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Comment by giantrobot | Hacker News Reader

> Science only works if contrarians get a voice.

This is more of the rather tired "contrarians are always right" meme that seems to crop up constantly on HN.

Sometimes a contrarian is right and the accepted consensus is wrong. But that doesn't happen only because the contrarian position is contrarian, it's because the contrarians brought receipts. They applied proper scientific rigor and came up with a falsifiable theory that fits empirical observations and is sufficiently predictive. They also set out to disprove their hypothesis.

Not all contrarians need a "voice". It's not worth anyone's time to rebut yet another unfounded and stupid perpetual motion theorem or electric universe bullshit. It's far easier to spam stupid contrarian ideas than to produce real rigorous scientific output.

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> This is more of the rather tired "contrarians are always right" meme that seems to crop up constantly on HN.

No, it isn't. I literally did not say that, I didn't mean that, I don't believe that, and trying to spin it that way is a tortured way of reading the very sentence you quoted.

Contrarians don't have to be right to require a voice for the system to work.

> Not all contrarians need a "voice". It's not worth anyone's time to rebut yet another unfounded and stupid perpetual motion theorem or electric universe bullshit.

The point is, you aren't smart enough to know the difference. Nobody is. The way I know that science is working is because I can see the all the disagreements and judge for myself. Efficiency isn't the goal.

But since you're concerned, I spend exactly zero percent of time time worrying about perpetual motion or electric universes. Even if I did spend time on this, that's my choice, and who are you to tell me otherwise?

Folks who want to protect "my time" from "unfounded theories" are rarely as interested in in my time as they are about censoring things they don't like.

> Efficiency isn't the goal.

Well, it shouldn't be. But in case your research is informing "urgent" policy decisions, it's hard not to get frustrated and just want those who disagree to shut up.

In most things science I doubt you can "judge for yourself". In a field where you have some expertise, perhaps.

At least I don't have the knowledge (not just technical but also the lingo-related aspect) to read any paper or judge between any different positions on non-trivial things.

That's fair, but that means it's all the more dangerous to blindly accept things as facts. The field is important too; the more objectively data can be gathered and analyzed, the more trustworthy the research is. There are always issues, of course.

"Have an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out."

As Carl Sagan said, "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

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