Gay isn't the President of Harvard because she's widely viewed as one of the most effective social scientists of her generation; if anything, her hiring puzzled social scientists, because of her scant track record. So calling out her whole academic discipline is a non sequitur. By the letter of your arguments, she's close to the ideal social scientist for the role: one who does very little social science.

Culture, tradition, and religion are all objects of study by social scientists. People do social science one way or the other. You can't have a world without it; you can only have good social science or bad social science. Again: that Harvard produces bad social science is hardly an outré argument. Just make that argument.

You’re begging the question. Just because people who study the same objects as culture, tradition, and religion, call their field a “science” does not mean we have to accept their terminology. I would call their field something more akin to theology, with the use of numbers being a sort of ritualistic exercise. Gay’s presidency is consistent with that—it simply abandons the pretense that those trappings actually matter to the field.

It's called "science" because it uses the tools of science to address questions about its subjects. Like all sciences, it makes predictions and tests them. As any social scientist will tell you, it is much more difficult to model and predict social phenomenon than basic physical phenomenon. You know that, which is why, in the message on the other branch of this thread, you couch your objection in "precise" predictions --- not an actual qualifier of science, but a decent rhetorical hedge.

Ultimately though, you're just quibbling with the name. You're as intensively interested in this field of study as its practitioners; from economics to developmental psychology, it is almost all you talk about. That's fine! But really, you just object to the conclusions you perceive social scientists to be arriving at.

> you're just quibbling with the name.

I'm not quibbling with the name, I'm objecting to classifying them together with real scientists. That classification has immense implications for how society views them and their assertions. I'd be fine if they called themselves scientists, if we called real scientists something else. The point is that society should recognize that their aping of scientific methodology confers no special validity to their conclusions.

> I'm objecting to classifying them together with real scientists.

Do you regard meteorology as a science? As a group, meteorologists aspire to make the best predictions they can with the available tools AND to develop better tools. As near as I can tell, social scientists do basically the same (as exemplified by, e.g., Kahneman and Tversky).

> Culture and tradition also relies on experiential knowledge—that doesn’t make it a science.

What's "science"? In mediaeval Europe, theology was viewed as a "science", indeed the "queen of the sciences", more noble than all the others. It may be objected that "science" was used in a broader sense in the Middle Ages than today; maybe that's true, but on the other hand, it is unclear exactly what the contemporary definition actually is - nowadays, people talk of "science" or "sciences" which are variously described as "natural", "empirical", "observational", "experiential", "experimental", "formal", "theoretical", "mathematical", "psychological", "medical", "clinical", "social", "legal", "human", "historical", "philological", etc - what is it that all these things actually have in common?

> Indeed, my problem with the social sciences is that they intrude on the province of culture, tradition, and religion. It fills the vacuum of authority resulting from the secularization of society

As well as the traditional Christian understanding of "theology as a science", I might also point to the phrases one sometimes encounters in Islamic contexts, such as the "science of hadith" or "science of fiqh". The idea you have of culture/tradition/religion and science as opposed is in itself rather non-traditional, not how mediaeval thinkers thought.

I would say that science requires being able to formulate internally consistent theories that generate precise predictions of reality that can be falsified by experiment. Nuclear physics is a science. Medicine is barely one. Simply drawing rough conclusions from data isn’t science—that’s something everyone does.

> I would say that science requires being able to formulate internally consistent theories that generate precise predictions of reality that can be falsified by experiment.

Is astronomy a science then? Astronomy is often said to be an observational rather than experimental science, but if your definition of "science" requires falsification by experiment (as opposed to just observation), then astronomy might not be a science at all.

And social science can make experimentally falsifiable claims. For example, one theory in political science (with some data to support it) claims that parliamentary systems (in which the executive is subordinated to the legislature) produce superior outcomes (greater political stability, superior policy choices, etc) to presidential systems (in which the legislative and executive branches are independent and roughly equal powers). One way to test this experimentally: convince a few US states to adopt the parliamentary system, wait a few decades, and then look for any statistically significant differences in outcomes between those states which adopted a parliamentary system versus those which retained a presidential (or should I say gubernatorial) one.

I mentioned before Eric Kaufmann. His book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? suggests that religion will triumph over secularism in the long-run due to a higher birth rate. If, over the next 500 years, the world never gets significantly less secular than it is today, I think he'd agree his theory would be falsified.