Hacker News Reader

Comment by medo-bear | Hacker News Reader

im also sceptical but in high school i learned about a bunch of people who were thought to be cranks but turned out to be right. for me personally its not too hard to immagine that big bang turns out to be false but i appreciate that it is the best model we have so far

View on HN

But you didn't learn about the millions of cranks that turned out to be wrong.

sure i did. but what you say doesnt invalidate what i said. if someone finds this interesting they can pursue answers perhaps. personally i find it entertaining. also apparently this guys work has been published in a reputable journal

the point was that "the unpopular, unconvincing hypothesis is right" need be treated as a possibility only if the probability is high enough, and knowing that the vast majority are wrong is an important bayesian input in properly estimating that probability

help me out. historically, at what point in bayesian probability estimation did "there is no such thing as ether" theorists go from crank to lets pay attention to these guys

This is cherry-picking.

Your interlocutors have already stipulated that on occasion, the scientific establishment has been wrong, and the cranks have been right.

Their point is that this is almost never the case. There are and have been cranks who dispute the scientific consensus on almost every point since the scientific method was first developed.

Are you also suggesting we should believe the anti-vaxxers who still back Andrew Wakefield's paper?

Are you also suggesting we should believe the people who say climate change isn't real?

Are you also suggesting we should believe the people who say the earth is flat?

Are you also suggesting we should believe the people who say that our current trees aren't "really" trees, and all the "real", giant, trees were killed long ago? [0]

All of these are cranks who disagree with the established scientific consensus—sometimes in bizarre but harmless ways, sometimes in extremely damaging and disturbing ones. If your point is genuinely "we should listen to cranks because they have a good track record", why not them, too? Why not all of them?

Or is there, in fact, something specific about this one that makes you think it's got something going for it besides "they might be actually super smart and seeing something the rest of us are missing"? If so, maybe lead with that, instead?

[0] https://www.inverse.com/article/21098-flat-earthers-trees

im not suggesting any of that. the burden of proof should be on the presenter sure. but calling this guy a crank is stretching the definition of a crank a fair bit. hes been funded by nasa and was published (once ?) in an astronomy journal

personally i dont think big bang theory deserves to be held up to same regard as classical and quantum mechanics, electro and thermodynamics, and relativity. and i dont think questioning it is anywhere close to flat earthism or creationism. still i happen to believe it is the currently best supported model, albeit one with plenty of questions to answer

The Big Bang is indeed a form of Creationism. It was first conceived by a priest, Georges Lemaître, in an attempt to reconcile scripture and astronomical observations.

So…

I literally composed my post excluding the word "crank", because I felt "unpopular, unconvincing hypothesis" was a less judgemental way of phrasing it, and one that focused on the idea, not the ideator, but you went ahead and used crank anyways

anyways, the threshold is likely when the hypothesis becomes convincing enough to a sufficient proportion or number of experts in the field

The vast majority of doctors did not believe in germ theory 170 years. There were like one or two people called cranks telling surgeons to wash their hands before surgery. The vast majority can often be wrong. It’s a terrible input

Reply on news.ycombinator.com