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You are conflating multiple issues here: whether social science studies are valid, whether the effects of social science are beneficial to society, whether pass

You are conflating multiple issues here: whether social science studies are valid, whether the effects of social science are beneficial to society, whether passing some "scientific method test" is a requirement for an approach to be "good." To take one example (of many), all of consumer marketing is an outgrowth of social science - nowadays consumer marketing, behavioral psychology, and behavioral economics are overlapping fields which happen to go by different names. We might debate whether marketing has been "beneficial," but I don't think you can reasonably argue that all marketing doesn't work just because the math behind it isn't as rigorous as quantum mechanics. (Not that we completely understand quantum mechanics.)

JDDunn9 13y ago
Consumer marketing would be a good example of something that has no long-term benefit because society changes too often. Marketing techniques that work in one decade won't work in the next. Because of this, marketing isn't cumulative. Our knowledge of the hard sciences is always improving, building on the work of the previous generations. Yes, there are legitimate fields that don't have rigorous math behind them, but the social sciences try to use studies and numbers as the foundation of their theories. They want to be treated like biology, but their studies are not up to par.