OK, so essentially all that inflated blather really boils down to is the fact that many practitioners are doing a poor/sloppy job of it... Sure, but that hardly invalidates the entire discipline. That's about like dismissing medical science because there's also snake-oil quackery going on as well.

This whole thread got me to thinking about Hari Seldon, and his psychohistory he discovered. Kind of a social science in a way..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hari_Seldon

Is that a really clever satire? Like using the language of social science to denigrate social science?

The last sentence sums it up for me....

ah -

in that case i think you'd find a friend in karl popper. read him on falsification and why he considered, say, einstein to be a scientist but not marx.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf-sGqBsWv4

i'd still say the last line of that quote misses the mark a bit, since 'hard science' is also generally about a post-hoc rationalization of observed phenomena, unless you're bruno latour and think that scientists are 'creating' facts in real time.

lastly: on the other hand, i think some people in this thread are using 'scientific method' as an arbiter, and it should be said that even einstein didn't use the scientific method all that much. he mostly conducted thought experiments and had a really great imagination.

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https://lshtm.academia.edu/MikeCallaghan

http://howtobeswiss.blogspot.ch/

Yeah, this is a deep question, and the type that's difficult to resolve in an LR type format. Properly answering would require going into various branches of science and discussing the differences about what is going on there. That takes much more than "get off my lawn!" levels of concentration and energy.

Hard science may be a post hoc rationalisation of events but it does give an indication of the future

E. G. We are so far still proving that einsteins theory of relativity is correct, and it's being validated

Economics on the other hand? Not so much.

I'm reading adaptive markets by Lo

It's fascinating because whilst - at least where I am up to in the book - he demonstrates that neither markets nor humans are rational, and whilst he can explain why, and whilst he has a theory, I'm not sure you can use it in any meaningful way beyond saying expect the unexpected and how much use is that when it comes to choosing where to invest?

Exactly.

Social "scientists" and economists are kind of like fiction writers - they take a known event and build narratives around it, and present some theories and hypotheses. Is it useful to predict future events, not so much. In that regard, they are even less of a science than history - at least historians try to faithfully document what really happened, whilst social science and economics are just retrospective guessing.