your maxim will probably not be backed up by empirical evidence.

Probably. But that's a well known problem with determining truth in the human i.e. non physical world. It's why we have a system of courts.

Scientific method = truth in the non human world.

Courts / juries = truth in the human world.

Obviously there are other methods that work some of the time, but pretty much everything else is propaganda/opinion.

Anyway, keep up the good work. But don't forget to include yourself in your continuing quest to understand the world.

I'll leave you with some create quotes:

I'm a physicist, which means I'm a natural scientist, which means that I believe that natural phenomena can be understood, described, quantified, predicted and controlled, and no one would find anything questionable about this statement...what if we replace natural phenomena with humans...obviously a very scary statement - Albert László Barabási

Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market...Our analysis is reality-based. - James Glattfelder

The financial world has proven by demonstration that we humans are abundantly capable of building systems that we can neither understand nor control - Richard Thieme

Capitalism provides very powerful motivations for economic activity because it associates economic motivations so closely with self-interest. But this same feature, which is a source of strength in providing economic motivation through the pursuit of profits, is also a source of weakness owing to the fact that so self-centered a motivation contributes very readily to a loss of economic coordination. Each individual, just because he is so powerfully motivated by self-interest, easily loses sight of the role which his own activities play in the economic system as a whole, and tends to act as if his activities were the whole, with inevitable injury to that whole - Carroll Quigley