Myth: Psychology isn't a Science, and Biology is Too Messy To Be A Fundamental Science Like Physics

This post is going to be particularly relevant to those considering to pursue a research career in the biosciences or psychology, or maybe even the mathematical sciences especially as applied to the biosciences. But it's also fun so you don't need to fall into any of the groups it's intended for. Skippable post and one of the less important posts for anyone who doesn't fall into any one of the above categories.

So this was my situation: But first a brief recap: I'm interested in their biological basis as well as developing interventions using tools and techniques from multiple disciplines to cure mental disorders especially those related to higher-order cognitive processes, cognitive deficits, intelligence and altered states of consciousness.

I also wish to advance the field of psychiatry and psychology by developing more scientific and objective measures to detect, diagnose mental disorders as well as pin down phenomena such as intelligence, creativity and emotions.

I wish to understand the origin of thoughts and intuitions, how they lead to irrational decisions and behaviour, as well as topics currently investigated by positive psychology such as self-actualization, happiness, meaning, values, desires, abilities and interests.

I am interested in topics like prejudices, perception and belief formation, and other topics that come under social psychology. I'm also interested in understanding intelligence not just in humans but also non-human animals and machines like Artificial Intelligence systems.

I had decided that I want to study Neuroscience or Psychology at the undergraduate level, but then someone told me that biology and psychology require mathematical tools to make them more rigorous, objective and exact, and at the present moment on their own they're too messy,

They say that I won't get anywhere by training myself in the biosciences or psychology, as they don't have the level of rigor and generalized principles at present like physics has, but that by applying the tools of physics and mathematics, they could be developed in a more general form and enable us to extract principles that are universally true.

I also talked to some other graduate students who then told me that it might be better to study a bioscience at the undergraduate level because 1) credentials are more valued in the bioscience than in the tech sector, where it's more about your skills and online courses are acceptable ways to demonstrate your interest,

2) Biosciences involve lots of theory and lab work that you could only learn under the guidance of professors and mentors,

3) It's easier to pick up the relevant mathematical and programming skills on the side than doing it the other way around because biosciences involves a lot of theory that you'd have to cover anyway if you wish to conduct research in it later in your career, and

4) If you study a mathematical science or mathematics at the undergrad level, you'd be required to study a lot of topics irrelevant to the techniques that are used to study the brain and the biosciences more broadly, but you can easily pick up the relevant topics on the side and

5) It'd be easier, more interesting and more intuitive when you learn those mathematical and programming topics by applying it to the neuroscience or bioscience projects you're interested in than if you just learn the theory.

I had no idea what to make of this conflicting advice. I find neuroscience and psychology more interesting, but I am open to the idea of studying a mathematical science if that would be more helpful for me in the future. But I was not sure how to reconcile both the sides and if training in neuroscience and psychology is really that useless, and which one is easier to pick up on it’s own and which one is a better major considering my interests.

One reply I got that I still think is very reasonable is- "If you want to study neuroscience at the graduate level, then in undergrad you should probably major in... neuroscience. You're overthinking it."

Haha. Overthinking and overanalyzing as usual, you'd understand if you have read other blog posts of mine. Can't be satisfied till I am able to figure out the most rational decision by applying all my thinking tools to all the factors and evaluation all the alternatives, and then getting stuck in analysis-paralysis due to perfectionism. Anyway.

I got quite a few helpful and insightful responses, some from professors working in the same field, but I won't post them here or go through them individually. I'll just summarize the solution to the problem now in my own words from all the advice I have received till now.

Study whatever interests you and whatever you are good at, and ensure you choose a career that gives you financial security and stability, so you don’t need to worry about sustenance. You can study and learn other stuff you haven’t studied at the undergraduate level later on. You could always expand your knowledge and skillset and collaborate with experts on other areas who have more ability and interest than you in those domains, and you can just take their help when you need techniques and methods from those disciplines.

Biology and Psychology are new fields but it is very possible to rigorously and objectively develop them with mathematical tools, and extract from them abstract general principles that are universally true. It’s just harder to do in biology because biological systems are constantly evolving and changing, and there are a lot of individual differences, but it is very possible, and it’s being done, to develop them using objective reliable accurate scientific tools and capture the changes and individual differences in a structured manner using the scientific method and mathematical tools.

For Psychology, it’s true that most of the stuff is too subjective and unscientific, but that’s because it’s a very new field just like cognitive neuroscience, and slowly developing towards being more reliable and accurate; it’s too early to dismiss it and say it’s not a legit science. There are people working in fields such as psychophysics and computational psychiatry who are trying to make it more objective, and it’s not unknown the psychiatry, unlike other fields of medicine, can not accurately detect, diagnose and treat mental disorders and illnesses.

