Quote Originally Posted by tedteague View Post
How can you establish an empirical, causal connection between campaign contributions and candidate electability. One could say that Huntsman receives no money because he is not popular, OR that he is not popular because he receives no money from PACs and special interest groups. This is my problem with the social sciences AS A WHOLE. the only two I can tolerate are econometrics (not micro or macro) and Psychology. The others don't seem to establlish much of a conclusion. And econ is rapdily losing any of the meager credibility it had before
Nine tenths of the economists spent the last ten years telling us the world economy was getting better and better and nothing could possibly go wrong. The other tenth who told us we were riding for a fall were starting from exactly the same data and theories, so the fact that they were right just shows that they had better intuition, nothing to do with science.

As for psychology, it fails all the tests of a real science: its propositions cannot be falsified, its predictions do not come right more often than chance, and there is no objective way to test one theory against another. All successful schools of clinical psychology are based on the simple fact that most people can heal their own mental problems if they can talk to someone non-judgemental for long enough. It doesn't make a scrap of difference whether the listener calls hirself Freudian, Jungian, NLP, CBT, Behaviourist or whatever, so long as se has the nous to keep quiet and let the patient talk hirself out of trouble.