While I’m not anti-psychology, I understand that perspective. It’s precisely when social sciences try to apply methods or standards from the natural/‘hard’ sci

While I’m not anti-psychology, I understand that perspective. It’s precisely when social sciences try to apply methods or standards from the natural/‘hard’ sciences that things go wrong. It is more difficult, as you said, and it’s also qualitatively different. We need different models. Human traits may be measurable, but as observable emergent properties of a many-layered complex system, they’re are not at all like temperature or any other physical property. It gets darker than that. The veneer of certainty, backed by the successes of hard sciences but ostensibly applied to humans, creates a ripe environment for pseudoscience and grifters to take advantage of others during their most vulnerable times. Yes - we should study humans, and iteratively get better at it. But we need to tread carefully.