I'd speculate that the 10,000 hour rule is a product of an American obsession with the idea of hard work being the most important factor in success, with the idea that everyone's abilities are reasonably equal, and determination and diligence is what differentiates them. This satisfies a certain sense of fairness and justice in life. I also think it's just not true, more the product of wishful thinking than any evidence.
People have differing levels of talent in different areas, and this does have significant effects on success and ability. There are "super-brilliant slackers," and there are very hard working failures. Talent, too, does not necessarily correspond with interest and enjoyment. None of this is fair, but life is not inherently fair.
The important thing here, more than practice, is figuring out what one is good at doing, and what one enjoys doing, and coming up with things that are in both sets.
A guy (30-year-old photographer) who never really played golf before is trying to reach the PGA Tour through 10k hours and deliberate practice. (ie, Not just mindlessly spending time on the driving/putting range).
In the last four years he's practiced about 5500 hours and gone to a handicap of 3.3.
That would be 9 hours per day, every single day of those three years. How many people have even had just one day where they spent nine hours on the same thing? That's not including breaks, and periods where you mind wanders or you're not focused.
And it is supposed to be 10,000 hours of "deliberate practice", if I remember correctly, i.e. exercises and trials focusing on harder point, with an immediate feedback. I don't think it is possible to keep that kind of focus 9 hours a day for 3 years in a row.
The reason that the 10,000 hour does not exist are: (1) different fields require different amount of training and dedication, (2) it is difficult to measure what "mastery" is because it is so hard to quantify, (3) some fields are more competitive than others and therefore requires more practice to get really good, (4) the way that one learns and practice can have a significant effect on one's skill level, (5) at the highest level there is always a factor of talent and luck. Overall, the 10,000 hour rule just means that it takes a really really long time and dedication to be a world class at something. For some it may take only 1,000 hours while others will not reach it no matter how much they try. I think that this meme has gotten out of control and perhaps people have focused more on the long hours than the joy of improving or understanding what improvement means. It is not always better to spend more time on something and in some sense the feeling that we should be working all the time has lead people to become less productive.
I think the problem is more (6) deliberate practice is hard to define. Some people believe that just sitting and doing problem sets is deliberate practice. Some people believe that hacking on a side project is deliberate practice of programming skills. I don't think that any of those two examples would qualify as deliberate practice.
How would you define deliberate practice, then? I would agree that deliberate practice may be hard to define across all skills, but it could be defined for a specific skill.
For example in programing, I would consider problem sets and side projects with functions and goals that are aligned but still outside of one's normal scope of work to be deliberate practice. Working on Project Euler problem sets could be considered deliberate practice. They are problems that can be done in most any programming language, are known to be great for learning a new one, but generally fall outside the usual work of handling data, transforming content, etc.
I would consider Project Euler to be akin to practicing scales on a musical instrument: playing scales is not necessarily music in a "having popular appeal" sense, but it does enable new skills and depth of knowledge of the instrument.
Taking the Project Euler example, consistently doing the exercises, if they go in difficulty for each done, is deliberate practise in (probably) algorithm design, but does nothing for architecture. But redoing the same exercises over and over, always improving the design of it in each iteration (examples: reduce number of lines, apply DDD or hexagonal, etc, though the solutions in Project Euler probably not the best for this kind of practise) improves architecture skills.
The idea of deliberate practise is to always be improving in the tasks you are doing, usually by taking more and more difficult tasks in progression, but also analysing the past actions to identify where to improve. For example, I always liked to play tennis (and have many years of competitive table tennis behind me). Before I started working with a coach, my practises were mostly playing the game, maybe having a few swings against a wall when I didn't have a partner. When I started working with a coach, we practises my service over and over and over again, changing targets in the field, the kind of spin, and analysing most of the services to see what went right and wrong with my service. I can only say my skills improved at more than 10x the speed than when I was just having matches with other people.
I know many people who do stuff for ages now, but they aren't someone you would ask for advice, because they're so bad at it.
I know two photographs, one is mediocre and does this stuff for over 6 years now (professionally for money) and one is superb and does it for 2 years (for fun).
Most people who get involved with a specific thing never get to the practice part. They just read a bunch of stuff, do a bit of it and think they know everything...
Possibly linked to luck, but I would add another important element: inate ability.
No amount of practice - 10,000 hours, 20,000 hours, or every waking moment for the rest of my life, is going to give me Michael Phelps' shoulder size or ability to process lactic acid.
There may be a (7) having to do with the age at which you start. Something like a 10k h rule would correlate with those who started earlier. To have any practical chance of actually putting in 10k h on the violin, it sure helps to start at age six.
It also helps if formal practice is the same thing as having fun for you.
The 10,000 hour rule is a cultural meme that has spread and found believers not because it is grounded in reality but because it is cognitively seductive. In the first place it should seem highly suspect that something as poorly-defined and multidimensional as "mastering" (how do you measure mastery?) a "field" (as if every field had the same complexity and breadth) could always be done by anyone (independently of the obvious issue of individual variations in intelligence and talent) under a constant, conveniently round figure of 10,000 hours of practice.
As a cultural meme it works in a similar way to the myth that "humans are only using 10% of their brains". I expect it to die a slow death over the next 50 years.
I think its popular because 10,000 hours seems nicely out of reach for most people, so it lets you off the hook for not being good at stuff. It's not my fault I can't play the piano: my lifestyle precludes it. If only I didn't have a job/kids/whatever, then people could see how creative I really am. Gladwell allows one to continue doing nothing while still imagining oneself as a thwarted hero. A great deal for just $16.99.
