billswift comments on The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship - Less Wrong

177 Post author: lukeprog 05 January 2011 07:22AM

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Comment author: shokwave 05 January 2011 09:31:37AM 6 points [-]

I find that most writing on psychology is necessarily pretty soft, because the the phenomena it is trying to describe are vastly more complicated than those of the hard sciences.

Is there one more step in there? Vastly more complicated -> science happens at much higher levels of abstraction -> high level abstract science is necessarily pretty soft? Because it seems to me psychology is necessarily soft because it doesn't want to turn into thirty years of neurobiology before it can talk about human behaviour.

Comment author: billswift 05 January 2011 02:19:32PM 4 points [-]

I think it is more: Complication allows the researchers' biases to slip in more easily, since among other things any sort of cross-check is nearly impossible, which leads to softer results, especially when being evaluated by someone with different biases.