"But there's no world-changing insight like relativity, evolution, or DNA, nor any smaller-but-still-very-cool discoveries like polymerase chain reaction, CRISPR, or Higgs bosons."
This isn't true. There is an extremely important, novel (when it was discovered), and (of course) replicable insight that came out of psychology: IQ. That an a…
"But there's no world-changing insight like relativity, evolution, or DNA, nor any smaller-but-still-very-cool discoveries like polymerase chain reaction, CRISPR, or Higgs bosons."
This isn't true. There is an extremely important, novel (when it was discovered), and (of course) replicable insight that came out of psychology: IQ. That an abstract concept like intelligence can be readily quantified and measured, that it has predictive power across almost every major field of human endeavor, and that it is, as a first order approximation, a unitary construct, are all valuable and unintuitive ideas. Psychologists just don't like the results of IQ research.
IQ is over 100 years old, so it's not quite recent. It's also a good example of the limitations of abstractions. It's an undeniably useful concept, but it also fools us into thinking we've mapped the whole space when in fact we've only mapped a sliver. https://www.experimental-history.com/p/why-arent-smart-people-happier
"But there's no world-changing insight like relativity, evolution, or DNA, nor any smaller-but-still-very-cool discoveries like polymerase chain reaction, CRISPR, or Higgs bosons."
This isn't true. There is an extremely important, novel (when it was discovered), and (of course) replicable insight that came out of psychology: IQ. That an abstract concept like intelligence can be readily quantified and measured, that it has predictive power across almost every major field of human endeavor, and that it is, as a first order approximation, a unitary construct, are all valuable and unintuitive ideas. Psychologists just don't like the results of IQ research.
IQ is over 100 years old, so it's not quite recent. It's also a good example of the limitations of abstractions. It's an undeniably useful concept, but it also fools us into thinking we've mapped the whole space when in fact we've only mapped a sliver. https://www.experimental-history.com/p/why-arent-smart-people-happier
https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/your-iq-isnt-160-no-ones-is