I simply see nothing comparable among natural scientists, who are generally capable of dissolving the concepts they work with and avoiding getting lost in such elaborate fantasies built of reified artificial concepts.
While that's mostly true today after several centuries of work, Newton would have been hard pressed to explain what a force was without resorting to something that sounds like mysticism. Also calculus was only placed on a firm mathematical footing by Weierstrass two centuries after Newton had invented it and based his physics on it.
That's not a good comparison. Every physical theory postulates the existence of some fundamental constituents of reality that cannot be reduced further. (And a practically useful theory may well treat that way concepts that we in principle know how to reduce to something more fundamental, but it would be impractical to do so.) The concepts in economics that I'm attacking are a completely different case: they consist of quantities defined in arbitrary ways, whose arbitrariness is then forgotten -- leading to their treatment as objective properties of realit...
A Wall Street Journal article by Harvard professor of government Harvey Mansfield claims that the social sciences and humanities are inferior to the sciences. The article implicitly urges undergraduates to major in science. From the article:
Do you agree with this? As a game theorist I probably have a rather biased view of the situation. It's certainly true that the ideal of the scientific method is vastly better than the practice of economists, but I think that majoring in economics provides better training for a rationalist than majoring in any of the sciences does.
Economics explicitly considers what it means to be rational. Although it infrequently considers ways in which humans are irrational, I'm under the impression that the hard sciences never do this. Furthermore, because economists can almost never perform replicable experiments we have to rely on what everyone in the profession recognizes as messy data; therefore we’re far more equipped than hard scientists to understand the limits of using statistical inference to draw conclusions from real world situations. Although I have seen no data on this, I bet that a claim by nutritionists that they have found a strong causal link between some X and heart disease would be treated with far more skepticism by the average economist than the average hard scientist.