

Why Science Requires Theories - saulrh
http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2011/11/theory-and-why-its-time-psychology-got.html

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nasmorn
Economics has the exact opposite issue. We have this very strong theory about
optimizing homogenous agents that create a pareto efficient outcome. Any
empirical fact that doesn't fit (which happen to be almost all of them) is
simply thrown out. Considering this it is quite logical why the main policy
recommendation for the last 30 years was deregulate everything, remove all
government intervention. The hope was to be finally able to observe some facts
that could actually be reasoned about with the existing theories.

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Drakeman
Education and its trying-to-be-legitimate partner Educational Psychology is
even worse. It is essentially a smal set of theories based on very small
sample quantitative and sketchy qualitative research. There's an added bonus
of philosophical and political policy initiatives that go against accepted
theory "just cause."

~~~
edtechdev
Yeah there's a 'hard science' crowd among educational (psychology)
researchers, that only accepts quantitative, experimental, randomized studies,
but even that form of research has serious flaws when applied to education.
They ignore biases that can affect results (most often experimenter expectancy
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer-expectancy_effect> ), and they ignore
ecological validity (many findings 'from the lab' end up not working at all,
being weakened or even reversed when tested in a classroom). On top of all
this, they never open source their software (if any), and they don't share the
data.

As one person put it, these studies, usually done with college student
volunteers as participants, "include participants who have no specific
interest in learning the domain involved and who are also given a very short
study time" ([http://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/cognitive-load-
the...](http://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/cognitive-load-theory-
failure/))

Most research is driven by the constraints of tenure-track jobs. Theory
doesn't get you tenure. Journal articles with empirical p values < .05 do,
regardless of whether they are never replicated, never applied to the field,
and never influence changes in practice.

Doing theory takes more time and more space (word wise) than a typical journal
affords - it's more compatible with books than journal articles, and most
journals don't publish theoretical articles. Books are often not counted for
tenure, actually: [http://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2010/05/03/would-dewey-
piaget...](http://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2010/05/03/would-dewey-piaget-
montessori-friere-get-published-today/)

On top of all this, educational research is barely funded at all. Engineering
and medical organizations usually spend 5-15 percent on research &
development. In education it is more like 0.01 percent - the majority of which
is spent on research, not development.
[http://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2007/05/18/the-state-of-
educa...](http://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2007/05/18/the-state-of-educational-
research-development/) [http://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/need-more-d-
in-edu...](http://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/need-more-d-in-education-
r-and-d/)

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neutronicus
It's an interesting argument, but (coming from a physics perspective) I don't
know if psychology should let Physics Envy drive it away from being about
exploring phenomenology.

It seems to me like any "theory" that psychologists come up with is going to
be necessarily less ironclad than what physicists come up with - more likely
to be a guideline (a mnemonic, almost) for understanding how phenomena relate
to one another. I sort of think their time is more profitably spent in just
obtaining encyclopedic knowledge of phenomena.

This could all just be my obsession with first principles talking, though.

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yummyfajitas
I've observed this same issue among medical doctors. They see little coherent
theory of the world, just a slew of results validated by clinical trials.
Until you have a clinical trial to prove it, a fact falls squarely in the
"unknown" category.

I once argued with a doctor about the possibility of cell phone and wifi
radiation causing cancer. She couldn't even conceive of the argument I was
making: infants are made of organic molecules at room temperature and we know
from a large number of experiments how such molecules react to radiation. "But
how do you know infants aren't more susceptible?"

~~~
16BitTons
For a long time, I thought of medical doctors as scientists. Then one day I
realized they were technicians. I still have an enormous respect for them, but
it did change my expectations.

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mathattack
Very good points. This is also why traditional economists (while having their
own reasons to struggle with being called scientists, at least have theories)
complain about behavioral economists. They say, "You point out exceptions to
our theories, but what's your counter-theory?" In general the behavioralists
are content to point out that the emperor has no clothes.

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Herring
It's not anybody's fault that there's no theory. It's just too hard to
"uncover what's actually going on". Maybe wait 200 years when we have the
tools (sensors, processing power, etc) to make sense of things.

