> Without a certain minimal degree of luck, you would have no scientific progress. A minor disagreement on this point. I think often our intuitions are shaped

> Without a certain minimal degree of luck, you would have no scientific progress. A minor disagreement on this point. I think often our intuitions are shaped by experience, and lead us to conclusions that we don't have a rational line of inference to (at least one we can explain). Science acts as a good filter, saying "we don't care how you came up with it, test it and we'll agree if it turns out it's right". This isn't a random guess, but it's far from reasoning you could convince anyone else with. This is different from a lucky guess. Your brain has been seeing a lot of the data, and is picking up on patterns, in other words your intuition is correlated with the phenomena, and that's what leads you to the theory you want to test. Second, sometimes purely rational arguments lead us to theories from other data. This isn't random chance, but it is exploiting regularities in the world around us to predict new things. For example, kepler's laws of motion weren't the direct result of observation. You can't observe equations that guide the motion of the planets. In between observations, the planets might have jumped all over the place. But it was assumed that the planets weren't doing that, and simple equations were inferred from the data available that fit the evidence. There is a step here between "observation" and "prediction" that doesn't involve a lucky guess.