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For a long time, when people criticised the methodological and predictive shortcomings of psychology as a discipline, I would come to its defense and insist that the reason that psychology hasn't made as much predictive progress as other fields is intrinsic to the nature of the discipline: the human brain studying itself is vastly more difficult than the human brain studying the kidney or whatever.
I haven't believed this for years. Yes, the factor outlined above does contribute, but the real reason that I no longer consider psychology a science in any meaningful sense is that it's essentially a cargo cult: it's a bunch of political activists and woo-peddlers going through the motions of following the scientific method, but without any understanding of why the underlying principles exist, and only doing the bare minimum to validate their own pet hypotheses with plausible deniability.
Do you mean pop psychology? Almost every business in the world uses psychology to recruit and retain customers. There’s probably 20,000 publications in psychology a year, if you ignore pop psychology there’s tons of meaningful insights.
Pardon me for thinking that that is probably complete nonsense. E.g. it's well known that open spaces are shit for people who need to concentrate, yet almost everyone uses them.
It's probably same for utter majority of workplace and recruiting psychology. Just trash that exists so managers can justify their decisions.
People don’t automatically or naturally do what is best for them. For instance, the “natural” way that people often study is by rereading or highlighting. But these are unequivocally the poorest ways of learning according to many studies. By many I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s 5000 studies related to this. Or if you consider exercise science, people don’t automatically rest or exercise in the optimal way. It’s not intuitive that active rest would be superior than inactive rest. It’s not intuitive that HIIT would be so efficient. For nutrition, we had no idea the optimal way to eat to retain vitamins, cooking in lead and so on, or overcooking vegetables and throwing out the broths.
I think the reason people study in open areas and with a show in the background is because it makes it fun. Quiet studying may be too boring for someone to do all the time.
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Like what?
In regards to meaningful insights: that we unconsciously tend to agree more with a speaker the more attractive they are; optimizing learning using spaced repetition and retrieval practice; that we tend to remember the beginning and end of experiences; the whole “flow” literature about which activities produce the most happiness.
I feel like this insight in particular was abundantly obvious to just about everyone centuries before psychology as a discipline came into being.
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