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."
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.