It's not so much that the field is broken, as that the field is ridiculously hard. Remember that every time you see someone on HN talk about A/B testing; employee relations; the effect of open-plan offices; UI and UX; how to extract payment from a recalcitrant client; anything to do with politics; why real-estate costs are high and their effect on a neighbourhood; or even right down their IDE's colour schemes, they're talking psychology. The highest-rated post on the front page at the moment, with over 2200 upvotes, is "Be Kind".
As a topic, psychology just does not lend itself to being able to be boxed up with a little bow. It is easier to get by as a charlatan in psychology, sure, but that's due to it being innately fuzzy and hard to pin down. You hear physicists speak of electrons being a 'probability cloud' rather than a 'thing' that can be cleanly predicted, and how that is absolutely mindblowing... but that's the kind of stuff that psychologists have to deal with as a matter of course.
> Science is prediction, not explanation.
... yet considerable effort is spent trying to figure out the Big Bang - and it's not like you'll find anyone claiming those efforts are "not science". I disagree with this aphorism.
> ... yet considerable effort is spent trying to figure out the Big Bang - and it's not like you'll find anyone claiming those efforts are "not science".
Good observation. I thought there was a context to Hoyle's statement, so I checked the Wikipedia:
Hoyle died in 2001 never accepting the Big Bang theory.[25]
"How, in the big-bang cosmology, is the microwave background explained? Despite what supporters of big-bang cosmology claim, it is not explained. The supposed explanation is nothing but an entry in the gardener’s catalogue of hypothesis that constitutes the theory. Had observation given 27 Kelvins instead of 2.7 Kelvins for the temperature, then 27 kelvins would have been entered in the catalogue. Or 0.27 Kelvins. Or anything at all."
— Hoyle, 1994[26]
As a topic, psychology just does not lend itself to being able to be boxed up with a little bow. It is easier to get by as a charlatan in psychology, sure, but that's due to it being innately fuzzy and hard to pin down. You hear physicists speak of electrons being a 'probability cloud' rather than a 'thing' that can be cleanly predicted, and how that is absolutely mindblowing... but that's the kind of stuff that psychologists have to deal with as a matter of course.
> Science is prediction, not explanation.
... yet considerable effort is spent trying to figure out the Big Bang - and it's not like you'll find anyone claiming those efforts are "not science". I disagree with this aphorism.