The problem in my view is that everything can be measured like hard science in the first place (not to mention the issue with fraud you point out in hard scienc

The problem in my view is that everything can be measured like hard science in the first place (not to mention the issue with fraud you point out in hard science). I am think the idea that a thing is only a science if and only if it's empirical is actually harmful, science used to refer to a more generalized idea of study 'scientia' this could also be mathematics or theology. Then natural science begins to eat the term and becomes more limited. I think that the current place we are is one that is actually has a very dim view of anyone thinking about a topic and is naively optimistic about experimentation in general. For if one looks at Aristotle theories ideas one may laugh given what we know now, despite using empirical reasoning for lots of his observations, Never the less I think where useful at the time as it's great for a theory to be good but failing that if a theory can usefully explain phenomena and provide one with mastery of phenomena in some limited way it's still useful. Occam's often abused razor is a way of building theories like this and this whole process is similar to compression, given observable phenomena how do we explain phenomena in the most simple way, this process uses experimental and empirical data but requires thinking about the results of all experiments deeply. From an outsiders view Natural science's largely seem to have pretty good major theories that lots of results of experiments can be used to correct constants of some kind in the theory and a well established field of study of theoretical physics that largely seems to be operating in the way I outlined. But the social sciences are rather stupidly obsessed by these little experiment and no one has the guts to build bigger theories these days, for any theory of the human mind has to deal with many variables and if one wants to have descriptive theories of human mind then one needs to do a lot of thinking and theorizing and sometimes separate form empirical data and then arguing the theories using the data and reject the theories using the data, but also other kinds of analysis. I have the most dim view of modern political science and sociology even more so, they tend to adopt this way of operating the most and to actually operate in that realm they need to theorize the most and experimental data is hard to do properly (and do not neglect history one bit, this is are experimental data and is as good as we can get).