"Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."
To extend your argument, you make money on it the same way as you do for those things that have been around forever. For jobs and dating, listing fees. For search, search marketing. And using the social graph to better target ads should increase CPMs by much more than content-based targeting.
I agree that social science is different from the physical sciences, but that's not an excuse for the cargo cult science that dominates the field. Read Historians' Fallacies for a view of how the social sciences should approach their work. (http://www.amazon.com/Historians-Fallacies-Toward-Historical...).
Social sciences have well-developed methodologies for dealing with fallacies. http://www.amazon.com/Experimental-Quasi-Experimental-Design... is the bible, and is mostly taught to doctoral students. But chances are Mr. Collins has never heard of it, since he's in business faculty. But he might have, and might actually have a solid research design. Just that its hard to tell from the book.
The practice of management in the real world is full of imperfections, because its about people, and people are imperfect.
