In short, whether our investigations in the social sciences be statistical or dynamic - and they should participate in the nature of both - they can never be good to more than a very few decimal places, and, in short, can never furnish us with a quantity of verifiable, significant information which begins to compare with that which we have learned to expect in the natural sciences. We cannot afford to neglect them; neither should we build exaggerated expectations of their possibilities. There is much which we must leave, whether we like it or not, to the un- "scientific," narrative method of the professional historian.
Norbert Wiener, 1948
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