[RodericDay]

I'm an engineer too, and I fully agree with you.

My particular peeve is engineers who kowtow to economics, putting it in a much higher pedestal than sociology or anthropology, because it is "mathy". The implicit assumptions are usually along the lines of "the assumptions seem obvious enough, and look at all those formulae in the transformations thereof!"

[gizi]

Science id defined by its method: to set up experiments in order to look for counterexamples for a theorem. It is pretty much impossible to set up experiments in economics. While I agree that sociology and anthropology do not satisfy the definition of science, economics does not either. Where are the experiments? Without experiments, no science.

[tpeo]

Do astronomers perform experiments?

This is the example used in methodological discussions of economics. I don't know if astronomers do actually perform experiments on some limited scale, but it seems that classicaly they relied on "luck" to test predictions e. g. testing general relativity through observations of eclipses. In social sciences, there is a somewhat similar thing called "natural experiment", which is the main test for the validity of predictions. In both cases, the researcher takes a more passive role in testing his predictions.

This can be dauting to researchers, but overall it's for the best. There are indeed experiments in economics, specially in game theory. But the majority of possible experiments would cross the boundary of what is morally acceptable, and well into morally abhorrent e. g. randomly restricting a sample's access to education to estimate it's effects on wages.

[marcosdumay]

It helps that astronomy is a branch of physics. In a sense, astronomers do perform experiments, on different conditions but with the same theory. (By the way, that's what bothers me most about cosmology, it seems to not agree with any small scale experiment performed.)

Well, certainly, natural experiments can lead to knowledge. But that's a much slower and more dangerous path, artificial experiments are better in every sense, except that they are mostly not available for economics. Anyway, I don't think the use of natural experiments are the bottleneck currently holding economics back.

[JoeAltmaier]

That's an antique notion. There are plenty of rigorous experiments being done in all of those fields.

[gizi]

For every theorem in sociology, for example, can you show us what experiment they set up, and what results they obtained and how we can repeat their experiment in order to find counterexamples for their theorem? From there, I will acknowledge the scientific status of that one, single theorem. I will still consider every other statement in sociology to be non-science. Seriously, they must produce such data for every single one of their theorems. Physics does that. Chemistry does that. Why would sociology be entitled to the same scientific status without putting in the same effort?

[darkmighty]

You're confusing science with mathematics. There are no theorems in science, it's all experimental. We have certainty on a few basic principles or models and make inferences based on those models.

I'm not going to defend sociology specifically because I don't know the field or it's state, but in every science (e.g. chemistry), you make a model for some restricted case to fit some data and you make assumptions on the scope of the model. Otherwise you couldn't say pretty much anything about anything: "We tested that proton and that one has a mass of X units. We can't say anything about this proton, thogh." -- the evidence piles up that the model has widespread vality. In the same sense, we can make assumptions on the scope of models. Of course, I imagine we have no hope for the time being of uniting the basic physical laws to that of sociology, simply because we don't have the power to understand the human brain just yet. I don't think refraining from modelling behavior is useful, and it will probably even help us better model the brain and generalize it's behavior towards "better" intelligence (AI).

[darkmighty]

Try telling that to this guy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjVDqfUhXOY