Just chiming in to say I agree with Villiam. I actually read your whole post just now, and I thought it was interesting, and making an important claim… but I couldn’t follow it well enough to evaluate whether or not it is true, or a good argument, so I didn’t vote on it. I like the suggestion to break up your stuff into smaller chunks, and maybe add more explanation to them also.
For example, you could have made your first post something like “Remember that famous image of a black hole? Guess what: It may have been just hallucinating signal out of noise. Here’s why.” Then your next post could be: “Here’s a list of examples of this sort of thing happening again and again in physics, along with my general theory of what’s wrong with the epistemic culture of physics.” I think for my part at least, I didn’t have enough expertise to evaluate your claims about whether these examples really were false positives, nor enough expertise to evaluate whether they were just cherry-picked failures or indicative of a deeper problem in the community. If you had walked through the arguments in more detail, and maybe explained some key terms like “noise floor” etc., then I wouldn’t have needed expertise and would be able to engage more productively.
Just chiming in to say I agree with Villiam. I actually read your whole post just now, and I thought it was interesting, and making an important claim… but I couldn’t follow it well enough to evaluate whether or not it is true, or a good argument, so I didn’t vote on it. I like the suggestion to break up your stuff into smaller chunks, and maybe add more explanation to them also.
For example, you could have made your first post something like “Remember that famous image of a black hole? Guess what: It may have been just hallucinating signal out of noise. Here’s why.” Then your next post could be: “Here’s a list of examples of this sort of thing happening again and again in physics, along with my general theory of what’s wrong with the epistemic culture of physics.” I think for my part at least, I didn’t have enough expertise to evaluate your claims about whether these examples really were false positives, nor enough expertise to evaluate whether they were just cherry-picked failures or indicative of a deeper problem in the community. If you had walked through the arguments in more detail, and maybe explained some key terms like “noise floor” etc., then I wouldn’t have needed expertise and would be able to engage more productively.