That is the best example I had of how one could, e.g, disagree with a scientific field by just erring on scepticism rather than taking the opposite view.
***
To answer your critique of that point, though again, I think it bares no or little relation to the article itself:
The “predictions” by which the theory is judges here are just as fuzzy and inferentially distant.
I am not a cosmologist, what I’ve read regrading cosmology have been mainly papers around unsupervised and semi-supervised clustering on noisy data, incidental evidence from those has made me doubt the complex ontologies proposed by cosmologists, given the seemingly huge degree of error acceptable in the process of “cleaning” data.
There are many examples of people fooling themselves into making experiments to confirm a theory and “correcting” or discarding results that don’t confirm it (see e.g. phlogiston, mass of the electron, the pushback against proton gradients as a fundamental mechanism of cell energy production, vitalism-confirming experiments, roman takes on gravity)
One way science can be guarded against modelling an idealized reality that no longer is related to the real world is by making something “obviously” real (e.g. electric lightbulb, nuclear bomb, vacuum engines).
Focusing on real-world problem also allows for different types of skin-in-the-game, i.e. going against the consensus for profit, even if you think the consensus is corrupt.
Cosmology is a field that requires dozens of years to “get into”, it has no practical applications that validate it’s theories, it’s only validation comes from observational evidence using data that is supposed to describe objects that are, again, a huge inferential distance away in both time/space and SNR… data which is heavily cleaned based on models created and validated by cosmology.
So I tend to err on the side of “bullshit” provided lack of relevant predictions that can be validate by literally anyone other than a cosmologist or a theoretical physicist, could be someone that’s proveably good in high energy physics validating an anomaly (e.g. gravitational anomaly causing a laser to behave weird around the time it was predicted that two black holes would be validated).
Hopefully this completes the picture to exhibit my point better.,
That is the best example I had of how one could, e.g, disagree with a scientific field by just erring on scepticism rather than taking the opposite view.
***
To answer your critique of that point, though again, I think it bares no or little relation to the article itself:
The “predictions” by which the theory is judges here are just as fuzzy and inferentially distant.
I am not a cosmologist, what I’ve read regrading cosmology have been mainly papers around unsupervised and semi-supervised clustering on noisy data, incidental evidence from those has made me doubt the complex ontologies proposed by cosmologists, given the seemingly huge degree of error acceptable in the process of “cleaning” data.
There are many examples of people fooling themselves into making experiments to confirm a theory and “correcting” or discarding results that don’t confirm it (see e.g. phlogiston, mass of the electron, the pushback against proton gradients as a fundamental mechanism of cell energy production, vitalism-confirming experiments, roman takes on gravity)
One way science can be guarded against modelling an idealized reality that no longer is related to the real world is by making something “obviously” real (e.g. electric lightbulb, nuclear bomb, vacuum engines).
Focusing on real-world problem also allows for different types of skin-in-the-game, i.e. going against the consensus for profit, even if you think the consensus is corrupt.
Cosmology is a field that requires dozens of years to “get into”, it has no practical applications that validate it’s theories, it’s only validation comes from observational evidence using data that is supposed to describe objects that are, again, a huge inferential distance away in both time/space and SNR… data which is heavily cleaned based on models created and validated by cosmology.
So I tend to err on the side of “bullshit” provided lack of relevant predictions that can be validate by literally anyone other than a cosmologist or a theoretical physicist, could be someone that’s proveably good in high energy physics validating an anomaly (e.g. gravitational anomaly causing a laser to behave weird around the time it was predicted that two black holes would be validated).
Hopefully this completes the picture to exhibit my point better.,