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pnrjulius comments on Selling Nonapples - Less Wrong
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I was with you until that last part about economics. Behavioral economists ARE working on actual detailed models of human economic decisions that use assumptions other than economic rationality. They use things like hyperbolic discounting (as opposed to just "nonexponential" discounting) and distance-mediated altruism (rather than just "nonselfishness"). So they're not making nonwagons out of nonwood; they're trying to make cars out of steel. They haven't finished yet; but it's really not fair to expect a new paradigm to achieve in 10 years what the old paradigm did in 200.
Maybe this was meant to go against popular accounts of economics... but frankly most popular accounts of economics are so bad they don't even rise to this level. They are things like "the Mexicans are stealing our jobs" "the bourgeoisie oppress the prolerariat" and "taxation is slavery", which are just so blatantly wrong they can't even be formulated in terms of serious economic models.
There's a middle ground between pop-econ and the behavioral economists. E.g. Austrian economists and some non-economist social scientists often complain about assumptions of rationality and equilibrium without providing much in the way of an alternative.
ETA: Some Austrians even explicitly criticize behavioral economists.
You're right, but there's also a lot of calls for 'non-apple' economics out there too. I try to avoid the sources of that material, but it's far more common than what you're referring to. I don't think Robin (and thus Eliezer, in what he appended to the original post) was referring to behavioral economics as an example of the topic of this post.