[cbolton]

I don't see a problem with any of this. For 1) maybe you want to explain more explicitly what bothers you? I don't find the U.S. army ranger thing surprising in a personal blog post. If one cannot write this without losing credibility... now that's something that worries me.

For 2), this looks quite normal in terms of mathematical modelling. You make a model based on some simplifying hypotheses. You show what result you can get from these hypotheses. The conclusion is "these results follow from the hypotheses". You don't pretend to prove that this is how it works in the real thing, you just give one example of a mechanism that gives the observed results. This is basically how you propose a new theory. Then your "opponents" are supposed to show with more scientific work that a) you made a mistake, or b) your simple theory is a bad model, for example because after changing hypothesis X to better reflect reality, the model no longer produces the expected result.

(Your opponents are not supposed to suppress your theory by exploiting their social connections to prevent publication behind your back. Well I guess there is a viable argument for suppressing valid research if the "truth" is harmful to society, but I don't think this was properly argued here).

[joshuamorton]

And as others note, that would be a reasonable social science paper, but "flimsy oversimplified model that might explain a phenomena" does not a mathematics publication make.

It's not made clear (and others mention) that the paper has changed a lot, so it's current form is different than it was originally, and it appears that the author tried to sneak it in to at least one journal, without normal peer review.

That's not good science.