Emotion Science Keeps Getting More Complicated. Can AI Keep Up?
Psychology needs to start moving away from trying to categorize things into these arbitrary fuzzy human buckets (&quot;emotions&quot;) and toward being able to predict things.  If someone is diagnosed with &quot;X&quot;, the most pressing question is now: how is this diagnosis useful to that person or society?  Is the person trying to change from the state they are in to a different state?  If so, does knowing they are &quot;X&quot; or feeling &quot;Y&quot; help with this goal?  I would argue that for the past few centuries, no, this process hasn&#x27;t helped very much.<p>For instance, consider the DSM description of borderline personality disorder:<p>&quot;BPD is a pervasive pattern of instability in interpersonal relationships, self-image, and emotion, as well as marked impulsivity beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:<p>- Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment<p>- A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by extremes between idealization and devaluation (also known as &quot;splitting&quot;)<p>- Chronic feelings of emptiness<p>- [...]&quot;<p>You get the point.  You have to meet <i>five or more</i> of the listed criteria.  Not four or more.  Not six or more.  But five or more.  There&#x27;s a lot of ad hoc, informally specified, subjective criteria that probably have no reproducibility if ten different psychologists were all told to independently specify which of the above criteria a given patient satisfies.  See the recently published update on the reproducibility crisis: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.the-scientist.com&#x2F;news-opinion&#x2F;half-the-time--psychology-results-not-reproducible--study-65117" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.the-scientist.com&#x2F;news-opinion&#x2F;half-the-time--ps...</a>.<p>In general, psychology doesn&#x27;t seem to be based on many of the lessons acquired in the physical sciences over a very long period of time, and there doesn&#x27;t seem to be much math involved.  Open a textbook on quantum field theory and open a textbook on psychology, and notice the main difference between the two.  Data on people is scarce, often biased, improperly sampled, and study results are frequently cherry-picked to promote some sort of predetermined narrative about how the human mind works.  The human brain is one of the most complex objects in the known universe, and pretending that we have a modicum of understanding about this object is the type of overconfidence and hubris that will lead to centuries of inadequate mental help for people that need it.<p>What&#x27;s the solution?  Start collecting data and start trying to <i>quantitatively</i> predict things.  I have no doubt that machine learning will fail to predict human behavior, but I also have no doubt that it will fail much less drastically than the current approach.  Outcomes need to be strictly measured.  In this case, I don&#x27;t think we are as interested in &quot;explanatory&quot; science as we are &quot;predictive&quot; science; i.e., we don&#x27;t care as much about <i>why</i> the blackbox model works as long as it improves people&#x27;s lives.  Consider for instance the current system of categorizing personalities: the &quot;Big Five&quot; system (OCEAN).  Why is this still a thing?  Any sort of primitive GBDT would almost certainly perform better than this, so it&#x27;s a mystery to me why these crude systems are still being used in the mental health industry in 2018.