I'd always understood it as figurative for "a whole lot of time." I think it works as both an encouragement and a warning: if you think you can become a master in a few weeks, think again. But if you've been practicing for a year and you feel like you're never going to get there, keep at it! You're making real progress even if it doesn't seem like it.
Malcolm Gladwell is a tool, but the idea makes sense on some level because he borrowed it from other areas.
If you've been focused exclusively and passionately on a specific field of study for the equivalent of 5 full time years, you will be an expert/master at that thing. The scope or meaning of that mastery is going to depend on what it is. If you're a plumber, you're going to be adept at using your tools and be an expert in the codes for plumbing systems and maybe some specific sub-domain (like industrial cooling).
I use a blue collar example here because there is an actual process to be designated a "master" in a trade. Usually it requires a minimum of 5 years of practicing your craft at the journeyman level. (Along with training and alot of study) Assuming a 2,000 hour work year... that's pretty much your magical 10,000 hour benchmark.
Does this really contradict that 10000-hour rule? (Well, apart from the fact that 10000 hours may well be an arbitrary number, and not as magical as Gladwell made it out to be)
From what I remember from reading Outliers, the claim about the 10000 hours was formulated more precisely than is posed here: it only said that above a certain level of innate talent (IIRC the particular level wasn't made a big deal of), differences in talent were less significant than differences in practice hours.
That's a much weaker claim, but a more credible one: if you're already blessed with eg a high IQ, then it pays off to work hard on your homework, and you can overtake the super-brilliant slacker in your class. But if you didn't have a very high IQ to begin with, the rule doesn't promise you anything.
The data in the article just says there's a lot of other stuff that determines the variance in performance - probably that includes "talent". It doesn't try to find if such a "talent threshold" above which talent is less important exists.
> Does this really contradict that 10000-hour rule?
No, it contradicts the premise that there could be such a number with the meaning attached to it. It's not about the value the number has, the issue is the number itself -- the idea that the thing under discussion could be assigned a specific value.
But the deeper problem is that it assigns a quantity to something no one understands well enough to quantify. Scientists avoid attaching a number to something until there's an explanation, a theory, that makes the number both compelling and testable (i.e. falsifiable).
>Scientists avoid attaching a number to something until there's an explanation, a theory, that makes the number both compelling and testable (i.e. falsifiable). //
Hubble seemingly ignored the outliers and drew a straight line through his data to create his eponymous "constant". Making a mark to work from isn't really unscientific it's just loose hypothesising - http://www.pnas.org/content/15/3/168.full.pdf+html.
Surely the fact that this meta-analysis has falsified the former claim [hypothesis] shows that it was scientific [at least under a Popperian formulation].
> Hubble seemingly ignored the outliers and drew a straight line through his data to create his eponymous "constant".
That's a perfectly reasonable use of statistics in reducing observations. The same method was used extensively in the recent hunt for the Higgs Boson, until the uncertainties in the process fell below 5 sigma, at which point a discovery was announced.
> Making a mark to work from isn't really unscientific it's just loose hypothesising ...
If it's not either derived from empirical observation or a reasonable extrapolation from established theory, it's ipso facto unscientific.
> Surely the fact that this meta-analysis has falsified the former claim [hypothesis] shows that it was scientific ...
No, it only shows that one unscientific claim (based on no theory and no evidence) can appear to unseat another. And it's not a "falsification", because the original claim is unfalsifiable on the ground that it's not based on a testable theory.
Group A says, "It takes 10,000 hours ..." without any basis. Group B says, "Utter nonsense." This happens in astrology all the time. Does that mean astrology is science? The difference between astrology and science is that scientists won't make a prediction without an empirical basis and a theory about why it's so.
Based on your formulation it seems all new "scientific" [null] hypotheses are "ipso facto unscientific"?
For example c being constant is an axiomatic part of relativity. Ergo to you it seems, as this is not empirical nor an extrapolation but a new hypothesis that when postulated contradicts established science, this suggestion - and presumably the ensuing formulation - was, um, unscientific?
Now I'm happy to go with that, call it a philosophical treatise and recognise the axiomatic nature of relativity but at this point I think your definition of science is too tight; theoretical physics to me is a part of science. Indeed I'd say wild hypothesising can be (and is called) science depending really on what you do with those hypotheses.
I thought that the original study was just showing a correlation. That is, that experts typically had 10,000 hours of practice into their field of expertise. People have claimed causation since then (i.e., 10,000 hours guarantees expertise). The weaker claim that 10,000 hours of practice is necessary (but not sufficient) in order to become an expert seems reasonable to me.
Thanks, yes, that's the other important point: you can't turn it around and expect a guarantee of success. I believe the original study didn't even claim any magical threshold of hours either - Gladwell probably just introduced that as a literary device: "10000 hours", and the added suggestion of some mystical threshold, make for much better storytelling than "oh you know, on the order of tens of thousands of hours" :)
And then if you add the other caveat too, it becomes too underwhelming to make for inspiring bedtime reading: "on the order of tens of thousands of hours, provided that you were quite great to begin with"!
Yes, too underwhelming to catch on as much as Gladwell's interpretation has. However, it actually makes an important point: even if you're talented, it requires practice to really become an expert.
There's a really interesting episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast that delves into this in some depth, particularly relating to sports, where the idea has really taken off, and where there is good evidence the specialisation it encourages actively harms performance: http://youarenotsosmart.com/2014/08/14/yanss-podcast-030-how...
The article states that only 12% of success is determined by practice, thus the hypothesis of it taking 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill is false.
