There is so much anger in this thread because someone is making qualitative predictions instead of quantitative predictions (except there are some statistical predictions, albeit based around correlations to existing observational phenomenon, but that seems valid to me?).
In some ways, it is a symptom of the success of science so far that we consider that the baseline for credibility.
If the predictive observations from this theory hold true, then it's possible a mathematical framework can be developed for it.
I consider it underhanded to label reasonable disagreement as "anger."
Those are not the comments I'm talking about. There are some in this thread that are derisive due to its focus on qualitative theory and predictions instead of a mathematical foundation.
I can't quite see why complaints about the lack of quantitative support are unreasonable. They sound reasonable to me. In fact there seems to be a very broad consensus that the article lacks supporting numbers.
Apart from reasonable disagreement, there's a lot of downvotes and flagged posts here.
I agree that reasonable dissenting posts have been flagged here. If that's what you're saying?
Both sides. I expressed some modest support in 2 short posts, and got downvoted twice.
[flagged]
It strikes me similar to something that is LLM generated. It relies very much on the relationship between words, like how a non-practitioner in a field might develop a fatuous proof or theory.
I'm not saying it is wrong, either. But it's not quantitative and makes weak predictions with very little work into the roadmap to experimentally validate the ideas.
I might be more forgiving if it didn't literally start with
>For scientists interested in citation
which is so pretentious and amateurish it's laughable. If the whole thing was written in the tone of "I'm an amateur and this is my pet theory" it would be fine, not interesting to me but whatever, fanfiction is a thing. If it was curious "could this be it?", sure. But it's pretending very much to be legitimate scientific work which is just strange behavior and it's pulling people in who don't know any better who are taking it seriously.
Intentionally fooling people for your own ego is gross.
I generally agree. If I had been ask to review this, I would have pushed very, very hard on whether "cosmological natural selection assumes that universes reproduce via black holes and big bangs" and most of what follows was necessary. Even if it's true I wouldn't have mentioned that Tyler Cowen was solicited for a review. And not having any math, at all, makes me think the author is not committed enough to their own idea to put in the hard work.
It was a very interesting piece, and something to be proud of. So far nobody has figured out the TOE so they are in good company. On the other hand I see no reason for them to believe they are in a position to be as dismissive as they are of existing theory.
> it's pretending very much to be legitimate scientific work
I don't know what that means.
It's describing an idea (poorly, imo). It's not a whitepaper. The blogpost isn't pretending to be anything but a blogpost. I'm not inclined to believe this has any more weight than any other random blogpost. It is a fun thought experiment.
> it's pulling people in who don't know any better who are taking it seriously.
This is one of the least important things to be concerned about.