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> Maybe social sciences are just really hard.

More likely is that they're not actually science.



Sounds snarky, but perhaps this is true in that Economics cannot be science in the Popper sense since our experiments are usually too noisy to lead to reasonably falsify any hypothesis.

Still, I don’t think we’ve come upon a better method of knowledge acquisition in this realm.


I think there are profound limits to what can be understood from the application of natural scientific methods to the social world, because it's an open and non-linear system in which the units - people, groups - reflect on and learn from their experience. Also, while in the natural world you can easily create operational codings of variables because they follow deductively from proven theories (e.g. temperature), you cannot do that for the social world. There is no single and authoritative concept of 'power', for instance.

All that said, there is no one scientific model. Evolutionary biology has never pretended to by anything like physics. It's an open and non-linear system. It cannot make predictions, and nearly every generalisation it makes is either relatively trivial, or has a great many exceptions. For the most part, it's a historical science.




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