The apparent alternative to the reliable vs. Newton tradeoff when you are the thinker is to put appropriate epistemic status around the hypotheses. So you publish the book on Bible codes or all-powerful Vitamin C, but note in the preface that you remain agnostic about whether any version of the main thesis applies to the real world, pending further development. You build a theory to experience how it looks once it’s more developed, and publish it because it was substantial work, even when upon publication you still don’t know if there is a version of the theory that works out.
Maybe the theory is just beautiful, and that beauty doesn’t much diminish from its falsity. So call it philosophical fiction, not a description of this world, the substantial activity of developing the theory and communicating it remains the same without sacrificing reliability of your ideas. There might even be a place for an edifice of such fictions that’s similar to math in mapping out an aspect of the world that doesn’t connect to the physical reality for very long stretches. This doesn’t seem plausible in the current practice, but seems possible in principle, so even calling such activity “fiction” might be misleading, it’s more than mere fiction.
I don’t think hypersensitive pattern-matching does a lot to destroy ability to distinguish between an idea that you feel like pursuing and an idea that you see as more reliably confirmed to be applicable in the real world. So you can discuss this distinction when communicating such ideas. Maybe the audience won’t listen to the distinction you are making, or won’t listen because you are making this distinction, but that’s a different issue.
The apparent alternative to the reliable vs. Newton tradeoff when you are the thinker is to put appropriate epistemic status around the hypotheses. So you publish the book on Bible codes or all-powerful Vitamin C, but note in the preface that you remain agnostic about whether any version of the main thesis applies to the real world, pending further development. You build a theory to experience how it looks once it’s more developed, and publish it because it was substantial work, even when upon publication you still don’t know if there is a version of the theory that works out.
Maybe the theory is just beautiful, and that beauty doesn’t much diminish from its falsity. So call it philosophical fiction, not a description of this world, the substantial activity of developing the theory and communicating it remains the same without sacrificing reliability of your ideas. There might even be a place for an edifice of such fictions that’s similar to math in mapping out an aspect of the world that doesn’t connect to the physical reality for very long stretches. This doesn’t seem plausible in the current practice, but seems possible in principle, so even calling such activity “fiction” might be misleading, it’s more than mere fiction.
I don’t think hypersensitive pattern-matching does a lot to destroy ability to distinguish between an idea that you feel like pursuing and an idea that you see as more reliably confirmed to be applicable in the real world. So you can discuss this distinction when communicating such ideas. Maybe the audience won’t listen to the distinction you are making, or won’t listen because you are making this distinction, but that’s a different issue.