I'm not arguing against the points you are making, but they are subtly different from what OP implied. It's hard to make specific claims against a vague analogy that just seems to embody a mindset, but that's what I'm trying to do. And it's not a strawman even if it would happen to miss OP's intent; you see this mindset everywhere.
My point was that OP appears to would have rejected this hypothesis out of hand, and that this approach that would be wrong if everyone that matters did it. Obviously there were people who mattered who did not, as the experiment demonstrates.
A posteriori it's difficult to put numbers on it, but I'd say this experiment was worth doing even if your heuristics put it at a 0.1% chance of succeeding. Obviously that's not the case for Mad Morty's 1000th garage-built perpetual motion machine, but multiple physicists obviously evaluated this hypothesis as less shitty than that.
All in all we would probably agree if we could just zero in on our key points, so I probably shouldn't have spent four paragraphs on this.
My point was that OP appears to would have rejected this hypothesis out of hand, and that this approach that would be wrong if everyone that matters did it. Obviously there were people who mattered who did not, as the experiment demonstrates.
A posteriori it's difficult to put numbers on it, but I'd say this experiment was worth doing even if your heuristics put it at a 0.1% chance of succeeding. Obviously that's not the case for Mad Morty's 1000th garage-built perpetual motion machine, but multiple physicists obviously evaluated this hypothesis as less shitty than that.
All in all we would probably agree if we could just zero in on our key points, so I probably shouldn't have spent four paragraphs on this.