I'm reading Jim Manzi's Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society right now. No complaints, though that's no surprise, as I'm familiar with the broad outline's of Manzi's work, and have found much to agree with him on in the past (though there are issues where we differ, never fear). That being said, I did ponder one aspect of Manzi's characterization of science: that it makes non-obvious predictions. This is not controversial, and I don't want to really quibble with it too much.
But in the context of social science in particular I think one of the gains of 'science' is the clarification of obvious predictions.
To illustrate what I'm talking about, the inverse-square law defines the decay of the intensity of light from a radiation source. Is this non-obvious? The precise decay function isn't obvious, but the general trend is clearly obvious. Intensity decreases with ...
