Climate change strikes me as another candidate for your category of “not science.” There are science-y things about it, like measuring temperatures and looking at carbon densities. But when confronted with anomalies, the model-builders (it seems to me) modify their models to incorporate the anomalies without changing the final prediction.

Why are there even studies to show this (we know why of course)? Such studies are bass ackwards. The studies should all be focused on what effects should be controlled for. If you still didn’t find parity all that means us you are missing an effect or that your bins are not labeled correctly (“males” and “females” are not homogeneous).

In the first sentence you contrast “libertarian” and “duh”, only to explain in the second sentence that it is the specifically “libertarian part” to complain/declare “duh” with respect to Public Choice, i.e. protesting its obviousness.

If Public Choice is not “libertarian,” how can it be pronounced “duh” by libertarians?

“In natural science, there are relatively many falsifiable propositions and relatively few attractive interpretive frameworks. In the social sciences, there are relatively many attractive interpretive frameworks and relatively few falsifiable propositions.”

This and the entire post is absolutely brilliant.

However, I fail to see a coherent application of Arnold’s social-scientific agnosticism in his writing in so far as he maintains, it appears to me, a rather rigid or conventional commitment toward libertarian preconceptions or preferences for selective perception (e.g. a penchant for the public choice perspective, which is at best a segment in a far larger agnostic spectrum).

Another implication of his agnosticism would seem to strongly suggest that politics, a politicised society should be regarded a normal condition, rather than a wicked outgrowth of leftist activism/preponderance and/or the result of dissenters being social-scientifically less educated than the likes of him are.

On reading brilliant scholars (recent reads of mine, which is why I mention them specifically) like Geoffrey Hodgson

http://www.geoffrey-hodgson.info/webnotes.htm

or Warren Samuels, I never cease to be taken aback by the utter crudeness of the leftist arguments they revert to when it comes to run-of-the-mill political issues – there is a complete disconnect between the sophistication of their minds and the triteness of their political affiliation, as if one did not have anything to do with the other.

Excuse my being rather cheeky here, but dare I say, I seem to detect a certain political stubbornness, an ideological inertia in Arnold that does not always square with his own writing.