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Notes -
Hoo boy, do I have some bad news for you.
Molecular biology works fine for messing around with neurons in a tissue culture dish, but it provides remarkably little insight into a complex system like the brain. It's good for saying if I knock this gene out we lose action potentials, therefore this gene is at least required for that process (how it fits in with the 1000s of other genes involved in that process? Often much less clear).
Anytime you zoom out to a broader systems-level view, or anytime you disconnect your work from some ground truth we're inevitably left with woo. If it weren't for clinical trials enforcing some measure of 'woo' colliding with reality, probably the entirety of the life sciences wouldn't be that far off from phrenology-level fMRI experiments.
Anyways. Sure, the social sciences are a waste of time from a scientific standpoint. I'd argue they have other uses, but that's a bit beside my point - the majority of research in the life sciences as a whole is largely subjective bullshit. It's always a shock to fresh students coming in how arbitrary and ineffective a lot of what we do is when they're used to textbooks having all the answers and making science out to be some dispassionate, objective endeavor.
Maybe we have different definitions of social sciences. I don't think that history, for example, is a waste of time from a scientific standpoint. You can't do experiments with history, but you can certainly use logic to figure out that some theories about what happened in the past are more likely to be accurate than others, you can search for additional primary evidence, and so on.
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