>That doesn't mean that if someone is being "silenced" or shouted down they're necessarily wrong, but it does mean that they won't score any points by complaining about it.

Fair enough but if incredibly impacting changes are being demanded based on this process then I think it merits a more thorough look than things that have less consequence if wrong.

>has a very similar tone to the arguments about evolution

For similar reasons. If one is to accept the complete evolution story that invalidates larges parts of the bible. Apologists can try to say those parts don't mean what they seem to say but a lot of people won't be happy with such an explanation because once you start that how can you know which parts do apply? The one's that haven't been refuted yet?

There is also a deserved level of skepticism on the (complete) subject of evolution because the loudest voices paint a picture of things that the science doesn't actually reflect (I'll spare us both further details to hopefully avoid this rabbit hole).

>Hmm, I suspect a lot of Less Wrong-ers would disagree with you there

A lot of people would disagree with me there, but personally I find it because they are unable to persuade. Their arguments, no matter how compelling, were not enough to sway what ever intended audience so they claim the other side is cheating. If the other side is pushing some snake oil theory as an alternative then perhaps they are, but if they're just not completely convinced then I think that's fair. We've had a very complete picture of gravity, only to find it was incomplete a couple of times now, for example.

>the entire philosophy of that site is based around the idea (one that I find very defensible) that we should usually be thinking statistically instead of right/wrong, and even if we can't know something for sure in the face of uncertainty, any pair of people that are thinking rationally and honestly should, in time, be able to at least agree on likelihood ratios between different possible outcomes by recursing through all the relevant priors and settling discrepancies that way.

The issue I have with the "rationalism" movement I'm seeing a lot of lately is that it seems to me that revolutionaries would have less opportunities in such a system. If you must believe the thing that is thought by consensus to have the highest probability of being true then the only way you could ever happen on something radical yet more correct in the end would be if you were pursuing something else that followed consensus but eventually contradicted another consensus-approved theory (e.g. this seems to happen a fair amount with quantum mechanics).

How many break-throughs have we had by people who simply didn't buy the consensus and looked for an alternative point of view? Weren't such people "irrational" until they ended up to appear more correct?

>For instance, if someone was honestly arguing that special relativity was wrong with an X% probability,

For me a good example of what I mean is dark matter. An Israeli scientist apparently didn't buy dark matter so he went out and discovered that the gravitational formula seems to just change at some distance. Of course people called him a heretic and such but as far as I know he hasn't been contradicted to this day. His findings could actually be related to dark matter some how, or total coincidence but it's possible that he could end up being right and everything we've invested in dark matter could turn out to have been chasing ghosts (I'm not going to assign probabilities on these two possibilities :).