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Lumifer comments on What are your contrarian views? - Less Wrong
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The definitions that I found are very wide and very fuzzy, and, essentially, boil down to "social science but with computers!". Is it, basically, statistics (which nowadays is often called by the fancier name of "data science")?
I doubt you can find a widely-acceptable definition of Data Science which is any less fuzzy. Computational Social Science (CSS) is a subset of Data Science. Take Drew Conway's Data Science Venn Diagram: If your Substantive Expertise is a Social Science, you're doing Computational Social Science.
Statistics is an important tool in CSS, but it doesn't cover the other types of modeling we do: Agent-Based, System Dynamic, and Algorithmic Game Theoretic to name a few.
Ah, I see, so you're coming from that direction.
But let me ask a different question -- in what kind of business you're in? Are you in the business of making predictions? in the business of constructing explanations of how the world works? in the business of coming up with ways to manipulate the world to achieve desired ends?
I'm in the business of modeling. I do all three of those tasks, but the emphasis is definitely on the last.
Could you give examples of successful interventions that you field has come up with, that wouldn't otherwise have been put into practice?
Nope! Not to say that an intervention proposed by a computational social model has never influenced policy in real life--I just don't know of any examples. That said, I'm workin' on it.