[FRIAM] Book publishing advice needed

[∄ uǝlƃ]

Hm. In these cases, where Firestein talks about quantum mechanics as an exemplar of how we navigate ignorance and my cancer survivor friend as a defense mechanism for avoiding nihilism or depression or whatnot, there is no "I wish I were a physicist". Firestein is a credentialed neuroscientist and my friend is a graphic artist. Neither seem to feel inadequate in their disciplines or wish their disciplines were more like physics. So, I really doubt it's envy. What it sounds more like is captured well by "There are more things in heaven and earth ...". Both Firestein and my friend are using physics to lend some credibility by proxy to their rhetoric. I just can't warp my way to thinking it's physics envy.

Even in this tangent, the clinicians I've worked with don't disregard experimentalists or vice versa. It's simply a practical acceptance. Where large N experiments can be run, GREAT! Where they can't, we use expert experience and heuristics. [†] In fact, gathering "raw", private, data from patients is a common practice and the toolkits used to translate between contexts is diverse. (We had a meeting about just such a thing yesterday.)

So, I remain unconvinced. It's not physics envy. It's appeal to authority.


[†] Now, if you instead argued that by "physics envy", you simply mean "we'd like to have more data, but we don't YET", then *maybe*. But why call that "physics envy"? That would be a misleading moniker for having to work with less data than you'd otherwise prefer.

On 7/7/20 11:53 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> Clinicians (therapists, counselors, psychiatrists, etc) use data that is based on private, highly sensitive personal information, it's very difficult and often impossible to apply the methods of experimental psychologists to that data.  The clinicians do write papers but by the experimenters standards the sample sizes are so tiny as to merit dismissal of the results.  
> 
> So, imagine you are a clinician.  Every case you have ever seen of a person with paranoid delusions involves significant grandiosity.  (Why would the CIA be focusing on you, Marvin) Your colleagues have observed the same with few exceptions.  Some clinician writes an article which mentions this.  Experimental psychologists read it and say you need to do a double blind study to assert that.  You realize that's impossible so you learn to disregard experimentalists just as they disregard you.  You both think, "I wish I were a physicist but I hated math".


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☣ uǝlƃ