Science leaves it up to experiment to socially declare who was right, but if there weren't some people who could get it right in the absence of overwhelming experimental proof, science would be stuck.
Given that there are also many people who get it wrong, this seems like a case of hindsight bias on EY's part.
I'd point you to the next post, "Einstein's Speed", specifically the section at the end beginning with the phrase "But a word of caution here".
Today's post, Faster Than Science was originally published on 20 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Changing the Definition of Science, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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