Yeah, this checks out Edit: but seriously, I would assume that this applies to hard sciences as well, if you replace “laypeople” with “domain experts”. Plausib

Yeah, this checks out Edit: but seriously, I would assume that this applies to hard sciences as well, if you replace “laypeople” with “domain experts”. Plausible hypotheses are cheap; designing a study and collecting data to prove them is hard. Many studies confirm something that feels obvious to researchers in the field, but being able to write that thing down as fact with a citation allows people to move a step forward. I would say it’s the extreme outlier study where an implausible hypothesis is proven true.