That being said, I wouldn't beat up the social scientists too much because other fields have their problems too. It happens even in math to some extent, which is more objective and precise than any other field. I've occasionally gotten math papers to review that had 50+ pages of dense proofs, and although I could in principle go through it in detail and verify that everything is correct, there is no way I'm spending the time to do that (and do it for free). The ABC conjecture is an extreme example of this, where entire conferences have been devoted to just understand what one person did in his 500 page paper.
Been there done that, amen! I once had to review a paper on my field of Physics coming from Italy. What was said in the abstract did not reflect at all what the actual content was. Their original manuscript was like 6 pages long. My review notes were 8 pages long, given the numerous errors, unsubstantiated claims and that the paper did not provide enough information for a repetition of the experiment. I believe I made a mistake in giving them a chance to improve it, in the hindsight I should have failed the paper immediately. It took a bloody weekend to go through that. My biggest gripe here is that I don't get paid anything for reviewing papers, but it is OK for the publishers to charge like $ 40 from a single download!
Lesson learned, I don't review publications any more - it was that one contribution of mine for betterment of human kind.
There's lots of lovely accounts in the lovely book "A short history of nearly everything" by Bill Bryson of geology and continental drift, and their (our?) difficulty with accepting that, which eventually involved drawing land bridges everywhere to explain why african and american plants and animals have remarkable similarities. I have a geology book from the eighties that barely acknowledges the theory, yet here we are: Continental drift is now the foundation on which geology is based, in the same way that the evolution theory is the foundation on which biology is based.
Incidentally, one of my colleagues lost the sense of touch from the other half of his face due to an acute nerve infection. Today he mentioned that doctors are saying that nerves do grow back, but it takes a lot of time for that to happen. So he can look forward of getting that sense back to his face in about half a year. But in the 1980s books when I attended primary school there was a clear distinction between the damage to the nerves and to pretty much everything else in the body. Nerve damage does not recuperate was the statement, and everyone of us listening recalled that. Apparently things have changed. Then again, the evidence has been there for some time. Some quadriplegics and paralyzed people have recovered, and that's not possible without some kind of recuperation process in the nerve system.
The thing with Maths and String Theory is that there are very few people who can understand what's being told. However, these studies are not affecting currently a lot of things. The same cannot unfortunately be said about the research of Social Sciences. I've said that I accept the now prevailing explanation why galaxies spin faster than they should, but I note as well that nobody has sent a satellite to another galaxy as of today. That single experiment alone, if possible with nowadays technology, could alone invalidate a bunch of work related to dynamics of galaxies. So I sort of remain sceptical of the astronomy outside our solar system. But they do get nice pictures of the faint galaxies, I'll have to give them that at least. The planetary discoveries are also racking up, and I tend to believe these are actual planets.
What it comes to the ethics of Science, guess what's the best driver for development of Medical Sciences?