Somehow that doesn't make any sense. >D
The author should maybe have read up more on the 10,000 hour rule, because the rule means that if someone is extremely talented in a certain skill already, it still takes them 10,000 hours to master that skill, such as Beethoven, Gates etc.
I observed Escher. I love Basquiat. I watched Keith Haring, you see I study art. The greats weren't great because at birth they could paint, the greats were great cause they paint a lot.
Doing a lot is not enough. Being critical towards yourself, striving to do better, understand what is better, looking for and listening to feedback, those are as necessary.
"It is important to note that our study shows only that the amount and distribution of practice is related to the level of performance of adult musicians. In fact, many additional factors consistent with the skill-acquisition framework could attenuate the differences among our three groups. Sosniak (1985) found that international-level pianists had spent considerable efforts to seek out the very best musical teachers during their musical development. Furthermore, it is likely that an analysis of the detailed activities during practice alone would reveal qualitative differences between violinists at different advanced levels of performance (Gruson, 1988; Miklaszewski, 1989)."
But more recent research has demonstrated (though I don't know to what degree, nor how many other papers have validated the following findings) that "individual differences in accumulated amount of deliberate practice accounted for about one-third of the reliable variance in performance in chess and music, leaving the majority of the reliable variance unexplained and potentially explainable by other factors". From http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289614..., sorry for the paywall.
In the end, I think it's important to spend time searching and finding something you will be happy to do for the majority of your life. If you want to progress at your chosen field, thought out and well planned studying/practise is necessary, and will make you better, whether or not you end up becoming the accepted world best. And if you enjoy it, it won't matter how high you go.
"So greatness is within virtually any person's grasp, so long as they can put in the time to master their skill of choice."
Gladwell did not say that. It is an over simplification of his argument. He concedes innate talent plays a role.
"For almost a generation, psychologists around the world have been engaged in a spirited debate over a question that most of us would consider to have been settled years ago. The question is this: is there such a thing as innate talent? The obvious answer is yes. Not every hockey player born in January ends up playing at the professional level. Only some do—the innately talented ones."
I just returned from a jazz workshop where we talked a lot about practising. The drum teacher said that it's not necessarily the amount of hours you put into it, but also the frequency and how focussed you work on it.
I remember reading once that best musicians actually worked less than the average ones. But, the difference was that the best had 2 highly focused 1.5-2hrs practice sessions per day (deliberate practice) and rest for the remaining of the day, while average had several shorter practice sessions throughout the day.
I'm skeptical about a specific number of 10,000 hours claimed to be valid across multitude of skills and domains, but I think the spirit of the rule makes a lot of sense.
I think the value of innate talents compared to training and exercise is highly overstated given that almost all skills (hunting and archery possibly being exceptions) are so new in evolutionary time scale that there could not possibly have been any selection for them and so they must lack any specific support in our hardware.
Somehow, nobody doubts the importance of exercise in physical fitness. Not sure why mental fitness should be different.
... given that almost all skills (hunting and archery
possibly being exceptions) are so new in evolutionary
time scale that there could not possibly have been any
selection for them ...
Couldn't you turn that evolutionary argument around, and say that exactly because there hasn't been any selection until recently, you'd expect a larger population variance in those innate talents?
IIRC, the 10,000 hour rule is for becoming "expert" at a skill, not for becoming an Outlier, or for gaining "success". Those "best musicians" with an average of 10,000 hours by age 20 are, by any reasonable definition, experts at their craft.
The conclusion, imho, remains the same: "put more work in what you love and someday, it will pay". As I see it, the 10000h rule is about patience and dedication.
The "10 times rule" is also interesting: it will take 10x more efforts than you think...
First time I see 90-90 law, looks like someone made it up from Pareto principle which is 80% - 20%. Besides I don't see application in this topic for it.
Why is that the conclusion? As much as I am skeptical of meta-analyses and the scientific soundness of most psychological research, the paper really does suggest that dedication has relatively little to do with performance. Patience and dedication toward something one isn't talented in may well not pay.
Anecdotally, when I was an undergrad, I also figure skated very diligently, far more so than studying, and spent thousands of hours diligently and efficiently practicing with excellent coaches, which was probably significantly more time than I spent studying. I graduated with accolades and admission to an excellent university for my graduate work, while unable to reliably do even a single axel.
Dedication and patience may not be enough, it doesn't mean it's not required... I think "dedication and patience" is not enough if you don't account for some efficiency.
I think it could be either "don't expect fantastic results before 10000h" or "see if you're ready to engage a 10000h challenge to know if you can do it" or "commit to 10000h or choose something else"...
I'm not sure this rule was meant to be the n-th principle of thermodynamics, ie. checking its scientific validity may be a good way to waste 10000 hours.
Sure it might not be real. I believe, though, if you spend 10,000 hrs on something, you'll have a higher chance of being better than someone who has only spent 1000 hrs on that thing. Is this not a correct assumption or belief?
I think such things depend on what exactly you are practicing. Chances are if you deliberately practice a language that long, you'll likely be overly fluent. That said, if your body is such that you cannot physically pronounce that 'r' correctly, you'll never speak without some sort of lisp or accent. Art and music are just as much luck as they are talent: Talent can very easily overtake practice. People that practice art learn techniques, but after some time, tend to become very good at emulating. Some people just get art, though, and intuitively know where to place things, where to shadow, what marks to leave out. When the talented practice, they create and manipulate and take whatever they've learned and they become more awesome. Alternatively, formal and deliberate practice in art actually kills some natural talent with overt rules. I've seen all things. Who actually makes it and is regarded as an expert by society? Whoever gets lucky. Music is similar: Some practice and become experts in a symphony, some practice and create symphonies, and others yet, regardless of practice, still struggle to keep on beat.
