This is pretty much why I’m not just agnostic, but fundamentalist about it - I consider the opinions of anyone who isn’t agnostic to be tainted. Of course, I have my own share of cognitive biases and what have you that interfere with acheiving a completely agnostic perspective, but the main thing is to acknowledge the point in the first place, and be open to working towards it. In my book, it’s just another example of the sort of culture that makes the difference between grunting animals and advanced civilisation.
So I tend not to simply reject anything I can’t easily understand; that requires a lot of hubris, if you can do ontology. Particularly given the many examples in the history of science of low-hanging fruit that went unpicked for too long, simply because peoples’ dominant paradigm didn’t easily accomodate it. There is vast opportunity to be had in mass agnosticism; I dearly hope to see an inkling of it one day.
The problem of scientific discourse today is that there is no path for new ideas which involve questioning our initial hypotheses to emerge today. These ideas are filtered out at the peer review process. They don’t make it into our popular science programs. Science journalists won’t touch them because that risks their scientific contacts. The culture online rejects them because of the current focus upon pseudoscience. The textbooks generally limit their discussions to the conclusions of scientists. The only option at this point is vanity press publication and journals dedicated to such ideas – which, in a general sense, nobody reads.
A significantly more effective means of doing science is a magnificent goal, and again, something that would be a lot easier to achieve if it weren’t for everybody’s damn cognitive biases and logical fallacies, particularly the assumption that things aren’t broke so people proposing fixes aren’t worth listening to…
But it seems like an easier sell than a concept you admit pretty much requires this more effective means to sell. So why the huge emphasis on plasma cosmology if there’s this intervening priority of recruiting coders to build a venue to give this idea and others a fighting chance? I’m pretty sure that if you’d poured all that effort into illustrating this fundamental problem and proposing your solution, you’d have achieved more traction by now - there are more coders than cosmologists reading BB. And the lack of an optimised battleground for scientific ideas is unquestionably a bigger problem than mistaken cosmology IMO.
Something I’ve noticed that’s common to many success stories is the flexibility that enabled them - someone starts off trying to achieve X, but hits a few speed bumps that’d stop many in their tracks… but without tunnel vision restricting the outcome, the lessons of failure prompt Y to be conceived as a goal instead. And here, Y could facilitate X.
Switch your focus, man.
