Most of the really important parts of our lives — who we love and how, how we live and why, why we lie and when — have yet to yield their secrets to real evidence.
Here is more. Here is a full directory of optimistic prognostications. Arnold Kling comments on same.
Odd choice of excerpt — the least optimistic sentence in Shirky’s essay.
Evolutionary psychology is a step towards evidence-based social science?
I agree with Neal that the historical evidence for the results of efforts to emulate the hard sciences in human behaviors is atrocious. That road is littered not only with Marxists but with a lot of embarrassingly bad research by otherwise smart people. I’m not sure that someone who actually believes in acting only on evidence can pursue evidence-based research into love, life decisions, etc., without a contradiction. IMHO, Feynman’s essay on “Cargo Cult Science” is a good description of nearly people who dream of making social science more like physics.
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