging from psychology to biology and they all do empirical scientific research.
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I'm sure psychology has been overlapping neurology more recently

https://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2007/04/04/ask-a-scienceblogger-do-we-rea

i'm not convinced we are gonna need psychology once neuroscience is further developed
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Did you just post an article over 10 years old and call it recent?
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SterlingM posted...

I'm sure psychology has been overlapping neurology more recently

https://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2007/04/04/ask-a-scienceblogger-do-we-rea

i'm not convinced we are gonna need psychology once neuroscience is further developed

Which is a different (still wrong though) argument from the one you just made ("psychology is conventional wisdom not science").
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I didn't say that was recent, I just haven't seen any evidence to the contrary and that blog highlighted some "research"

Seems like people wanna hold on to it for some reason when we will be moving past it
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SterlingM posted...

I didn't say that was recent, I just haven't seen any evidence to the contrary and that blog highlighted some "research"

Seems like people wanna hold on to it for some reason when we will be moving past it

Why do you feel so confident waving off a field you know nothing about?
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i'd love to be proven wrong, psychology hasn't done that
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SterlingM posted...

i'd love to be proven wrong, psychology hasn't done that

If you've read a single journal article on psychology I would be surprised.
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so whats a breakthrough in psychology people should care about?
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'Breakthrough'? You misunderstand science in general.
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oh what is science about?
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SterlingM posted...

oh what is science about?

Almost entirely incremental knowledge gain.
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and what has psychology contributed
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SterlingM posted...

and what has psychology contributed

You realize this is a silly question right? I'm not going to summarize the psychological literature for you. One because i don't really have the expertise for that (though, nor does any one psychologist), two because that's a silly waste of my time.

Psychology has shown, empirically, the properties of memory encoding, memory recall, attention, visual perception, etc...
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Psychologists literally won a Nobel prize for prospect theory. This guy is ridiculously ignorant.
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Yes its given definitions to things we all intuitively know

But it can't get inside the brain, so why pretend we'll need it when neuroscience is fully developed
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I literally do neuroscience for a living and we work directly with psychologists, because behavioral measures and techniques are indispensable to our field. You clearly know nothing about neuroscience or psychology.
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Prospect theory

"The theory states that people make decisions based on the potential value of losses and gains rather than the final outcome, and that people evaluate these losses and gains using some heuristics."

If you find that impressive good for you but that seems like a joke to me, I guess its the best we can do for now.

And these guys see the writing on the wall, neuroscience will make them obsolete
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SterlingM posted...

Yes its given definitions to things we all intuitively know

But it can't get inside the brain, so why pretend we'll need it when neuroscience is fully developed

You don't intuitively know it. Many properties of these phenomenon counter normal intuition. People just think they know how people work.

You can think of psychology in the abstract, which might help you understand the goals and purposes of it. You have general input, stimuli, and you have output, behavior. By systematically manipulating the input and examining what happens to the output, you can get an idea as to what that blackbox function is doing. This is essentially David Marr's algorithmic level of abstraction.

Neuroscientists care about how the brain does these things, how it implements those computations, that's essentially at David Marr' implementation level of abstraction.

See, both are important levels to study. While they can get at similar questions, and the end run for neuroscientists is to understand how these computations are necessarily constrained by the brain's architecture, both level of analysis are important and are often asking very different questions.
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In the words of Ernest Rutherford, "all science is either physics or stamp collecting"

Psychology aims to explain why we do what we do, now we can actually get inside the head. No ones calling that psychology.

COVxy posted...

Neuroscientists care about how the brain does these things

and at the end of the day, how the brain does it is all that matters
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It's a great degree if you like crippling student loan debt without a way to pay it off because it's a useless degree.
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I think you're just trolling at this point, but I'll make one more point.

If you do not understand the link between input stimuli and output action, it's very easy to get lost in the trees. With a complex system like the brain, with many dynamic pieces performing many actions, it's incredibly hard to see the bigger picture. Understanding the input output relationships allows for grounding, for dynamically linked computations across the brain to make sense when grounded on the known input-output conversion.
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Rutherford has another quote for you, can't remember it fully though,something like if you can't explain your theory easily then its probably wrong.

Its hard to see the big picture because you don't have all the information. You see something as advanced as the higgs boson can be explained in a few words. You have to jumble a bunch of words together just to say psychology is hard.

So what I think you're trying to say is the brain takes input and the output is our senses.

Why do we need psychology for that?
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SchoolForAnts posted...

Blue_Dream87 posted...

Romulox28 posted...

SchoolForAnts posted...

Romulox28 posted...

averagejoel posted...

calling degrees useless is pigheaded and completely misses the point of going to university in the first place

The old scams that colleges push, you go to college to become a well rounded person, a polymath.

Maybe in the reinissance, but now you need to put food on the plate too.

are you saying that well-rounded people cant find work?

Lot of CEOs and other rich mofos have degrees outside their career field. Dude just doesn't know what the point of a degree is for some

Privileged fucks can do whatever they want because of their privilege

lol ok

im assuming TC is trolling but it is always weird to see this meme online about how your BA somehow predetermines the rest of your life. for most people your BA becomes negligible after you get your first job & have work experience
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SterlingM posted...

So what I think you're trying to say is the brain takes input and the output is our senses.

No, I didn't say that lol.
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part of the reason why I'll never take psychology seriously
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I was thinking about going back to school online at snhu for a history degree. Either that or an English degree. English seems like it'd be more useful. If I go with history I'd probably go all out and go for a masters. I've always been an indecisive guy.
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SterlingM posted...

Rutherford has another quote for you, can't remember it fully though,something like if you can't explain your theory easily then its probably wrong.

