>Otherwise you end up like all those physicists who hated quantum mechanics so much that they either quit physics or spent decades of effort on futile attempts

>Otherwise you end up like all those physicists who hated quantum mechanics so much that they either quit physics or spent decades of effort on futile attempts to refute it. Of course, there is a lot of hindsight at work here. If one of those physicists had succeeded in refuting quantum mechanics then we'd remember them as geniuses ahead of their time. I suspect that the practice of individual scientists in choosing which hypotheses to confirm or refute is highly irrational in general. It's just that we remember the people who guessed right (or who really did have some kind of deep insight – it's hard to tell).