In any case, though, I do think any person spending so many deliberate (or even not so deliberate) hours on one subject winds up with a pretty amazing knowledge base and probably knowledge of quite a few branches of knowledge. Even if the original goal wasn't actually mastered, still worth it for knowledge.
I propose a new study: The half-life of the 10000 hour rule, i.e., how many years before belief in the 10000 rule among the general population (or among certain specialized populations) is reduced to half of its present level.
The 10,000 Hour Rule says you need 10,000 Hour practice to master a field. It does not say 10,000 Hour practice is the only/most important factor in performance. It has nothing to do with explanation of variances in performance. It does not say 10,000 Hour practice will guarantee your success. It does not say gene is irrelevant to learning. It only says, as a normal person (not genius, not mentally disabled), you need 10,000 Hour practice to master a field.
This is just another example of psychologists trying to sound like scientists. Scientists quantify their claims, put forth physical rules and associated mathematics, after which measurements confirm or refute the quantified predictions.
Psychologists express opinions, most of which don't lead to empirical or quantifiable predictions, but occasionally a psychologist, jealous of real scientists, will try to quantify an opinion, as in this case where 10,000 hours was attached to someone's viewpoint. Then, later, inevitably, other psychologists will argue against the earlier opinion, as thought the refutation was anything more than another opinion.
What psychologists don't do is try to offer explanations, craft testable theories, about their observations, then subject the theories to empirical test. That would actually be science.
> The 10,000 Hour Rule Is Not Real
On the contrary! It is exactly as real as psychology is.
Wow. That's a rather bold claim to levy against an entire field without any evidence to back it up.
The 10,000 rule was created by Malcom Gladwell a writer who has received wide criticism within psychology for making claims that go far beyond the empirical evidence. The linked article talks specifically about how the 10,000-rule was mis-attributed to a current psychologist's theory.
While it's true that there are a lot of psychologists out there who are not doing good science, it's quite unfair to say that psychology doesn't "offer explanations" or "craft testable theories". Much of the work done in psychology is quite rigorous. Remember, cognitive psychology (brain imaging and reaction time data) and neuropsychology (brain imaging, rat and primate studies) are psychology too, and even personality and social psychology can be done with rigor and an eye toward the limits of what can be claimed based on the evidence collected.
I know that psychology has been getting hammered in the popular press lately, but like most of what comes out of the popular press, the real situation is much more nuanced than what they report.
> That's a rather bold claim to levy against an entire field without any evidence to back it up.
As to evidence, it's copious. The NIMH has recently abandoned the DSM as a basis for scientific research proposals for the simple reasons that it has no scientific content. Also, you need to understand that psychologists have the burden of evidence to produce positive evidence of robust scientific theories backed by empirical observations, not on their critics to prove a negative, which is what you're proposing. Proving a negative is an impossible burden (example: try disproving the existence of Bigfoot), and here it's misplaced in any case.
> While it's true that there are a lot of psychologists out there who are not doing good science, it's quite unfair to say that psychology doesn't "offer explanations" or "craft testable theories".
That's a simple fact, it's hardly controversial. Count the number of explanations (theories) offered by psychologists over the years that were empirical and testable, and that survived the subsequent tests -- or, for that matter, that were conclusively falsified using empirical evidence. There aren't any.
> Remember, cognitive psychology (brain imaging and reaction time data) and neuropsychology ...
"Neuropsychology" is a desperate attempt to conflate mind studies and brain studies. Psychology's subject is the mind. Neuroscience's subject is the brain and nervous system. There's no common ground. Many psychologists are calling themselves neuropsychologists now, aware that mind studies have been discredited on the basis that it's impossible to empirically study something that has no empirical existence, and that science requires empirical observations.
To those who say that the mind is a manifestation of the brain's activity, that's an interesting philosophical position, but it can't be verified (or refuted) empirically, because the mind is not an empirical entity. This means all this talk about the life of the mind is philosophy, not science. It's certainly too soon to be offering mind treatments and claiming it as science, without any empirical evidence. This is how and why recovered memory therapy went off the rails -- there was no empirical basis to falsify any claim, which meant that any claim could be -- and was -- made:
"Neuropsychology" is a desperate attempt to conflate mind studies and brain studies. Psychology's subject is the mind. Neuroscience's subject is the brain and nervous system. There's no common ground.
My university degree was a comajor, half a standard psych degree, run by the humanities department, half a neuroscience degree, run by the bioscience department. You are just plain wrong here, and trivially disprovable: damage to the brain causes changes in the subject's mind.
This means all this talk about the life of the mind is philosophy, not science.
Science is philosophy, and robust science relies heavily on methodologies that have been determined through philosophy. Another issue you're getting wrong is the supposed need for science to have explanations. Science is about robust observation and reporting; an explanation is a bonus. No-one wanders around saying that astronomers are charlatans because there's no explanation for dark matter.
It's all much of a muchness, though. You've made up your mind that psychology is some sort of satanic evil, and won't be dissuaded. You've quoted the same NIMH article three times now, missing that the article isn't saying that the DSM is worthless, but instead that there can be a better resource - and that better resource won't come along unless the issue is forced.
> ... trivially disprovable: damage to the brain causes changes in the subject's mind.
Prove it scientifically. Prove that the mind change resulted from the brain damage, not the other way around. And prove that we can get ten observers to interview the experimental subject, ask questions about his/her subjective mental experience, through self-reporting, and draw the same conclusion.
