The field of clinical psychology is in an uproar over the resignation of two members of the group revising the field’s basic manual for diagnosing mental disorders.

But is it science? The field of clinical psychology is in an uproar over the resignation of two members of the group revising the field’s basic manual for diagnosing mental disorders.

As the article notes, “An inaccurate [manual] could lead to misdiagnosed patients receiving useless or even harmful treatments.” The protest letter, written by the two resigning members, also includes this gem:

As it stands now, the [manual’s] personality section is not readable, much less usable. It will be ignored by clinicians and will do grave harm to research. This is the sad product of small group of cloistered … “experts” stubbornly ignoring the sharp criticism from within their own group and the near universal rejection of their proposals by everyone else in the field.

Kind of reminds me of climategate. I wonder who is funding this working group.

The IPCC scientist working group has decided that Freedom of Information Act laws do not apply to its work

The law is such an inconvenient thing: The IPCC scientist working group, meeting in San Francisco, has decided that Freedom of Information Act laws do not apply to its work.

Putting aside the absurdity of a bunch of individuals simply declaring they don’t have to obey the law, it is interesting to me that the lead scientists of the IPCC happen to be meeting in San Francisco the same time the UN climate conference was going on in Durban. This seems to me to be further evidence of how irrelevant science was to that Durban conference.