Look, I really don't want to be antagonistic here, but this is a pet peeve of mine re: science. Plus psychology and group dynamics in particular are a big part

Look, I really don't want to be antagonistic here, but this is a pet peeve of mine re: science. Plus psychology and group dynamics in particular are a big part of my field... so I'm going to engage here, and I just want you to know before I start that I'm doing it in good faith. Framing what is happening in thread as "making hypotheses" is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. A hypothesis is a guess about the causal structure relevant to a narrow question that is formulated to be falsifiable. Normally it's generated from a deep understanding of the domain and is actually a question about an aspect of that domain that isn't yet clear. "Is it like THIS or like THAT? How could we tell the difference between those worlds?" It's like debugging, actually. You see a bug in your software, and you know something, probably a lot, about the overall program. That lets you imagine what, specifically, might be going wrong, so you form guesses about that, and you check those guesses. You can check by just watching the values of variables as they move around the system until you see something anomalous. You can also check by predicting what might happen given certain inputs, and you send those inputs to verify that you are right, and to give you clues about where to investigate further. Finally you notice the part of the program that is almost certainly the source of the problem, and then you form a model of what is supposed to happen, and you change the code to reflect your new understanding until the inputs match the expected outputs. Sometimes the answer is a small change, and sometimes it's a major structural or conceptual change. That is a scientific investigation that involves real hypothesis formation and testing. Suppose instead that your well-meaning, non-technical uncle saw the bug. He might suggest you restart the computer. Whether he's right that that would fix the immediate problem is virtually irrelevant: HE doesn't have any idea if it would fix anything, and if it did fix something it wouldn't actually address whatever the underlying technical problem actually is. It may be an issue that you know--because you understand the domain--couldn't possibly be solved with a restart. Your uncle doesn't know anything, he's just parroting stuff he's heard before about how to "fix computers." In other words, he's just making shit up. Spouting whatever makes intuitive sense to him given his total lack of domain expertise. It's all well-meaning, and done in good faith, but... Your uncle did not, in any meaningful sense, generate a "hypothesis" about your software bug. What I am saying in my original post is that this thread is full of your well-meaning, non-technical uncle. And it's particularly grating to me because the "program" in question here is science itself, and the uncles are signaling their group membership in Team Science by doing something they seem to believe is science-like, but in fact is not. And further the not-science-like thing the people in this thread are doing is structurally identical to the people they are signaling against. The difference is that the people in this thread have slightly more sophisticated models of things like gravity and distinguishing plausible information from implausible information. Flat earthers are a particularly central example of believing some shit they made up, that makes intuitive sense to them given their lack of domain expertise. The people in this thread, making their guesses about psychology and group dynamics, are doing the same activity in the same way, but just in a domain that isn't as obvious. It bothers me. Rant over.