This is a classic problem, you must know about it, and it's why you shouldn't be making claims about the mind and science.
> Science is philosophy, and robust science relies heavily on methodologies that have been determined through philosophy.
No, science is not philosophy, any more than philosophy is literature, something that it resembles.
Science requires falsifiability. Philosophy does not. I could go through dozens of similar points that make science distinct from philosophy.
> Another issue you're getting wrong is the supposed need for science to have explanations.
Since you haven't thought your position through, let me prove that science requires explanations. Doctor Dubious invents a new treatment for the common cold. His treatment is to shake a dried gourd over the cold sufferer until the patient gets better. Sometimes the treatment takes a week, but it always works — the cold sufferer always recovers. So, why doesn't Doctor Dubious get a Nobel Prize for his breakthrough?
The answer is that the procedure is only a description — shake the gourd, patient recovers — without an explanation, without a basis for actually learning anything or being truthful about the connection between cause and effect. It's the same with psychology.
Science requires the shaping and testing of theories. This is what distinguishes it from the practice of witch doctors.
> You've made up your mind that psychology is some sort of satanic evil, and won't be dissuaded.
Either locate where I said or implied this, or retract and apologize, as you would be obliged to do if this were a science discussion between educated people. I won't hold my breath.
I could go through dozens of similar points that make science distinct from philosophy.
Go for it. I'd like to hear them. You're offering, I'll take you up on that.
(edit: --actually, snipped the edit, because it just makes things longer --)
retract and apologize, as you would be obliged to do if this were a science discussion between educated people.
If this were a scientific discussion, you wouldnt be throwing around the word 'science' like it was some kind of trump card. Instead of 'prove it scientifically!' you'd be saying 'show me your methodology and results'. I mean, your doctor dubious example doesn't even work - you don't need to know the mechanism of how the patient recovers from a cold to merely have a control group that shows the same recovery without the magic gourd.
Prove it scientifically. Prove that the mind change resulted from the brain damage, not the other way around.
Final Edit: Are you aware that the NIMH article you've linked three times to defend your case explicitly states that biology underpins mental state? Why do you want me to prove something to you that you're already using to defend what you're saying?
In any case, neither of us are going to change the others' mind, but please stop spreading misinformation about psychology, because you have a distorted, tunnel-vision view of it and laypeople who don't know any better will take it on face value. If you actually are the scientist of the kind you laud, then you'll attack individual studies based on methodology, rather than entire fields based on cherry-picked selections and self-defined terminology.
> If this were a scientific discussion, you wouldnt be throwing around the word 'science' like it was some kind of trump card.
But it is, it is exactly that. When people try to redefine science to suit themselves, with dire consequences like recovered memory therapy, finally society must formally define it unambiguously. Here's an example where the Creationists tried to redefine religion as science, and in a court test with expert witnesses, their claim was refuted through a clear definition of science:
In short, science is defined in the law. This shouldn't have been necessary, but the examples provided by psychology and religion made it necessary.
> Instead of 'prove it scientifically!' you'd be saying 'show me your methodology and results'.
No, that doesn't work -- the Creationists would insist that what they do is science (which they do) and demand admittance to public school science classrooms.
> I mean, your doctor dubious example doesn't even work - you don't need to know the mechanism of how the patient recovers from a cold to merely have a control group ...
This is pretty funny. I just had a conversation the other day with a psychologist in this forum who insisted that a control group served no purpose. Also, in a field that uses the expression "no-treatment control" so regularly, the nature of the control group is important also. A "no-treatment control" is a group of people who are told to go home without treatment, then are compared to people who get treatment. Consider the difficulty of double-blinding a study in which the control group is sent home untreated.
> Are you aware that the NIMH article you've linked three times to defend your case explicitly states that biology underpins mental state?
It does no such thing, your claim is false. The article, and others by the same author, say that psychological theories, those based on the mind, are being, and should be, replaced by biological ones, those based on evidence other than the mind. Insel says, "We need to begin collecting the genetic, imaging, physiologic, and cognitive data to see how all the data – not just the symptoms – cluster and how these clusters relate to treatment response. That is why NIMH will be re-orienting its research away from DSM categories." Tl/dr: away from the mind as sole source of treatment guidance.
In the long term, causes will inform the field, not symptoms. The causes will be biological and genetic. The symptoms are "mental", which makes them next to useless to science.
> ... but please stop spreading misinformation about psychology, because you have a distorted, tunnel-vision ...
Yes, right. My views and Insel's (NIMH chair), and Allen Frances' (editor of DSM-IV) and others, dovetail perfectly. It's your turn to prove that I have distorted anything, that your claims are anything other than empty rhetoric.
> If you actually are the scientist of the kind you laud, then you'll attack individual studies based on methodology ...
On that basis, everything is science, there are only individual flawed studies that create a localized bad impression. On that bases, astrology is science, with a scattering of bad studies in a basically sound field.
> ... rather than entire fields based on cherry-picked selections and self-defined terminology.
Complain to NIMH chair Insel, who holds the same views I do. Scientists would like to see a transition away from mind studies, on the reasonable basis that the mind cannot produce empirical evidence, and for the reason that (a) as Insel says, "Patients with mental disorders deserve better", and (b) because disasters like recovered memory therapy are becoming more common.
It does no such thing, your claim is false. (re: the article)
"Mental disorders are biological disorders involving brain circuits that implicate specific domains of cognition, emotion, or behavior". It's the second dot point. The first dot point and parts of the prose strongly imply similar, but the second dot point explicitly states biological underpinning for mental states.
