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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: November 14th, 2023

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  • a social science uses the scientific method, but experiments can’t really be replicated because of the moral and ethical implications of experimenting and deriving conclusions when studying humans and their interactions.

    economy is the most egregious because theories are applied in real societies with, sometimes, disastrous results. economists are taken way to seriously for their scientific output. psychology comes a close second because of exactly the same problem. not because those “scientists” come up with theories or hypotheses but because they apply, and test, faulty and incomplete conclusions to the real world.

    ps: i didn’t know about the formal sciences definition, but they do make sense.

    edit: just to add my biggest pet peeve with economics is that economists derive conclusions from incomplete data and different schools of economy use different metrics for the same concept. one case is that a few years ago uk changed how they measured gdp so that the numbers looked better and nobody called them out, and that happened because everybody has different metrics for assessing gdp. its all made up and the numbers don’t matter.