Hacker News Reader

It might be bad form to nitpick a nitpick, but whether a statement is a speculation depends on how much information it is based on. We don't know how they came up with the number, so we don't know if it's speculation. We can't say it's not speculation for the same reason. Now, if I were to say that this anecdotal data-point is scientifically significant, that would be speculation.

View on HN

Proof matters. It’s not on the reader to work it out. Everything else is an opinion or speculation

Proof doesn't really matter. Most theories you have in your life are unproven. Scientific hypotheses should be falsifiable which means unproven. There are dozens of comments in this section making unproven claims that you don't seem to have taken issue with. You just don't like this one in particular because its associated with a religion.

They should be falsifiable and they should make predictions under various conditions and be right about them for the hypothesis to be considered a theory. Does this have them? Usually successful hypotheses have a body of work behind them, say like Newton’s principia or Darwin’s origin of species. They usually have corollaries and extensions which extol the same truth in various ways. Rest is opinion/speculation - just because it is religion I won’t give it a free pass.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com