Brian Hughes (2018): Psychology in Crisis

 
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Mine arrived yesterday, did the test husband does on any new non-fiction book - open a few random pages and read a paragraph. Looks like it will be a really interesting read, and is refreshingly free of unexplained jargon. :)

I'm not reading it today as it's my 70th birthday :eek: so I'm watching catch up TV and drinking gin instead. ;) (Sorry @Brian Hughes)
 
ladycatlover said:
Mine arrived yesterday, did the test husband does on any new non-fiction book - open a few random pages and read a paragraph. Looks like it will be a really interesting read, and is refreshingly free of unexplained jargon. :)

I'm not reading it today as it's my 70th birthday :eek: so I'm watching catch up TV and drinking gin instead. ;) (Sorry @Brian Hughes)
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HAPPY BIRTHDAY !!! :emoji_birthday:
 
Just started reading your book @Brian Hughes :). Only just read the first few pages, but already gained some good insights - education is so very much about gaining new insights.

I am an engineer not a scientist, so at one level the notion of independent replication is not new to me. But I had not properly appreciated what a core tenet it is of human scientific endeavour until reading your introductory words. Without independent replication, science would be just another self-fulfilling belief system; and indeed science that fails to achieve independent replication amounts to little more than just that.

I have this notion of "putting pegs in the ground", which to me at least is applicable here. When a scientific study is the first of its kind and breaks new ground, it is I think akin to putting up a tent in stormy weather, and that first trial effectively puts that first peg in the ground. The tent is still at major risk of blowing away, but independent verifications are akin to putting further pegs in the ground, progressively anchoring the tent ever more firmly. If they fail to do so then the tent will be cast to the winds, and rightly so.

If the 'replications' are not independent, then to me this is like putting more pegs into the same spot in the ground, just holding the same guy rope, so in fact making no real difference to the proper anchoring down of the tent, though it may hang around longer than it should, flapping around wildly.

You have a great way of getting things across, which is invaluable, not just to me but to our cause. I really do hope your book becomes a standard text for students.
 
Barry said:
I have this notion of "putting pegs in the ground", which to me at least is applicable here. When a scientific study is the first of its kind and breaks new ground, it is I think akin to putting up a tent in stormy weather, and that first trial effectively puts that first peg in the ground. The tent is still at major risk of blowing away, but independent verifications are akin to putting further pegs in the ground, progressively anchoring the tent ever more firmly. If they fail to do so then the tent will be cast to the winds, and rightly so.

If the 'replications' are not independent, then to me this is like putting more pegs into the same spot in the ground, just holding the same guy rope, so in fact making no real difference to the proper anchoring down of the tent, though it may hang around longer than it should, flapping around wildly.
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Yes. Of course there is more to it as far as philosophy of science is concerned (there was a discussion about pan-critical rationalism on PR years ago). It's not just about the number of pegs, but how loose those pegs are. ;)
 
Philipp said:
I generally can't read entire books most of the time.
I wonder if an audio version of something like this is economically viable... I imagine there must be more people who have a problem like the two of us, but Idk how many copies a book like this one can expect to sell.
I do hope it's a shitton, though.
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There are text-to-speech apps or programs. I've tried the following: copy in kindle, click "Send to" (or "share") and choose the app. The app will read and show the text you copied. It seems you can't do this with the entire eBook at one go, just page for page. But it works.
 
The book and it's criticism of PACE is now in Wikipedia:
it's on a talk page (This talk page is automatically archived by MiszaBot I. Threads with no replies in 3 weeks may be automatically moved.)

"
New book criticizes the PACE trial
You might be interested to learn that academic psychologist Professor Brian Hughes has just published a book "Psychology in Crisis" (ie, a tertiary source) about the way flawed research prospers so freely in modern psychology. This book contains a whole chapter on the PACE trial of CBT and GET as an example of alarmingly bad research, and thus may be relevant for this CFS article, which currently has large sections on CBT and GET."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Chronic_fatigue_syndrome

nice to see a link to MEpedia......how long it will be there is another matter.
 
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