Its hard to see the big picture because you don't have all the information. You see something as advanced as the higgs boson can be explained in a few words. You have to jumble a bunch of words together just to say psychology is hard.

So what I think you're trying to say is the brain takes input and the output is our senses.

Why do we need psychology for that?

Coxvy is extremely intelligent, however he's also extremely narrow-minded as well. Take from that what you will.

SterlingM posted...

Its hard to see the big picture because you don't have all the information. You see something as advanced as the higgs boson can be explained in a few words. You have to jumble a bunch of words together just to say psychology is hard.

lol what

whats the highest level of physics you've studied?
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Psych is a useless degree for 90% of people that get one.

That's mostly the fault of the stupid people that choose to pursue it with no end goal but still.
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the beauty of good science is you don't have to study it to understand it
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SterlingM posted...

the beauty of good science is you don't have to study it to understand it

What do you know about science?

Conflict posted...

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Y'all really fed this guy hardcore huh

Regardless as to whether he's trolling or not, there are dozens of people reading his posts and agreeing.
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This is the big issue with psychology.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/03/psychologys-replication-crisis-cant-be-wished-away/472272/
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/aug/27/study-delivers-bleak-verdict-on-validity-of-psychology-experiment-results

In the investigation, a whopping 75% of the social psychology experiments were not replicated, meaning that the originally reported findings vanished when other scientists repeated the experiments. Half of the cognitive psychology studies failed the same test. Details are published in the journal Science.

Even when scientists could replicate original findings, the sizes of the effects they found were on average half as big as reported first time around.

A lot of psychology basically amounts to pseudoscience. Psychologists apply something resembling the scientific method to data that they collect from experiments involving people and write up a paper sounding as confident as they can in some conclusion when ultimately in the vast majority of cases it is complete nonsense.

Atralis posted...

This is the big issue with psychology.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/03/psychologys-replication-crisis-cant-be-wished-away/472272/
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/aug/27/study-delivers-bleak-verdict-on-validity-of-psychology-experiment-results

In the investigation, a whopping 75% of the social psychology experiments were not replicated, meaning that the originally reported findings vanished when other scientists repeated the experiments. Half of the cognitive psychology studies failed the same test. Details are published in the journal Science.

Even when scientists could replicate original findings, the sizes of the effects they found were on average half as big as reported first time around.

A lot of psychology basically amounts to pseudoscience. Psychologists apply something resembling the scientific method to data that they collect from experiments involving people and write up a paper sounding as confident as they can in some conclusion when ultimately in the vast majority of cases it is complete nonsense.

The replication crisis extends across all scientific domains, not just psychology. Psychology is just the field at the forefront of trying to understand it and make changes to the scientific culture to ensure better practices.
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COVxy posted...

Conflict posted...

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Y'all really fed this guy hardcore huh

Regardless as to whether he's trolling or not, there are dozens of people reading his posts and agreeing.

My investigations have concluded that he is the alternate account of a former user named sir mix a lot.

psychology doesn't force you to take it seriously like other sciences

i'm sure the people who practice it are smart but it seems like a field for people who like hearing themselves talk
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Psychology is a worthwhile field of study, therefore a worthwhile degree.
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COVxy posted...

The replication crisis extends across all scientific domains, not just psychology. Psychology is just the field at the forefront of trying to understand it and make changes to the scientific culture to ensure better practices.

The difference with psychology is that there is not a core foundation to rest upon. I'm thinking of Force = Mass * Acceleration or the fact that mixing certain elements together at certain temperatures and pressures will cause known chemical reactions.

Its always been common knowledge in psychology that many prominent theories of the past have ended up being nonsense (Think Freud). With the current replication crisis in psychology you now know that even most of the very scientific sounding studies that have been produced up the present day are also simply false.

The fact is that if a person had got a bachelors in psychology in 1988 or 2018 most of what they learned was just plain wrong. The big list of psychological conditions and theories they memorized was mostly about as valid and true as theories about astrological signs. Now they learned other skills like paper writing and statistics and they exercised their minds even if the things they were learning were mostly fluff so I wouldn't call the degree useless but honestly I would place more value on a degree in philosophy or history than on psychology because you aren't going to come to find out that most of the cute little theories you learned about how the human mind works were bullshit.

Atralis posted...

Its always been common knowledge in psychology that many prominent theories of the past have ended up being nonsense (Think Freud)

Essentially Psychology resembles very little of what it looked like prior to the 1950's, as aside from the psychophysicist's of the late 1800's and the uprising of behaviorism in the early 1900's, it was back when psychology was much more like philosophy than anything else. Using anything prior as an example is kinda silly.

It is true that formal theory is something that is lacking is psychology, in the same way it is lacking in biology. This is changing, but it's slow. This isn't to say that psychology is resting on poor legs. I have very little doubt in my mind that the large majority of core results in cognitive psychology will replicate every time. Hell, with most of these experiments, you can perform a single experiment on yourself and get pretty robust results (we did this in my cognitive psychology class in undergrad, 9/10 experiments I had data collected from myself that were robust in the same direction as the results from the literature). A visual search of a single feature will always be robustly faster than a visual search for a conjunction feature. Conjunction search will always scale with number of items while single feature search will not. In fact, if you look at the replication efforts, it's easy to predict what results will replicate and what won't. Psychologists predict this better than the public, but even the public is good at this.

There's been a culture in science, and particularly within social psychology, to push flashy unexpected results. And it should be no surprise that if a scientific result surprises anyone it is unlikely to replicate. So a culture of biased publishing, selective reporting, and p-hacking descended upon social psychology in particular. But this isn't uniform across psychology, and it exists across all subdomains of science, more in some than others, but all fall prey to these biased incentives.
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