Sure. But when the socially dominant theory doesn’t fit observations, it’s called “a temporary setback that calls for some reworking”, and when a heterodox theory doesn’t fit observations, it’s called “falling flat on its face”, as you can see in another reply below. That’s not a healthy dynamic.

> There's not some shadowy cabal of cosmologists doing everything in their power to keep the cult of dark matter alive.

No… but curiously, you will get your comment flagged and removed on HN for making such a claim!

Yes! In fact, philosophers have spent a lot of time thinking about this exact problem:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-inverted/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-knowledge/

>eliminativist

Eliminativist claims in philosophy are claims that deny the existence of some class of entities. You can be eliminativist about all sorts of things - numbers, objective morals, countries, tables and chairs, etc.

>qualia

First-person conscious experiences. Pain is a qualia. The way the color blue looks, as opposed to say the color red or green, is a qualia. The sensation of hot or cold is a qualia.

When someone stubs their toe and says "ow", you can infer that they're in pain based on their behavior and your knowledge of how pain works, but you can't actually feel or directly observe their pain. That's the "first-person" part.

>phenomenal consciousness

A synonym for "qualia", because some philosophers started to feel like the word "qualia" had too much historical baggage, so they needed to come up with a new term.

>introspective illusion

Exactly what it says on the tin. An illusion (meaning, an impression that something is real, when it is in fact not) generated by introspection.

So, putting it all together:

>illusionism

Illusionism about consciousness is the thesis that phenomenal consciousness is not real. So, to give a specific example, an illusionist would be committed to the thesis that pain is not real. As a corollary, no one has ever felt pain before, because there is no such thing as pain. People have been under the illusion that they feel pain, but they actually don't.

Bernardo Kastrup has a bunch of essays/books up for free at his website https://www.bernardokastrup.com/p/papers.html?m=1

We haven’t even been able to reproduce abiogenesis.

I don’t think HN is even sold on the value and legitimacy of analytic philosophy. It’s best to get people on board with that first, before moving on to the weird stuff.

Ok. So what are the consequences for this human operator and/or Waymo?

Human drivers make mistakes all the time, it’s true. But there are consequences for those mistakes. If a human drives into the opposite lane that’s a big problem, especially if they end up causing property damage or bodily injury. Why are the same standards not being applied here?

And there are already a lot of more comfortable and familiar input devices for gaming.

Classic solution looking for a problem.

In general, the most highly skilled developers who are most capable of doing a thorough code review are also the ones who are most likely to be genuinely over capacity as is.

In particular we’ve observed some galaxies that seem to have little to no dark matter. Gravitationally, they behave the way that you would “naively” predict without the need to plug in a correction term that represents dark matter. This indicates that there is something physically different about these galaxies (like an unobserved substance), and it points away from MOND-style theories.