It's about the problems you can study. Take the Cornell Food Lab as example. One of the examples was that people will eat less sweets if they are stashed away

It's about the problems you can study. Take the Cornell Food Lab as example. One of the examples was that people will eat less sweets if they are stashed away and not fully visible on a table. It's interesting and it might very well be true, overall. But it is absurdly hard to know for sure. For one, devising an experiment for this is very hard. But the main problem is that you will absolutely find at least one person that eats more sweets when they are stashed away. So, the theory is wrong? Not really. It might be an invalid theory though. But if you think that, there are very few things those fields could study. I'd say there were no use for them. > they have sufficiently nuanced theories that sifting through petabytes of data to find what you claim exists is justified. That does not sound like searching for falsifiability to me. However, it sounds like the workaround I also tried: Backing a theory - that expects an overall result, not to be true for each individual - up with as much data as possible so one can reasonable assume it is true. But that's not really the correct approach. No, for something like the Higg Boson they try to see it or its effects (and if they were not to see it in the right circumstances, the theory were false). Might be a bad example though given how it touches physicists theory building.