F X said:
You describe your own personal ideas here as "the hypothesis", and a discussion about it is taking place here. If you described as "my theory" then it would be a violation of the rules here.
I'm not putting forward this hypothesis as a scientific theory. I'm putting it forward as a hypothesis about why meta-discussions
about scientific theories show a particular pattern. If you are commenting that the rules about meta-discussions are somewhat different from the rules about object-level discussions of theories themselves, then yes, you are right; the rules have to be interpreted somewhat differently for meta-discussions, because if we interpret them strictly, meta-discussions would be impossible.
You appear to recognize the difference, since later on, you say:
F X said:
if that is the case, it's a different discussion.
Exactly. It's a meta-discussion, in the terms I used above, rather than an object-level discussion.
F X said:
One could also argue that trying to understand the psychology of "why people believe as they do" is also science.
Yes, one could. If we took that viewpoint, then discussions like this one would belong in a "psychology" forum or something similar.
However, there is an alternate viewpoint that one could take: meta-discussions like this one aren't about scientifically studying why people believe what they do, or behave the way they do in internet forum discussions. Meta-discussions like this one are about the rules that forums like PF adopt, and their rationale. If we had to wait for a thorough scientific study of people's beliefs and behaviors before we could set up rules for forums like PF, we wouldn't have any such forums. That's not feasible. We have to get on with the business of running PF as best we can, whether there is any valid science bearing on the subject or not. So we have to pick some rules, and use whatever intellectual tools we have available to try to explain why we picked the rules we picked. That's the way I would approach this discussion, and the article it is based on.
F X said:
From my experience, there is a great deal of interest
People who have personal theories have a great deal of interest in posting them, yes. But, at least in the PF threads I've seen, basically nobody else cares; the only people posting in such threads are the OP, the one with the personal theory, and moderators who are trying to enforce the forum rules.
There is a related type of thread which does tend to attract more interest: a thread in which someone has an elementary misunderstanding of some aspect of a current theory, and refuses to abandon it. I didn't have this kind of thread in mind when I wrote the article, but I agree it can look somewhat similar, as far as the topic goes. It is true that "misunderstanding" threads like this can attract lots of posters and go on for a long time; my general observation is that many different people will try many different ways of getting the OP to recognize his misunderstanding, and none of them will work, and eventually a moderator has to shut the thread down because it's going nowhere.
The difference, IMO, is that in this type of thread, the OP does not have an alternate theory; they just don't believe the current theory. If you ask them, "Well, how do
you explain the facts?", they draw a blank; or, in some cases, they deny the facts. But they don't say things like "I can explain all of the same observations as GR using a Newtonian gravity model", which would be a personal theory. They don't construct their own explanations at all; they just refuse to believe the explanations given by the current theory.