New paradigm for psychology just dropped

Summary

I’ve complained a lot about the state of psychology, but eventually it’s time to stop whining and start building. That time is now.My mad scientist friends who go by the name Slime Mold Time Mold (yes, really) have just published a book that lays out a new foundation for the science of the mind. It’s called The Mind in the Wheel, and it’s the most provocative thing I’ve read about psychology since I became a psychologist myself—this is probably the first time I’ve felt surprised by something in the field since 2016. It’s maybe right, it’s probably wrong, but there’s something here, something important, and anybody with a mind ought to take these ideas for a spin. I realize some people are skittish about reading books from pseudonymous strangers on the internet—isn’t that what your mom warned you not to do?—but baby, that’s what I’m here for! So let’s go—Lots of people agree that psychology is stuck because it doesn’t have a paradigm, but that’s where the discussion ends. We all pat our pockets and go, “paradigm, paradigm...uh...hmm, I seem to have left mine at home, do you have one?”Our minds turn to mush at this point because nobody has ever been clear on what a paradigm is. Thomas Kuhn, the guy who coined the term, was famously hard to understand. People assumed that “paradigm shift” just meant “a big change” and so they started using the term for everything: “We used to wear baggy jeans, now we wear skinny jeans! Paradigm shift!”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.”In this way, doing science is a lot like reverse-engineering a board game. You have to figure out the units in play, like the tiles in Scrabble or the top hat in Monopoly. And then you have to figure out what those units can and can’t do: you can use your Scrabble tiles to spell “BUDDY” or “TREMBLE”, but not “GORFLBOP”. The top hat can be on Park Place, it can be on B&O Ra...