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Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

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Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#291

Post by scubbo »

poszlem wrote: post #240
scubbo wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint - mindfully reviewing and examining your thoughts and speech is an effective way to improve clarity and to identify unexamined (and perhaps unfounded) assumptions.

Cool, as long as it's your thoughts and not mine. I have no problem with other people policing their own speech and thoughts. My problem starts when they start to enforce what they found on other people.

Do you recognize that there is a distinction between enforcement, and being told "using this particular form of speech is harmful to certain people - if you continue choosing to use it, you are choosing to present yourself as someone who values your own speech over someone else's comfort, and will be judged accordingly"? If so, then we're in broad agreement (though we may disagree about where the line between social judgement and enforcement lies)

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#292

Post by lofatdairy »

johannbok wrote: post #282
lofatdairy wrote: post #226

Honestly, I'm a bit disappointed by the level of discourse this post has generated. I'm also an outspoken skeptic of findings in the field of psychology, but the article is quite well formed and well argued. If anything, accepting the nitpicking from a lot of these comments would result in psychology being _less_ rigorous and precise. A lot of psychology's problems comes from how readily available it seems to be to e…

As a psychiatrist, I'm just going to tip my toe into this conversation: I have not read the entire list. I read a good chunk of it. Almost everything on it is -not- stuff I see among my colleagues, and appears to be how psych stuff is presented /in popular media/ rather than in the profession. Which is fine if one targets this for the science media/science communication types, but it seems very odd to apparently have…

Yeah I don't disagree that the article does have a nitpicky streak. However, since it's in the service of having a higher standard in publishing, I don't think it's useless, except in the sense that it dilutes the more useful recommendatios.

Speaking from my own experience, a lot of the statistical and clichéd methdological phrases also appear in some lower-quality biology papers I've seen, and it's mistakes I see grad students make and even submitters make. The fact that the authors can point to thousands of google scholar hits shows that the paper is addressing a real issue and was a worthwhile endeavor. If anything, this is what I feel more commenters should have criticized. Not that it appears in the paper, but that the state of the field is such that the familiarity with statistics (and I argue math, history, philosophy, etc) is so poor that such inaccurate language is so frequently deployed.

I can't speak to how this relates to practice, especially with regards to psychiatric practice. Quite frankly I was less concerned with that than the obsession with the sign/symptom distinction that's both commonplace and useful, and the weird attempts to preserve phrases like "steep learning curve" when what's being criticized is actually the lack of specificity the phrase encodes.

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#293

Post by jrm4 »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #237
bawolff wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't easily identify whether or not I'm neurodivergent, because I'm not sure what it means or what the opposite would look like. Does anybody know? The people who are claiming to be neruodivergent would say its quite obvious to themselves (FWIW, the general definition is roughly ADHD or Autism, both of which have more concrete definitions). I was assuming the statement was about other people verifying the veraci…

Even if I'm a brain in a vat, I'm a brain in a vat that thinks it's hungry. But I'm not a brain in a vat that thinks it's neurodivergent or not neurodivergent because it doesn't know what that would mean in the first place, and it's not sure anybody else (assuming other brains in other vats exist) does either.

Exactly. I'm thinking of other diseases and other conditions. Like "has covid" or "very likely does not have covid" are verifiable or falsifiable enough for the situation even if you occasionally get it wrong. Neurodivergent? Probably easy to find clear yeses, sure. But I'm guessing all of your clear yeses there have things that have other, clearer, names.

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#294

Post by thyrsus »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #224
wwtrv wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might still be preferable to coming up with theories explaining mechanisms we don't fully understand and then looking for data which might prove it. That might become especially problematic when scientists stake their entire careers on it. We might end up with situations similar the amyloid hypothesis which likely tuned out to be a dead end a huge waste time & resources.

> coming up with theories explaining mechanisms we don't fully understand and then looking for data which might prove it Also known as the scientific method.

Equally, if not more, important to the scientific method is gathering data that might disprove it.

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#295

Post by jakear »

avgcorrection wrote: post #231
NickM wrote: post #167

Glad to see "chemical imbalance" make the list. It is very common to see people use terms like "dopamine hit", "endorphin rush", "low serotonin", etc. in ways that don't make scientific sense. I assume people do it to sound knowledgeable or to make it sound like their ideas are backed by science, but neurotransmitters are vastly more complicated and subtle in their effects than is implied by these kinds of usages, an…

Using inappropriately technical jargon (especially “dopamine”) is one of my pet peeves (which I just get more of the older I get). Why, say, describe fond feelings or affection as “oxytocin”? Do you know anything about this neurotransmitter? Or are you just using it as a fancy synonym for love and affection? Is the vernacular English language—but I guess pop-neurotransmitters are vernacular now—too impoverished to ta…

> Every little mind-wandering and slip-up becomes the fault of the fetish that is “the ego”.

