> A great deal of their difficulty is, of course, the difficulty of the subject and the inapplicability of the scientific method to the subject. "Inapplicabili

> A great deal of their difficulty is, of course, the difficulty of the subject and the inapplicability of the scientific method to the subject. "Inapplicability of the scientific method to the subject" is exactly what I wish was more widely appreciated. Perhaps I would just rephrase it to say that "the scientific method won't get the same results it does in other fields". It's not that psychologists/etc are stupid or malicious. If you talk to any big player in that field they will gladly acknowledge all the problems. A lot of research will try various things to minimize some of the limitations. Nobody will hate you for pointing it out. But the problem is none of that can ever work. And if you take that position there's just no place for you in these fields other than being a hater. Take something simple like non/fake respondent bias. Everybody knows about it. Nobody flat out "denies" it. But most sketchy fields think they can work around it. You can do better than the other study, but you cannot cancel it out. It's fundamental. I don't care how stable the result is. If what you're studying can only ever be ascertained by asking people you're basically a pollster. You're studying people's responses, not the "nature" of some psychological concept you came up with. This is not to say all the work is useless. Polls, stock market models and these kinds of things can be useful in a very bounded context. But pretending it works like some other fields where you can just build on top of previous results is a futile endeavor. I'm not going to argue the science/not science part, I'm fine with people calling it "science" if applying the same methods is the only criterion. I think useful/not useful is a better debate. For example, biology, medicine in particular, is IMO rife with sketchy stuff, but once in a while the field can indeed knock it out of the park and produce something useful.