NN Taleb has some advice nominally targeted at British Conservative leader David Cameron in The Guardian:

"The over-efficiency of the systems means things run smoothly, but are subject to rare but violent blow-ups."

"We replaced the heuristics of the elders with arrogant (and incompetent) beliefs, breaking, in the name of science, the chain of knowledge."

"Look at mother nature. There is a complex system built around sound principles that has insured both evolution and survival. It does not let anything get too big to fail. It breaks things early."

Read the whole thing. Unfortunately Taleb has become so inoculated against theory that he has blindsided himself to emergence-systems-complexity which offer a more reasoned path forward, but his diagnosis is again spot on.

Empiricism does not need to be in opposition to all theory, just to overblown theory.