Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is about time that we call out soft sciences for what they are. Pretty much a hoax and a way to escape real work when going to university. Two of my partners both have academic degrees in soft sciences, one even made it to a PhD. And both pretty much lack understanding of the scientiific process. This is horrifying, because society treats them as if they should know.
And if you think that's bad, just wait till you hear about string theory! /s Honestly this is a thin critique indeed. Social sciences are difficult precisely because they focus on phenomena with multi-factorial causes. Simple, high confidence, predictive theories are rare in psychology, sociology, anthropology etc, not because social scientists are committing a 'hoax'. In part because the factors impacting individual…
Furthermore, there is a difference between something being difficult and it being impossible. Many don't realize that astrology was, for many centuries a "real" science, at least as real as modern social science is. It only ended, with some irony, because of the Church. They claimed that astrology's claims to be able to effectively divine the future was heretical and blasphemous, which led to astrology to go from a staple of education and science to being a fringe pseudoscience used for entertainment purposes only. I've no doubt that many practitioners of the time did genuinely feel that what they were doing was simply very difficult. And in fact there probably are some incidental correlations one can draw based on groups across time, so they would be able to show some "real" results, even if the entire field was completely bunk.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_psycholo...