4 ms·
I'd think the conclusion you should draw is not that "even the famous experiments were not valid, so nothing in psychology is" but rather "the validity of an ex
by Sharlin 7mo ago
I'd think the conclusion you should draw is not that "even the famous experiments were not valid, so nothing in psychology is" but rather "the validity of an experiment does not correlate with how famous it is".
- d-us-vb 7mo agoA direct conclusion. The insight I'll draw from that is that academia gives voice to the results the current zeitgeist finds interesting and believable without properly verifying the evidence. See also the replication crisis.
- watwut 7mo agoFamous experiments are not chosen by academia. They are chosen by non academics. What you usually find is academics being much more reserved and more critical of these then journalists, bloggers or random commenters on HN.
- r-w 7mo agoI don't know about "much more reserved"... Citation needed. In the absence of evidence otherwise I assume academics are just people.
- watwut 7mo agoYes they are just people - people who are much close to the topic then random commenters on HN. Frankly, you made up accusation of academics from nothing and without bothering to check what they generally say. You just made it up
- Dylan16807 7mo agoWhat accusation did r-w make...?
- wredcoll 7mo agoI don't think academia runs fox news and cnn but I'll withhold judgement
- r-w 7mo agos/voice/authority/
- palata 7mo agoI guess my point is that I don't need to think for long before I find an example justifying why physics is a serious field. What would be the equivalent of Newton's laws in psychology? Does such a thing exist? Or does the whole field just prove how complicated human beings are by being incapable of proving anything else (which in itself would be an interesting result, don't get me wrong)?
- Sharlin 7mo agoPhysics is an exact, quantitative, natural science. Psychology is neither exact, quantitative (usually), nor a natural science. They are not comparable. But like many other fields of study that are not hard sciences, psychology can still be useful and valuable. (Note the "can". Given the replication crisis, how much of psychology actually is I cannot say.)
- palata 7mo agoSure, I agree with that. But do we have an example of something that is provably valuable? I am genuinely interested: after reading this article, I realised that there is nothing I can attribute to psychology off the top of my head. I mean, Milgram used to be one, but well...