Yes, but as far as the economists are concerned, asking for someone to rectify CAPM with the low-volatility anomaly is just nuance. The author of this piece is

Yes, but as far as the economists are concerned, asking for someone to rectify CAPM with the low-volatility anomaly is just nuance. The author of this piece is saying, Let's not just throw unconstrained nuance at a theory: let's look at a holistic and sort of complexity-adjusted assessment of how well it's doing before we start asking it to behave like a Swiss Army knife, with a special mode to satisfy every empirical whim. I'm saying that this -- the argument against nuance of this type -- is used to defend otherwise flatly wrong theories. (And I misread your comment to be saying that about other fields of social science too.) In other words, when someone says, "But wait a minute, can you augment CAPM to handle the particular messy real-world case that I care about?" the response is: sorry, but we have to Occam's Razor away your request, we can't tailor it to everything. The problem is that that messy real-world case is not some bespoke, uncommon corner, but is the most up-front qualitative property of the whole theory. I guess what I'm saying is that the author says we should Occam's Razor-ify requests for nuance, yet in economics people masquerade as if they are doing legit Occam's Razoring (we can't tailor our analysis to every whim) when really they are just protecting pet theories that simply are bad. It's actually a caution against the way the OP's advice about constraining nuance can be misused and politically abused to defend models that are simply wrong.