After a few years in grad school, I think the principles of science are different from what you’ve picked up from your own sources.
In particular, this stands out to me as incorrect:
(1) I had carefully followed everything I’d been told was Traditionally Rational, in the course of going astray. For example, I’d been careful to only believe in stupid theories that made novel experimental predictions, e.g., that neuronal microtubules would be found to support coherent quantum states.
My training in writing grant applications contradicts this depiction of science. A grant has an introduction that reviews the facts of the field. It is followed by your hypothesis, and the mark of a promising grant is that the hypothesis looks obvious given your depiction of the facts. In fact, it is best if your introduction causes the reader to think of the hypothesis themselves, and anticipate its introduction.
This key feature of a good hypothesis is totally separate from its falsifiability (important later in the application). And remember, the hypothesis has to appear obvious in the eyes of a senior in the field, since that’s who judges your proposal. Can you say this for your stupid theory?
(2) Science would have been perfectly fine with my spending ten years trying to test my stupid theory, only to get a negative experimental result, so long as I then said, “Oh, well, I guess my theory was wrong.”
Given the above, the social practice of science would not have funded you to work for ten years on this theory. And this reflects the social practice’s implementation of the ideals of Science. The ideals say your hypothesis, while testable, is stupid.
I think you have a misconception about how science handles stupid testable ideas. However, I can’t think of a way that this undermines this sequence, which is about how science handles rational untestable ideas.
After a few years in grad school, I think the principles of science are different from what you’ve picked up from your own sources.
In particular, this stands out to me as incorrect:
My training in writing grant applications contradicts this depiction of science. A grant has an introduction that reviews the facts of the field. It is followed by your hypothesis, and the mark of a promising grant is that the hypothesis looks obvious given your depiction of the facts. In fact, it is best if your introduction causes the reader to think of the hypothesis themselves, and anticipate its introduction.
This key feature of a good hypothesis is totally separate from its falsifiability (important later in the application). And remember, the hypothesis has to appear obvious in the eyes of a senior in the field, since that’s who judges your proposal. Can you say this for your stupid theory?
Given the above, the social practice of science would not have funded you to work for ten years on this theory. And this reflects the social practice’s implementation of the ideals of Science. The ideals say your hypothesis, while testable, is stupid.
I think you have a misconception about how science handles stupid testable ideas. However, I can’t think of a way that this undermines this sequence, which is about how science handles rational untestable ideas.
EDIT: it seems poke said all this years ago.