>>>No, it boils down to the guy in the cart, and the existence of the cart. Both continents would have probably been better off doing what they want for themselves, without any cart to pull.
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>>>As for those social so-called "sciences"... c'mon. They'd be doing the same thing they are doing anyway, just to a different tune.
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>>Hey, watch it... I have a Master's degree in Sociology...
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>I'm watching but I can't see... so if you can help me, what's its basic axiom? What's its underlying theory?
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>My point is that in my neck of the woods these were called "social sciences", but I thought it was a communist plot to elevate Marxism and their own social theories to the rank of actual science, and guess what - we had mandatory sociology, political economy and a couple of civics and defense related courses on every college. The guys who were studying that didn't have physics, maths or chemistry as mandatory.
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>But then the more I learned on those, the less I was convinced they were sciences. Areas of human knowledge which apply scientific method as far as it goes, fine, but not sciences. Because most of the time they aren't exact, they are statistics, projections, can't check each other's work, can't repeat an experiment, there are too many variables to consider, you're never sure whether the results you got come from your introduced variable or some unforeseen factor etc. The matter presents a problem of far higher level of complexity, by orders of magnitude, that it's still unfeasible to write anything down and vouch for it. It's still too dependent on the milieu, mores of the times, culture etc, what you may find in one country, may not even be true for most of that country or even the city where you did the research.
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>Once I saw a classification of problems by complexity - simple, complex and friggin complex (because I forgot the actual words used :). Simple problems are just the basic mechanical or chemical laws - how to make fire, how to plant seeds, how does gravity operate (not what makes it work!) - things which may be described by a couple of equations or the algorithm written down on a single page.
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>The complex problems are those of, say, engineering or group organization - how to build an ocean liner, how to conduct an orchestra, how to run a company, how to play chess, how to write a novel. The variables run into hundreds, and the algorithm may be a size of a book, but you still know what to do. Sometimes, you can solve a highly complex problem by simplifying it into a just complex - you can run an army, but not of individual soldiers, but rather of depersonalized "troops", you can run a country by looking at the map, graphs, reports etc, without necessarily knowing what's going on in most of it. Abstraction yields reduction yields simplification to a level of a regular complex problem.
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>Then there are really complex problems, like understanding the human body from cell level up, building a complete planetary meteorological model, semantically correct machine translation etc etc. I guess humanities (as sociology et al are called here) as such highly complex problems will become sciences once there's a solution at this complex level, i.e. when they can have an exact explanation of how and why things happen in human societies. Until then... I actually don't envy you guys. We mathematicians have it simple - we can just imagine a set of axioms, follow a logic and see what we get, and then someday someone will put it to some practical use. You have people, much more complex.

This could be a long conversation, but basically I agree with your view that social sciences deal with immensely complex and variables -filled topics. It is much easier to plot and project the path of a rocket to the moon than it is to predict what an individual person might decide at any given point. Expand that to a community or an entire country and you'll be better off flipping a coin than relying on scientific theories. I believe that social sciences are much better at explaining and understanding what happened in the past than what will happen in the future. Yet it is a scientific discipline with scientific methods which at least attempts to organize and categorize information gained from history, social experiments, wars, community actions etc. Given the inherently inexact nature of this science it has always been susceptible to political manipulation, which in turn tends to reduce its perceived objectivity over time. I'm sure you are well aware of this, given your background. I found out early on that if I know what my professor's political slant is, I can tailor my essays and research to that slant and get straight A's. Can't do that with math!

My main reason for studying sociology in the first place was because at the time I was a journalist, and I wanted to get a better and more organized understanding of the "psychology of societies." And as it turned out, this was a very good choice for my profession.

My minor was in macroeconomics, which was quite interesting, since we got to use a lot of math mixed with behavioral science in order to understand the past and predict the future, With math in the mix we got much closer to making good predictions at least for the near future, but it still remained an inexact science with a lot of "human variables." You don't really need to look further than the stock market to see that perception drives economy as much as any underlying "hard" fiscal data.