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I'm not particularly interested in Harvard students. I'm pretty sure they're not super interesting to anyone outside of the Harvard diaspora and their friends.

by harry8 11y ago

I'm not particularly interested in Harvard students. I'm pretty sure they're not super interesting to anyone outside of the Harvard diaspora and their friends. I'll bet 100% the paper was generalising from Harvard students to some wider population, or why would you publish it. If the paper says "this thing we're publishing is only applies to Harvard students and has zero wider significance." I'll eat humble pie and apologise. Psychology has a big issue of claiming things as fact that are no such thing. It has had this issue since forever. The history of psychology research is truly ethically hideous both in terms of what it did to people in experiments and what it claimed to have found that was then used to maim people in the general population. Research lobotomy if you have any doubts at all about that statement. Some fraud got a Nobel prize for research that he used to advocate "safe lobotomy with no adverse affects." (But maybe he fooled himself and it wasn't blatant fraud. Bah.) These are the screams from the psychology establishment as they get called out for claiming so much that is just totally false. It's really hard to know something. There is an immense amount of work you have to do and you all you might find after decades is "dead end". Not in Psych research papers and they absolutely deserve the contempt they get for it.

vacri 11y ago
> The history of psychology research ... Research lobotomy... So, you've pretty much publicly announced that you're heavily clueless about what psychology is, and are buying into that armchair critic opinion that it's a discredited arm of psychiatry. Discussions on HN constantly revolve around psychology. How to negotiate for a better salary? Psychology. A/B testing? Psychology. How to give or take an interview effectively? Psychology. UX design and testing? Psychology. How to motivate yourself or others, or avoid procrastination? Psychology. Game theory? Psychology. And this is just the common discussions on the rather niche forum of HN. As I write this comment, the #1 article is "Dsxyliea", which is... psychology. When you abuse psychology because of a brief, discredited and niche episode in its history, you're saying the equivalent of "web browsers are shit software, because IE on XP can't do SNI".
- harry8 11y ago
  Of course we talk about psychology, the questions remain interesting. Hacker news discussion does not pretend to be scientific research. Last time I looked a game theory it was a branch of mathematics. See how much utterly discredited nonsense has been popular in psychology over the last 100 years. But this year's fads are different? Evidence would convince me. Psychology clearly continues to have systemic problems with evidence. Power pose. Priming. Yeah. There's plenty...

by harry8 11y ago

vacri 11y ago

> The history of psychology research ... Research lobotomy... So, you've pretty much publicly announced that you're heavily clueless about what psychology is, and are buying into that armchair critic opinion that it's a discredited arm of psychiatry. Discussions on HN constantly revolve around psychology. How to negotiate for a better salary? Psychology. A/B testing? Psychology. How to give or take an interview effectively? Psychology. UX design and testing? Psychology. How to motivate yourself or others, or avoid procrastination? Psychology. Game theory? Psychology. And this is just the common discussions on the rather niche forum of HN. As I write this comment, the #1 article is "Dsxyliea", which is... psychology. When you abuse psychology because of a brief, discredited and niche episode in its history, you're saying the equivalent of "web browsers are shit software, because IE on XP can't do SNI".

harry8 11y ago
Of course we talk about psychology, the questions remain interesting. Hacker news discussion does not pretend to be scientific research. Last time I looked a game theory it was a branch of mathematics. See how much utterly discredited nonsense has been popular in psychology over the last 100 years. But this year's fads are different? Evidence would convince me. Psychology clearly continues to have systemic problems with evidence. Power pose. Priming. Yeah. There's plenty...