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The entire edifice is and always has been based entirely on fraud. The field as a whole has probably been the most influential branch of "science" in terms of direct social and political impact. Its theories having driven the mass-rewriting of large portions of our society, despite being unmitigated bullshit. That influence is entirely the result of systematic lying on the part of its practitioners and advocates, who have never honestly engaged with or accounted for their failures. Its history is my go-to example for why the Enlightenment is a bad idea, and why rationalist positivism of the sort endorsed by @fuckduck9000 in our ongoing debates is foolish and self-destructive: it demonstrates that motivated lying outperforms truth-seeking in Enlightened, rationalist societies hands-down and for arbitrary lengths of time.
What, in your view, is the "concept" of psychology? Because from where I'm sitting, the concept is and always has been "come up with a story for how the brain works and why that means society has to be changed to match your preferences, fake some evidence, smear dissenters as anti-science luddites, claim the resulting disaster proves you should be granted more power".
That seems accurate. People can study whatever they want, so long as they're honest about what the evidence actually shows and where its limits are. Psychology has never been able to do that.
If forced to choose between what we've actually gotten and no study at all, I'd happily choose no study at all. It seems obvious to me that the field as a whole has been strongly net-negative for its entire history.
I think your criticism of psychology would actually be true of most of the university endeavor. It’s no longer a place (outside of extremely hard sciences) of dispassionately going where the evidence leads. Most of the research done in soft “sciences” or humanities is much more about finding the answers you actually want, or in twisting texts and history to tell the narrative of human nature the way you need it to be to get the outcome you want.
And this, I personally believe is why so much of modern society has gone off the rails as compared to our ancestors. When issue advocates can sneak their pet ideas into the narrative by publishing them in a academic journals, teach them unopposed in college classrooms, and slowly trickled out to broader society without them having to meet even the sniff-test of replication (which is not exactly a high bar anyway, but more of a fraud and absolute bullshit detection method). When people believe untrue things, and act as if they are true, society in general declines, and unless it’s stopped, it collapses into the sea of ignorance and superstition. And on the way out, it creates absolute human misery as people do things that don’t work, create cultures that don’t achieve, and so on.
Real, rigorous study has never actually failed when applied honestly. Nations who value it tend to punch very high above their weight given their populations and natural resources. Jews without a state for thousands of years managed to punch so far above their weight that people needed to invent conspiracies to explain it. The cultures of East Asia following Confucius managed to produce great civilizations even in places like Japan where there weren’t a lot of natural resources to sell.
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