[lefnire]

I too hate when people dare to dream out loud about interesting unsolved riddles in the universe. For some, sci-fi psuedoscience is their inspiration into the field, boosting their achieving the impossible - take Musk. I recently landed my first machine learning job, brought here precisely because I think synthesized consciousness is possible, swayed by none other than this community's most hated quack: Ray Kurzweil. Many choose science because they're inspired to achieve incredible (literally "not credible") things. If journalists should shut up, I wouldn't have my rewarding job. I've learned to ignore psuedoscience whistle-blowers, they just sound curmudgeonly to me.

[mannykannot]

People who dare to dream out loud about interesting unsolved riddles in the universe are fine, but all too often in these articles, what we get is an unjustified claim that the riddle has been solved (or that a whole class of possible answers are ruled out), resting on little but straw-man arguments, appeals to intuition dressed up as objective facts, and attempts to rule issues out of consideration by definition, through wordplay. This is not the way to a true understanding. Of the authors I have read on the subject, Scott Aaronson stands out as someone who tries to (and succeeds in) avoiding this form of argumentation.