Parable of Alien Chess

That's a bizarre attitude. Thought experiments were a major and important tool in developing the theory of relativity, precisely because they were taken seriously and done rigorously; contradictions weren't waved away as "just a tool to facilitate discussion".

> I think a better approach on encountering a flawed analogy is to attempt to improve it, come up with a better one, or address the underlying claim directly, but saying "this analogy is unclear to me the end" isn't going to get you very far in life.

On the contrary, being willing to call out nonsense has served me very well. There is no "underlying claim" here; the story is what's meant to carry the claim, and if the story doesn't work (and it doesn't) the whole thing falls apart (and it does). It's nonsense, top-to-bottom.

A theory that is more complex and fits the data worse is a less good theory because it is easier to get stuck in. If I have two new theories with this property, how do I choose between them? Imagining a situation where the less predictive theory is closer to the underlying reality does not change this - the fact that it is closer to the underlying reality is irrelevant until and unless we have measurements that allow us to distinguish those cases, at which point, we will have evidence for the (now) more predictive theory.

This article is actually arguing for a system that would result in more dogmatic acceptance and less critical testing.

This is about priming people to buy into some propaganda system, for instance one constructed for political purposes, and reject their existing assumptions. The weird swerve at the end is the payload.

The reason to do this is, if you're knowingly maintaining a propaganda system that works towards some known purpose, and you want people to fall into it more readily. This doesn't discount the validity of the initial concepts: local maxima are real, and our ability to thoroughly understand things is limited.

But we remain functional through pretending we can indeed understand things, and there's usefulness in that. Generally, axioms are brought into question when specific details don't line up with our theory.

In a vacuum, 'abandon all theories!' is a fine position to have. In reality, 'abandon all theories!' is a set-up for getting fed a pile of information that benefits somebody else, because you become a willingly useful idiot ready to be programmed by anyone.

Running into somebody like this, I find the initial 'abandon all theories!' attitude to be refreshing. I even agree with some of it. If the NEXT THING he tells me is all about how Pepe's face is on the Moon outlined in craters, I've learned to be extremely suspicious of what the guy is really selling. Because even if he is himself sincere… there is somebody up the chain pursuing 'Nigerian spam' techniques and finding out by this who's credulous enough to be used for their own purposes.

And that's what I get from the 'going off the rails at the end'. The point of the article is to hook the truly credulous, and the writer may or may not be in on that.