> I cannot count the amount of times I've read about scientists in the past getting ridiculed for some "crackpot" theory only to be vindicated later.
I can, and it is a much, much smaller number than either:
1) a theory was widely accepted because "it just made sense" and turned out to be false (bloodletting, Aristotle's physics, caloric, aether, bad air causing disease...)
or
2) a theory being ridiculed and it turning out to be nonsense (n-rays, Cartesian vortices, cold fusion...)
Take-home: the initial plausibility of any theory will vary widely between people (plausibility is subjective, probability is objective). But as evidence accumulates the beliefs of all good Bayesians will converge.
Ergo: initial plausibility isn't the least bit interesting. Validation by systematic observation, controlled experiment, and/or Bayesian inference is. So bringing up initial plausibility--in either direction--is not so interesting, except in the case (as in this one) where a nearly infinite number of theories have almost identical initial plausibility, because we know with as much certainty as we know anything that air travel is incredibly safe, so failures are necessarily due to bizarre low-probability anomalies.
Under those circumstances, anyone who promotes their particular theory as vastly more plausible than any of the equally implausible alternatives is necessarily nuts: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1364
Implausible theories direct the course of systematic validation. Searches and studies are conducted entirely based on theories which all start out with high initial implausibility.
The issue with this plane crash is that most theories from the investigators have a plausibility level that has barely changed from the initial level. This is why it is worth considering to a certain extent some of the more non-mainstream theories.
I can, and it is a much, much smaller number than either:
1) a theory was widely accepted because "it just made sense" and turned out to be false (bloodletting, Aristotle's physics, caloric, aether, bad air causing disease...)
or
2) a theory being ridiculed and it turning out to be nonsense (n-rays, Cartesian vortices, cold fusion...)
Take-home: the initial plausibility of any theory will vary widely between people (plausibility is subjective, probability is objective). But as evidence accumulates the beliefs of all good Bayesians will converge.
Ergo: initial plausibility isn't the least bit interesting. Validation by systematic observation, controlled experiment, and/or Bayesian inference is. So bringing up initial plausibility--in either direction--is not so interesting, except in the case (as in this one) where a nearly infinite number of theories have almost identical initial plausibility, because we know with as much certainty as we know anything that air travel is incredibly safe, so failures are necessarily due to bizarre low-probability anomalies.
Under those circumstances, anyone who promotes their particular theory as vastly more plausible than any of the equally implausible alternatives is necessarily nuts: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1364