It is really quite sad. The issues people like Baumeister (and, say Carol Dweck) are working on are highly instrumetally important, but even after all the defensive arguments made by gagaoolala (in the reddit thread) it's clear that the studies were just not done right - a decent study should not require this much defence. Each argument, even if it's excellent by itself, is an additional assumption, and the conjunction of assumption takes away from the validity of the conclusion.

I wonder why this seems common in psychology, simply luck of training or other, more pernicious reasons?