Damn you said exactly what I wanted to say but way more concisely haha. > To me, it raises the question of whether for the goals of any kind of "social science

Damn you said exactly what I wanted to say but way more concisely haha. > To me, it raises the question of whether for the goals of any kind of "social science" to come to fruition if it must become an artistic practice. “Artistic practice” is absolutely what I think the field is missing, and which many other disciplines with similar concerns (ex. marketing) are way more enthusiastic to incorporate. And thats not just about getting social scientists to start painting or whatever, but more adopting that mindset of an artist trying to perfect their craft. The basic program for the performing artist is to bomb over and over again until you can change people’s behavior “by feel” (or maybe you never develop the knack and change careers). Politicians similarly start out by pressing the flesh and going to endless community meetings until they figure out how to move a crowd. Doing these things isn’t “hard” once you’ve figured out the trick, but it’s a skill that you acquire by extensive practice and apply by intuition/artistic judgment, rather than something that you can figure out solely through sufficiently rigorous analytics. Not to say that this isn’t experimentation, it absolutely is, but it’s not laboratory experimentation, it’s fully integrated within the real world.