Thank you for responding to this, Satt. I really did need some input here, and it's very good to see another perspective and to have been shown a whole list of things that could be done.

I am in an unusually bad situation because the subject I'm most interested in is psychology. I noticed something was wrong with the psychology industry while I was still young enough to avoid getting into it. The three main problems are:

1. That you have to diagnose people immediately to collect insurance payments when in reality it takes a long time to know whether there's even anything wrong with them at all, and being deemed "messed up" by a professional could be very hurtful to the patient.

2. I could tell that a lot of what was passing for therapy was BS and decided there must be something drastically wrong with the schooling. I didn't know that that it was this bad, but I am glad I noticed something was drastically wrong early on.

3. I am primarily interested in gifted adults. Neither an abnormal psychology degree or developmental psychology degree would give me a solid understanding of gifted adults - those are focused on the average Joe and children with learning disabilities respectively. Gifted adults are neither very well served by the typical therapist (imagine taking a space ship to a car mechanic) or by schooling methods intended for children with learning disabilities. I didn't realize that my main interest was in gifted adults until later, but I could tell that the psychology that I had been exposed to wasn't what I was looking for. I have a space ship myself, and wanted psychology that taught me about space ships like mine.

So I went to college for web design instead. I studied psychology on my own. I love being a web developer, a lot, but I want to really make a difference in the world and I don't feel that adding little buttons to websites is making that happen. Of course, web development can be used for making a difference, too, but if most of what I know about psychology is wrong (it quite possibly could be?) then how am I supposed to pursue my main interest? I was hoping to do self-improvement writing, and I can still do that at any time, and possibly gain an audience that way, but if the foundation of knowledge I am working from is bad, then it's not useful to do so. What I want to get from writing about self-improvement is meaning, not money, so that would be unacceptable to me.

Something occurred to me: I've learned enough about the psychology of gifted adults now that I'd probably have a strong advantage when it comes to writing review articles or meta-analyses on gifted adults. I'm not credentialed, so could not give the articles any traditional "credibility" (that's in quotes for a reason, now that I know all of this...). However, considering the circumstance (that getting an accredited psychology degree requires you to learn a bunch of mumbo-jumbo and that they don't teach about gifted adults anyway), I'm thinking that getting a degree would not increase the quality of my articles substantially enough to justify spending tens of thousands of dollars and so many hours on it. Reading the key books on research practices would probably be the best action, though I do not know what they are.

If you (or other LWers) have thoughts on how to approach this sticky problem, I'm interested in hearing them.