[Lewton]

The author unironically uses a parable about aliens predicting chess outcomes with a coin flip and how wrong that is, to promote the idea that random fringe ideas without predictive power have value.

I severely doubt anyone who isn't already primed to agree with the conclusions would read this and find it convincing

(I don't find the idea that science needs ways to escape local maxima particularly controversial, but this article is terrible, and made worse by the unnecessary antagonism)

[boldslogan]

I think the issue arises, when a player who is not good at chess would lose, literally 100% of the time against anyone even close to a top regional level. In other words, chess is not a 50% chance game, it is a variable chance game depending on who you play, so the analogy is hard to follow because the aliens would not come up with this 50% outcome idea.

[a-nikolaev]

Chess must be a "beauty contest" then.

Seriously, a model that can predict things better than a coin flip will be more scientific. Even if it utilizes something that is somewhat hypothetical / not immediately observable. Say, Newtonian mechanics talks about forces - but forces is a totally made up concept, their nature is (for the most part) not explained within the Newtonian mechanics framework at all, but it's a good model.

Also, many models of reality that are "inferior" to the "real models" are still very helpful and useful in science. Many numerical methods scientists are happy to use, say finite differences, discretize continuous equations. This transformation makes the model strictly speaking worse. But this is fine, since it allows to produce calculations that match and predict experiments. Even in Physics, people start using ML / neural networks to approximate complex calculations. Not because a neural network is a better more descriptive model of the reality (of course it's not), but because it calculates the answer close enough to the real one.

Crank ideas are crank not because they use use some made up concepts that cannot be experimentally seen. They are crank, because they ignore mainstream development, staying blissfully unaware of the subtleties and details the mainstream theories have already considered and resolved.

So the main fault of crank theories is the ignorance of their creators, who are either not willing or not able to correctly contextualize their work within the previously existing knowledge. If you want to do science, you have to do your homework: 1) explore and learn what is known already, 2) develop it further or propose an alternative, 3) contextualize your work within the existing knowledge about the subject. Skipping steps 1 and 3 is dishonest.

[8note]

The other thing being that if both players are very good, it's near guaranteed to be a tie

[gampleman]

I think you misunderstand - you don't always play black in chess. So on average white wins 50% of the time (modulo first move advantage and draws as the article states).

[a-nikolaev]

But they can observe that Alice always wins when playing against Bob. (If they somehow can determine that one player is black and the other is white, they probably can also distinguish the players as well?)

[jjk166]

They can't see a chess piece but they can see humans well enough to tell them apart?

Analogies don't work if you deliberately make assumptions that are inconsistent with what they are trying to convey.

We could rephrase the analogy such that the aliens are listening to a specific broadcast from earth from 1000 light years away. Some percentage of the time the broadcast is "White won", the rest of the time the broadcast is "White lost." Is it reasonable to assume that it's a game of pure chance just because you don't have a good method of predicting the outcome?

[a-nikolaev]

Yeah yeah, I agree. But, I think, the thing is that once you start making so many carefully made assumptions what is and isn't happening, then the nice parable format falls apart quickly.