[superposeur]

> Sorry to break it to the hard-sciencers

Believe me, you aren't "breaking" anything to anyone. If you could solve the secret of happiness (your example), no amount of money would be too small.

The issue isn't whether social science would be good to figure out. Definitely it would, to the extent there is actually a "thing" to figure out, which may be true and may not; i.e., "what makes people happy" may be so contingent and/or so ineluctably open to interpretation that it makes no sense as a rigorizable concept. (There is nothing wrong with unrigorous concepts, btw, these have been fruitfully explored by the poets and philosophers and therapists.)

Ok, so even granting that there is a stable, rigorizable "truth" for the social sciences to discover, the issue is whether the methods and analyses as they have been practiced are effective or even could be tweaked to be effective. Clearly, they aren't. And not just a few bad apple studies, but seemingly the whole darn lot.

[llamaimperative]

> Clearly, they aren’t

Arguing is easy when you just assert your conclusion eh?