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Comment by stefantalpalaru | Hacker News Reader

Judging one's work by anything other than the work itself is unscientific.

The purpose of science is to generate correct beliefs about the world. If you believe in nonsense, that's very poor scientific work.

Presumably you can imagine a somewhat stupid robot that does random scientific experiments, generating good beliefs and bad ones. Why would that invalidate the good beliefs?

Belief A has no rational basis. Belief B has a rational basis. If you believe A yet have proven B, that doesn't make B wrong. Even if believe that it was A which led you to the discovery.

It doesn't. But it is a good clue that the robot isn't using a rational process to select beliefs, and is instead doing so randomly. It is far easier to come up with an invalid belief than a valid one, and if you aren't selecting them rationally, you are practically guaranteed to be wrong.

>If you believe A yet have proven B, that doesn't make B wrong.

It makes you wrong. All the time you spend as a proponent for A is wasted.

Brute force approaches can work. For example, evolution produced humans.

I agree that it's better not to waste your time believing A if you can avoid it.

> If you believe in nonsense, that's very poor scientific work.

Non sequitur. What you believe is separated from your work. Just like when you were a kid and your math homework had nothing to do with the fact that you believed wrestling was real.

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