Well, there’s a weak gimme answer: scholarship (eleventh tenet of rationality). It’s science, even if not directly related to human cognition.
It’s also an interesting topic for rational discussion, in the sense of “here’s some evidence against a thing that almost everybody believes. What is your response to it?” Things I would expect to see (and of which there have been some) is comments about things like updating beliefs, offering evidence that the sources of this contrary evidence should not be taken as authoritative, attempting to assign priors to the accuracy of various theories or hypotheses and seeing what that says about our actual beliefs in this area (and how they change when new evidence is introduced), etc.
Besides, this is discussion. I wouldn’t say the post is suitable to be promoted on the main page, but neither are posts on many of the memes associated with LW (like peoples’ thoughts on friendly AI, or effective altruism). This post may turn out to be less correct than those topics (or may not), but this doesn’t make it any less suitable for posting here.
Well, there’s a weak gimme answer: scholarship (eleventh tenet of rationality). It’s science, even if not directly related to human cognition.
It’s also an interesting topic for rational discussion, in the sense of “here’s some evidence against a thing that almost everybody believes. What is your response to it?” Things I would expect to see (and of which there have been some) is comments about things like updating beliefs, offering evidence that the sources of this contrary evidence should not be taken as authoritative, attempting to assign priors to the accuracy of various theories or hypotheses and seeing what that says about our actual beliefs in this area (and how they change when new evidence is introduced), etc.
Besides, this is discussion. I wouldn’t say the post is suitable to be promoted on the main page, but neither are posts on many of the memes associated with LW (like peoples’ thoughts on friendly AI, or effective altruism). This post may turn out to be less correct than those topics (or may not), but this doesn’t make it any less suitable for posting here.