This is why I'm not interested in talking with you anymore. You behave exactly as a religious fundamentalist, twisting words, creating strawmen, ignoring inconvenient statements like the above, and putting words in people's mouths - for example, Insel doesn't say that psychology itself is bad science, just that the DSM isn't as good as it could be. In fact, the word 'psychology' doesn't even appear in his article.
Exactly. It's cargo-cult science. Attaching numbers and equations and quantifying things to look more credible. Math is supposed to be used to help focus and constrain thinking, not to make opinions sound More Serious.
Sadly, I know a lot of people (mostly wanna-be-rich entrepreneurs, whose only skill seems to be the want to become rich) who buy into such psychology BS without second thought. Things like "cone of learning" or 7-38-55 rule, which sounds absurd if you think about it for more than a second.
(then there's another part of the equation, i.e. "journalists" and business consultants stumbling over a paper with some numbers and specific claims, who then throw out constrains, exaggerate the conclusions and make a run for it)
Yep. Some younger readers may not know what this refers to, so here's a quote from the original Feynman paper "Cargo Cult Science":
"I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas — he's the controller — and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land."
If you loathe psychology so much, why do you hang around on a site where (until fairly recently) about a third of articles were about psychology in some form? A/B testing, effective advertising, staff morale, avoiding burnout... all these sorts of things are psychology, and plenty of them have metrics.
I guess he (like myself) cares more about the other two thirds of articles. Also good you mention that, because there's a lot of cargo-culting and serious-sounding nonsense in the A/B testing/advertisement/metrics articles.
The point is, one has to be precise in what one's claiming. There's a lot of good psychology out there; you can recognize it by being littered with caveats, "maybes", and definitely not full of numbers. My personal opinion on the field (based on articles I read, books citing many a psychological paper, and on talking and observing psychologists and psychology students I know) is that there's a lot of hard work being done to run in circles, thanks mostly to not grokking statistics and not caring about rigour.
And pop-psychology industry, business consultants repeating everything they read without giving it a second thought, and journalists overexaggerating claims are not helping.
There is a definite irony in demanding that one has to be precise in what one's claiming... right after dismissing an entire, very broad field as cargo-culting. "Exactly. It's cargo-cult science" in reference to a comment that classifies psychology as just the poorly-done parts of psychiatry? Terrible precision.
> ... in reference to a comment that classifies psychology as just the poorly-done parts of psychiatry?
In sciences, because of the unifying nature of theory, there are no poorly done parts. Both cosmology and particle physics would be independently weak were it not for the other, and what unites them is ... scientific theory.
Psychiatrists don't listen to psychologists, who don't listen to clinical psychologists, who don't listed to social psychologists. They're independent entities. If psychology were a science, that would all change, as physics is changed, as biology is changed -- all by tested, falsifiable, scientific theories.
> If you loathe psychology so much, why do you hang around on a site where (until fairly recently) about a third of articles were about psychology in some form?
Easily answered. The air where I live isn't clean, but I breathe it anyway, hoping that my natural defenses will filter out the pollutants. This approach has it all over holding my breath until the air becomes clean.
> all these sorts of things are psychology, and plenty of them have metrics.
Metrics without an accompanying explanation. Science requires explanations, empirical, testable, falsifiable explanations. Here's how the chairman of the NIMH explains this issue, as he moved to abandon the DSM:
Alright, the 7-38-55 rule was created in the 1960s and is not given any credit by modern psychologists. Studies since have shown that while tone of voice and body language convey a lot of meaning and in many cases more meaning than the semantic meaning of words, the ratio itself is an artifact of the artificiality of the setting in the original experiments.
The cone of learning was created in the early part of this century by a scholar of education (not a psychologist) and was never tested psychologically.
Are you really going to criticize a whole field by cherry-picking junk scientific claims made 50-100 years ago in some cases by non-psychologists?
> Are you really going to criticize a whole field by cherry-picking junk scientific claims made 50-100 years ago in some cases by non-psychologists?
No, I would rather criticize an entire field based on what they're doing right now.
The psychological professional societies abandoned Asperger Syndrome a year ago and removed it from the diagnostic manual, but this has had no effect on psychiatrists and psychologists, who continue to hand out Asperger Syndrome diagnoses -- now, today.
The NIMH has decided to abandon the entire DSM, as a basis for scientific research proposals (it will remain as a diagnostic guide) for the simple reason that it has no scientific content, but this has had no effect on the activities of those who look on it as the field's scientific guiding light -- now, today.
ADHD is now listed as the top misdiagnosed condition among children. It's estimated that a million U.S. children are misdiagnosed with ADHD, with all the attendant consequences (loss of self-esteem, a belief that one is defective or afflicted), because no one knows what ADHD is, and because the diagnoses are handed out based on the opinions of psychologists and the outcome of a questionnaire, on self-reporting -- not any kind of objective laboratory test -- now, today.
Recovered Memory Therapy resulted in hundreds of bogus prosecutions and destroyed families in the 1990s -- not "50-100 years ago" as in your claim -- including such spectacular stories as Beth Rutherford, who claimed to have been raped by her father and forced to abort using a coat-hanger, a story that was swallowed whole by mental health professionals, until someone with a bit more common sense discovered she was a virgin.
Therapists are free to offer recovered memory therapy if their clients want it, there's no professional or legal sanction for those who do so -- now, today. Example:
Asperger's was dropped from the DSM by the American Psychiatric Association - psychiatry is a professional degree within medicine. Psychology is a research discipline. Clinical psychology is a research discipline and a clinical (practice) degree. They are not the same thing.
