I have found Hacker New to be full of some of the smartest people I've encountered on the internet. However, every time a discussion pops up where a social or soft science is involved, the discussion becomes mired by arrogance, bias, and general small mindedness about what constitutes "real science." I see comment after comment of where the author implies or outright says that psychology is pseudoscience or close to it. The challenge in designing, implement, and supporting a study in psychology or similar science is staggering.

That's no excuse for questionable statistics interpretation or outright manipulations, but to write off an entire field of study because it doesn't have the convenient quantitative measuring capabilities that other sciences have is ridiculous.

I have noticed a pattern as of late, or maybe its just the articles I have been reading on HN, but there seems to be a lot more people making dubious claims, commenting on things they no nothing about, and just genuinely turning this place into a cesspool like the rest of the internet.

What is so hard about not posting an opinion on subjects that you don't have knowledge of or any proof to back up your claims? If you haven't studied psychology, have even a vague idea of what it's about, or what its past or present state is then why muddle up the conversation with you BS conjecture?

I'm sure a legitimate licensed clinician would have a field day with some of the posters on this site.

While I agree with much of the substance of your post, the fact remains that psychology is a mess. A friend of mine once told me that doing a doctorate in a subject only really gave you the ability to see how your field is wrong and all the problems with it, and I would agree.

The problems with psychology, from someone who's been at it for a while: 1) lack of focus on replication 2) in survey studies, failure to correlate psychometric measures with behaviour or other kinds of measures (surveys versus reaction time measures versus physiological measures). 3) An unfortunate lack of understanding of the assumptions behind the statistical procedures used routinely within the field. 4) Misplaced emphasis on theory at the expense of prediction. A relatively well known psychologist, quite statistical aware, posted on stats.stackexchange.com that the goal of psychology was theoretical understanding, not prediction. For the life of me, I can't see how one can develop good theories without prediction, but it appears to be a dirty word within much of psychology.

That being said, people are hard. They change their behaviour based on what they think you are trying to do, they tell you what you want to hear, and even when they tell the truth as they see it, they may well be mistaken.

So while its not right to write off an entire field for some errors (in fact, my results are all perfect) its also useless to deny the problem and pull a Freud by saying that everyone who disagrees with your methods has some kind of psychological disorder.

> What is so hard about not posting an opinion on subjects that you don't have knowledge of or any proof to back up your claims? If you haven't studied psychology, have even a vague idea of what it's about, or what its past or present state is then why muddle up the conversation with you BS conjecture?

This isn't a psych journal -- this is a discussion site -- and what's so hard about not reading "muddled up" discussions? If your concern is that laypeople are getting the wrong idea about Important Things, then you're squandering your opportunity to nudge them in the right direction.