I'd wager most of us here have been punished by bad science and bad scientists at some point in our lives, if not all along the way.
Where things really went bad was with the misguided attempts in the 20th c. to expunge philosophy, specifically metaphysics, from the sciences. The domination of the landscape by Logical Positivism, Logical Empiricism, and its offspring such as Skinnerian Behaviorism, represented a bleak period in history, not just for human knowledge, but for the human condition.
Metaphysics, just the ordinary business of reasoning about unobservables (and nothing to do with mysticism), eventually made a return in the early 1970s with the publication of a seminal work, easily the most important work of philosophy published in more than a half century. Anyone know what this work is? I ask because most people don't, and that illustrates my point keenly. [Answer to come.] The importance of metaphysics has not to date made itself understood in any of the scientific fields, specifically the social sciences, and progress is not nearly what it could and should be. But there are important contributions out there in naturalist philosophy, just not where they do most of us any good.
Science is a natural kind. It exists independently of any of our attempts to characterize it. It exists in a natural tendency, and it is surprisingly robust, robust enough to give the illusion that we're somehow always on the right track, even when we aren't. So when I say the social sciences are proper sciences, it's because they are, and it just so happens that they are done badly most of the time. As a science that is heavy on the metaphysics component, it is more difficult to "see" the answers, and for the most part, all we have is a historical web of reasoning stretching back 2500 years to draw on.