I don’t think a hypothesis should be “thrown out” for being “too weird,” I think it should be ignored for being too weird.
Nobody here is under any obligation to respond to a question/hypothesis that’s thrown out. So in the SDMB world, my raving capitalist solution is “market operation”… If it’s too weird, very few will participate… If quite a few participate, then the hypothesis has enough validity to merit discussion (regardless of whether “proof” can be gained or not)
I would say that those who go into a thread a take the time to post a message saying something like “this is hokum and too weird to take seriously” are A) wasting their time and B) perpetuating the very thread they find useless by bumping it to the top and adding views/posts to it – signs that might indicate legitimacy to others… The very theory behind the dictum to “do not feed the troll” in the case of purposefully inflammatory meritless posts.
Certainly - without any theoretical framework to test nothing useful can be done. However, my intuition tells me that if there is a relationship, then we’ll suddenly find the notions of dark matter and negative energy practically disappear overnight.
Aside from the whole falsifiability problem for “weird” hypotheses, I think there’s a further reason not to take them seriously. Maybe you’ll want to denounce this as an informational cascade, or a bounded rationality problem, but I think that’s perfectly legitimate to use a “legitimate viewpoint” heuristic as a short cut in deciding what hypotheses merit further inquiry and which can be discounted until much more credible evidence has come forth. If someone were to dig up our dear old dead pal Eddie Burke, I’m sure he’d have something to say on the matter of the wisdom of trusting tradition and authority.
