orthonormal comments on It's all in your head-land - Less Wrong

32 Post author: colinmarshall 22 July 2009 07:41PM

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Comment author: pjeby 24 July 2009 01:11:50AM *  9 points [-]

From Teaching Dogma in Psychology, a lecture by Dr. Richard Marken, Associate Professor of Psychology at Ausberg College:

Psychologists see no real problem with the current dogma. They are used to getting messy results that can be dealt with only by statistics. In fact, I have now detected a positive suspicion of quality results amongst psychologists. In my experiments I get relationships between variables that are predictable to within 1 percent accuracy. The response to this level of perfection has been that the results must be trivial! It was even suggested to me that I use procedures that would reduce the quality of the results, the implication being that noisier data would mean more.

The lecture was Dr. Marken's farewell speech. After five years of unsuccessfully trying to interest his peers in the improved methods made possible by PCT (most lost interest when they understood enough to realize that it was a major paradigm shift), he chose to resign his professorship, rather than continue to teach what he had come to believe (as a result of his PCT studies) was an unscientific research paradigm. As he put it:

It would be like having to teach a whole course on creationism and then having a “by the way, this is the evolutionary perspective” section. Why waste time on non-science? From my point of view, most of what is done in the social sciences is scientific posturing and verbalizing.

It's an interesting read, whether you agree with his conclusions or not. Not a lot of people with the intellectual humility regarding their own field to accept the ideas of an outsider, question everything they've learned, and then resign when they realize they can't, in good conscience, teach the established dogma:

So my problem is what I, as a teacher, should do. I consider myself a highly qualified psychology professor. I want to teach psychology. But I don’t want to teach the dogma, which, as I have argued, is a waste of time. So, do I leave teaching and wait for the revolution to happen? I’m sure that won’t be for several decades. Thus I have a dilemma—the best thing for me to do is to teach, but I can’t, because what I teach doesn’t fit the dogma. Any suggestions?

Edit to add: it appears that, 20 years later, Dr. Marken is now considering a return to teaching, as he reports on his 25 years of PCT research.

Comment author: orthonormal 24 July 2009 07:24:14PM *  2 points [-]

Thanks for the citation. I know it's a bother to do so, but I'd appreciate it if you linked your sources more often when they're publicly available but unfamiliar to the rest of us.