Yes, that would certainly make the parable much closer to some issues that other people have already pointed out! However, you say:
Personally, whenever I hear someone say “I think we should seriously consider the possibility that such-and-such may be true, despite it being politically incorrect”, I consider it more likely than not that they are privileging the hypothesis.
Well, if the intellectual standards in the academic mainstream of the relevant fields are particularly low, and the predominant ideological biases push very strongly in the direction of the established conclusion that the contrarians are attacking, the situation is, at the very least, much less clear. But yes, organized groups of contrarians are often motivated by their own internal biases, which they constantly reinforce within their peculiar venues of echo-chamber discourse. Often they even develop some internal form of strangely inverted political correctness.
Moreover, my parable assumes that there are still non-trivial lingering groups of X-phobe fundamentalists when the first contrarian scientists appear. But what if the situation ends up with complete extirpation of all sorts of anti-X-ism, and virtually nobody is left who supports it any more, long before statisticians in this hypothetical world figure out the procedures necessary to examine the issue correctly? Imagine anti-X-ism as a mere remote historical memory, with no more supporters than, say, monarchism in the U.S. today. The question is—are there any such issues today, where past beliefs have been replaced by inaccurate ones that it doesn’t even occur to anyone any more to question, not because it would be politically incorrect, but simply because alternatives are no longer even conceivable?
Yes, that would certainly make the parable much closer to some issues that other people have already pointed out! However, you say:
Well, if the intellectual standards in the academic mainstream of the relevant fields are particularly low, and the predominant ideological biases push very strongly in the direction of the established conclusion that the contrarians are attacking, the situation is, at the very least, much less clear. But yes, organized groups of contrarians are often motivated by their own internal biases, which they constantly reinforce within their peculiar venues of echo-chamber discourse. Often they even develop some internal form of strangely inverted political correctness.
Moreover, my parable assumes that there are still non-trivial lingering groups of X-phobe fundamentalists when the first contrarian scientists appear. But what if the situation ends up with complete extirpation of all sorts of anti-X-ism, and virtually nobody is left who supports it any more, long before statisticians in this hypothetical world figure out the procedures necessary to examine the issue correctly? Imagine anti-X-ism as a mere remote historical memory, with no more supporters than, say, monarchism in the U.S. today. The question is—are there any such issues today, where past beliefs have been replaced by inaccurate ones that it doesn’t even occur to anyone any more to question, not because it would be politically incorrect, but simply because alternatives are no longer even conceivable?