đź“ť New paradigm for psychology just dropped (Adam Mastroianni). I queued up the The Mind in the Wheel by Slime Mold Time Mold, but haven't read it yet. Adam's point is that a paradigm has to explain which things do what and what rules they follow.
So let’s get clear: a paradigm is made out of units and rules. It says, “the part of the world I’m studying is made up of these entities, which can do these activities.”
He lays out three different kinds of research:
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Naive research: run experiments without knowing anything about the units and rules.
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Impressionistic research: make up words and study them.
The problem with this approach is that it gets you tangled up in things that don’t actually exist. What is “zest for life”? It is literally “how you respond to the Zest for Life Scale”. And what does the Zest for Life Scale measure? It measures...zest for life.
- Actual science research (my name): doing experiments where you can actually learn about the units and rules.
We’re not doing impressionistic research here, so we can’t just create control systems by fiat, the way you can create “zest for life” by creating a Zest for Life Scale. Instead, discovering the drives requires a new set of methodologies. You might start by noticing that people seem inexplicably driven to do some things (like play Candy Crush) or inexplicably not driven to do other things (like drink lemon juice when they’re suffering from scurvy, even though it would save their life). This could give you an inkling of what kind of drives exist. Then you could try to isolate one of those drives through methods like:
Prevention: If you stop someone from playing Candy Crush, what do they do instead?
Knockout: If you turn off the elements of Candy Crush one at a time—make it black and white, eliminate the scoring system, etc.—at what point do they no longer want to play?
Behavioral exhaustion (knockout in reverse): If you give people one component of Candy Crush at a time—maybe, categorizing things, earning points, seeing lots of colors, etc.—and let them do that as much as they want, do they still want to play Candy Crush afterward?
Adam also covers why neuroscience is the wrong level of abstraction for learning the things we need to learn.