Once again, the aim isn’t to do away with subjective tests and questionnaires, because they seem to work just fine in other fields of medicine, but the important difference is that other fields have objective measures to accurately test conditions like heart rate and blood pressure. Psychiatry doesn’t, but we are starting to uncover the biological basis of mental disorders using quantitative and computational techniques, and it’s working great. So subjective would stay even when we develop objective measures, and that’s important to understand so we don’t completely mistrust and disregard subjective psychological tests, but instead try to supplement them with objective measures.

Hopefully we could develop psychiatry like other fields of medicine within the coming decades, else I’ll just have to do it myself. I’m just trying to see whether or not other humans can do it without my help, but I’d be glad to use a fraction of my ability to uncover the nature of reality and neural basis of consciousness to eradicate all unnecessary suffering at once.

It's probably not a good idea to study something that's not currently relevant to the field you are primarily interested in, because you can't be sure if it'll be relevant to your interests in the future, and by the same logic you would have to learn everything that could in future be applied to your interests, which would be a lot of information for a single person to acquire and gain any sort of proficiency in.

I think that's why science is a joint collaborative effort, and people do what they are interested in and are good at, and tackle complex problems in teams. So I'm also planning to do just that- study what I think I'm good at and what I enjoy learning, because this way I'll be able to do my best on whatever problem I'm trying to solve that's related to my domain, and get help from others who are good at and interested in what they are doing. I can always pick up the other topics along the way or later on, collaborate with others or take help from the experts for any projects if required.

I'll still try to learn the basics of all the fields that might be relevant in the future for me and are absolutely essential to be a good researchers or even just to develop my logical and critical thinking skills, topics including mathematics and programming, but they won't be my primary focus if I think that my aptitude and interest lies in another domain in which I can excel more easily and also study something I'm more passionate about.

This could not necessarily only be something that's irrelevant to my goals, because it would be required for anyone who wishes to do something novel and innovative to go out of their comfort zone and learn topics that have been neglected by the contemporary researchers who still have unsolved problems in their field, and keep up to date with breakthroughs that might be relevant to my interests, and do everything in my control to maximize the probability of me solving the problems I wish to solve, and plan accordingly.

To summarize, my current best solution is to not study the topics are are currently irrelevant to mathematics and learn the more important topics and later on as and when the need to extend my toolkit or knowledge to other fields, to solve some problem that requires some topic of mathematics that's not currently used for instance, then I could just learn the topics or acquire the skills at a later stage when they're required instead of learning everything at once without knowing how it would be important to my goals and research interests.

Of course this is the current solution. I'm still open to new ideas and open to changing my mind in light of new evidence if anyone is able to present convincing logical arguments backed up by empirical evidence to support their claims. But until then this is what I'm going to stick with, because it sounds like the best solution to me till now.

I hope this post helped anyone planning for a research career to make more informed decisions, or even someone who's not planning to do that to come up with some sort of general decision-making tools or principles to help them in their life, and if not that then even just reading it for the sake of it because it was so fun even though very confusing and the stakes are high because it concerns my career. Still fun because I got to learn a few new things and topics I wouldn't have encountered otherwise, or so soon.

Please let me know if you have any comments. Feel free to connect.

edit: I thought a bit more about this, or more like by subconscious brain did before it gave me more clarity on this topic. In brief, I intend to just learn enough mathematics and programming that's absolutely necessary and the bare minimum to be a researcher who intends to make some novel breakthroughs and come up with some innovative interventions, but I won't push myself too much. I have realized that it's overall better to harness my strengths and work on getting great and the top percentile in something that I find enjoyable (and I also happen to be good at, or rather I'm good at because I find it enjoyable and hence more fun to practice so it comes more intuitively, as I'm inclined to find it interesting,) rather than pushing myself too much in domains that I lack in.

So it's not that I won't improve in areas that I'm less proficient in, I definitely will, but my primary focus would be on establishing my expertise in domains that I have more fun working on and that I'm at least above-average at, based on my experiences and perception of my own abilities and self-awareness of my internal subjective states while doing such activities (though I do have some really interesting ideas to make it more objective using some tech and AI tools, might create a post in the near future about this.)

And I would seek help or collaborate with researchers who are good at and enjoy doing what they do, and it makes sense because science is a join collaborative endeavour, and so is the modern society (as Adam Smith describes in his classic Wealth of the Nations) and it also seems to be the most rational thing for me to do, considering my inclinations or proclivities, so I shall do exactly that. It's the point of the explore-exploit trade-off where I must stop and decide, and rationalize based on my intuitive preferences and intuitive subconscious desires a bit- take a leap of faith, if you will- to avoid analysis paralysis. (reference to my post 'Analysis Paralysis')