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billswift comments on The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship - Less Wrong
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I very much agree with your final sentence.
Do you think Eliezer's post is more precise and useful than the controlled experiments published in peer-reviewed journals described in the book I linked to? 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.
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.