As a field, I think UI/UX has a ton of anxiety about it's place in the cannon of design. There's a pretty clear path from that anxiety to these hollow attempts to justify itself as a "serious discipline."

Look at the other paths that visual designers could take, from "pure art" illustration to a much "harder science" like architecture, UI/UX sits pretty square in the middle. So many of the people I've worked with want it desperately to be both art and science. I'm sure we've all had conversations with a UX/UI designer who will ping-pong between space "feeling better" with different padding, and something like Millers Law, or perhaps a misapplied statistical inference from Optimizely.

I'd love to see UI/UX split into a more art focused design field and a more science focused HCI field. This might stop the navel-gazing and impulse toward faux-science, and publications like this: https://www.invisionapp.com/inside-design/why-designers-shou...