I come from the field of criminology via anthropology, and as primarily an academic, I can safely say there are lots of stupid things that the social sciences do which make it hard to "translate" into actionable or practical application. One is the tendency to typologize or come up with names for things. This is usually either an exercise in semantics or some kind of ego trip in which the academic hopes the name will catch on and they will be forever cited in the literature because, after all, most literature reviews go like this: "Jones et al. remark that there are three types... whereas Smith holds the following four types exist...." Two is the deliberate fascination with theory building, an exercise devoted mainly to the development of "puzzles" for other academics to work on; i.e., providing the "stuff" or starting points for theses and dissertations. Most of this theory-testing only produces R-squares of .20 or .30 at best, which means a large percentage of known factors remain unknown. That's what makes social science a soft science, I suppose. We aren't dealing with close tolerances or things with 999.99% certainty like chemistry. Yet, there are some good practical applications derived from the occasional theoretical insight. Most of these are obtained by luck or serendipity rather than by design. Some are substantive, and the better ones involve being a polymath rather than toiling in the theory-practice divide.