The thing is this: People are getting way too hung up on formulating a conclusion about ideas which compete with conventional theories. My thesis is that the way in which we talk about science has a dominant influence upon the quality of the discourse. It’s actually obvious, once you think about it – for if we were still using Morse code, the conversations would be even that much worse.
So, my own take is that we should never expect a system which has not been designed to support the emergence and evidential support of new ideas to just nevertheless result in emergence and accurate beliefs. Support for emergence must be designed; then, when it occurs, it must be captured; and once it’s captured, it must be identified and visualized to have priority. Without tools to do this, emergence just becomes buried in the heap. Accuracy in belief requires a collective effort to vet and contribute knowledge in a constructive manner. The threads never make it to this point. They weren’t designed to do this. What we have today is fundamentally designed to support the status quo – whether intentional or not.
What I try to tell people is that if the goal is to create a tool for innovation in science, then the way to do that is to study the ways in which the discourse about against-the-mainstream ideas in science tend to derail. What you will observe is that – even if the competing idea is not correct, which is actually irrelevant – the observed reasons for rejecting the idea will tend to be wrong. That’s because the actual debate amongst theorists is always more complex than the threads you see online. This is particularly easy to demonstrate with the Electric Universe. People are going to be completely taken by surprise by the number of rebuttals which exist, and which are not being pointed to in these threads.
The point here is that people who are focused on the conclusions over the quality of discourse are not trying to design a scientific social network. The site design is what matters. Build the site, and only then should people be formulating conclusions, once we have a system which does not fundamentally favor the status quo.
