Personally, I see this blanket dismissal as one of the blind spots of our otherwise intelligent community.
Perhaps because so many of us are engineers, and that it strokes our egos to see the softer sciences fail?
Not ALL, but the replication crisis has demonstrated that at least 2/3 of such studies can't be replicated.
If you had a communication channel where 2/3 of your packets failed to deliver, I'd say a statement like "this channel isn't reliable" is very justified.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Psychology_...
That's called kernel development (from scratch) :P
And the blanket dismissal often posted here in a knee jerk reaction isn't very charitable to a whole body of research, that is arguably harder to operationalize than the hard sciences.
I'd prefer a more substantial discussion of the findings or paper at hand rather than to just bring up the replication crisis anytime any psychological finding is mentioned on HN.
I think many people on HN, myself included, are kind of addicted to appearing clever.
This tends to produce responses that earn us clever points with the least effort possible.
We've heard about the replication crisis a thousand times, we've heard about the Gell Mann effect. Neither of these alone constitute a substantive argument against a particular scientific paper or piece of journalism.
I'm waiting for someone to write a bot to post Gell Mann and Replication Crisis replies to every newspaper article or psychology paper. Maybe someone already has...
Credibility doesn’t depend on the relative difficulty of proving out truth claims. We don’t owe Psychology or Sociology blind faith because their claims are (arguably) more difficult to confirm than harder sciences.
You may well be bored of hearing about the replication crisis—you’re entitled to your opinion, but the low quality of the field of psychology is pretty relevant to the topic.
> I think many people on HN, myself included, are kind of addicted to appearing clever.
Apparently so are psychologists :) (kidding, I have lots of respect for psychologists and other researchers even if the fields themselves are prone to drawing bad conclusions)
Just the "lol math is hard and statistics is annoying" crowd. Honestly the thing that pisses me off most about psychology students is how only a tiny fraction of them understands and gets the actual importance of hard statistics to their field.
But instead, it's almost accepted to trash the statistics courses as just these boring hurdles to get past by. And it's still cool to suck at math.
Problem is, right now you can't tell which they are.