After all, all science amounts to an approximate model, even your vaunted "hard sciences".
Read Kahneman's "Thinking,Fast and Slow" to get a better idea as to why.
Our biological heritage has left us - oh, OK, the vast majority of us - fundamentally incapable of understanding complex systems and making predictions that have any value beyond the immediate short term. Our intuition - our System 1 heuristics (read the book) - is completely ill-suited to this, and our reason - System 2 (ditto) - doesn't fare much better without advanced training.
Kahneman and others also cite many cases where trained experts make the same errors of judgement and analysis as the rest of us when they stray even fractionally from their areas of expertise.
The GP is right: We get a lot more of this "soft stuff" wrong than we get right because we generally don't bother to apply hard science methods to the problem.
Personal anecdote: I stopped listening to the news because I used to work in crypto. Well, that's the tl;dr reason.
I worked for a company that did PKI and noticed that tech journalists, who might be expected to at least have some greater technical background than just folk made egregious errors in their reporting, in reports that were researched and drafted and edited and considered and fact-checked prior to publication.
While PKI is complicated, it is not complex. Not like the economy. So if these "specialized" journalists with a technical leg up could get so much of something so simple so wrong, what were folks with degrees in English and/or journalism doing to something as advanced and out of our grasps as the economy?
Truth be told, I haven't stopped reading the news - I read it differently. Should an interesting headline catch my eye, I look for a few more. The more interesting the story, the more sources I check/read before accepting to learn anything from the reporting. This is a necessary side effect of how complex the world and its news are, and how simplistic reporting is.
Economists had no idea why their theories of rational actors were so flawed (but flawed they knew them to be) until Kahneman and Tversky came along. Hard science can only cast light on the dismal and dark, and the dismal and dark will remain so, will remain largely speculative, until they adopt our tools.
I mean if your entire field is dedicated to predicting the future of finance and economics and you don't predict them - it kind of shows that you really don't know what you are doing.
All I'm doing is pointing out that the social sciences have no clothes on.
You're reading too much into the disproportionate effect mistakes in economics have had on society. Science get things wrong all the time...failure is part of the learning process.
The social sciences don't have to because they aren't based on the scientific method - mainly the design and independence of repeatable experiments with controlled variables.
Hard science equations have no room for bullshit whereas the social ones do - hence EMH is still taught.
Also...I'm not an economist so I don't really know what's going on in this area...but maybe EMH is still being taught because it's the best model we have at the moment?
Are you sure it's being taught everywhere? Maybe some places have already dropped it? Change takes time.
EMH is taught globally and it will continue to be taught until such a point as people stop believing.
The same is true of many physical sciences - geophysics, oceanography, climate science, astronomy, etc. Your criticism applies to basically any scientific theory which has poorly understood microfoundations (i.e., a lot of them).
The EMH is taught because it's a useful approximation to reality, even if it's imperfect. Or, as the article puts it: Whether markets are efficient or not, and whether P = NP or not, there is no doubt that there will be markets that can allocate resources very close to efficiently and there will be algorithms that can solve problems very close to efficiently.
Incidentally, the EMH claims that financial crises are unpredictable. So the lack of useful predictions of the financial crisis is evidence in favor of the EMH.
[edit: Note, in response to Dn_Ab that 3SAT, the problem considered by the paper, is NP complete.]
Or for markets, aspects of it may invovle solving NP-Hard problems with efficient approximations that are themselves NP-Hard (you are better placed to opine on whether such a possibility is likely).
As for physics. The idea of not changing course is exactly what sets apart good theories from bad. If you have a new theory and it does not include the old at a limit then it is a good sign that you are doing something wrong. Newton was not wrong, just inaccurate. Einstein did not invalidate Newton, only corrected the extreme cases.
"I mean if your entire field is dedicated to predicting the
future of finance and economics and you don't predict them
- it kind of shows that you really don't know what you are
doing."