cut/pasting from another comment of mine:
by saying that psychological research is itself useless, you're also throwing away things like A/B testing, UX testing (including Apple's much-vaunted usability stuff), research into grief management, team-building research, research into cognitive recovery therapy after acquired brain injury, work looking into ameliorating sexism and racism, perception research for HUDs in fighter aircraft (my honours research), some pain management research, research into dealing with PTSD, research into crowd control and management...
Someone with a PhD in the topic should be well aware of the breadth of the field that is 'psychology', and to say that the only useful thing in the field is psychometric testing just displays your myopia.
Half the stuff that HN talks about is psychology, from A/B testing to building staff relationships. It is far from 'useless', particularly given this audience.
It is ironic in the extreme that the people that shit on psychology do so because they see it as a 'pseudoscience' that 'doesn't observe things properly', yet so very few of them actually see psychology for what it is - instead just falling back on their own narrow stereotype of it.
