Just finished listening to the first Meehl lecture a few days ago and it's still sticking with me. This lecture series is quite a treasure trove! I'm interested in the political economy of ideas in psychology and the human sciences more broadly, and I suspect there's a lot of "buried" wisdom in here.
Lots of gems about knowledge creation and good explanations. So many references to follow up on!
His point about Freud and Skinner as examples of people perhaps best suited to just do their thing and contribute that way rather than consistently engaging with criticism of their work is definitely interesting too. My guess would be that this is a sort of 'shadow truth', though, and not something to encourage even though for some thinkers it might be the case. Those people will probably get to that point naturally, and for the rest of us we can probably contribute more by engaging with criticism directly. But maybe this approach would be a useful strategy at the margin more broadly, and I'm just overrating the benefits of engaging with criticisms from where I'm standing right now.
Really looking forward to hearing your thoughts on the lectures. Will them check them out as I go along.
I think there's definitely a balance to be struck with respect to criticism. Unfortunately, people can be dogmatically committed to the wrong path. But it's often impossible to know if a little more persistence can pay off.
Looking forward to your perspectives as you proceed through the lectures. I'll be happy to engage with your criticism in the comments. :)
I haven’t listened to the lectures but my standard philosophy of psychology and statistics question is whatever reason do you have to assume that human behavior can be understood using ideas from stationary processes. The best modeling approach so far in terms of verisimilitude is complex adaptive systems (CAS) which are definitely NOT stationary processes. It has been shown that a reductionist approach to CAS is guaranteed to fail. And yet, people in the social sciences cling to their NHST like little frightened children clinging to their teddy bears to protect them from the bogeyman of mysterious monsters(nonstationarity) BOO!
Amazing to see Meehl get more attention! Discovered him recently myself, and wrote a bit about him and these exact lectures at the end of a recent post (forgive the shameless plug, but may be of some interest to your readers :p) : https://vmasrani.github.io/blog/2023/predicting-human-behaviour/#the-oedipus-effect-predicting-changes-the-predicted
Shameless plugs allowed!
One blog post about it, and I'm already excited for the all the blog posts ahead.
Just finished listening to the first Meehl lecture a few days ago and it's still sticking with me. This lecture series is quite a treasure trove! I'm interested in the political economy of ideas in psychology and the human sciences more broadly, and I suspect there's a lot of "buried" wisdom in here.
Lots of gems about knowledge creation and good explanations. So many references to follow up on!
His point about Freud and Skinner as examples of people perhaps best suited to just do their thing and contribute that way rather than consistently engaging with criticism of their work is definitely interesting too. My guess would be that this is a sort of 'shadow truth', though, and not something to encourage even though for some thinkers it might be the case. Those people will probably get to that point naturally, and for the rest of us we can probably contribute more by engaging with criticism directly. But maybe this approach would be a useful strategy at the margin more broadly, and I'm just overrating the benefits of engaging with criticisms from where I'm standing right now.
Really looking forward to hearing your thoughts on the lectures. Will them check them out as I go along.
Thanks!
I think there's definitely a balance to be struck with respect to criticism. Unfortunately, people can be dogmatically committed to the wrong path. But it's often impossible to know if a little more persistence can pay off.
Looking forward to your perspectives as you proceed through the lectures. I'll be happy to engage with your criticism in the comments. :)
I haven’t listened to the lectures but my standard philosophy of psychology and statistics question is whatever reason do you have to assume that human behavior can be understood using ideas from stationary processes. The best modeling approach so far in terms of verisimilitude is complex adaptive systems (CAS) which are definitely NOT stationary processes. It has been shown that a reductionist approach to CAS is guaranteed to fail. And yet, people in the social sciences cling to their NHST like little frightened children clinging to their teddy bears to protect them from the bogeyman of mysterious monsters(nonstationarity) BOO!