She did not confuse humanities and social sciences. She started off focusing on humanities then segued into a bigger complaint about humanities and social sciences together sharing the same problem. The author has a doctorate from Columbia in psychology. So there's probably a lot more thought behind her frustrations.
As for the home departments of the authors, that doesn't change the fact that their work was humanities research. Unless you're saying humanities departments shouldn't be blamed for arguably bad humanities research produced by "outsiders" and published in physics journals. It doesn't appear to me that the publication contained any new applied math or physics.
Correlations are not science by the way, no matter how repeatable they are, they're just statistics. You need to prove causation to be scientific. Big analyses of countries generally can't do controlled experiments so their findings are always dependent on what they chose to include (and not include) in their models as the supposed causal mechanism.
As for the home departments of the authors, that doesn't change the fact that their work was humanities research. Unless you're saying humanities departments shouldn't be blamed for arguably bad humanities research produced by "outsiders" and published in physics journals. It doesn't appear to me that the publication contained any new applied math or physics.
Correlations are not science by the way, no matter how repeatable they are, they're just statistics. You need to prove causation to be scientific. Big analyses of countries generally can't do controlled experiments so their findings are always dependent on what they chose to include (and not include) in their models as the supposed causal mechanism.