The NIMH has abandoned the DSM as a basis for psychological research (conducted by research psychologists), because it failed to incorporate the scientific evidence collected since the last DSM. The scientific evidence they ignored was collected by, you guessed it, research psychologists.
You're right ADHD is a commonly misdiagnosed condition. One of the major problems is that it is often diagnosed in the doctor's office by MDs who have no psychological training. It is also mis-diagnosed by practitioners who should know better, and that's a problem, and one that results from diagnosis criteria that need to be updated according to the state of the modern psychological science, you're right.
Yes, there is no objective laboratory test for ADHD, or major depression, or obsessive-compulsive disorder or bi-polar disorder or borderline or most psychological conditions not associated with some kind of brain injury. That does NOT mean that these aren't real conditions that have a real physiological basis. It merely means we don't have the ability to test for them physiologically yet. A symptoms-based approach to diagnosis isn't as good as a laboratory test, but unfortunately it's the best the current state of the science will support. That doesn't mean that the science is bad, only that our understanding is still young.
Recovered memory therapy was debunked by psychologists who showed in laboratory experiments that false memories could be "recovered".
The fact that practicing psychologists are able offer treatments that are not evidence-based is deplorable. I whole-heartedly agree with you. Please keep in mind, however, that this is not because there aren't treatments that are evidence-based, it's because the practice of therapy is an entrenched system that has it's own internal and external politics.
And I hope you'll consider that psychological research and the practice of psychology are different things. And it's not just because practice doesn't necessarily follow the research. It's because psychology as a science studies how the mind functions and the majority of this is not related to mental illness. Cognitive psychology, language, neuropsychology, etc. are sub-disciplines that investigate aspects of mental functioning and are only related to clinical science in that they both study phenomena that occur in the brain.
> The NIMH has abandoned the DSM as a basis for psychological research (conducted by research psychologists), because it failed to incorporate the scientific evidence collected since the last DSM.
Absolutely false. There is no useful science that could have been incorporated into the DSM to save it, and had this been so, Insel and the other critics of DSM-5 surely would have mentioned it. None did.
> Recovered memory therapy was debunked by psychologists who showed in laboratory experiments that false memories could be "recovered".
Recovered memory therapy was debunked by courts of law, not in psychological laboratories (those mental health professionals who doubted its efficacy were obliged to testify in courts, not in conferences), and it is still offered by clinical psychologists to anyone foolish enough to want it.
> That does NOT mean that these aren't real conditions that have a real physiological basis.
Yes, but that is an opinion, not a scientific finding. Remember that recovered memories, assisted communication, homosexuality, Asperger Syndrome, and dozens of other conditions, were also "real conditions" until they fell out of fashion or failed to agree with changing public tastes. None of them was ever proven to be real, or proven to be false -- ever. They just evaporated over time.
> And I hope you'll consider that psychological research and the practice of psychology are different things.
Yes. However, medical research, and medical practice, are not "different things". The reason is that medical research produces results of immediate and practical use to clinicians. The reason for that, in turn, is that medical research is an empirical science, a science that unites the field, produces a common ground for experimenters and clinicians, a common ground that does not exist in psychology.
It was a writer of popular entertainment who reduced a huge amount of research on expert performance to "it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert", that's then been further reduced by the filter of popular culture until all the caveats about deliberate practice and minimum talent levels have been stripped out.
Psychologists absolutely try to offer explanations and craft testable theories, whether the nature of their work makes it quite as amenable to the methods of the hard sciences is of course a legitimate question.
> Psychologists absolutely try to offer explanations and craft testable theories ...
This is absolutely false, contradicted by the history of psychology. In fact, the reason the DSM has been abandoned is specifically because it contains only descriptions (symptoms), no theories (explanations). Here's how the chairman of the NIMH explains his recent decision to refuse to accept the DSM as the basis for scientific research proposals:
This doesn't mean psychologists are abandoning the DSM. Why should they? After all, they're still handing out Asperger Syndrome diagnoses, a year after this bogus condition was dropped from the DSM by their peers. This kind of guidance from the top, based on evidence or the lack of it, just doesn't matter in psychology, compared to what's popular with the clients.
If a theoretical basis was required for a given practice, as you suggest, of course things would be different -- clinical practice would have to await the discovery of an established cause for any treated condition. But that is never true in psychology.
1) The DSM is controlled by psychiatry not psychology
2) One of the biggest criticisms the NIMH levied was that the DSM 5 failed to incorporate the scientific findings collected in the last 20 years by psychologists.
3) The practice of clinical psychology != psychology. Most psychologists do research. Clinicians practice. Unfortunately the two disciplines are both quite demanding, and it's generally not possible to do both at the same time.
> 1) The DSM is controlled by psychiatry not psychology
Actually, it's controlled by neither psychiatry nor psychology (but influenced by both groups). And it's being abandoned by the psychiatrists as we speak:
> 2) One of the biggest criticisms the NIMH levied was that the DSM 5 failed to incorporate the scientific findings collected in the last 20 years by psychologists.
No, that's false. As the above linked article shows, the complaint was that it's all symptoms with no root causes. Had there been a corpus of science being disregarded, surely someone would have mentioned it during the long DSM-5 editorial process. But there was no science whose absence they could complain about.
> 3) The practice of clinical psychology != psychology.
Do you suppose that a doctor can offer a clinical practice not backed up by research? No, (s)he cannot -- (s)he would be expelled from the field. The expulsion would be informed by clear science. This isn't true in psychology. The reason? There's no science to ignore.
