h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Is it a real science? Or just a collection of opinions and observations strung together in such a way as they seem to make sense at least some of the time but no one really knows what is going on?
(and ok, the more cynical of us might apply the later to some of the other sciences, but that isn;t the discusion!).
And whilst we are at it, is it any more or less 'scientific' or valid than psychiatry?

Some of it is real science, some of it is just peoples theories with very little to back them up. So you get the parts where someone has lost a piece of their brain and their behaviour is strange, or they image the brain, or how many numbers can you remember, what is the smallest difference in time before you cannot tell which side a sound comes from (0.03 seconds for me) etc. Which is founded on empirical evidence. However you also get the Freudian, Piaget stuff which is theoretical (which leads into psychiatry) which is much harder to disprove and has very little evidence to back it up (and anything where any disproval can be countered only by the hypothesis itself is always dodgy). Just a quick view into my brain on the subject Until later....
BCNU - Crescent

Interesting. The first bit is the stuff I am interested in, how the brain functions, or malfunctions, and am thinking (still! some may remember my ponderings on this in the past) about starting a course in psychology. Thing is you seem to have to plough through all the (to me) boring social psychology stuff at the lower level to get to the interesting stuff like cognitive and developmental psychology later on.

yep It was what put me off from going on in psychology. 1st year was great - looking at exactly the sort of intresting stuff - brain damage, voodoo death etc. However the next year was Freud (imbicilic, cokehead doing what he can to get in his clients pants) and Piaget theory of childhood development. No evidence for either theory but put across as fact Grrrr! Even still I may have given it a go, but biochem was more intresting to me Until later....
BCNU - Crescent

Firstly: yes, it is a science. Modern psychology is all about devising experiments to collect empirical data, and using those data to create and test theoretical models of how the brain works. It's just that unlike many branches of science, pretty much everything in Psychology is open to constant debate, reinterpretation, refinement, and refutation - simply because we don't have the tools or the understanding to find "definitive" answers. But I'd guess the same would be true of quantum physics, or genetics: the aim is to create a theory that usefully fits current knowledge.

As for "the boring bits", it's true that there are a lot of different areas within Psychology - social, developmental, cognitive, applied [psychiatry etc], biopsychology... But my personal experience (my degree is 1/3 Psychology) is that they're more linked than you might imagine, and certain key concepts do cross over from one branch to another. My course covered just about everything in the first year, and then gradually focussed in on cognitive parts to go with the AI theme of the degree; but some of the other aspects in the first year were really fascinating.

Sounds like you were unlucky having Freud and Piaget put across as fact - just about nothing is talked off as fact here, and I remember several whole lectures on the precise ways in which Piaget was wrong... [Although I'd have to disagree that there's no evidence *for* Piaget's theory; it's just that there's a lot of evidence that it's not so simple as he thought]

[IMSoP]

Is A2118782 and its peer review thread any help?

Increase Mathers, so yer doing an AI degree? Where you doing it? Ai and A life parts of my Computing degree were what got me interested in this in the first place. Thing is, being in full time employment, and degree I do will have to be a correspondance or distance learning one, but always useful to find places that do them.

I also find it to be mainly a lot of nice sounding theories, with nothing real to back them up. No real way to falsify them and such.

Ictoan - I'm at Reading University, just finishing a BSc in "Intelligent Systems". It's a rather strange mixture of courses from Cybernetics, Computer Science and Psychology departments, which gives a good mix of view points on a lot of the overlapping topics. Unfortunately those only three of us doing it, so the departments do occasionally forget to co-ordinate what they're supposed to do with us! Perhaps for that reason, from the year below me on it doesn't really exist - there's a replacement, but it doesn't involve co-ordination with Psychology.

Xanatic - I take it you haven't ever studied psychology then! That argument might have been valid 50 years ago, but modern psychology is very mcuh about falsifiable theories and predictions - a major part of any psychology course is actually applied statistics, since mostly all we can do is test a large sample and prove that it "couldn't" (i.e. is very unlikely to) be random. The result is generally that the theories stop sounding nice and have to be reinvented as soon as someone comes up with an elegant new study, to better represent the current understanding. It's a science alright, just a relatively young one.