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Eugine_Nier comments on Follow-up on ESP study: "We don't publish replications" - Less Wrong
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This is a very good point. You make a compelling case that the use of careful statistics is not a recent trend in psychology. In that regard, my penultimate paragraph is clearly just deeply and irrecoverably wrong.
Well, I was responding to Eliezer's claim about a general lack of a scientific process. So the specific question then becomes can one give examples of "non-trivial, correct, and useful" psychological results that have occurred in the last year or so. There's a steady output of decent psychology results. While the early work on cognitive biases was done in the 1980s by Kahneman and Tversky, a lot of work has occurred in the last decade after. But, I agree that the amount of output is slow enough that I can't point to easy, impressive studies that have occurred in the last few months off the top of my head like I can for other areas of research. Sharon Bertsch and Bryan Pesta's investigation of different explanations for negative correlation between IQ and religion came out in 2009 and 2010, which isn't even this year.
However, at the same time, I'm not sure that this is a strike against psychology. Psychology has a comparatively small field of study. Astronomy gets to investigate most of the universe. Math gets to investigate every interesting axiomatic system one can imagine. Biology gets to investigate millions of species. Psychology just gets to investigate one species, and only certain aspects of that species. When psychology does investigate other intelligent species it is often categorized as belonging to other areas. So we shouldn't be that surprised if psychology doesn't have as high a production rate. On the other hand, this argument isn't very good because one could make up for it by lumping all the classical soft sciences together into one area, and one would still have this problem. So overall, your point seems valid in regards to psychology.
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Have these results been replicated? Are you sure they're correct? Merely citing cool-looking results isn't evidence that the scientific process is working.
Remember, "the scientific process not working" doesn't look like "cool results stop showing up", but looks like "cool results keeping showing up except they no longer correspond to reality". If you have no independent way of verifying the results in question, it's hard to tell the above scenarios apart.
Bertsch and Pesta's work has been replicated. The dinosaur temperature estimate is close to estimates made by other techniques - the main interesting thing here is that this is a direct estimate made using the fossil remains rather than working off of metabolic knowledge, body size, and the like. So the dinosaur temperature estimate is in some sense the replication by another technique of strongly suspected results. The snail result is very new; I'm not aware of anything that replicates it.