[derefr]

Education is IMHO uniquely problematic / a bad example of a professional discipline, because nobody knows what works. Academia is horrible at running RCTs on education methods; and industry is horrible at incentivizing good teaching (i.e. ineffective teachers, whether in kindergarten or college, never get fired just for being ineffective.) Our current "theory of education" is probably just 1000 P-hacked studies in a trenchcoat.

It's likely pretty easy to measure that lawyers from professional law schools win more cases than self-taught lawyers. Or that doctors from medical schools have higher patient satisfaction / produce higher average QALYs in their patient cohort than self-taught doctors.

I think a more closely analogous question to the one of CS vs SWEng might be: if a group of psychiatrists (professionals) and psychologists (academics) switch places, who performs better in the other context?

[seanmcdirmid]

> if a group of psychiatrists (professionals) and psychologists (academics) switch places, who performs better in the other context?

The psychiatrist is an MD who can prescribe drugs. The psychologist wouldn’t have that kind of authority, so they can’t do the job of the former. A psychologist can actually do therapy, which a psychiatrist isn’t trained for. These are very different professions.

[barry-cotter]

Psychiatrists in the US overwhelmingly have to be trained in psychodynamic therapy, aka Freudianism. The only thing we know for certain works in therapy and that has worked consistently is the client and counselor having a good relationship.

> Conclusions and Recommendations of the Interdivisional (APA Divisions 12 & 29) Task Force on Evidence-Based Therapy Relationships

http://societyforpsychotherapy.org/evidence-based-therapy-re...

> The therapy relationship makes substantial and consistent contributions to psychotherapy outcome independent of the specific type of treatment.

> The therapy relationship accounts for why clients improve (or fail to improve) at least as much as the particular treatment method.

[sdenton4]

omg, my least favorite thing in the education literature:

Prof does a 'study' where they teach a class with both hands vs with one hand tied behind his back. Each class has 200 students, and he finds that the one-handed class outperforms the two handed class with p=0.045 with N=200...

And I'm like NO! This is basically an N=1 study because the teacher is common across both classes. Have you never heard of pen-effects?!?!?!

Unfortunately, fixing the problem in the study design means convincing a bunch of your friends that one-handed teaching might be better and engaging in an experimental study together... But that's obviously way too hard.