> Most psychologists do research. Clinicians practice. Unfortunately the two disciplines are both quite demanding, and it's generally not possible to do both at the same time.
You're missing the point that what experimental psychologists do has no relevance to clinical psychologists, unlike the example of scientific fields, where every new scientific finding influences the entire field and other fields as well.
Cosmologists study nature at the largest scales -- entire galaxies. Particle physicists study nature at the smallest scales -- quarks, smaller than atoms. But cosmologists and particle physicists work together, share findings, and attend each other's conferences. Why? Physics is a science.
When cosmologists discovered dark matter, this immediately caught the attention of particle physicists, who are now embarked on a program to find out what kinds of particles make up dark matter.
When particle physicists discovered that neutrinos have mass, this caught the attention of cosmologists, who realized this means they had to rewrite their theories of stellar evolution.
If cosmologists were psychologists, of course this could never happen. After all, what do particle physicists know? The answer? They know science.
Experimental psychologists ignore, or disown, clinical psychologists, and the reverse, regarding them as frauds. Why? Psychology isn't a science. Were it a science, validated empirical theories would unite the field, as quantum theory and relativity unite physicists, and evolution and cell biology unite biologists and doctors.
Psychology is considerably broader than psychiatry, but really, you need to temper your frothing hate a bit. A year after a cutting edge change, and professionals haven't rearranged their lives around it? Welcome to the real world. Even in the fast-paced world of IT, new things are rarely put into production that fast.
But even in the rest of medicine, it takes a long time. There are heaps of doctors out there that are practising decades-old medicine. I remember seeing Patch Adams speak about 15 years ago - he mentioned that when he did his medical degree, there was a total of one hour spent on preventative medicine, and that the curriculum hadn't changed to date, despite the immense amounts of research and cultural shift around it.
Anyway, you'll find the same thing in plenty of fields - people doing practical science are usually a ways behind people doing theoretical science.
> ... people doing practical science are usually a ways behind people doing theoretical science.
Psychologist are doing neither practical nor theoretical science. Were this not so, if any useful science was coming out of psychological research or practice, it would long since have united the field behind theories that would forge a consensus about what the field means. This is true in physics, it's true in biology, it's true in geology, it's not true in psychology.
> You talk about quantifying claims and at the same time separate all psychologists from scientists.
Think about your argument. If I separate all psychologists from scientists, I'm not quantifying. If instead I say 50% of psychologists don't meet minimal scientific standards, that would be a quantification.
Also, surely you realize what I'm saying is now the majority view on this topic, yes? Even with the highest-ranking psychiatrist in the country:
Are you aware that psychology and psychiatry are not the same thing?
Are you aware that the practice of psychology and psychological research are likewise not the same thing and that "practicing" psychologists and "research" psychologists are two very different professions?
The primary claim levelled by the NIMH was that the DSM 5 failed to incorporate the mountain of psychological research that has been conducted in the last 20 years. This was done for a variety of reasons, none of which had anything to do with a lack of scientific research or evidence on the various conditions elucidated in the DSM (reasons like: "preserving continuity", "insurance concerns" and "ease of use"). The modern DSM is absolutely a problem, but it's not a problem because the science is crap. It's a problem, because the people in charge of the DSM (and yes there were a few psychologists there) didn't prioritize sound science.
> Are you aware that psychology and psychiatry are not the same thing?
Of course, but when you say this, you're acknowledging that they have no common ground. What if I talked about Dark Matter and discussed the work of cosmologists and particle physicists, both of whom are contributing to the research. Would you object that I was unfairly or ignorantly conflating two different fields? No, you couldn't do that, because physics is a science, and sciences are united by theory. What unites psychiatry and psychology, two fields only seemingly joined by a common ground in human psychology?
> The primary claim levelled by the NIMH was that the DSM 5 failed to incorporate the mountain of psychological research that has been conducted in the last 20 years.
It's true that there's a mountain of psychological research. It's also true that it's not scientific enough to influence clinical practice. Director Insel's complaint wasn't about what's missing from the DSM, but what is present.
Surely you don't think that clinical psychologists would ignore a clear scientific finding that would increase their effectiveness and their income? The reason this hasn't happened is because there are no such findings.
> ... and that "practicing" psychologists and "research" psychologists are two very different professions?
Yes, unlike scientists, all of whom study nature from different perspectives, and all of whom productively listen to each other. The reason that experimental psychologists, and clinical psychologists, ignore each other, is because there's no incentive to do otherwise -- there's no useful science coming out of experimental psychology, and there's no useful science coming out of clinical psychology.
Try to imagine what would happen if a clinical psychologist, or an experimental psychologist, discovered something that would lead to an explanation (a theory) and survive repeated empirical test, and force consensus between different observers. It would produce something not present in psychology today -- it would produce a central, defining corpus of theory that would guide both research and practice. But there is no such finding, no such research, about the mind, because the mind is not -- cannot be -- a source of empirical evidence or theories, what science requires.
> The modern DSM is absolutely a problem, but it's not a problem, because the science is crap.
Yes, that is the problem with the DSM, and you don't need to take my word for this -- read the NIMH's views on this topic:
" ... The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity."
People have differing levels of talent in different areas, and this does have significant effects on success and ability. There are "super-brilliant slackers," and there are very hard working failures. Talent, too, does not necessarily correspond with interest and enjoyment. None of this is fair, but life is not inherently fair.
The important thing here, more than practice, is figuring out what one is good at doing, and what one enjoys doing, and coming up with things that are in both sets.