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Comment by imperio59 | Hacker News Reader

Psychology is not a science. Psychologists are not taught statistics in their curriculum. Why did anyone expect that they would come up with sound, statistically accurate results?

You can read any two psychology "textbooks" and get two differing opinions about how to address the same issues...

It's not a science folks. It's never been. It's always been an opinion-based practice, and this just proves the fraud being perpetrated on the people of this earth who trust these charlatans for help on matters ranging from personal mental health all the way to court "expert" testimony that can swing the decision of a judge or a jury one way or the other...

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>Psychologists are not taught statistics in their curriculum.

That's just outright untrue. Maybe you have good points somewhere else in your comment but saying such nonsense makes me less inclined to hear you out.

This reply is to anyone reading this that takes the parent post seriously - the scientific method is the best tool we have for gaining knowledge, and it is effective especially with difficult subject matter such as psychology. Psychology isn't just science, it's difficult science.

BTW the only statistics I know are what I was forced to learn studying psych (although I was a computer science major, which required none)

Studying human behavior is just very difficult for any science (psychology is just at the fore). E.g. in programming languages, there are researchers that are trying to figure out how to empirically study human performance in relation to various programming features. It is quite difficult to get meaningful results, and experiments are expensive (you can't just put people in a box for later use!). No wonder most PL researchers focus on machine performance and theory...it is just easier that way.

How can you do computer science without any stats? Don't you study machine learning?

Many of us are kind of old. Machine learning wasn't much of a thing in the 90s, and I think has only become popular in the last few years.

>Psychology is not a science.

False.

> Psychologists are not taught statistics in their curriculum.

False.

> You can read any two psychology "textbooks" and get two differing opinions about how to address the same issues...

Mind-bogglingly false; you have no idea what you're talking about.

I suspect you're either confusing psychology with psychoanalysis, or you're confusing experimental psychology with clinical psychology, as it's true that the DSM-IV had a serious disgnostic reliability problem (not sure what the sate of the DSM-V is).

In any case, understand that the term "psychology" encompases such research as this: http://cavlab.net/?lang=en

Non-social psychology (e.g. perception, attention, psychophysics, etc) has indeed become a pretty hard science.

It's an applied science, and they aren't charlatans.

It's not exclusively an applied science. Not in the least.

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