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PhilGoetz comments on Where's Your Sense of Mystery? - Less Wrong
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That's an very good point, especially because most smart people who really understand science share your opinions
I like your last point - that you feel better than everyone else now, because you do get real science, and so you'd hate to have everything change around. Maybe the people who do like.the idea of a Martian pyramid are those who currently feel worse than everyone else, but who would suddenly become better than everyone else if the pyramid were proven real, because they're the only ones who have studied it.
That would also explain why I find some pseudohistory interesting but most pseudoscience just plain annoying.
Possible experiment to test this: give two randomly assigned groups a test on biology and medicine. Give one group a really easy test and tell them they're within the top 10% regarding medical knowledge; give other people a really hard test and tell them they're within the bottom 10% of medical knowledge. Then give both of them an article on some ancient natural alternative medicine treatment and see which group is more positive towards it. I predict the people convinced they know nothing about medicine will support the alternative treatment more, regardless of how much they actually know.
That was my first thought, because you know it's very sexy on LW and OB to attribute your thinking to status signalling.
But I don't think that's it. I'm going to reclaim the rational high ground. I've seen lots of examples of the kinds of theories of the world that lead to pyramids on Mars, lost civilizations in the Atlantic, hollow Earth, auras, divination, etc.
They're ugly theories. The pyramid on Mars is not enticing, because it would lend support to ugly theories and pull the rug out from under beautiful theories.
(If the pyramids on Mars were built by an ancient Martian civilization, then, fine. But if they were built by spacefaring aliens who visited the Egyptians - or, worse yet, by spacefaring Egyptians - not so fine. A human face on Mars would be even worse.)
(Gene transfer by bacterial conjugation is a little bit ugly, because it makes it a lot harder to predict things from evolutionary theory, and to make all sorts of inferences. I was going to give that as an example, but realized it isn't the same thing at all. It makes the empirical realization of your theory messier, but it doesn't force you to adopt a different, uglier theory.)
Gene transfer also resolves some very puzzling and ugly irregularities. Sometimes the beauty isn't just the theory, but it's relationship to data. If a theory's very elegant, but the data too messy, it disturbs my sense of completion.