Note

Psychologists should blog phenomenology instead

Should we read, discuss, and cite interesting academic psychology papers? Should we even find them interesting? I think their value is other than supposed.

Most experimental psychology papers are either outright false, or don't imply what they seem to. When true, they usually validate a very narrow phenomenon, yet the authors strongly suggest broad implications for a whole domain of human activity (without—if they are honest—actually saying so).

This does not, on the face of it, seem a promising methodology for a large, influential, significant, and fascinating academic field.

Yet I find I often want to discuss and cite such papers. Why? Because their broad, not-quite-stated claims seem valid and important. Those are probably true in some sense, even if not at all the sense the experiment supposedly tested.

It seems that the actual method of academic psychologists goes:

1. Notice some interesting thing that people do which hasn't been commented on before.

2. Devise and run an "experiment" that sort of sounds like the thing that's actually interesting, although it's only vaguely analogous.

3. Futz around until your "hypothesis" is "supported" (p < 0.05).

4. Publish a pseudo-scientific paper with two paragraphs at the end explaining the interesting thing.

Other psychologists read it and find the original observation interesting, and don't bother to read the experimental sections, because (at some level) they know that's a meaningless ritual required by academic institutions.

If you are lucky, and/or good at promoting your work, non-academics skim the paper and find your interesting observation interesting and write about it for a wider audience.

I do that, for example! I don't think I'm wrong to do that, even though I usually don't read the experimental section carefully (because I have realized those are mostly meaningless rituals).

Why is the meaningless ritual there? And isn't there a way to drop the requirement, since it's a waste of everyone's time?

The ritual is required for status and funding. You can get both for Science™️. You can't get it for phenomenology, although that's the valuable part of the job. So you have to pretend to do Science™️, and everyone in the field tacitly agrees to go along with the pretense.

In a sane world, academic psychologists would notice something interesting people do and would write a blog post about it and skip the ritual. You aren't allowed to do that because just anyone can write a blog post about noticing something interesting people do.

Scott Alexander (

), for example. He makes hundreds of thousands of dollars per year from noticing interesting things people do and writing substack posts about them. He can't put "Professor" in front of his name, but prominent academics take him way more seriously than they take most other academics.

And then there's

(PhD in psychology, Harvard, 2021). He quit academia to write his substack about interesting things people do, and now it provides a full-time income (experimental-history.co…. You can tell he's having way more fun that way, with complete freedom to think and write about whatever he wants, and no academic committee meetings.

Maybe all academic psychologists should quit and write paid substacks instead?

Or maybe academic psychology should find a way to drop the pretend Science™️ and let professors write fun, interesting blogs instead of boring, mostly-untrue journal articles?