> you dare question a website with 'scientific' in the URL? I like your moxie.

Yep, I had a lot of nerve doing that. :)

A while ago, in an article I noted that Wikipedia defined neuroscience as "the scientific study of the brain and nervous system", while psychology was defined as "the study of the mind, partly through the study of behavior." Within hours of my article's appearance someone inserted the word "scientific" into psychology's definition. Solved that problem.

> I recall reading something posted recently about how the way the grants in social sciences is set up ensures that you get a whole lot of papers that have a catchy 'truthy' hook to them, which will then get disseminated by the mainstream media and quickly forgotten.

Yes, even to the extent that two studies arrive at opposite conclusions but don't notice each other (and no one points out the contradiction). My favorite example of overlooked contradictions are two current, well-regarded psychological theories -- Grit and Asperger Syndrome.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grit_(personality_trait) : "Grit in psychology is a positive, non-cognitive trait, based on an individual’s passion for a particular long-term goal or endstate coupled with a powerful motivation to achieve their respective objective."

So according to the Grit contingent, focusing on a few activities, or just one, is a "good thing", and typical of successful people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome : "Asperger syndrome (AS), also known as Asperger's syndrome or Asperger disorder, is an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) that is characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction, alongside restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests."

So according to the Asperger contingent, focusing on a few activities, or just one, is a mental illness.

How can this happen? The answer is that there's no central defining theory in psychology, so people are free to draw conclusions that don't need to be compared to tested, defining principles like relativity or evolution.

> It basically turned the fields into little more than generators of soundbites.

Well put. :)

> So according to the Asperger contingent, focusing on a few activities, or just one, is a mental illness.

You chose to ignore the requirement of "significant difficulties in social interaction". These are also not the only diagnostic criteria.

When you make comments like this, it becomes very hard to take your other criticisms of psychology seriously, as it raises the question as to what else you're ignoring/leaving out or unaware of.

The entire point of a syndrome is that it is a grouping based on the presence of a certain set of required symptoms combined by some threshold of additional symptoms, rather than a clearly identifiable underlying cause.

Many individual symptoms of a syndrome can be perfectly normal on their own or even strong desirable at certain degrees, but become substantial problems for the individuals involved when combined together, or when the trait is too intense. There's in other words no contradiction between the positive treatment of grit vs. the description of Asperger syndrome as a disorder.

>> So according to the Asperger contingent, focusing on a few activities, or just one, is a mental illness.

> You chose to ignore the requirement of "significant difficulties in social interaction". These are also not the only diagnostic criteria.

But much field experience shows that the absence of the full symptom set doesn't prevent the diagnosis, therefore the comparison is valid. During its tenure as a serious syndrome Asperger's diagnoses went completely out of control, due to ambiguous diagnostic criteria and (my point) how much like normal behavior the symptoms are.

Allen Frances, the editor of DSM-IV (the edition that introduced Asperger's), now thinks the inclusion of Asperger's was a mistake that led to what he now describes as a "phony epidemic" of diagnoses. Over the protests of many psychologists, Asperger's has been removed from the new DSM.

> There's in other words no contradiction between the positive treatment of grit vs. the description of Asperger syndrome as a disorder.

False. The contradiction is obvious -- they both describe the same behavior. And when it was pointed out that many very successful people exhibited Asperger's symptoms (or "Grit" symptoms, depending on one's outlook), psychologists responded by labeling those people mentally ill. As a result, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Thomas Jefferson, and Bill Gates have been labeled mentally ill. The evidence? They accomplished something noteworthy by focusing their attention on a few activities, or just one.

But you're missing the point, which is that psychology proceeds based on descriptions, not explanations. Asperger's is a description without an explanation. "Grit" is a description without an explanation. Science requires explanations. This is why the DSM, psychiatry and psychology's central authority, is in the process of being abandoned as unscientific.

> There's in other words no contradiction between the positive treatment of grit vs. the description of Asperger syndrome as a disorder.

That's true, and it shows what's wrong with psychology -- its superficiality and willingness to accept mere descriptions in lieu of explanations.