[giftedbygod]

And will you apply science to an angry mob burning US flags and killing because of a movie?

You have so called "social sciences", but they are pretty much useless otherwise there would be someone paying them a lots of money to figure out what will happen next for example in the Middle East.

Sciences are very limited once you get a human being with free will into the equation. And then you multiple that by culture than by genes then by experiences and then by 6 billion.

I love history. And the main reason for my love of history is love of science fiction. If Nazi Germany never happened, don't you think that the whole story would make amazing science-fiction? How you apply scientific method to history? You can analyze, but as soon as you do your results/opinions will be different than anybody else's at least at some level. It's not like we all know 2+2=4. Now try Why people voted for Hitler? Good luck with your fixed narrow-minded analytical mindset to figure this one out. You can have debates for years about it and still you won't know for sure anything. Science is for people who want the right answer right away. Life is more complex than that simplistic view.

[TeMPOraL]

> Science is for people who want the right answer right away. Life is more complex than that simplistic view.

A simplistic view is assuming that scientists (and for that matter geeks/math guys/programmers) see things in 0-s and 1-s, strictly defined terms, etc. Math and science are much better equipped to handle fuzziness and lack of precision than any kind of "common sense" or soft whatever. It's just the other way around - handwaving at things because they are fuzzy and complex is a simplistic thing. Approaching them with combined might of all the advances in understanding and technology is what scientists do (or at least should do).

[mbesto]

These "sciences" are limited because they don't follow the scientific method. In the scientific method, only conclusions are accepted if they can be reproduced infinitely. The lines get blurred often because experiments cannot be conducted indefinitely. The media (or organizations) tend to skew the retest of experiments for their own agendas.

Hence why, for example, Economics is also not a science.

[_urga]

Did it happen? What does it mean? Our history is far more embarrassing/surprising/extraordinary than we like to admit. Which may be why we like to speak so much of science and so little of history. But history holds its own. Often it's not the happening of an event in history that we have difficulty with, but its meaning. Consider the historical accounts of Christ ("the King"). He happened, in history. We read the letters written by those who persecuted him, believed him, walked with him, saw him do the things he did, those who loved him and those who hated him. Did it happen? To the historian, of course. But to the common man, what does it mean? And there we grind to a halt... mistaking naturalism for science, unfamiliar with the nature of historical evidence, textual criticism, the death of form criticism, practicing historical revisionism, historical denial, conflating possibility with frequentism etc. But did it happen? If it happened, what does it mean?

[ebiester]

The social sciences are to business as the hard sciences are to engineering. The theories of persuasion that came out of communications and social psychology departments revolutionized marketing. The Likert scale was developed by a psychologist, and is one of the foundations of all surveys.

Much of what we think about "big data" and applied statistics were pioneered in Sociology departments.

Anthropolology informed how businesses do intercultural communication. I know a professor who did a side project for a multinational about connotations based on color and imagery in their products and how a particular culture would relate.

And I know for a fact that the CIA hires out of regional studies departments. So yes, the government is paying people trained in the social sciences a lot of money to figure out what will "happen next" in the Middle East..

[beeneto]

> You have so called "social sciences", but they are pretty much useless otherwise there would be someone paying them a lots of money to figure out what will happen next for example in the Middle East.

It doesn't follow from "nobody pays social scientists" that "social science is useless", if it were true there could be many reasons why nobody paid for research in the social sciences.

But in fact someone is paying them a lot of money for them to figure out what will happen next for example in the middle east, e.g.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Social_Policy_and...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Political_and_economic...

> Sciences are very limited once you get a human being with free will into the equation. And then you multiple that by culture than by genes then by experiences and then by 6 billion.

Free will, if it exists, isn't the problem that the scientific method has when dealing with people. Any system as complex as a person has too many variables to be able to control in an experiment.

[padobson]

+1 Your existence will be cold, lonely, and meaningless if you only ever act on falsifiable information.

[jasongullickson]

What do you propose as an alternative that addresses the deficiencies you identify here?