Ironically, you’ve here used “fetish” in a way that the article explicitly admonishes, opting instead for the vernacular definition. And I think that’s okay! Language is about communication, if when you say fetish I know what you mean, and when other people say dopamine I know what they mean, who cares what the diction police say?

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#296

Post by thyrsus »

vvpan wrote: post #168

For the sake of the Hacker News audience I wish "introvert" was its own category and not under "Personality Type". It is baseless pseudo-science but comes up in tech-related circles all too often.

As (43) states, introversion is on a scale (a matter of degree) rather than a type (i.e. not like char vs. float). That it is persistent in a probabilistic sense is well established.

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#297

Post by vorpalhex »

lofatdairy wrote: post #226

Honestly, I'm a bit disappointed by the level of discourse this post has generated. I'm also an outspoken skeptic of findings in the field of psychology, but the article is quite well formed and well argued. If anything, accepting the nitpicking from a lot of these comments would result in psychology being _less_ rigorous and precise. A lot of psychology's problems comes from how readily available it seems to be to e…

Accuracy vs speed.

Yes we can deep into the weeds on how to best estimate a task.. or we can ask "How many man-hours is this going to take roughly?" and you give a number and then WE DO THE THING.

The argument about "man-hours" is bikeshedding.

Language is to be heard and understood. It carries both it's technical meaning and it's subjective meaning. If you're arguing, as the article argues, that words that are subjective have to be removed then you are left without any language at all.

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#298

Post by xmddmx »

light_hue_1 wrote: post #91

> (19) No difference between groups. ... Authors are instead advised to write “no significant difference between groups” or “no significant correlation between variables.” This is terrible advice. To the public, and often even to experts, "significant" doesn't mean "statistically significant" it means "big". We need to abolish this use of "significant" not promote it. Way too many papers show "significant" (statistic…

You are correct - this is terrible advice.

The main issue is that the word "significance" is overloaded with two meanings in research & stats:

"Large and important" (e.g. "clinical significance", often given as an effect size, or some benefit/cost tradeoff)

"P value below alpha" (e.g "statistical significance", Probabilty of rejecting H0, which is roughly equivalent to "if the true effect size were zero, what's the chance I could see this effect size in my data given random fluctuactions [and a bunch of other assumptions]"

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#299

Post by xmddmx »

I think the aritcle is pretty good (I have a strong disiagreement with one of the 50 terms, but otherwise I think they did a good job).

I'm relatively new here at HN, but as a psychologist (who also dabbles in hacking) some of the reactions do support, sadly, the stereoytype that computer/engineer-types suffer anoagnosia (the lack of knowledge of what you do not know).

Some engineers do not understand that the world of human behavior is far more complex than the world of atoms, molecules, components, chips, software, etc.

Behavioral and social scientists are, you may be surprised to learn, aware of this fact, and actually lead in scientific investigation of the difficulty, specifically: dealing with constructs, and figure out how to define and measure them.

"Soft sciences" actually are much harder than "hard sciences" in many ways.

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#300

Post by xmddmx »

johannbok wrote: post #282
lofatdairy wrote: post #226

Honestly, I'm a bit disappointed by the level of discourse this post has generated. I'm also an outspoken skeptic of findings in the field of psychology, but the article is quite well formed and well argued. If anything, accepting the nitpicking from a lot of these comments would result in psychology being _less_ rigorous and precise. A lot of psychology's problems comes from how readily available it seems to be to e…

As a psychiatrist, I'm just going to tip my toe into this conversation: I have not read the entire list. I read a good chunk of it. Almost everything on it is -not- stuff I see among my colleagues, and appears to be how psych stuff is presented /in popular media/ rather than in the profession. Which is fine if one targets this for the science media/science communication types, but it seems very odd to apparently have…

"Psych PhDs generally don't do frontline stuff"

Ok, to be fair, I did roll my eyes at a few of their terms. However, you are mostly arguing out of scope/training.

Psychiatrists are not researchers, they are MDs.

They are generally pretty smart people, and I admire their work.

But MDs have next to zero formal training in research, methodology, or statistics, and even fewer have taken courses in the theory or philosophy of science or knowledge.

That's why MD/PhD programs exist, or MPh degrees, so the MDs can learn how to do research properly.

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