[leeoniya]

i think the monimum bar for something to be science is that it has to have a rigor to it which can be used for removing doubt:

- hypothesis

- control group

- well chosen or random samples from representative population

- statistical significance

- a way to separate correlation from causation

- enumeration of conflating factors and potential for flaws in the chosen methodology

- list of prior studies or research

- peer review

- reproducibility, possibly using alternative methods

until all of this is done, a survey (or any study) is not science. convincing the layman is insufficient; you have to convince other experts in the field.

[sytelus]

In a way, science is a process of creating a model. To create a model, you first need evidence (i.e. data) and then you form hypothesis which your proposed model. Then you make prediction using your model that wasn't known before. If predictions continues to remain true over time then you have higher confidence in your model. However, a true scientist would never set his/her confidence to 1.0 in any model because all models are eventually wrong and needs to be improved further. So the science is the process of continuously gathering evidence, improving model and remain skeptical that you might be wrong. It is very much like training a machine learned model using training data. Most soft sciences do the first two steps and bypass everything else. It's like you created ML model, you had good result on training data but you never tested your model on hold out set, assumed your model was good enough and just moved on to make a press release.