> Rejecting the entirety of a science because it deals in confidence values rather than "facts" is foolish ... I'm not rejecting pop psychology. I'm saying it'

> Rejecting the entirety of a science because it deals in confidence values rather than "facts" is foolish ... I'm not rejecting pop psychology. I'm saying it's not science. Science requires something fundamental, it can be expressed in one word, and I invite the readers of this post to say what it is. As soon as the word leaves their mouths, they will realize why social psychology cannot be science. When the physicists at the LHC observed what they thought might be the Higgs Boson, they refused to announce a discovery until the had a five sigma result. Five sigma is approximately equal to 2.8 * 10^-7 (explanation: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/07/17/five-sigmawhats-that/ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/07/17/...), and it expresses the probability that, if there is no Higgs particle, a random observation might create the observation that has been made. Five sigma. That's science. Opinion articles whose titles end in question marks are not science. And I should not have to explain this to educated readers. > I particularly love that you used the word "ascend"; I shan't be the first to compare positivism to scientism Scientism is an irrational confidence in science as an answer to all the world's problems. Social psychology is an irrational confidence in the power of articles that observe correlations without either proposing or testing theories about those correlations to accurately represent some aspect of reality.