[toomim]

Perhaps you're not aware that "fringe idea" is precisely the type of research that can turn out to usurp the mainstream and disrupt old paradigms.

The idea that the earth travels around the sun was once a "fringe idea."

> he is so clearly using his tenure as a defense against the ... untestability, of his ideas.

The idea of the earth going around the sun was untestable until Tycho Brahe got enough data and Kepler put it together in a way that could more parsimoniously and accurate predict planetary motion.

In other words, the experience that you describe perfectly fits into his argument. You might want to read Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" to get the full picture.

[dekhn]

The person you're criticizing got a PhD in astrophysics. They definitely would be familiar with all the situations you describe. They've probably also read the wikipedia page for Kuhn's book.

The reality is that Loeb made a claim that is not inconsistent with evidence, but is very fanciful. And the alternative hypotheses are all simpler, and explain the observations well enough that I think either Occam's razor or common sense would say that unless Loeb can somehow conjure up some unquestionable data, it's unlikely his claim will ever be verified or falsified and the mainstream will continue to believe (rightly, I think) that we didn't just see an alien corvette.

Hoofbeats mean horses, not zebras, unless you're on the African savannah, or something like that.

[Uehreka]

I feel like I often see this line of argument on the internet: “Every scientific revolution was unforeseen by the mainstream of its time, you don’t want to miss the next one do you?”

But until someone proposes a predictive metric for evaluating which of these “non-mainstream ideas” are good and which are bad, I don’t think this is a fruitful area of inquiry. And that’ll be a tall order, since many of the available methods for determining truth are the very things keeping these ideas out of mainstream scientific journals. And cultural metrics like “It pisses off the establishment, so it must be right!” apply equally to both correct and incorrect non-mainstream ideas.