In my view, clinical psychology, like medical practice, is likely to be an art and not a science, for a long time. The reason is we can't wait for the science to come up to speed. People are suffering, and need relief, right now.
My view is that replication is just one safeguard within science, but is not the only thing needed. Confirming or refuting isolated factoids doesn't tell us much more than the factoids themselves.
I think a science needs to develop towards theories that connect those factoids into a framework. Psychology has not reached that stage yet. Compare to physics or chemistry. Some commentary has suggested that the replication crisis extends to those fields too. My graduate research project in physics was never replicated. But physics has a framework of theory that remains strong by connecting studies to one another, so that if one or more isolated studies fail on replication, the whole framework remains strong.
In some sense, "useful" could include merely "useful to science."
I don't think this could work out in medical practice or psychology. There are simply too many variables that influence the outcome in those disciplines and too many unknowns how those things work in detail that can't be expressed in a formula. The brain still remains a mistery
My view is that replication is just one safeguard within science, but is not the only thing needed. Confirming or refuting isolated factoids doesn't tell us much more than the factoids themselves.
I think a science needs to develop towards theories that connect those factoids into a framework. Psychology has not reached that stage yet. Compare to physics or chemistry. Some commentary has suggested that the replication crisis extends to those fields too. My graduate research project in physics was never replicated. But physics has a framework of theory that remains strong by connecting studies to one another, so that if one or more isolated studies fail on replication, the whole framework remains strong.
In some sense, "useful" could include merely "useful to science."