To quibble just a bit I think that it is occasionally (tho probably not in the terminator examples the paper briefly mentioned) reasonable to use a very throughly fleshed out fictional account as evidence of plausibility. I mean by giving a detailed narrative you rule out the possibility the idea is internally incoherent or requires some really really implausible things to be true.
Still, I don’t think this is a very strong effect and is overestimated all the time by people who think that literature gives more than entertainment/enjoyment but actually gives insight.
You need to do a lot more to demonstrate irrationality than this. Obviously, as other commenters have pointed out, there are an infinite number of rules that agree with any given finite sequence of experimental results so obviously you can never conclusively demonstrate that your rule is indeed the correct one. Moreover, you can’t even be ‘bias free’ in the sense of assigning all possible rules the same probability unless you want to assign each rule probability 0.
Now you might be tempted to just give up at this point but this is exactly the same problem we face when doing science. We have an infinite number of possible rules that extend the results we have seen so far and we need to guess which is most likely. Amazingly we do it pretty well but justifying it seems impossible, it’s the classical philosophical problem of induction.
In short it’s not clear anyone is ‘wrong’. Maybe they have a good initial probability distribution for what sorts of rules people normally pick. Heck it’s not even clear what it means to be ‘wrong’ in this sense, i.e., having an implausible a priori probability distribution