> Shall we start psychological therapies just because someone thought it sounded good, instead of measuring if it works?
Yup. All psychotherapies were started just because someone thought they sounded good; and are still being practiced because they sound good. There are hundreds of different schools of psychotherapy today. There is a movement toward testing the effectiveness of therapies, but they just show whichever therapy the researcher fancies is the best, and metastudies reveal about equal effectiveness of all the major therapies.
The point is, I think, that quantitative measures are not lifting the scientific status of a field automatically; and can mask the lack of sound foundation.
Yup. All psychotherapies were started just because someone thought they sounded good; and are still being practiced because they sound good. There are hundreds of different schools of psychotherapy today. There is a movement toward testing the effectiveness of therapies, but they just show whichever therapy the researcher fancies is the best, and metastudies reveal about equal effectiveness of all the major therapies.
The point is, I think, that quantitative measures are not lifting the scientific status of a field automatically; and can mask the lack of sound foundation.