Most people don't even go as far as to make a hypothesis there. It's arguable that every time someone forms a question, it is the same as forming a hypothesis; purely because questions can be reworded as hypotheses. However, in the case of someone who is just exploring, they would not go so far as to hypothesize.
It's normal for the person to say something like "I wonder if it happens with all sodium compounds" or, "I wonder if there are any sodium compounds that explode as well". But in these cases, there is no basis and no reason to form a hypothesis. one could argue that the person is making a hypothesis like "all sodium compounds explode in water"; but the person doesn't care. The person could just as easily make the hypothesis "no sodium compounds explode in water". And there's no reason to make either of these, or any hypothesis at all, because no theory has been formed that can be tested.
And further, making a hypothesis like this limits the amount of new information that can come in from these experiments. The information is now limited to "whether or not the substance explodes", when there are plenty of other reactions that can happen. The person who makes this hypothesis is liable to miss small bubbles appearing. That is anti-desired when exploring, when trying to observe as much as possible so as to build a theory.
The point is that the person in your example is not doing a hypothesis experiment, the person is doing an exploration experiment. Unless a theory exists, there's no basis for choosing any hypothesis at all.
Yet, let's say then that the person discovered some cool stuff and started to build a theory. He wants to tell you about his in-progress theory. Obviously he hasn't done any hypothesis experiments, because hypotheses haven't mattered yet. He tells you about his observations, and his conjectures. Many people, in response to this, say "can you prove it? Why should I believe you?". To which he has no answer, because he has nothing to prove yet. All of his observations are just observations, and he has no solid theories. Because he has no theories, any temporary hypotheses he makes continuously jump around, and to an outside observer have no coherence or meaning. Any attempt at proving something will prove futile, and will be a waste of time, purely because there is nothing to prove.
The higher-level or higher-class version of this response is: "what are your credentials? Why should I believe you?".
In this way my comment does relate to the entire post. Often times, there is no true objection. Often times, the objection is merely that someone is mentally lazy and doesn't want to think or explore. Often times, the objection is that I haven't formed a complete theory yet, only a list of observations and conjectures, so there's nothing the person can believe in. The difference in opinion there is that I want to work with them and believe in nothing, and they want to work on their own and believe in something. It's not that they object to the theory or observations or conjectures, they just object to thinking about it.
It happens every now and then that someone encounters some of my transhumanist-side beliefs—as opposed to my ideas having to do with human rationality—strange, exotic-sounding ideas like superintelligence and Friendly AI. And the one rejects them.
If the one is called upon to explain the rejection, not uncommonly the one says, “Why should I believe anything Yudkowsky says? He doesn’t have a PhD!”
And occasionally someone else, hearing, says, “Oh, you should get a PhD, so that people will listen to you.” Or this advice may even be offered by the same one who expressed disbelief, saying, “Come back when you have a PhD.”
Now, there are good and bad reasons to get a PhD. This is one of the bad ones.
There are many reasons why someone might actually have an initial adverse reaction to transhumanist theses. Most are matters of pattern recognition, rather than verbal thought: the thesis calls to mind an associated category like “strange weird idea” or “science fiction” or “end-of-the-world cult” or “overenthusiastic youth.”1 Immediately, at the speed of perception, the idea is rejected.
If someone afterward says, “Why not?” this launches a search for justification, but the search won’t necessarily hit on the true reason. By “‘true reason,” I don’t mean the best reason that could be offered. Rather, I mean whichever causes were decisive as a matter of historical fact, at the very first moment the rejection occurred.
Instead, the search for justification hits on the justifying-sounding fact, “This speaker does not have a PhD.” But I also don’t have a PhD when I talk about human rationality, so why is the same objection not raised there?
More to the point, if I had a PhD, people would not treat this as a decisive factor indicating that they ought to believe everything I say. Rather, the same initial rejection would occur, for the same reasons; and the search for justification, afterward, would terminate at a different stopping point.
They would say, “Why should I believe you? You’re just some guy with a PhD! There are lots of those. Come back when you’re well-known in your field and tenured at a major university.”
But do people actually believe arbitrary professors at Harvard who say weird things? Of course not.
If you’re saying things that sound wrong to a novice, as opposed to just rattling off magical-sounding technobabble about leptical quark braids in N + 2 dimensions; and if the hearer is a stranger, unfamiliar with you personally and unfamiliar with the subject matter of your field; then I suspect that the point at which the average person will actually start to grant credence overriding their initial impression, purely because of academic credentials, is somewhere around the Nobel Laureate level. If that. Roughly, you need whatever level of academic credential qualifies as “beyond the mundane.”
This is more or less what happened to Eric Drexler, as far as I can tell. He presented his vision of nanotechnology, and people said, “Where are the technical details?” or “Come back when you have a PhD!” And Eric Drexler spent six years writing up technical details and got his PhD under Marvin Minsky for doing it. And Nanosystems is a great book. But did the same people who said, “Come back when you have a PhD,” actually change their minds at all about molecular nanotechnology? Not so far as I ever heard.
This might be an important thing for young businesses and new-minted consultants to keep in mind—that what your failed prospects tell you is the reason for rejection may not make the real difference; and you should ponder that carefully before spending huge efforts. If the venture capitalist says, “If only your sales were growing a little faster!” or if the potential customer says, “It seems good, but you don’t have feature X,” that may not be the true rejection. Fixing it may, or may not, change anything.
And it would also be something to keep in mind during disagreements. Robin Hanson and I share a belief that two rationalists should not agree to disagree: they should not have common knowledge of epistemic disagreement unless something is very wrong.2
I suspect that, in general, if two rationalists set out to resolve a disagreement that persisted past the first exchange, they should expect to find that the true sources of the disagreement are either hard to communicate, or hard to expose. E.g.:
If the matter were one in which all the true rejections could be easily laid on the table, the disagreement would probably be so straightforward to resolve that it would never have lasted past the first meeting.
“Is this my true rejection?” is something that both disagreers should surely be asking themselves, to make things easier on the other person. However, attempts to directly, publicly psychoanalyze the other may cause the conversation to degenerate very fast, from what I’ve seen.
Still—“Is that your true rejection?” should be fair game for Disagreers to humbly ask, if there’s any productive way to pursue that sub-issue. Maybe the rule could be that you can openly ask, “Is that simple straightforward-sounding reason your true rejection, or does it come from intuition-X or professional-zeitgeist-Y ?” While the more embarrassing possibilities lower on the table are left to the Other’s conscience, as their own responsibility to handle.
1See “Science as Attire” in Map and Territory.
2See Hal Finney, “Agreeing to Agree,” Overcoming Bias (blog), 2006, http://www.overcomingbias.com/2006/12/agreeing_to_agr.html.