Comment by danaris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danaris | Hacker News Reader

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Your conclusion ("the failing of Psychology in the academic world") is not supported by your evidence.

You have demonstrated that there is one prominent psychologist who holds some fairly-obviously terrible and inaccurate beliefs, and is willing to trumpet them to anyone who will listen.

This is no more an indictment of the field of psychology than the occasional right-wing "climate scientist" Fox News brings out to "prove" that climate change is not real is an indictment of the field of climate science.

Many scientific fields likely have a handful of far-right kooks who would be happy to rack up YouTube views promulgating alt-right talking points dressed up in the trappings of science. That says very little about the state of their fields, and a great deal about the state of our nation. And YouTube.

I'm sorry. I was very murky with my wording. I was not trying to say that the field of Psychology had failed or was a failure. What I meant to say was that, our current state of academia has in this instance demonstrated "a" failure. That failure to me is highlighted by the comment I responded to when it was implied that Peterson's view was more "bonafide" because it was from a "real" psychologist. By all academic standards the commenter would be correct. Peterson is not only a Psychologists but also a professor, A widely published and cited one at that. One who has been afforded debates at collages with Sam Harris and Zizek. This to me is a failure of the academic world to distinguish between leaders of the field of psychology and crackpot YouTube personalities. By credentials alone he is both and this is unnerving to me.

That said, of course, I do not believe that it speaks to psychology as a whole. But again I poorly worded that sentence and take responsibility for the misunderstanding. I would only add that I think, and I may very well be wrong, that if a physicist were to parrot "free-energy/perpetual-motion" to anyone that would listen, that person would be promptly removed from teaching at any legitimate university. That is not to say physics is better than psychology, if anything it implies that it is easier than the still very important soft sciences.

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