In what areas are the massive fortunes of the future going to be made?

Yes, and the possibility of falsification is required for science. It's not a convenient option.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory

Quote: "The strength of a scientific theory is related to the diversity of phenomena it can explain, which is measured by its ability to make falsifiable predictions with respect to those phenomena."

No falsifiability, no scientific theories. No scientific theories, no science.

> What a mature scientist does is say, "OK, let's accept the limits of our field and do the best we can".

Yes, in science. Psychology is not a science. You do grasp, don't you, that there is a lower threshold below which it's misleading to call something science? This is why the director of the NIMH recently (and reluctantly) decided to drop support for the DSM.

It hasn't occurred to psychiatrists and psychologists yet, but when the NIMH dropped the DSM, it dropped them too. This fact may require 30 more years to sink in, in much the same way that the changing status of astrology did in Galileo's time. As serious as astrologers sometimes are, astronomy just works better.

These things take time.

> I expect that psychologists and psychiatrists will change their theories to fit the evidence.

1. Psychologists don't have theories, they have hypotheses. A scientific theory must be falsifiable.

2. I expect more fiascoes like Recovered Memory Therapy, in which science and evidence were held in contempt. So do many others.

According to Popper's definition. I don't recall him being appointed the universal lawmaker for science. I mostly recall that he created a definition and then insisted, as you do, that everyone accept it wholesale and hurl into the outer darkness anything that didn't fit his square hole.

You're also fond of trying to create false dichotomy between Science, immaculately conceived, ever perfect, and the process of systematically searching for truth to the limits of our ability to observe reality and compound evidence pro and contra which inevitably varies according to subject matter. For example, you pin your hopes to neuroimaging, apparently unaware that subject variability means that eventually that too will rely on (gasp!) large sample studies to produce (oh noes!) statistical results.

I presume that you hope by saying "it's not a science" over and over that people will instead decide that it is utter quackery, astrology, akin to crystal healing and chakra-cleansing. Because you never address, or even acknowledge, the median between strong sciences with experimentally-friendly linear problem domains and utter falsehood.

Your other favourite debating tactic is to select particular very serious failures, reintroduce them over and over, and then to implicitly generalise them to the entire field for all time. By this standard Galen condemns modern medicine and Ptolemy makes physics a joke. You talk about science, but you refuse to entertain the view that psychology and psychiatry change when the evidence becomes sufficiently resolved. You give only one test for what is a science and ignore all the others.

I don't know why you have singled out psychology and psychiatry for this treatment.

> According to Popper's definition.

Karl Popper didn't invent falsifiability, he discovered it. But I see you have a very common belief that falsifiability is optional, and that things can be called science that don't have this essential property. So let's do a thought experiment in which falsifiable theories aren't required -- let's see where this takes us.

Let's say I'm a doctor and I've created a revolutionary cure for the common cold. My cure is to shake a dried gourd over the cold sufferer until he gets better. The cure might take a week, but it always works. My method is repeatable and perfectly reliable, and I've published my cure in a refereed scientific journal (there are now any number of phony refereed scientific journals). And, because (in this thought experiment) science can get along without defining theories, I'm under no obligation to try to explain my cure, or consider alternative explanations for my breakthrough — I only have to describe it, just like a psychologist.

Because I've cured the common cold, and because I've met all the requirements that psychology recognizes for science, I deserve a Nobel Prize. Yes or no?

Ask yourself what's wrong with this picture, and notice that the same thing is wrong with psychology — all description, no explanation, no established principles on which different psychologists agree, no effort to build consensus, and no unifying theories.

> You give only one test for what is a science and ignore all the others.

There is only one test. It's a matter of common sense, philosophy, and law. The definition I gave, and provided references for, is written into the law, for a number of reasons including people's desire to keep religion out of public school classrooms. The Discovery Institute, that hotbed of Creationism, make the same argument you're making -- science isn't strictly defined, it's all a matter of opinion, and Evolution is just a silly idea cooked up by some eggheads.

> I don't know why you have singled out psychology and psychiatry for this treatment.

Easily explained. Sociologists and astrologers aren't scientific, but they don't have clinics and they don't mislead parents and children, invent imaginary illnesses for them to have. Physicists are scientists, but they don't have clinics and they don't presume to treat your ills. Doctors have clinics, but they're reasonably scientific, and when they're not, they can be sued within an inch of their lives, sometimes even thrown in jail.

Psychiatrists and psychologists are in a class by themselves -- they masquerade as scientists, some ill-educated people think they're scientists, psychiatrists can dispense rather dangerous drugs, but neither they nor psychologists are remotely scientific. And best of all, they don't have to accept adult responsibilities.

Rebecca Riley was diagnosed with bipolar syndrome and ADHD at the age of two, with the encouragement of her parents, who were already making $30,000 per year from Social Security payments for their other children, diagnosed earlier with bogus mental illnesses and already a walking gold mine. But Rebecca was their finest moment, and that of her psychiatrist. Rebecca died at age four from the drugs her parents and psychiatrist encouraged her to take.

Her parents were convicted of murder. Her psychiatrist is still practicing. Sort it out for yourself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Riley

Psychology isn't melting down because of what's present, it's melting down because of what's absent -- reliable, unifying, testable, falsifiable principles. Each scientific field is defined by those principles that stand the test of time and evidence. Psychology doesn't have any of those. It's a movable feast that can't stop moving.

> And you're still overgeneralising bad cases onto a whole field.

No, actually, Thomas Insel, director of the NIMH, is doing that. His predecessor at the NIMH, Steve Hyman, is doing that. Allen Frances, editor of DSM-IV, is doing that. If what I say relied on strawman arguments, or if I were the only person saying them, I'm sure these very intelligent people, these leaders in the field, would refuse to say the same things and take the actions they've taken.

It's not every day that you see a field collapsing from the top down.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/05/the-s...

Quote: "The reification of the D.S.M. might not have been more than a philosophical problem, were it not for the fact that, at least in Hyman and Insel’s view, it was beginning to hamstring research. And, indeed, the D.S.M. has frustrated scientists, who note that the most common symptoms of mental disorder—sadness and worry, for instance, or delusions and hallucinations—appear as criteria for many different diagnoses; that many patients can be diagnosed with more than one disorder; and that the few solid findings about mental illness that have emerged from genetic and neuroscience studies indicate that the D.S.M’s categories simply don’t correspond to biological reality."

Wow. Look at all those straw men.