Where do ideas for experiments come from if not somone's unsupported fantasies?
They come from small, modest guesses in accordance with Occam's razor. You have got to be able to distinguish between (1) reasonable hypothesis generation and (2) unhinged fantasies with a thousand moving parts unsupported by data.
The social sciences do not have a good track record when it comes to their unhinged theorizing.
Plus, some fields of social science would do better if they existed merely as a way of giving people more accurate fantasies of how the world works. Better than existing as think tanks for political causes.
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Bostrom goes so far as to say that unless we rule out the possibility that a machine could create a simulation of a human existence, we should assume that it is overwhelmingly likely that we are living in such a simulation.
“I’m not sure that I’m not already in a machine,” he said calmly. http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/12/27/aianxie...
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Even if we rule that out, doesn't the possibility that we are in a simulation still exist? Maybe the creators of the simulation exist in an n-dimensional space, and the reality we experience is a gross simplification of that.
TBH, I find the idea comforting in a weird sort of way, as it gives a structure to everything (e.g. Of course quantum states only collapse when observed - why bother simulating something no one is looking at?).