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Notes -
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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