Suggesting that dark matter is actually gravitational leakage from MWI 'parallel universes': You tell me.
How much do you know about the relevant physics? If you're not an expert, and you're just saying whatever comes to mind, it's pseudo-science. You need a lot of evidence to narrow down the set of hypotheses enough to find the correct one. Not just anybody knows enough to do that.
MWI doesn't have different equations than "mainstream" quantum mechanics. It's just an epistemological interpretation.
One admittedly problematic heuristic I immediately thought of is that proto-scientists are significantly less certain about their claims than pseudoscientists are.
The difference between a pseudoscience and a far-fetched hypothesis is the attitude toward the scientific method. Wikipedia:
...Pseudoscience is a claim, belief, or practice which is presented as scientific, but does not adhere to a valid scientific method, lacks supporting evidence or plausibility, cannot be reliably tested, or otherwise lacks scientific status.[1] Pseudoscience is often characterized by the use of vague, contradictory, exaggerated or unprovable claims, an over-reliance on confirmation rather than rigorous attempts at refutation, a lack of
Cryonics as an arguably reasonable bet for its cost: proto-science
Is it?
Using math to demonstrate that taking classical physics and adding determinism results in MWI-style quantum physics: proto-science.
I'm not an expert, but isn't Tipler considered largely a pseudo-scientist?
As Mitchell pointed out below, there are severe theoretical issues. The theory predicts 22 new particles (and doesn't even specify their masses thus making detection difficult) and fails to account for the properties of many existing ones. Most importantly, the theory has no chirality, and chirality is extremely important for fundamental particles. This error is severe and no way to avoid it has been found. E8 does crop up in string theory in other settings but it's unrelated to Lisi's work.
A deeper problem is that the theory doesn't actually solve a lot of problems, even if it were true. You mentioned Not Even Wrong; here is an excerpt from Peter Woit on the E8 theory:
...One idea Garrett is fond of that has generally left me cold is the idea of unification via a large simple Lie algebra like E8. While there may be some sort of ultimate truth to this, the problem is that, just as for GUTs and for superstring models, all you’re doing when you do this is changing the unification problem into the problem of what breaks the large symmetry. This change in the problem adds some new structure to it, but just doesn’t seem to help very much, with the bottom line being that you get few if any
- Cryonics as an arguably reasonable bet for its cost: proto-science
I got to meet Aubrey de Grey for the first time at the Venturists' cryonics convention in Laughlin, Nevada, last month, which I helped to organize. In his talk, Aubrey asks why people who accept in principle the idea that we could learn to cryopreserve viable organs like the human kidney think that the human brain has some spooky ability to defy this process and perversely die regardless.
...
- Cryonics as a surefire way to achieve immortality: nigh-certainly pseudoscience (unless it's the
We want a lot more precision restoring brains than from restoring kidneys-- it's conceivable that there's a limit which makes good enough restoration for kidneys possible, but not for brains, though I don't think that's the way to bet. It's plausible to me that restoring brains adequately is much harder.
The definition of 'protoscience' given by different people seems to vary a lot. You seem to be defining it as "An idea that has not yet been rigorously tested but is worth pursuing." This definition is something most people would just call "science". The wiki article on protoscience has several more definitions for it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protoscience
I'm not sure you're suggesting this, but this essay makes it appear that one should distinguish protoscience from psuedoscience by checking to see whether the topic is approved by the LW community or not.
Proto-scientists will say: I have an idea A. Events of category Y will increase our confidence in A, while events of category X will make A less likely. Pseudo-scientists leave out the last clause.
My own definition - proto-science is something put forward by someone who knows the scientific orthodoxy in the field, suggesting that some idea might be true. Pseudo-science is something put forward by someone who doesn't know the scientific orthodoxy, asserting that something is true.
Testing which category any particular claim falls into is in my experience relatively straightforward if you know the scientific orthodoxy already - as a pseudoscientist's idea will normally be considered absolutely false in certain aspects by those who know the orthodoxy. A...
Suggesting that dark matter is actually gravitational leakage from MWI 'parallel universes': You tell me. (But if it's true, then since I can't seem to find any previous serious discussion of this idea, I get to name part of it after myself, right? :) )
I have conceived of exactly this idea - so it can't be just the two of us. Surely some people versed in cosmology can explain why the math doesn't work out?
taking classical physics and adding determinism
I guess you meant to say something else: classical physics is already deterministic.
Whatever decisions or factual judgments about such claims you need to make, it seems better to formulate them more precisely, without using these categories. The examples in the post seem mostly useless (as in waste of cognition, low value of information).
So we're assuming that it's easy to classify something in the "proto-or-pseudo-science" box...all statements about which you aught to have low certainty go into that box.
Then, the way to distinguish between the two is the level of certainty that the person making the claim projects. If they are projecting high certainty for a claim for which they aught to have low certainty, then it's likely to be pseudo-science.
Creating an explanation with a conclusion already in mind (the Christianity example) is a subset of high certainty - since they started...
For people who find explicit Bayesian calculations about their own uncertainty useful (I don't) this is a pretty ideal case; you calculate how much weight to assign to facts like "is professor at a respected university"; "was published in journal X", "was paid by institute Y". (See Gwern's[?] example with the Death Note script)
Sir Karl Popper suggested if a theory includes a description of how it can be observed to fail by outsiders, it is science. And that science is not about accepted or unaccepted ideas, professional or amateur research, but only falsifiability. He suggested science is one kind of explanation that has utility but expressly said it was not the only or best explanation.
There are a great many ideas which don't have enough carefully-measured evidence to be sufficiently confirmed as scientific fact and accepted as such by the scientific community (a recent joke was "While the Higgs Boson has not been discovered yet, its mass is 125 GeV"), but don't have enough carefully-measured evidence to be ruled out yet, either. Do any of the tools of the LW community help narrow down which ones are more worthy of consideration than others?
Eg:
* Cryonics as an arguably reasonable bet for its cost: proto-science
* Cryonics as a surefire way to achieve immortality: nigh-certainly pseudoscience (unless it's the method by which your Everett Immortality keeps you alive)
* Using math to demonstrate that taking classical physics and adding determinism results in MWI-style quantum physics: proto-science.
* Using math to demonstrate that quantum physics proves Christianity is true, from a certain point of view: pseudo-science
* Tubulin might self-organize into microtubules capable of computation on a sub-neuron scale: Possibly proto-science
* Tubulin architecture is 'quantum' in nature and that is what gives rise to consciousness: Probably pseudo-science
* 'Quantum consciousness' means anything is possible: Downright silly
* The E8 Lie group can provide a system for organizing the properties of subatomic particles: Proto-science, perhaps
* Heim theory is useful for predicting particle masses: Pseudo-science, probabilistically
* Using the Bullet Cluster to claim that dark matter is a better theory than Modified Newtonian Dynamics: proto-science
* Claiming that dark matter is made of 'anapoles': Proto-science, perchance
* Suggesting that dark matter is actually gravitational leakage from MWI 'parallel universes': You tell me. (But if it's true, then since I can't seem to find any previous serious discussion of this idea, I get to name part of it after myself, right? :) )
These may not be the best examples, but they're the closest ones I can think of to the boundary. If you know of any better ones, feel free to comment with them.