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Comment by coolsdude2282 | Hacker News Reader

I evangelically bring this up constantly in day to day life, and people just outright refuse to accept that psychology isn't rigorous. This cannot be reiterated enough, if anyone reading this is unfamiliar with the current replication crisis, please stop whatever you are doing and read up on it. It changed the way I view all social sciences.

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>It changed the way I view all social sciences.

It should have changed the way you view all sciences, period, because the replication crisis concerns biology, medicine, physics, computer science etc equally.

In fact some of the most powerful studies on the subject have been on the topic of biology.

It's so striking how people who view the "soft sciences" this way really have no understanding of science at all. It's a very American thing and it really reveals the extent to which science has been socially constructed in America to be some kind of infallible truth machine. The hard-on for infallibility is so striking -- there's something about sociality, uncertainty, nuance, luck, and fallibility that really terrifies these people on a foundational level.

>there's something about sociality, uncertainty, nuance, luck, and fallibility that really terrifies these people on a foundational level.

It's the old protestant/puritan spirit, just moved from the certainty of God to another certainty (for all the lip service to the "scientific process", it's the certainty that's valued most in science).

Science has replaced religion for many people and so they expect something infallible or "word of god".

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