Hacker News Reader

There are really strong parallels between this and the Ted Hill NYJM fiasco. And, like the physicists in this story, professional mathematicians pointed out that Hill's paper was wildly inappropriate for the venue. Both Hill and Strumia tried to launder their institutional credibility into authority to make political arguments. Arguably, Hill was more successful, even if his stunt was more egregious.

View on HN

In the 19th century William Whewell developed concept of "Consilience of Inductions". Evidence from independent, unrelated sources can "converge" on strong conclusions. We should feel more confident about our conclusions when we have lots of lines of evidence that stand alone independently, preferably collected by different people, in different parts of the globe or at least different universities. Maybe they don’t even like each other.

Many contrarian views grow long time in small small minded groups or even withing one individual. They have high internal consistency and logic. When exposed to outsiders, they usually spot some obvious errors immediately.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com