Biology has a replication crisis almost as bad as psychology. I agree with a lot of these criticisms but I wonder why we don't see articles questioning if biology is a science. Perhaps there was a period in the past where biology was more rigorous, whereas psych has always been really handwavy?

There's not a lot of real predicting in bio research IME (granted only with a couple subfields). A bunch of things are tried and then whatever works is the focus of the publication, with a write up implying there was a clear hypothesis from the start. Of course not all bio labs are like this, but I'd argue not all psych labs are either.

A lot of this is bad incentives and poor training, but human research is especially hard to control. So I think the issue is partially inherent to the field (in both psych and to some extent bio).

Biology is huge. It encompasses everything from neuroscience to zoography. Somebody could probably make a good case for psychology being under the umbrella of biology, if they were inclined.

I'd guess the replication crisis in biology is not evenly distributed among branches of biology; for instance I guess it's much worse in biomedicine than it is ornithology. And even within one branch of the biology, I expect the replication crisis is not evenly distributed. Studies about the behaviors of birds probably reproduce less than studies about the distribution of birds (particularly since the introduction of photography, which removes a lot of ambiguity from the later but not necessarily the former.)

Biology got us two (soon three) working mRNA-bases Covid-19 vaccines.

> I wonder why we don't see articles questioning if biology is a science.

Simply because we can't question the results of the field: medicine, vaccines, etc. Whereas for psychology, I fail to think of a single tangible result.

Science definitely involves explanation as well as prediction, otherwise we’d still be iterating on more and more complex epicycles as predictive models for astrophysics. Induction isn’t everything.

Prediction and Ockham's razor. "Explaining" is nothing more than hitting someone's head with verbiage until they capitulate.

The Big Five personality classification (currently being discussed on the front page [1]) has been reproduced and has predictive power. Sure the results are 'mild' compared to the physical sciences, but it's the best (first?) result that's come out of psychology research that actually meets this bar so far. Apparently it was used by Cambridge Analytica during that whole FB scandal, which is not great but validates it at least?

CA was years ago. Google probably has a much more refined model by now. Too bad they aren't sharing it.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27097590

[2]: my comment on [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27099032

String theory is also very weak on predictions. I guess if it should be classified as non-science.

You mean predictions that can be tested right now? Unclear why the proposed time horizon is the right one. This standard would have rejected most of quantum mechanics, some of GR, and many other useful theories and explanations when they were first proposed.

Correct. Similarly, one can imagine a point in the future in which technology advances enough to prove/disprove various predictions with regard to psychology.

You and the person you are responding to are in agreement. They were being sarcastic.

I think you'd be in good company with that conclusion.

Perhaps the root problem is that it is seemingly impossible for psychology to isolate and control for the dependent variable in question: consciousness.

In that case, wouldn’t the success of advertising support psychology as a science?