I learn things all the time by wondering if somebody else is right. Much better than just thinking everything is simply the way I think it is now.
Even if you know somebody is wrong, talking about it is absolutely harmless.
Part of being an expert is knowing how to filter out the noise so that you can actually get some work done.
If one wanted to deal with noise all day, they'd join SETI. Or parliment.
If someone has a novel theory, let them come up with evidence to support it, and clear identification of how the theory can be invalidated.
That's not closed-mindedness; that's pragmatism. Could they actually be right? Yes, in the same way that a baby could beat Muhammad Ali - but you won't see anyone lining up to buy tickets.
You only have so much time in your life, so no need to waste it on peoples' 10-second "theories", like "How about achieving faster-than-light communication by stuffing so many photons down the fibreoptic cable that they "push" each other faster?". Some ideas are just plain dumb and obviously not worth a trained person's time.
> If someone has a novel theory, let them come up with evidence to support it, and clear identification of how the theory can be invalidated.
Ok, sure, but you can’t really be coming to _Hacker News_ expecting the latter, or none of the former, so it’s a moot point and poor expectations.
It's one thing to politely ignore crackpot theories or state the established facts in response, quite another when the crackpots start attacking you.
The original commenter I’m replying to, taken at their word, is ready to dismiss anything somebody says, regardless of merit with no further discussion, just because they think there’s “no way” that person could be right. Which is hilariously close-minded way to conduct oneself.
Comparing their work to the dross that AI produces is insulting
I'm actually excited for computers getting big enough to comprehend human language and science.
I hope one day Dross becomes Dos! AI needs more XP. VR AI and VR AI Science edu is what I'm most hyped for.
Lookup what General Relativity actually is, what it looks like. The mass-energy tensor and the extremely complicated underlying partial differential equations it is actually encoding.[1]
Every parseable language explanation is irrelevant: the mathematics works. If you have an alternative idea...then the mathematics needs to work. What that means is irrelevant, provided it makes useful predictions and does not contradict established observations.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress%E2%80%93energy_tensor
Dismissing uninformed ideas does everyone a service. If you're a complete outsider to a field and have no training it it, decide to come up with random ideas about difficult unsolved problems, and then feel stifled when an expert dismisses your ideas... well, that's a level of arrogance and hubris that I think is more than a little infuriating.
> The original commenter I’m replying to, taken at their word, is ready to dismiss anything somebody says, regardless of merit with no further discussion, just because they think there’s “no way” that person could be right. Which is hilariously close-minded way to conduct oneself.
That is a hilariously uncharitable interpretation of what they said.
Now, exhibit a testable hypothesis. Better, try to explain the 67 to 75ish mpc/s ranges in other methods.
Then we can talk. Nuff said!
I withdraw my idea, but continue to wave lengths of wire 11.8 inches long.
I do wish I could read a website called cosmogony news, every day.
The cancle out your talking about is what happens with magnets and dipoles. What if negative mass was a monopole?
Testing the theory would be be the same kind of tests created for testing the Big Bang.
> The issue is that these physics threads always end up the same, with commenters having only popular-level background offering suggestions they came up in five minutes
… is this really an issue?
I speculate you’ve taken something you don’t want to see personally and dressed it up as “the problem” when you could instead just find a way to be okay with it.
But maybe there’s something genuinely problematic with that behavior which I don’t know about.
I'd much rather hear plausible theories made by people who actually know what they're talking about.
They will eventually die and a younger generation will enter the field who don't know why those ideas were dismissed. For all you know you're shutting down a 14-year-old (either directly or someone observing) who is actually interested and may become one of those physicists.
It's roughly equivalent to https://xkcd.com/1053/
No, the younger generations are constantly entering the field, slowly learning and building up the tools required to think about these sorts of things. By the time they've done that, they don't need to have their silly ideas shut down, because they do that themselves, using the knowledge they've built.
And when they do have novel ideas, they have the mathematical and scientific tools to actually argue why their novel ideas deserve expensive, scarce telescope time, unlike the armchair pop-sci wannabe cosmologists (myself included) on HN.